danger fix

In Los Angeles, there are thousands of rock bands, and all of them need bass players.

That's where I come in. But I'm only one man-- I can only play in so many bands at one time. Luckily, band line-ups in this city shift like tectonic plates beneath the desert paradise, but most of the time these change-ups have little impact outside of the Hollywood/Sunset Strip rock epicenter.

After not playing live for seven years, 2003 saw me back in the saddle. Holly Golightly recruited me for her band and that got the ball rolling. Somewhere in the middle I ended up doing bass tracks for Holly's friend Ellen; auditioning for Holly's friend Deborah, for a band that she has yet to get off the ground; joining ICON with my buddy Buddah towards the end of my tenure with Holly; trying out for a band called Funkin Pie that I hooked up with through Mikey, Holly's guitarist and former boyfriend; joining Ellen's band full force in the wake of Holly's departure, and hesitating to join Funkin Pie because I had too much on my plate during the holiday season; watching the band with Ellen implode due to in-fighting between Katie the violinist and Ellen; playing with a hair metal cover band thanks to the recommendation of Angel, the guitarist from ICON (a band whose fate is now in limbo)...

...and yesterday, I got a 2-for-1 Special on band membership: while getting ready to audition for one, I was invited to join another!

The first band is called Ninefinger, and it was by kismet that I even met them: I went to an ICON rehearsal at Sound Arena in Reseda and ran into E, the drummer from Holly's band. He was there rehearsing with Ninefinger, who he had just joined. He had been referred by Mikey, the guitarist who referred me to Funkin Pie.

I sat in on their rehearsal for a song or two and dug their sound: a sonic mix of Fugazi and Live, two bands that radiate sincerity and earnestness in their music.

Weeks later, E called me and informed me that their bass player bailed. I was asked to fill in. I requested a CD of songs and rocked it on repeat in my car over the Fourth of July weekend. Then I got a call saying that Wednesday we were convening for a get-together, to try each other on and see what transpires.

I got off of work extra early and hung out at my boy Down Low's place. When I showed up, Low's buddy The Wolf was there. Low, The Wolf and I used to jam out years ago-- The Wolf is a drummer, and a rather good one at that.

The Wolf asked me if I was playing in any bands, because the group he was currently in was looking around for one. After I consented to give them a try, he gave me directions to their lockout and warned me that the singer, Gio (sounds like "Joe") can be a bit of a prima donna.

I am used to that, having paid my dues in plenty of bands with divas for singers.

What made this invitation so tantalizing was the prospect of covering songs that I truly love from bands like The Stooges, The New York Dolls, Kings Of Leon, Gun Club, Television, Sex Pistols, The Modern Lovers, Velvet Underground, and Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones. The Wolf gave me a CD of a Johnny Thunders anthology and told me stop by after the jam with Ninefinger, if I still had the energy.

I had a feeling that energy wouldn't be a problem.


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What's great about being a musician is that, no matter how many band facts you know or how many album liner notes you memorize, no matter how many bootlegs and compilations and obscure one-off curios you find, there is always a gap to be filled in your personal musical canon.

There are two things that I hold dear to my heart in the rock universe:

(1) Sloppy garage rock-- I can't get enough of that messy stuff. Slightly out-of-tune guitars, barely-in-time chops, wildly out-of-control histrionics... there's plenty of hyphens to be added to the stew.

(2) Tragic rock 'n' roll burnouts-- from Jim Gordon to Roky Erikson to Syd Barrett to Arthur Lee to Bradley Nowell, I have this romantic fixation with musicians and performers whose personal demons either consumed them alive or bandied them about throughout their turbulent existences.

Johnny Thunders embodies both of those virtues... if you can call such attributes "virtues".

I knew of Johnny Thunders from The New York Dolls, one of the most influential '70's glam rock bands ever. They sounded like The Rolling Stones to the tenth power, as if Mick & Keith had decided to damn the torpedoes and go full-on lipstick-and-heels drag.

The New York Dolls are one of those handful of bands whose legacy drifts into unlikely waters. You can see why groups like Poison and Motley Crue dug The Dolls and Thunders' solo work, but it's surprising to hear that The Dolls were Morrissey's favorite group when he was growing up. Nothing in his work with The Smiths suggests this connection, and the only solo album of his that even flirts with glam is Your Arsenal, produced by the late Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson.

Imagine Guns 'N' Roses with an ounce of humility. Imagine if L.A. punk band X were a group of cross-dressing junkies (in singer Exene's case, that's not too far off the mark). Imagine if The Black Crowes had never heard of Mountain, Uriah Heep, or Bread. Imagine The Dead Boys and The Sex Pistols joining forces with The Damned to create the sleaziest rock group in history.

That's The New York Dolls, and at its center was Johnny Thunders.

Dee Dee Ramone co-wrote a song with Thunders, a tune which yielded recorded versions from the both of their respective bands. The song was titled "Chinese Rock", which inspired the name of early '80's glam superstars Hanoi Rocks; it's also slang for heroin, the drug of choice among seedy punk/glam rockers. Not surprisingly, both Dee Dee and Thunders died from drug-related overdoses-- Dee Dee OD'ed on smack, Thunders on methadone, the smack treatment drug.

After two albums that lit up the rock world but sold poorly (the prerequisite for this genre of music, it seems), Dolls singer David Johansen put down the make-up and wigs, adopted a pompadour and a tuxedo, and rechristened himself as Buster Poindexter. Remember that "Hot Hot Hot!" song from the '80's? Well, that dude used to sing songs like "Lookin' For A Kiss" and "Vietnamese Baby" while dressed in nylons and platform high-heels.

Johnny Thunders, in the wake of the demise of the Dolls, put together a band called The Heartbreakers, not to be confused with Tom Petty's classic back-up group. The band was short-lived but one of its members, Richard Hell, formed The Voidoids shortly before striking out on his own.

I know all of this stuff, and have known this stuff for a while. But much like my long-overdue discovery of Sly and The Family Stone in the late '90's, listening to Jet Boy-- The Anthology as I drove from the Ninefinger rehearsal filled an enormous hole in my musical landscape. I recognized more songs than I thought I would, and of course there were one or two Dolls standards to give me some familiarity. But the overall effect was similar to when I heard The Best of Sly Stone for the first time: I said to myself, "Why am I just finding out about this now?" and at the same time I realized that this was where some of my favorite artists stole their biggest riffs.

Johnny Thunders is the Missing Link in my rock 'n' roll evolution chart.

The true find was a song that GNR covered on their Spaghetti Incident? album, their last effort before Axl Rose went insane and the other members jumped ship. That whole album was a slew of covers, and GNR remade "You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory" in their own image.

They did a fine job. But I'd never heard the Thunders original until last night. And hearing it from Thunders, with his fractured voice and spare acoustic accompaniment, makes the song more powerful, more direct and personal.

If you had never heard The Dolls or Thunders before and I played "You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory" for you as a surprise, I doubt you would ever link the two in your mind. The Dolls and most of Thunders' oeuvre are electric and unruly; "Memory" is a ballad that sounds like the drug-addled protagonist of Neil Young's "The Needle And The Damage Done" telling his side of the story.

Recorded and released in 1978, "Memory" sounds like it was written and performed by a man on the verge of defeat, like "a man out of time", as Elvis Costello once sang. 13 years after this song was released, Thunders died on April 23, 1991.


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April 23 is the alleged birth and death date of William Shakespeare. I find that ironically amusing, because while Johnny Thunders was far from a Shakespearean wordsmith, he is a bit of a Shakespeare in the way he detailed the squalor and joy of being young, high and rockin' in New York in the '70's. You see, for all the deranged lunacy of Daddy Rollin' Stone's antics onstage and off, there was that elegance, that charisma that drew everyone to him. Thunders had problems, with alcohol, drugs and women, but he was also a hysterically intense talent whose real gift-- lead guitar playing that possessed a heap of soul and transcended punk's minimum requirements --was overshadowed by the craziness that followed him wherever he went.

Like most addicts, Johnny Thunders was selfish and untrustworhy and stubborn. His friends couldn't save him, his family couldn't save him, and the one thing that did keep him going, the music, seemed to fail him as well. I am not romanticizing the pain that he put his loved ones through, nor am I glamorizing the descent into hard drug abuse that has claimed the lives of too many talented souls out there.

It's just that Johnny Thunders, the King of Junkie Rock, the man who made heroin chic before Calvin Klein did, lived his life the way he wanted to, which is part of the tragedy. On "Memory" his voice is haunting, wispy, almost feminine; in the Dolls, he looked good enough to fuck, with his pumps and ripped stockings and garish make-up; but he was tougher than all of that, scarred from life on the streets of Queens, messed up from a delinquent existence, a Grade A misfit from the get-go, not too smart of a guy... and yet, there he was, defying the odds, playing rock music to bored Manchunian shut-ins on TV, inspiring a wallflower like Steven Morrissey to shed his first name, start a band, and become the most unlikely rock star ever.

There was a lot of humility and self-deprecation in Johnny's songs. "Born To Lose" is a classic sing-along fist-in-the-air punk rock anthem, and the chorus goes "Baby I was born to lose"... For all the outrageousness and difficulties Thunders incurred, you never get the sense that he was an egomaniac or a demanding rocker. He just wanted to play his songs, do his thing, and also set the world on fire.

It's refreshing, in this day and age where narcissistic celebrities hog the limelight with their insipid tales of recovery and twelve-step programs, to hear from someone as unrepentant as Johnny Thunders. He was an old-school guy at heart, from the tone of his guitars to his bad habits. He never complained, he never whined, he never gave a fuck.

Usually, I wish my fallen rock heroes would've had the good sense to not die, but Johnny is the kind of rocker whose fate was determined a long time ago. Therefore, there really was nowhere else for him to go logically except for down. Normally, that depresses me, but occasionally someone rides the bomb that drops into The Abyss with such relish that you almost (for a split second) want to see what the fuss is all about.

Not that I ever want to do smack-- I've smoked opium, that's enough for me, thank you very much. I would never want to do heroin-- it just sounds like I'd dig it too much. If I ever get addicted to junk, everyone out there has my implicit permission to beat the fuck out of me until I get sober.

However, I figure, if you're going to throw your life away, if you're going to just allow drugs to overwhelm you until you cannot deal any longer, you may as well go all the way. Johnny went all the way. He would be 53 next Friday if he'd lived, which would've been 40 years longer than anyone expected him to live, and only 14 years longer than he actually did live.

I think what I like the most about him is the mix of vulnerability and unsentimentality. Johnny Thunders said it best when he sang:


You can't put your arms around a memory
You can't put your arms around a memory
You can't put your arms around a memory
Don't try


That chorus functions a a cautionary warning to me. It's the rock equivalent of the last sentence in J.D. Salinger's Catcher In The Rye: Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. The message in both of these works is crystal clear-- they are declarations from individuals who have made up their minds as to how they are going to live the rest of their lives. There's power in that, even if the individuals self-destruct in the end.

Kurt Vonnegut once described smoking cigarettes as a "classy form of suicide". Many relatives of lung cancer victims would disagree, but then again it is difficult to understand why anyone would want to end their own lives, or hurt themselves so wantonly. A week doesn't go by when someone doesn't chastise me for my cigarette habit. I certainly don't want to die, but why is it so hard for me to stop? Is it an addictive personailty trait? Insecurity? Low self-esteem? A way to cope with stress? Or is it simply because I like it too much and now I'm hopelessly hooked?

I don't have the answers, but I do know one thing: once upon a time I had a death wish, and during those times I felt more alive than if I'd been quietly sitting at home, reading a book. My wish for death propelled me through the frying pan, the fire and the whole damn grill. Unlike Johnny Thunders, I never went too far, and yet I understand why someone would. Some people just want to cross the line that everyone else refuses to step over.

We watch them step over that line with a combination of fascination and disgust because we have an urge to live (and die) vicariously.

People like Thunders pay the dear price so that I don't have to follow suit. But lest you think I'm ascribing martyr status to a dead junk punker, keep in mind that Mr. Thunders would've found such canonization to be contrite and petty.

That probably explains my obsession with the Casualties Of Rock, the walking wounded who articulate our deepest fears and most excessive wishes. I like living on the edge but over time I have become timid, and hearing tales of legendary punk rock partying gives me my danger fix without endangering my actual self.

I'd like to keep it that way. That's the lesson I learned from Johnny Thunders last night: I can't put my arms around his tortured memories, so I shouldn't even bother to try. Even if I wanted, I wouldn't be able to, so at least I have his music and his words-- and not his actions --to go by.

Thanks, Johnny.