Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood

Nina Antonia

Description

Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood is the definitive portrait of the condemned man of rock’n’roll, from the baptism of fire and tragedy that was the New York Dolls, through the junkie punk years of the Heartbreakers, to his sudden and mysterious death in 1991. It is an unflinching account of a unique guitarist whose drug problems often overshadowed his considerable style and talent, but whose unquestionable influence on glam, punk, and more still resonates today.

Nina Antonia discovered Johnny Thunders and the New York Dolls as a teenager and spent her formative years as a dedicated fan before starting work on this book in her twenties. Then, when Johnny and his manager read her early drafts, they decided she should make it an authorised biography and granted her unique access to Johnny’s life. As such, it begins by painting a historical portrait of Thunders and his early life and work before shifting into the present tense as Nina vividly describes her own experiences with the real-life Johnny and his associates.

First published in 1987, Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood has been kept alive over the years by an audience that isn’t always catered for. While the New York Dolls are now rightly acknowledged as having been as pivotal as the Velvet Underground, and you might catch the odd fashionista sporting a Dolls T-shirt, Johnny’s dark flame burns for those who have known adversity. He is the voice of the disenfranchised; he is every gifted son or daughter who went off the rails. Like Jesse James or James Dean, he couldn’t come in from the badlands of rock’n’roll; he wouldn’t appease or kowtow to the establishment.

This new edition adds a new closing chapter, bringing Thunders’ legacy up to date, new photographs, and a foreword by Mike Scott of The Waterboys.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Punk
• Musician
• Multiple signal classification
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 11 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911036142
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

This book is dedicated to the memories of Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan.

A Jawbone book
Revised edition 2023
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
Office G1
141–157 Acre Lane
London SW2 5UA
England
www.jawbonepress.com
Published under licence from Jungle Books (Bravour Ltd t/a)
www.jungle-records.com
Volume copyright © 2023 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © 1987, 1988, 2000, 2015, 2019, 2023 Nina Antonia. Foreword © 2023 Mike Scott. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

CONTENTS
FOREWORD BY MIKE SCOTT
FOREWARNED
PART ONE: JET BOY
01 A JUKEBOX MADE OF CITY
02 CURSED, POISONED, CONDEMNED
03 MALICIOUS ROMANCE
04 SO MANY STAINS AND WISHES
05 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
06 TOO FAST TO LIVE
PART TWO: BORN TOO LOOSE
07 SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE
08 THE ART OF COSA NOSTRA
09 ASK ME NO QUESTIONS
10 CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND
11 PRIVATE WORLD
12 HURT ME MORE
13 QUE SERA, SERA
PART THREE: BORN TO CRY
14 FATE AND FATALITY
15 ALCHEMICAL RESOLUTIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD
BY MIKE SCOTT
Johnny symbolises three things: rock’n’roll, looking sharp, and getting out of it. As everyone knows, the third of those eventually outweighed the first two and upturned his musical career. Yet Johnny’s preternatural abilities as a rock’n’roller and sharp dresser, even in the depth of his depravities, ensure his legend. If he hadn’t been an all-time great rocker or the sharpest dresser of his generation, with a charisma the size of Manhattan, no one would care about him now. He’d be a forgotten junkie who never made it. But the legend lives because Johnny Thunders was the sharpest, slickest guitar-playing stage performer of all time, a larger-than-life cartoon, a streetwise demigod with switchblade moves, drop-dead duds and elegant, contemptuous riffs that sounded like sneers. He had an Italian’s style, a New Yorker’s sass, and America’s eternal youth. No one will ever top him. No one ever did. I saw him once whip a steel comb out of his pocket mid-song, primp his quiff between licks, turn on a dime, and then machine-gun the crowd with his guitar on the return, all in one fabulous movement. The only male performers I can call to mind with a comparably killer blend of moves and artistry are Elvis, James Brown, and Prince. But Johnny was more beautiful than James, more dangerous than Prince, played better guitar than Elvis, and was more reckless than any of them. And more doomed. His story ain’t pretty, and his trajectory was laced with calamity, but his natural magic was always present in action or potential. Nina knew Johnny and has observed his life with fandom, understanding, compassion, and detachment. She is more than qualified to capture its dynamics in her well-chosen words and a series of illuminating interviews.
MIKE SCOTT, THE WATERBOYS, DECEMBER 2022

FOREWARNED
Johnny Thunders didn’t just flirt with death, he courted it. Even so, his eventual demise in New Orleans on April 23, 1991, still came as a terrible shock. All of the false alarms and embellished whispers of his passing over the years had somehow managed to make Johnny seem both vulnerable and invincible, until the dread inevitable was finally substantiated.
When I first began working on In Cold Blood in the early 1980s, Thunders wasn’t a memory, and I wrote in the present tense, hope clinging to the ledge, Johnny nine-lives defying the odds. Now it’s all consigned to the past.
Johnny Thunders created an almost unique situation in that it was next to impossible to separate the man from his reputation. When reality had finished reporting on drug problems, police busts, and deportations, rumour picked up the story, erasing the fragile line between cold fact and neurotic fantasy. Then you had to separate the man from himself: Johnny Genzale, the shy sweetheart, and Johnny Thunders, the sleepy eyed gutterpunk.
Looked upon as the pale spectre of rock’n’roll immolation, Thunders qualified his image every time he staggered into the mile-high headlines of the press. He lived a dangerous life and eventually came to represent what most people would rather forget when it comes to popular entertainment. Sure, they may want to read William Burroughs or go and see Trainspotting , but media tourists rarely want to tangle with the real deal, choosing instead the darkness of the cinema or the printed word, so they can walk the same streets without having to cross through the shadows that exist there. Johnny didn’t set out to be a dope-fiend artiste ruling the roost of slum city rock. He wanted to be as great as Presley before the army, or Sinatra in his prime, and sometimes he was.
Sadly, and perhaps obviously, for a great many of Thunders’ ‘fans’, one of the main pulls seemed to be the progression of the guitarist’s mental and physical anguish, the tolerance of his body and the levels of his nihilistic, self-destructive motivations. As the condemned man of rock’n’roll, Johnny wasn’t always as oblivious as casual observers might have believed, or critics presumed, but he wasn’t strong enough to escape, either.
He once said onstage, ‘Okay. You got it. I’m gonna die tonight. I’m gonna die up here ...’ and the audience cheered.
In time, the junkie mythology overshadowed Thunders’ innate abilities: the unique rock’n’roll sense of finesse, the sharp wit, and a singular guitar style. A legion of musicians has attempted to emulate his stance and attitude but hasn’t come close and never will. It’s not too hard to play the way that Johnny did, and guitarists have tried and will go on trying, but they can’t make it sound the same: a pact between persona, warmth, and power that built to an extraordinary crescendo. When Johnny was on form, he could charm a snake pit of a crowd, snapping out of drugged lethargy to deliver all that rock’n’roll ever promised to be: freedom, subversion, style, release. Johnny Thunders was the last embodiment of a broken perfection that was true rebel culture before commerce overwhelmed creativity. A miniature classic that assumed legendary proportions, he had a way of moving through it all that told you he knew everything, even though there were some things he’d rather forget.
NINA ANTONIA, AUGUST 1999
PART ONE
JET BOY
CHAPTER ONE
A JUKEBOX MADE OF CITY
Before the fifties died of an exquisitely painless form of cancer and fear, blood cells tingled to Dion and stolen Lucky Strikes. Leather jackets boasted turf designs stitched on the back like pirate flags, baseball bats swung menacingly in alleyways whilst high above the shadows someone played a Paul & Paula tune. Drive-ins became the official shrines for swift sex, popcorn, and B-movies, and Sal Mineo turned capped sleeved vests into an art form.
On the outskirts of the city, where ivory was still the colour of soap not the polished handle of a switchblade, a little kid with heavy black hair lay in bed listening, when he should have been sleeping, to the music that came dancing across the landing from his sister’s room. As he drifted off, the teenage romance and ruin of The Shangri-Las, The Crystals, and The Angels seeped into his dreams: ‘I grew up listening to music. My sister Mariann was five and half years older than me and she played all those girl groups, that’s how I heard all that stuff.’
John Anthony Genzale was born in Queens, one of New York’s outer boroughs, on July 15, 1952, a heady mix of second-generation Neapolitan and Sicilian heritage. His father, Emil, should have been proud, but he was prouder still of his lady-killing charm and good looks, leaving his wife Josephine to fend for the family, as Mariann Bracken recalled:
We lived in East Elmhurst, Queens. It was always just the three of us, my mother, Johnny, and me. My father was a womaniser, and he left when Johnny was an infant. We had little or no contact with him. He never gave my mother any support, financially or otherwise. She had to work at whatever she could, and while she worked I took care of Johnny. We had a hard life but no matter what, Johnny had everything.
Except a guitar. By the time Johnny Genzale was four years old he’d seen Elvis Presley personify what rebellion was on television, and he wanted some. He hadn’t had to plead too much for his ma to bring home a plastic guitar from the toy store, and although no melody could be plucked from the strings, it felt right. A year later, Johnny had his first brush with both the law and audience approval, according to Mariann:
He had to have his tonsils out and he kicked and screamed all the way to the hospital. He wasn’t going in. We walked in one door, he ran out the other. A police officer brought him back. Although it was only one night in the hospital and home the next day, we were worried sick. When we went to pick him up, the nurses told us that he had entertained them. He’d been imitating Elvis Presley the whole night!
Although little Johnny Genzale was usually shy outside of his impromptu performances, he was a livewire, and all the esoteric disciplines of the Catholic church and his role as an altar boy did little to curb the wild streak that ran through him. It was baseball that mopped up his energy, hitting the ball as high as the stars, and even though he was kind of petite he was strong enough and fast enough to make the neighbourhood team: ‘I used to play baseball from eight in the morning till eight the next night and loved it.’ Queens, after all, does boast Shea Stadium, where the legendary Mickey Mantle, the sporting hero of Johnny’s childhood, brought the New York Yankees to baseball glory.
If Johnny Genzale progressed through his schooling in a deluge of bad behaviour reports that followed him from Our Lady of Fat