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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (45 page)

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Johnny convinced Susanne to take him back and, for a time, seemed content living with her in Stockholm. He did another well-received tour of Europe, got together with Jerry Nolan for another record,
Trouble Traveler,
and once again took Japan by storm. More live bootlegs were released. There were more sessions with various motley musicians. Everybody wanted to work with Johnny, even though he didn’t show up sometimes, stole clothes and jewelry, not to mention drugs, and raked people through the rock-and-roll coals. It was expected. It was almost cool. Susanne got pregnant, and in 1988 their daughter, Jamie, was born. She stuck by Johnny till the end. The story remained the same. Junk was always a problem. It’s amazing he made it as long as he did.
His sister, Marion, tells me Johnny tried several times to clean up. “Yeah, he went away about six months before he died. His biggest problem was this: At the beginning it was his own father, and then the breakup when his wife left him, taking the children and him never seeing them again. That had a lot to do with his continuing drug problem. Julie was pregnant by another man when Johnny met her; he stayed with her and took care of her son, and they had Vito and Dino after that. When she left, he never saw or heard from them again. He had no idea where she was; he even had a private investigator looking for her. He never knew if they were dead or alive.” Dino is now sixteen years old. I remark that it seems very unfair to Johnny’s sons that they were deprived of their father. “Oh, it’s left a tremendous strain on them,” she agrees. “They found out he had died from the TV And the only reason they knew about me was that Julie called and asked if they were in Johnny’s will.” She laughs bitterly. “Of course, there was no will.”
In April 1991, following a tour of Germany, Johnny fulfilled his longtime dream, checking into a motel in New Orleans, hoping to finally hook up with “a bunch of old black musicians” and start a band. He arrived with a cluster of colorful new suits and his pockets full of deutsche marks. The next morning he was dead. “He had always talked about New Orleans, it was just a place he wanted to go. He was very happy to be in New Orleans the night I spoke to him,” Marion asserts. “He was so happy to see the street musicians.” I ask Marion what Johnny’s state of mind was that night. “My son Danny was going to
meet him there, and he kept calling Danny, telling him what to get. ‘Make sure you get the truck, bring everything down.’ That’s all he wanted to do, he wanted to leave. He felt that getting out of New York would help his drug problem.”
“When the police called,” Marion continues, “they just more or less said, ‘The junkie OD’d, and that’s it. They didn’t even rope off the area. We have the feeling that somebody slipped him something. I heard several stories that there was some bad acid going around, and that’s one thing Johnny would never do, ever! He would mostly take any drug, but never hallucinogens. I don’t know if you could say there’s anything like a smart junkie, but Johnny didn’t live all those years not being smart. He knew what to do, and what to do it with. The way he was found, the way the room was, it was a mess. His suits were missing, the money, his passport, all his stage makeup, everything. Nothing was recovered.”
When I ask Marion about the coroner’s report, I am stunned by what she has to say. “Johnny had leukemia,” she admits sadly. “He never knew it. A lot of leukemia, from what I understand from my physician, can be similar to withdrawals from drugs, and I guess Johnny just took it all for granted.” How far along was the leukemia? I want to know. “It was pretty extensive. According to my physician, he only had six weeks to live.” Was the leukemia listed as his cause of death? “They didn’t put down a cause,” she marvels. “What they said was that he had leukemia, and there were traces of methadone. No alcohol either. Nothing adds up. He had just flown, and John did not fly without drinking on the plane, because he hated flying.” Marion then tells me that she’s trying to find someone to redo the toxicology report but is running into a lot of dead ends. Finally I ask Marion how Johnny was found. “On the floor, alone.”
Nick Kent, who called Johnny “a fearless little motherfucker” who was “never boring,” saw him a few weeks before his death. “Jesus Christ, I could hardly stand to look at John. You know in a bullfight how when the decisive dagger has been plunged into the neck of the bull and basically it’s all over for the poor creature and it goes limp and cross-eyed before sinking into the sawdust? Well, that’s how Thunders looked … being ushered in: limp and cross-eyed from all the torments he’d been visiting upon himself in the pursuit of maintaining his righteous rock-and-roll identity. A few weeks later he died in New Orleans in a lonely hotel room with only some bad cocaine [and] some prescription methadone … .
Que sera sera.”
In a
Village Voice
article, Jerry Nolan wrote about losing his friend: “I have a rough time getting through the days. I get real lonely, and I miss Johnny terribly. I don’t like the idea of living without him … . He never had a father. I was like a father to him, a brother to him. It’s just not fair. Everywhere I look I see Johnny’s clones. Poison, Mötley Crüe, I could name a hundred bands that
had a Johnny Thunders clone in them.” A few weeks later Jerry told the
Village Voice
about bumping into Keith Richards, walking down Broadway: “He gave me the typical limp handshake and says, ‘Look, Jerry, I’m sorry. I know what it’s like. I don’t know what to say. I wish I had a poetic answer. But I will say one thing. Somehow, I don’t know, but somehow, hang in there. Stick to it. Don’t give up.’ Keith really picked up my spirits.”
A year later Jerry Nolan died of a drug-related stroke.
STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN
I
n an era when MTV had image-conscious rock and rollers decked out in Duran Duran doll clothes, Stevie Ray Vaughan climbed to the top armed only with his beloved guitar. Nobody could say he was good-looking, but he had magic in his big bony fingers, and his Texas boy’s heart was crammed full of the blues.
He was just a little guy the local Oak Cliff kids called “Tomato Nose,” but when he secretly plugged in his brother’s guitar, shy Stevie Vaughan became king of the closet. The scrawny kid with the itty-bitty teeth knew his handsome older brother, Jimmie, would pound him when he found him wrapped around his precious guitar, hiding out in his closet, but it was more than worth it.
Jimmie Vaughan had been a child prodigy, and the family thought young Stevie was copycatting, but it was soon apparent that he, too, had the musical gift. When he was ten years old, mother Martha and daddy Jim bought their youngest son a Masonite toy guitar from Sears. “After he started playing,” said
Martha, “he just never quit.” By listening to his brother’s influences, young Stevie was already imitating Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Bobby “Blue” Bland, but his main hero was his brother, Jimmie. Instead of trading baseball cards or shooting hoops, Stevie hunkered down with Albert King records, determined to copy the master note for blistering note.
Jimmie’s first band, the Swinging Pendulums, got gigs all over Dallas, and sometimes twelve-year-old Stevie got to sit in and jam, fortified by a few secret swigs of his daddy’s beer. Though Big Jim had a killer of a temper and a penchant for boozing, for a while he allowed his sons to play their music and maybe get a chance at the big time. But when Jimmie went on to join a successful Texas rock band, the Chessmen, and started staggering home bombed at four in the morning, the Vaughans vowed to keep their youngest away from the music business. Fat chance. After Stevie had flipped burgers at the local Dairy Queen for a while, making seventy cents an hour, he realized all he wanted to do was play guitar. His parents would just have to understand.
By the time Stevie entered high school, his band had already played several local gigs. He had a black singer, which irked Big Jim no end. The first time Stevie’s dad met Christian Plicque, he had asked him to shine his shoes, but nothing would deter Stevie from his music. When the Chessmen opened for a new mind-boggling guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie was front and center, gobbling it up, mixing the bold new sound into his burgeoning bowl of blues.
The Chessmen fell apart due to heavy drug and alcohol action, but it wasn’t long before Jimmie put Texas Storm together and asked Stevie to play bass until they could round up a permanent member. Finally Stevie felt like his brother’s equal, albeit a temporary equal, and as soon as a bass player was found, Stevie joined another band, Liberation, with singer Christian Plicque. At fifteen Stevie Vaughan was playing seedy, sleazy cellars every night, driving hundreds of miles, making almost no money, missing school, messing around with girls, and doing a whole lot of speed. He tried to hide the high life from his folks, but it showed in his face. After the 1971 Christmas holidays, Stevie really pissed off his parents by announcing he wasn’t going to finish his senior year at high school. Instead, he and his newly named group, Blackbird, were hitting the high road to Austin, where all the groovy people were pursuing their passions. The little redhead with the John Lennon glasses wielding a guitar would fit right in. Big brother Jimmie was already there—how could it not be the coolest place on earth?
After hanging out in San Francisco with Janis Joplin and taking way too many amphetamines, Jimmie had rediscovered his blues mojo during a Muddy Waters gig and took it to Austin, where he was ripping up the club scene. When Stevie wasn’t playing with his own band, he was always in the audience, hooting for his brother. If Jimmie’s playing could soothe a savage beast, Stevie’s could create one.
After a disappointing whirlwind trip to Los Angeles with a well-connected musician, Marc Benno, who promised Stevie stardom, the nineteen-year-old was back in Austin, stealing steaks from Safeway for his dinner. Not even twenty, Stevie felt like a washed-up nobody until he found a beat-up 1959 Stratocaster at an Austin instrument store, Heart of Texas Music. “I love this old thing,” he told the owner. “This feels like what I’ve been looking for all these years.” He traded a newer Strat for the funky older one, telling the store owner that it was the only guitar he had ever played that said what he wanted it to say.
Stevie’s dedication proved to be too much for the members of his band, and in less than a year Blackbird was over and Stevie briefly joined Krackerjack. One of the clubs on the band’s regular circuit was the Abraxis in Waco, Texas, where the musicians were furnished with cocaine, and Stevie fell right through the sparkling trap door. But the kid felt good about himself. Coke was better for you than speed, right?
Austin’s answer to the Fillmore, the Armadillo, became Stevie’s headquarters for the next two years. He played until he dropped, developing his flaming bluesy style to kick-ass perfection, eventually joining another R&B band, the Cobras, on New Year’s Eve 1974. The band had a lot of camp followers, eager to shove cocaine up Stevie’s flattened nose, and he was always flying, wired to the hilt. When the band did some demos, Stevie not only did some ferocious solos, he sang for the first time, and started singing live soon afterward, his voice nearly as soulful as his picking.
Stevie Ray tearing it up. “I have been gifted with something,” he said, “and if I don’t take it to its fullest extent, I might as well be farting in the bushes.” (JAMES FRAHER/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/VENICE, CALIF.)
Lindi Bethel, Stevie’s main squeeze, cooked for him, sewed his clothes, and supported him when he was low on cash, but she couldn’t keep him faithful, and Stevie Vaughan was a double-standard kind of guy. He demanded that she be “good” whenever he was on the road, and when Lindi bitched, Stevie said that it was the music, not the devil, that made him do it. The music could take the blame.
Cobra band members called Stevie “Little Nigger” because he loved black music so hard, but mainly because he was such a fuck-up. They were tired of driving the kid around, holding his hand. When Stevie gave his notice, the Cobras heaved a combined sigh of relief.
When the landmark club Antone’s opened in Austin, Jimmie Vaughan’s Fabulous Thunder-birds were the unofficial house band, opening
for heavy-duty legends like Muddy Waters and Otis Rush. When Albert King came to town, Clifford Antone asked the blues great if Little Stevie Vaughan could sit in, and King begrudgingly obliged. Stevie was so charged up to be playing with the master that he owned the stage, keeping up with King the entire night. King tipped his hat to the kid. It was time for Stevie Vaughan to start his own band.
Rounding up Austin’s finest, Stevie put together the Triple Threat Revue and started a fourteen-year road stint. Often waking up in strange houses in strange towns, Stevie wondered where the fuck he was, and where were the drugs? Girls were mad for the shy guitarist, following him from gig to gig, but when he laid eyes on Lenny Bailey, he knew he had to get her away from his friend Diamond Joe. A week later Joe was hurling darts at Stevie’s picture, and Lenny was his. The couple had a skewed domestic scene, preferring to score a bag of ice each day instead of springing for a refrigerator. Though Lenny was able to provide the household with drugs, they were both into the spiritual sphere, consulting their horoscopes and throwing stones. Crystals or crystal meth, what was the difference? Above anything else, Stevie valued his musical gift, never really understanding why he was chosen to be so blessed.
Less than a year after their debut, Triple Threat lost a couple of members due to Stevie’s jacked-up demands and became Double Trouble, the new name taken from an Otis Rush song. Stevie was playing like a motherfucker, but shooting a lot of speed and downing a fifth of Chivas Regal a day. His fingers bled, but he didn’t seem to notice unless it got in the way of his playing. At a show in Lubbock he pulled a bloody callus down to the quick and reattached it with Superglue so he could do a third set. One night, when Jimmie did his usual heckling job from the audience, Stevie jumped offstage and punched his big brother in the jaw, then broke down into remorseful tears. When Stevie talked about Hendrix dying so young and how maybe he was in for the same fate, his friends started to worry about him.
Stevie and Lenny were busted for cocaine possession after Double Trouble opened for Muddy Waters in Houston, and in a state of confusion—after asking former girlfriend Lindi Bethel to come back to him—Stevie proposed to Lenny. They tied the knot between sets in the office of the Rome Inn nightclub, pledging their way-out adoration by creating rings out of wire found on the floor. They were probably guitar-string wedding bands. When the newlyweds went to court for the cocaine bust, Stevie was ordered to undergo drug abuse treatment. It didn’t take.
When Double Trouble signed with Chesley Millikin at Classic Management, the new manager liked the sound of the guitarist’s middle name, and Stevie became Stevie Ray Vaughan—Stevie Rave On!—the new guitar Wunderkind. “I have been gifted with something,” Stevie said, “and if I don’t take it to its fullest extent, I might as well be farting in the bushes.”
Through Chesley, Double Trouble played a howlingly successful showcase at Danceteria in New York for the Rolling Stones, and the following week the grinning faces of Stevie and Mick Jagger graced the “Random Notes” page of
Rolling Stone.
Mick made noises about getting Stevie on the Stones’ new label. It didn’t happen, but the word was out.
A friend of Chesley’s, Claude Nobs, extended an invitation for Double Trouble to play at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival, and after a raunchy, dazzling display of virtuosity from Stevie, audience member David Bowie came backstage to hand out some praise. He also asked if Stevie might be interested in appearing in his new music video. The second night of the festival Double Trouble jammed with Jackson Browne, who offered the band his studio back in L.A. free of charge. Things were looking way, way up for the kid who had hid in the closet with his brother’s guitar.
The band took Jackson Browne up on his offer, recording ten songs in three days. While Double Trouble was in the studio, David Bowie called to see if Stevie would like to come to New York and play on his new album, asking what he was doing for the rest of next year. Good question.
Bowie and Stevie Ray were an odd pairing—Mr. Glam Sophistication and a no-frills blues guitarist who was called “Stinky” because he worked and slept in the same clothes for so long. But Stinky tore it up in the studio, completing six songs for the
Let’s Dance
album in two and a half hours, and Bowie asked Stevie Ray to join the Serious Moonlight Tour. It was a sticky offer, tearing Stevie up, but he decided it just might jack him into the big time, so when rehearsals began in March 1983, Stevie Ray showed up.
Bowie hadn’t planned on Stevie’s coke habit or his starstruck wife, Lenny, as part of the package, and quickly laid down the
Let’s Dance
law. Stevie’s manager thought his client was worth more than three hundred dollars a night, and when Chesley Millikin was asked to cease managing Stevie for the Moonlight Tour, Stevie shocked the rock world by quitting the Bowie tour before it started. The bold move heightened his “working-class guitar hero” image.
After working on music industry icon John Hammond for two years, Chesley was overjoyed when the producer called after hearing a live tape of Double Trouble from Montreux. When he heard the rough mixes from Jackson Browne’s studio, he was determined to put out Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first album. The Bowie record helped the cause, and after some remixing, Epic released Double Trouble’s
Texas Flood
in June 1983. By the end of the year Stevie had gone gold.
Stevie no longer had to worry about paying the bills and always carried five grand in one boot and a gram of coke in the other. He indulged his passion for guitars, buying the best of the best and giving them all names. Onstage he kept his head down and attacked his instrument like a hell-bent lover on a rampage, torturing the strings into adoring submission while his fans went
into a frenzy. With the fame came the drug-toting sycophants, and even after a loving yet stern warning from mentor Albert King, Stevie continued daily to down a bottle of Chivas and inhale seven grams of coke.
Texas Flood
was nominated for four Grammy awards, winning Best Traditional Blues Category, and the second album from Double Trouble,
Couldn’t Stand the Weather,
sold like Texas hotcakes. After a packed date at Carnegie Hall, Stevie found his parents in the glad-handing backstage crowd and hugged Big Jim until they both had tears running down their faces.
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