Hot and Cold reviews
contents of book
[& excerpts]
V interview regarding

dust jacket (script beneath title reads: essays poems lyrics notebooks pictures fiction)




cover beneath the jacket

PRESS RESPONSE TO HOT AND COLD

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Yesterday late in the evening I started feeling thick and heavy as if I were being pulled down, as if something deep underground had started to exert a new kind of gravity that was sucking my body and senses towards it, while my floating mind stayed above. I could hardly keep my eyelids raised and I had to lie down. Once I did that, my body hollowed and lightened, like a drawing of itself. My mind seemed to float loose while leaking into my body like molecules: sex, sax, six, socks, sucks... It was like my body liquified, then evaporated, the whole prehistoric breathing, and my mind was a rudderless little boat that drifted in it. I seeped and haltingly flowed according to the permeability and slant. In the puddles at the bottom of the boat was a tumbled messy litter of everything imaginable that had happened or could happen to me. How could it be so small? My senses seemed to have returned, but were caught in the contents of the boat, as if perception were engendered by those objects.¹ It seemed that if I looked at one item -- a tan-colored lifesize hobbyshop model of a robin, for instance -- everything else in the strew became possible, so that when my attention left the glued-together plastic bird, the items around it had become something other than what they'd been before. Oh, it was too beautiful, this surrender. It is the secret standard of worthiness. All who do it are good! My mind² opened and the boat, being one, the only, wasn't a boat.³

[1998]
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JOHNNY THUNDERS AND THE ENDLESS PARTY

Johnny's party is over. Thinking about him this morning (May 9) in New York. It's another drizzly colorless day as it was for his funeral last week.
           I hope when I die people don't go soft about me. It's stupid. Apart from his family and four or five lifelong friends, probably the people who'll miss Johnny most are those he exploited. The ones who were made to feel important because he spent time with them in order to get them to do things for him. Of course, he never even really had to try to get this kind of treatment: people fell over themselves to get next to him. They liked to be near him just to look at him, as you would a jungle carnivore. And a girl could not be wrong to have him at her side. That's how he made his living, like a lot of rock and roll performers. I don't think Johnny would want people to go soft about him.
           Then again, he lit into journalists a lot for not treating him with enough respect. He even wrote a song ("I Tell The Truth Even When I'm Lying") replying to what he considered their unfair and insulting treatment of him. It included this "open letter to the music press: I revoke your poetic license, you probably got on 42nd Street, the same place you got your lover, the same place your mother got your father..." When he told me how much he liked Japan, it was mostly because the people are "real polite and kind. I tell you I did 40 or 50 interviews and not one person asked me about drugs." That's what he attacked them for, asking him about drugs. While of course he himself exploited heroin's significance in the maintenance of his bad boy image. He included conspicuous syringes in publicity photos, and frequently mimed jamming needles into his forearm during his stage act.

           I've found my try at writing this -- including viewing videos of recent Thunders shows, reading old interviews, listening to tapes and records, talking to some of his closest old and new friends, and, especially, recalling in detail a lot of time I spent with Johnny myself -- spooky and scary as well as sad (where's the good part?). Mainly because I find myself identifying with him, so that it becomes almost as if something I say about him I'm saying about myself. And that to feel something or evoke a feeling about him is to feel the same thing about myself. (Of course, that's what stars are good for.)
           But the main qualities, the virtues, that set Johnny apart were that he didn't give a fuck and he dressed great.

           Johnny, of course, was the rock and roll Dean Martin of heroin, at least in his last decade. I've known him since 1974, which I think was the last year before he had a real narcotics habit. I admired the Dolls; they inspired me. They were the first pure rock and roll group. "Pure" in that they knew and operated on the assumption that rock and roll is at least 50% (maybe 100%, maybe 200%) attitude. They were the first group that regarded themselves as stars rather than thinking of themselves as musicians, or writers, or vocalists. The Dolls were for New York groups sort of what the Sex Pistols were for British groups. They excited everybody by being flawless: in it for fun, never pretentious or pretending to be anything they weren't; they were ballsy, noisy, tough, funny, sharp, young, and real. Stupid and ill. They mocked the media, threw up on grownups, and kidded with the kids in a language of drugs and sex.
           And I don't think there's really much an argument to be made against the observation that Johnny peaked with the Dolls, when he was 20-21. Even his most recent sets undeniably picked up whenever he played a Dolls tune. (He didn't do many of them, but you'd hear a "Lonely Planet Boy" or "Personality Crisis.") The next 17-18 years were just spent getting to know him a little better.
           There was something perfect about Johnny. Though because he was a legendary archetype, you tended to think of him as predictable, as a type. You tended to condescend to him because you thought you had him nailed (and otherwise he might be a threat). But he always surprised me when I talked to him. The surprising thing was how smart he was. He was smart in the same way he dressed so perfectly. Smart the same way Elvis Presley was. You couldn't top him and he didn't delude himself.
           (I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace. A kind of innate ruling of the world. That's what you wanted and Johnny had it. And he knew it -- to him, the highest compliment was to be "as good as Frank Sinatra and Elvis.")
           He was perfect because he made no apologies. He was just graceful. He instinctively knew how to make do with what he had. (Though he made a lot of bad records.)
           Rock and roll, of course, is about not growing up and settling down, defying those who have, and living for sex and other types of fun. That's who Johnny was. The New York version.
           Johnny made his choice, or lived out his destiny, and he had a right to it. He always went to drugs to be able to face the day, and he always went to his guitar to be himself. (Though he spent most of his time watching tv.) There's no judging to be done. It's like Marlene Deitrich in Touch of Evil when she sums up Quinlan with, "He was a man..." I've got to admit it annoys me too to see cynical, exploitive, self-centered, death-drive get glamorized. I hated the Chet Baker documentary for that reason and Chet and Johnny have a lot in common. They were both junkies who always put themselves first and treated their talent as just another little windfall they could squeeze for all the narcotics and fancy clothes they might be able to drain from it. (Johnny: "I would never become righteous. Everybody's entitled to do what they want if they don't hurt me." It took Johnny to say "me.")
           Johnny though was the kind of person you always forgave. He did everything with such impenetrable confidence, everything about him was so up-front, with his soulful murmer in your ear making you feel like a human insider, you could only say "Well, that's J.T...." and write it off. (His most frequent companion of the last year telling me with real fondness how he'd always bring her something -- some knick-knack from his bedroom wrapped in a scarf -- before he asked to borrow money.)
           It was impossible to insult him to his face; he could hold his own with anyone. You wouldn't want to anyway; he was so sweet and soft-spoken (still conveying that you'd better not touch his hair).
           One of the most widely felt reactions to Johnny's death has got to be that the conclusion has been foregone for so long now that there isn't any drama left. In other words, we've considered him dead since 1980. That's a nasty thing to say, and, even though I myself must admit it occured to me, it isn't really true or fair. In fact, one of Johnny's distinctions was that he was always worth seeing. (For all the above reasons: he had that kernel of talent, he didn't give a fuck, and he dressed great.)

***
           [April 29] Johnny's funeral today. At the cemetary, as words are spoken over the coffin, and flowers dropped on it, out in the dreary day, finally tapping into the sadness. Like the sadness is a dimension that is always there but we have developed over the years such a way of avoiding. Sort of like the way in his last concerts, in the light, he looked scary, like an accusation or a reminder you'd rather not get.

[1991]
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[ca. 1981]
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