by Marc Spitz
MICHAEL DES BARRES: As far as decadence goes, the Continental Hyatt House on the Sunset Strip, better known as the Riot House, was the court absolute of this Babylonian kingdom.
RON ASHETON: Los Angeles was the glam capital of America, not New York, so of course the Stooges relocated to L.A. right after we recorded the Raw Power record in London. MainMan, Bowie’s management company, opened their West Coast offices in this big house on Mulholland Drive. Iggy and our guitar player, James Williamson, lived there. I stayed at the Hyatt House on Sunset Strip, where I was able to enjoy the perks of living there for a while… signing for everything and getting to know all the house detectives and the vice cops and the prostitutes who’d hang in the bar every night. There were all these high rollers that seemed to live there all year round, like this guy Mr. Thompson, who was some big wheeler-dealer in God knows what. I’d slide into the bar at the Hyatt and sit right next to a hooker on one side and a vice cop on the other and Mr. Thompson’d be across the way yelling, “Have drinks on me!” and he’d buy the whole bar a drink. It was a great time… until MainMan dropped us, and then it all went to hell, everything turned into a bad nightmare.
DANNY SUGERMAN: Iggy’s career was still washed up despite the energy and goodwill of the glitter rock scene in L.A. Raw Power looked glam, but it didn’t sound “glam.” Sales bombed badly. It wasn’t Sweet or Suzi Quatro. Rodney didn’t play it very much at all. But people knew Iggy had worked with Bowie and that carried a lot of legitimacy, so he was able to depend on the generosity of strangers quite a bit. Iggy had no money. He was set on self-destruct. There was nothing happening to give him any hope. He took drugs to numb himself to the reality.
HARVEY KUBERNIK: The Dolls realized thay could get better gigs out here. In New York, they were playing art galleries. Then they came out to stay at the Riot House and play a couple of shows at the Whisky. They were downtown-New-York, swaggering, looking-for-a-party types, but I don’t know if they bargained for the level of decadence going on here. At the time they loved it, though. They were not anti-L.A. at all, like the Velvets were. I do remember David Johansen was mad he couldn’t find hand-cut pastrami in L.A. He was like, “Where’s Nathan’s?” I said, “There’s one in the Valley.” We had to do a hot dog run to Nathan’s with him. I’d never seen anybody put sauerkraut on a hot dog. I was like, “Wait a minute, you eat this at ten in the morning?” He said, “Oh yeah. Anytime.” He was always going, “Where’s the vendor carts?” I never knew you could get a hot dog on the street.
SABEL STAR: [When the Dolls came to town to play the Whisky] we got them all something. Syl got some crotchless underwear, David [Johansen] this cocksucker thing, and I got Johnny some silver Fredrick’s of Hollywood underwear, which was my favorite. I gave Johnny his present and he goes, “Why don’t you come upstairs with me?” It was so weird because I knew he was going to be mine. For a week, we never left that room.
SYLVAIN SYLVAIN: Johnny and Sabel went into the hotel bedroom. She gives him a blow job and that’s it, they were married in the eyes of God. He was hers and she was his.
SABEL STAR: Johnny was so sweet and innocent and so cute. That first week was magical. I just fell in love with him. During the day, we’d hang around Hollywood Boulevard, we went to all the shops and we got our picture taken in a little photo booth, it was so much fun. Johnny and I just went off on our own, then there’d be the gigs at night. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
LEEE “BLACK” CHILDERS: Iggy set out to turn people onto heroin. I don’t know for sure what his reasons were, but I lived with him for eight or nine months and I watched him do it. We had this really nice big house in the Hollywood Hills, he was with Corel then, and he’d invite people up to the house. It gave him something in his head, it was like sex, I guess, he’d tie them off and shoot ’em up, watch the blood bloom in the syringe. Watch them have their first high, and that’s what he got off on.
SYLVAIN SYLVAIN: Johnny was a big Iggy fan and the four of them were always together, and one thing led to another. Johnny’s the kind of guy you turn him onto one joint and the next day he’s got a whole pound. So they’d fix together and that’s when that started. Johnny began using. Not regularly at first, just a little bit here and a little bit there. It turned out to be the worst thing you could ever introduce Johnny to, with all his problems, all the sexual confusion. “Am I a boy or a girl?” Heroin was perfect ’cause it puts you at rest with all that.
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: There was this groupie [at the Hyatt House where the Dolls were staying] who was being really pushy and annoying. Apparently she was behaving really badly so they put her in a chair naked. Then they wrapped her in tape, taped her to the chair so she couldn’t get out, then they covered her naked body with slices of baloney. They carried the whole taped package out, put it in the elevator, and punched for the lobby. The doors closed and down she went. The doors opened in the lobby and there was a naked girl covered in baloney.
MICHAEL DES BARRES: Abusing groupies and the room service guy was not my thing. Unfortunately for some bands, the rock-and-roll wild nights at the Hyatt consisted of beating and sodomizing some poor infatuated midteen girl with an absent father complex or throwing the room service guy out the window. The Caligula rock-and-roll cliché. I wasn’t into any of that. I hated it. Why would I want to do that when I could be off with some beautiful woman in the hills with great wine, good conversation, and wonderful sex.
HARVEY KUBERNIK: The party ended, pretty quickly. Iggy got hooked on heroin and Raw Power didn’t take off immediately, so there you go. So long, Iggy. Goodbye and good luck, you know? It’s been fun.
DANNY SUGERMAN: After Columbia dumped the Stooges, Iggy owed MainMan a hundred grand, so Tony DeFries used the Columbia advance from Raw Power to make Bowie a star in Japan, and Iggy was pissed. He’d been used. He had nowhere to go. Being a fan, I felt an obligation to help him out. There was a guest room where I lived in this house in Laurel Canyon owned by Manzarek, who used the downstairs living room for his rehearsal studio, and Iggy stayed there. He was pretty strung out. Pamela Morrison was hanging around, also strung out. Both were at a pretty low place in their lives and I was just 18, 19, a kid trying to help them, but Pamela was not impressed with Iggy. He once showed his dick to her and she said, “Put that toy away.”
RAY MANZAREK: Iggy was crashing at my rehearsal space and Danny’s living quarters on Wonderland Avenue. We were trying to put a band together, but Iggy had a failure of will… and couldn’t see himself going in the direction I wanted to take it in. He said, “I can’t abandon my audience.” I said “What audience? What the fuck are you talking about? You don’t have an audience!” He just couldn’t do it. He had to have the Stooges guitarist James Williamson come in. So James came by and cranked his guitar up to 11 and I said, “Well, you don’t need me. There’s no sonic space for a keyboard.”
DANNY SUGERMAN: I wanted to reform the Doors with Iggy singing. I think Iggy wanted it, too. He himself started the rumor, first printed in Creem magazine, that he was auditioning for Morrison’s role in the Doors. Unfortunately, the other ex-Doors, Robby Krieger and John Densmore, failed to perceive his genius. Still, Ray and Iggy jammed a lot, and they played on the third anniversary of Jim’s death at the Whisky. Iggy got up at the end of Ray’s set and did “L.A. Woman,” “Backdoor Man,” and “Maggie McGill.” The crowd loved it, but John and Robby hated it and walked out on him.
RON ASHETON: When MainMan dropped us we just went out and played our butts off. We still lived in L.A., but Bowie and his manager, Tony DeFries, were gone. We played the Whisky a lot… that was down and ugly and dirty times… we had nothing happening… it was hand-to-mouth living in the Riviera Motel on Sunset. Those guys had no money, so I got to pay for Iggy’s room and my brother’s room and we were just going from one weekly hotel to another. Boy, that was the true, bizarre kind of fear-and-loathing side of being in L.A., something I wouldn’t wish on an enemy. We were playing for just enough money to
survive. It was a bad time. Bad feelings. Bad drugs.
PLEASANT GEHMAN: You’d buy Quaaludes at the Rainbow parking lot. Everybody would be there. Everybody knew that’s where you could get them. They cost a dollar. Quaaludes were like the Ecstasy of the time, a downer version of E.
HAL NEGRO: If you wanted Quaaludes, you could always go to the Rainbow. But don’t go there for them now ’cause they don’t sell them anymore. They don’t even make them anymore.
CHUCK E. STARR: Quaaludes were wonderful. You didn’t have to drink that bottle of Boone’s Farm before you went in. You’d just take half a Quaalude, and you were smashed. It was better living through chemistry. That was the best drug ever because you didn’t have to drink. God forbid you drank with them, ’cause you went right to sleep. People would do them with wine and get in their cars and wake up—if they were lucky—wrapped around a telephone pole.
JUDITH BELL: It was Quaaludes and malt liquor. You’d do a half a lude and sink a can of Goldfrog malt liquor, guzzle that thing as fast as you could. On Quaaludes, you’d fuck a doorknob. They made people just want to have sex. I remember watching Dan Rather call them “disco pillows” on the news. After that we called them disco pillows, too. God!
RON ASHETON: After the Stooges broke up in L.A. I was starving—’74, ’75 was all about trying to fall asleep with a clenched fist in my stomach. And I got no shoes. Then somebody said to me, “I can give you a pair of platforms.” I loathe platforms. It’s a hundred degrees out and it’s 1975, the glam rock thing is way over, and I’m wearing blue platforms. And I hate the color blue.
ANDY SEVEN: I remember seeing Iggy at Rodney’s after the Stooges broke up when he still had the platinum rinse, and Michael Des Barres, the singer for Silverhead. Stan Lee, who later started the Dickies, used to go there. He was this short, pushy little puffed-out guy with a big Marc Bolan poodle shag, and he claimed he had the leopard jacket that Iggy wore on the back cover of Raw Power, he told me he got it from Iggy for dope collateral.
RON ASHETON: Oh, yeah, Iggy would trade his possessions all the time for drugs. That’s how he lost some of those great clothes, like that plastic jacket on the back of Raw Power with the tiger’s head… that got traded to somebody for drugs or whatever.
STAN LEE: When I was sixteen I used to hang out with Iggy. I got his Raw Power jacket in a drug deal that went down in the Whisky parking lot. It was used as collateral, and thankfully I kept it.
CHUCK E. STARR: One night at Rodney’s Iggy took a Sparklett’s water bottle, threw it onto the floor, and it broke into a million pieces, then he dove onto the glass. Another time he was wearing this dress and he kept pulling it up and he wasn’t wearing anything under it and he was scaring the customers. One time he came over to my house and called David Bowie in London and I got like a sixty-dollar phone bill. That would be like a coupla hundred dollars by today’s standards. When he started making money in the ’80s, I should have called him and said, “Hi, can you give me the money for that bill now?”
ANDY SEVEN: Iggy once showed up at Rodney’s all luded out and he kept jumping up and down at the DJ booth wanting to sing along to side two of Raw Power. Rodney played the entire side of the album for him and Iggy tried to sing along over the DJ’s announcer mic, but he was so fucked up he couldn’t remember the words. He was in full drag, complete with dress, high heels, makeup, and this really scary gingham straw hat like girls wore in the ’30s. He was totally blasted out of his mind, and I heard the next day he got picked up for impersonating a woman.
TOM AYRES: One time, Iggy actually played live at the English Disco. Just before the show, it was rumored that he was planning to kill himself onstage at the end of the act. Sure enough, when the set was coming to a close, Iggy got out a butcher knife and went wild, man, all across his chest. The security guards had to jump onstage and literally carry him off.
RON ASHETON: One day Iggy said, “Hey, you got any of those Nazi uniforms of yours with you in L.A.?” And I said, “Yeah, I got a couple of things.” And he said, “Well, we’re doing this show at Rodney’s and I want you to dress up in the Nazi uniform and whip me. We’ll get you some beers and stuff.” So I took a couple of my buddies down there and that’s what I did. I just showed up in my brown shirt. Iggy had a bass player and a drummer and they were just playing this weird rhythmic music and Iggy was trying to incite people. Iggy got up in this black dude’s face and was really trying to provoke him, and I thought, “God, if I was that guy, I would fucking deck him.” Then he got out a rusty pocketknife and started cutting himself up.
DON WALLER: That night I went backstage at Rodney’s and found Iggy lying on his back on a couch with Sabel Star holding him and Ron Asheton was standing around in his Nazi uniform and there was Williamson and Scott Asheton and Scotty Thurston just hangin’ around… they were givin’ Iggy a half a gram of coke just to get up the energy to go onstage, he was so junked out.
RON ASHETON: It was a fake whip, but you could still hurt somebody with it, but it wasn’t hard enough for Iggy. He was like, “Come on… thrash me more, really do it.” I guess he thought that I would really just lay into him, but there was no way, man. No way I was just gonna whip the hell out of him. But my two buddies came in and they had belts… my one buddy had taken one of those high-tension wires, a big round cable wire in a heavy rubber casing, and he’d made a blackjack thing out of it, and my buddy said, “Fuck it, I’ll hit him!” and they came out and started beating on him. They were hitting him a lot harder than me, and he did get a little wound up and that’s when he started cutting himself. He wanted to be put in a gunnysack and dragged through the club and put outside in the gutters of Sunset Boulevard. So that’s what we did. We drug him out, kicking him in the bag, and then we dumped him out on the street.
MICHAEL DES BARRES: Iggy just went on an absolute mutilation spree… kind of like, “I’m going to hurt myself before you hurt me.”
DANNY SUGERMAN: Iggy wanted me to call every writer in L.A. and tell them he was going to kill himself on stage that night. I didn’t want to make that call, but I did—to my eternal regret. It was a mess, no staging, no rehearsal. The “piece” was called “Murder of a Virgin,” I believe. I drove him to the ocean afterward, where he washed off his wounds in the moonlight.
HARVEY KUBERNIK: Bowie weathered the gradual glitter rock decline by shrewdly retiring Ziggy in late ’73 and reemerging the following year with the Diamond Dogs stage show, which sold out about six thousand tickets at the Universal Amphitheater. He escaped with his career intact. The rest of them—the Dolls, the Stooges—were smacked out and stuck in the glitter ditch. Stuck in the quicksand, and sinking fast.
CHUCK E. STARR: In late ’74, suddenly this new type of dance music was happening with songs like “Lady Marmalade.” You know, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” People were just going nuts over this new stuff. Times change. By then Rodney’s was much nicer. They’d built these cool wooden booths and a VIP section. They’d moved in these old 1920s couches. And they put glitter on everything and painted Rodney’s name on it. They really made it nice. But then the scene started to change. Platforms were still popular, but kids started wearing bell bottoms over them. Groups like Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes appeared. Gradually this new music came to be called disco. Newcomers would ask me: “Well, this is a disco, isn’t it?” The sign outside said RODNEY’S ENGLISH DISCO, so they’d come in looking for a disco as they knew it, and so the new people were totally confused by the name. They’d bug me to play new disco and I’d oblige with a few tracks, but glam was dying anyway. Bowie had taken off his orange haircut and had started wearing these butch suits and was going for an R&B sound. Mott the Hoople and the Sweet hadn’t done anything new for years. Gary Glitter was getting fat in England. It all just ended.
DON WALLER: Rodney’s support of the Dolls certainly helped them out in L.A., but they still couldn’t get it together. The Dolls played the Santa Monica Civic with Silverhead, and two-thirds of the crowd walked o
ut ’cause they were even sloppier and their overall sound was even worse than usual.
PAMELA DES BARRES: Silverhead and the GTOs played the last big glam show at the Hollywood Palladium. The New York Dolls, or Iggy, one of them didn’t show up at the last minute. It was all haywire. The scene was getting very debauched at that point. A little too decadent for my taste. Too many hard narcotics. I’m actually a flower child.
CHUCK E. STARR: They had a big end-of-glitter party at the Palladium. Oh, honey, they carried me through in a coffin. I was throwing glitter and plastic nails at everybody. I was the glitter corpse. That was the end of it.
RAY MANZAREK: I thought glam was totally absurd. Men in makeup and spandex and soft feathers and eyeliner. It was the ultimate degeneracy. The worst of Rome. I thought it was most distasteful and absolutely the wrong direction to go in. That was the falling apart of everything for me.
TOM AYRES: The English Disco went strong from the end of ’72 to almost the end of ’74. People were just insatiable for it. Then suddenly it was all over.
MICHAEL DES BARRES: I think it fell apart for us not because we had a choice but because we were so fucked up and it caught up with us and then you had to either clean up or not. The makeup had faded and you either put some more on or you went natural.
LEEE “BLACK” CHILDERS: I just kinda faded out of MainMan like everybody else. It all just kind of faded away. Iggy helped me realize that glam was over. He taught me the difference between glam and cool. Iggy always made fun of David [Bowie] and the whole glitter voguing routine, even though for a while there he went along with it, ’cause he could have a fabulous place to live and a lot of money, but Iggy was always saying, “Who do they think they are? They’re so awful looking, look at those shoes!” I began to realize that just having a lot of glitter on your clothes was eventually gonna wear real thin, which it did. Iggy got fired from MainMan first and then I was let go, too. Everything has its moments and then it doesn’t anymore, especially in California.
