* * *
He was a special guy, one of a kind, and I’m very honored that he was a close friend. I’m still very close with Linda. Every year, there’s a tribute where she celebrates Johnny’s life at his graveside statue at Hollywood Forever Cemetery with the showing of an old horror film on a drive-in movie screen, a little gig, and some remembrances. This past year was the tenth one, and it’s turned into a fan favorite, drawing a couple of thousand people. All the old gang helps out, and it’s a chance for everyone to be in the same place at the same time. A little bit of a sadder occasion than a poolside barbecue in the sun, but it’s a good charity event that raises money and awareness.
John’s early passing made everyone feel a bit more mortal. He was the strongest, most rigid guy I knew, and if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone, including me. It seemed like a bum rap for him. Unconsciously, I felt that every day in Beverly Glen, every ball game, every drive in the hills, every box score in the sports section should be appreciated a little more and not taken for granted. I was definitely affected by his death. It was the first time I had ever experienced the slow passing of a friend. I had known a few people who died suddenly from drugs or a car accident, but this time, we sat on the couch together, and I watched it happen slowly. We still go up to the Ramones’ ranch for the occasional barbecue, where we inevitably talk about the fabled root beer incident.
20
Whatever I Can Do to Help
I was standing around, drinking coffee late at night next to the van with Captain Sensible and the crew members, at a truck stop somewhere in England, when Mikey Boy Peters came back over to the van and calmly told us, “My cancer has come back.”
There was a collective gasp. How do you respond to that? This was one of my truest pals ever and the singer in a band we were currently on a tour with. No one spoke. We were all bundled up, shifting from foot to foot, trying to stay warm, and even in the cold, no one was anxious to get back into the van. I remember getting very hot under my heavy overcoat; my scarf was pulled up around my face, and the steam from my breath was fogging up my glasses. It was English weather—damp, cold, and windy in the parking lot—the nearby motorway traffic was whizzing by, and the whole scene was lit by the usual fluorescent streetlights and signs in an English roadside services stop parking lot at 2:00 A.M. We had just finished a show, and we were driving overnight to the next one. More luxury and glamour, but with this gang, I didn’t mind; we were all pals and equals.
The Jack Tars is a good side project. We each bring a few hit songs to the table, and the fans like this combination of musicians. We continue to do this band with Captain Sensible, Mikey Boy in remission from his cancer, and current permanent member Chris Cheney from the Australian rockabilly/pop/rock band the Living End. He sings and plays guitar as good as anyone I’ve ever worked with and is a true pal. We first met when his older sister had to smuggle him into the shows on a Cats Australian tour in the 1980s. My son, TJ, later discovered his band, and we stayed reconnected. The Jack Tars is a bunch of beloved characters. Sometime guests and members include true pal Billy Duffy from the Cult, true pal Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols, good buddy Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses, Mick Jones from the Clash, Rami Jaffee and Chris Shiflett from the Foo Fighters, and good buddy and super-talented fellow Long Islander Fred Armisen.
Fred’s the creator and star of the fantastic sketch TV show Portlandia, and he did a long, successful stint on Saturday Night Live. Fred and I have a good connection. His childhood train stop on the LIRR was in Valley Stream, not far from ours in Massapequa. He’s a longtime musician and fan; it turned out that he had seen the Cats play very early on. Besides being a real drummer, he has an act where he sings and plays a perfectly researched, invented punk rock character called Ian Rubbish. He is a perfect fit for the Jack Tars. I’m happy to know him.
Captain Sensible is almost indescribable, a one-of-a-kind, unique character. As a founding member of the original punk rock band the Damned, he’s become a British institution. He’s reinvented himself a few times along the way and is now a punk rock elder statesman in the best sense of the word. I’m fortunate to count him as a true pal and a bandmate. We’ve piled up a lot of road miles and sound checks together. One of our tours in the UK coincided with his attempted run for Parliament, as the Blah! Party representative. It didn’t seem to me to just be a stunt. The guy is passionate and knows his stuff. It’s not easy, punk rock and antipolitics.
There are tales around him of legendary bad punk rock behavior. I’ve only had positive times with the cat, although I did have to hold his hand a few times on bumpy flights and once had to read to him during some exceptionally rough turbulence on a flight from London to New York City. At the end of the day, he’s a wicked good guitar player and a lovely bloke.
Mike Peters and I go back thirty-five years. His band, Seventeen, would later become the Alarm. They were the opening act on the first Stray Cats UK tour in 1980. They turned up at the gigs and pretended they were the official opening act. It took ten shows until anyone realized there was no official opening act. By then, we all liked them, and they did the rest of the tour. The last night of the tour was in Blackpool, and we whooped it up at the show. It was Christmas 1980, and the Cats had a top-ten hit record on the British charts; “Runaway Boys” was at number nine when they froze the charts for the two-week Christmas break. We had followed through with everything we knew we could accomplish and had been shooting for.
In a tragic coincidence of that tour, we were in Liverpool on the day John Lennon was killed back in our hometown of New York City. I was and am a Lennon guy. I can’t even say how much I love and respect the man and his music. I can get choked up every time by thinking about it for too long. Liverpool was a mythic musical place to me like Memphis or Lubbock. The club we played was called Erik’s, and I think it’s been on the club circuit a long time. Everyone has played there. It’s right in the section of town where the Beatles had played the Cavern Club a hundred or more times. At the time, this place was the closest thing to playing the old Cavern Club, which was across the street but closed down. We were looking forward to visiting a music mecca. No one we knew had ever been there, for sure. The pile of flowers in front of the club was ten feet high. People were just walking by and throwing bouquets on the pile. There was a heavy vibe in the city, but we didn’t cancel, and everyone was nice to us, and we had a great show. We did an encore of “I Saw Her Standing There” with Seventeen coming up to sing along. Lennon was a well-known Gene Vincent fan and a rockabilly at heart. I’ve always liked to think he would have dug the Stray Cats.
After a high-energy show and big encore, I was in a bathroom stall doing a little powder when the door was kicked in and flew off the hinges toward me. I was dragged out and knocked to the floor by some angry security guards. They kicked me over and over again. I tried to crawl away and hide under the sink. With the help of crew member and buddy Bobby Startup, I got to my feet and out of the bathroom. There was a full-scale riot going on in the club and in the parking lot. I later found out that a girlfriend of one of the security guards was in the dressing room. All of this happened over the untrue and mistaken idea that some awful drunken woman was in our dressing room. One thing led to another, and the security guards stormed the bathroom where I was. This led to someone in the club getting a foot stepped on or beer spilled, which led to someone throwing a punch, and it was game on, and the audience was involved, too. People were just fighting each other, and the club security was going at it for no good reason other than it was Saturday night in Blackpool. These were the classic tuxedo-clad, no-neck or -brains gorillas that worked in the clubs in the north of England. These are horrible characters and would even be funny caricatures if not for their violent nature and quick tempers. I was unaware of this sort but have seen them a lot in the years since. They seem to propagate in club culture. This time it was not my fault. A few of our crew guys were caught up in the melee and were busted up pre
tty good. Lee and Brian were both uninvolved and unhurt. They had gotten out of the dressing room and into a car and avoided any injury.
The police arrived, and a few of us were being taken to a local hospital and then to the police station for questioning over our part in the riot. On the way out, I slipped a plastic bag with my stash to Mike Peters and told him to hold it for me. I had a chipped tooth and was bruised, but nothing was broken. At the police station, I called a copper Barney Fife and compared their town to Mayberry after they were interrogating me and treating me like the bad guy. They didn’t get the reference, which was good. We all drove back to London.
The other two guys flew back to Massapequa for Christmas. For some reason I can’t remember, I stayed in London by myself. After a few days of sitting around, I started to get a little antsy. There was not much going on, and BBC television just showed the picture of the girl holding the balloon for fifteen hours a day. On top of it all, I was out of blow and a bit lonely. Not being a proper drug guy, I was never very good at getting the stuff, and no one was around to help this time. I called around a little, but it was Christmas, and even dealers take off for the holidays. I remembered giving the baggie to Mike. So I somehow got to one of the main stations, probably Victoria, got the right train, and made the right connections on British Rail to arrive in Rhyl, North Wales, on Christmas Eve 1980. I then asked around at the taxi stand and found a driver who knew Mike, who took me to his mom’s house, where the family was having dinner. I managed this, I’m pretty sure, with no or very little money, wearing a T-shirt and leather jacket in the middle of a harsh winter.
Christmas in Wales—the whole extended family was there around the fireplace. It was a scene right out of a movie. They were understandably surprised when I turned up unannounced. Everyone greeted me and took me in as a member of the clan. They all knew Mike had been on tour with the Cats and were all proud of him and armed with questions for me. I had a few drinks with the folks; I seem to remember an elderly woman knitting by the fireplace, but I was trying to get Mike’s attention.
He sensed this and took me to an upstairs bedroom where he had the baggie stashed in his sock drawer. Mike didn’t use the stuff, so it was intact. I went to the bathroom, did a healthy whiff, and went back downstairs to Christmas in Wales. The whole gang was lovely, and I was more talkative now. The only slight wrinkle came when it was time to eat. I had gone back and forth a couple of times to the bathroom and had been steadily drinking wine and beer since I’d arrived. I was feeling just fine, but in that state, I didn’t have an appetite and didn’t want to appear rude or ungrateful. These people had just taken in an uninvited, rough-looking, 120-pound, frozen, greasy-haired, leather-jacketed New York stranger to their family holiday dinner. So when the Christmas goose arrived with all the trimmings, I had to keep pushing it around the plate to make it look like I had eaten it. It was real home cooking, and I’m sure it was amazing.
After dinner, Mike and a few others took me around their village, where I met all the locals at the pub and neighborhood disco that was a having a special do that night. Word spread fast, and in the pub there were quite a few people who wanted to meet me and say hello. The Cats were currently on TV and the radio, and it was a small town; Mike’s band being on the tour was big news. One guy, who thought he was the town mod and tough guy, wanted to start some aggro with me, the visiting teddy boy celebrity. With the day I had just had, I couldn’t even muster my usual vitriol for any comeback or response. The guy was so disappointed by my lack of interest that he wound up just walking away in the end in a kind of disgruntled defeat. The best way to win this fight turned out to be with pure indifference. I made it back to London the next day and carried on with life.
Mike’s band changed their name to the Alarm and went on to have success. We always managed to stay in touch, as I have with a few true pals I still have from those early days in London. I saw the Alarm do their most famous show at a huge open-air concert at UCLA—I think it was televised on MTV. We lived in Stone Canyon at the time, which is close to UCLA, and the guys came over to my house after their big show. On a different occasion, Brian and I got onstage with them at the Palladium.
Sometime in the 1990s, Mike was diagnosed with cancer. The prognosis was not good, and I believe the doctors told him to get his affairs in order. He opted out of traditional treatment and got heavily involved with a self-healing method. I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but he continued to play gigs as a casting-out type of therapy and fought the cancer like an enemy within. He miraculously went into remission and stayed that way for ten years. We continued to stay in touch and would see each other’s bands when we could.
Sometime in the early 2000s, he contacted me with an idea for a new band. After a few lineup and name changes, we’ve become the Jack Tars. The band is a loud, acoustic, traveling jukebox playing the hit songs from our respective bands. Each guy sings his own songs with accompaniment from the others. The gig is peppered with stories about the genesis of the songs and clever banter and brings some big onstage personalities. It makes for a good show and a fun night out.
It was during the early days of doing gigs with what would become the Jack Tars, with the overwhelming support of the others, I had the confidence to try to sing a few songs. I’m not a real singer, but I love singers and have always envied real singers. The natural ability to sing is a great gift. I’ve always been pretty good at playing the drums and can comfortably play anywhere, anytime, in front of anyone. Singing is another story, and I found it hard in the past. At Mike’s insistence, I sang the Cats songs during the set. The audience accepted me doing my own songs, and it made sense to me right away. I earned the right to sing these songs a long time ago, and the fans excuse my lack of vocal expertise because they want to see one of the Cats do those songs. I like to compare it to Ringo doing a Beatles song. I tell the audience that I was the third-best singer in the Stray Cats. Now I can sing quite a few and have learned the most important thing is to pick the right songs. I’m not going to try to do Otis Redding or Elvis. I owe it to Mike for encouraging me to just do it.
True pal and original Sex Pistol Glen Matlock was very helpful on this front, too. We’ve known each other since the early days of the Cats in London. The first official bonding act of our new rhythm section was Glen offering to pay the dry cleaning bill that I incurred from an old drinking incident with him at the Venue in Victoria at some gig years before. I told him I appreciated it but that the jacket in question was lost long ago. Glen and I used to drink together, and now we don’t drink together. Unbeknownst to me, he gave it up, independently, around the same time as I did. Everything else is the same. The love of rock and roll and the need to pay the bills win every time. Glen and I have driven in his car to and from gigs all over England. We had a blast stopping for cream teas and visiting historic monuments on the way to the shows. A Stray Cat and a Sex Pistol, stopping and making detours involving heavy map reading, for a cream tea lunch in an English country village? What has the world come to? Glen’s hospitality and friendship over the years have helped me beyond words. Having a luxury suite waiting in a good part of leafy London is a great relief when trying to hustle up a rockabilly life. In a spooky small rock-and-roll world coincidence, Glen had a similar incident at the same club in Blackpool the year before our adventure there. It was through his encouragement that I decided to write this book in the first place. We’ve recently done a record with mutual true pal Earl Slick, confirming my sneaky suspicion that there are really only twenty-seven people in the world and they’re just running around all over the place.
So back in the van, Mike had dropped this bomb, and we were all speechless. A bunch of old rockers were crying in a van at a motorway services truck stop. We drove to the next place in silence. The sound of everyone’s thoughts was loud. Sometimes silence can be the perfect form of communication. Everyone knew what everyone else was thinking without the use of words. We were near the end of this run of dates,
and Mike got through them. I went home and didn’t hear from him for a while. I’ve since learned that he did a few rounds of chemotherapy and radiation then.
Mike has always been that “rock and roll can save your soul” kind of cat. No negativity is allowed to ride on him for free. This is real heavy stuff, but he’s the type of guy that does beat this. He’s also the type of guy that does something about it. When he told me he was going to start a charitable organization, I told him I’d always help, no matter what. Be careful of what you agree to in advance.
The new charity was to be called Love Hope Strength and would do rock-and-roll type events to raise money for cancer research. I figured I could handle that. The first event was a climb of the interior staircase of the Empire State Building on April 16, 2007. We were set to play a little gig on the observation deck on the eighty-sixth floor. I was born in New York City and walked past the Empire State Building a thousand times but had never been inside. I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone—do a good deed and do a little hometown tourism.
A few of us were on the stair-climb event, including longtime true pal Billy Duffy from the Cult. I’ve known Billy since 1981, when he had an after-school, pre-rock-star job with another true pal, Lloyd Johnson, at Johnson’s Clothing on the Kings Road. Everybody shopped and hung out at Johnson’s. BD has gone on to make a dozen great albums; I’ve seen his band play twenty times, and he’s a current buddy whom I see all the time. We are charter members of Hike Club, a loose affiliation of idle musicians who stay marginally fit by hiking Franklin Canyon in Beverly Hills just about every day. He has known Mike almost as long as I have, confirming the twenty-seven-people theory. Other stair climbers included true pals—the excellent bassist and longtime neighbor Jimmy Ashhurst and the Pontiff, original Sex Pistol, and king over us all, Steve Jones. He’s one of my best pals ever, and I continually blame him for just about everything I’ve ever done. He’s the guitar player on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, an album that is very important and influential to all of us. Along with Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions and Gene Vincent Rocks! And the Blue Caps Roll, it made up the three records that really shaped me as a musician and style-conscious cat. I got into rockabilly around the same time as I did punk rock, and that record was an influence. I feel honored to have both Steve and Glen as true pals.
A Stray Cat Struts Page 19
