The untold story of Johnny Thunders’ final performance the night before his death
“Rock ‘n’ roll is simply an attitude. You don’t have to play the greatest guitar.” – Johnny Thunders (1952-1991)
It is a mark of Johnny Thunders’ artistic output that arguably his best work came when he rolled off some Parisian sofa to quickly lay down a one-take acoustic album for junk money with the soul-exposed album Hurt Me. Joan Baez may have dubbed Bob Dylan the ‘original vagabond’, but she surely did so forgetting that Thunders made him look like a landed gentry.
This studied carelessness echoed in his music, too. His style was defined by his decree that “the only technical things I know are treble, volume and reverb, that’s all”. His swagger was typified by his recollection that “The Dolls were an attitude. If nothing else, they were a great attitude.” And his mystique was epitomised by the professed notion, “No one really knows me. People think they know me.”
That last point is one that has persisted in the enigmatic legacy of what he left behind. One point largely missed is that he was always looking for salvation in music as opposed to relishing in his own demise. Chaos and junk were never his muse, but rather a way of life that he was always trying to leave behind. “I’m gonna try to be cured,” he said shortly before his death. “I’ve been on heroin for eight years, and I want to try a different style of life. It made me split from my wife. It ruined a lot of things for me.”
Sadly, Thunders ran out of time on that pursuit, but his music will forever remain a mark of reconciliation. Borne from his troubles, the way that the tracks brace fallibility and echo with the lingering hope has brought a lot of deliverance to those who have listened. With his honest originality, Thunders has continued to laud a vast sway of influence over modern music.
And perhaps the most crucial point of all when it comes to his artistry – one often forgotten – is that he kept going with that music until the very end. In the eight years since the fabled recording of Hurt Me, a record that sounds like a withering farewell in the best possible way, Thunders had drifted ever closer to obscurity. However, he always just about kept his foot in the door of hip culture, despite chronic circumstances, refusing to be shut out from the discussion. On April 21st, 1991, he would find himself in a studio once more, recording in Europe.
Less than 48 hours later, he would be found dead at the Inn on St. Peter Hotel in Louisiana. Although other theories have come in since, thanks to Dee Dee Ramone saying, “They told me Johnny had gotten mixed up with some bastards”, hinting that ‘the wrong crowd’ had brought about his demise, the official cause of death was drug-related causes.
In fact, as singer Willy DeVille, who lived next door to Thunders, explained, when he went to see them take out the guitarist’s cadaver, “rigour mortis had set in to such an extent that his body was in a U shape.” He went on to explain that when he wheeled the body bag, it was fixed into a U shape, the zip straining against the bent form within. A crowd gathered around this strange morbid triangle, kids gauped, unaware that in ten years time, their favourite band would likely be inspired by what lay within, fittingly ungainly even in death.
The day before that sad end, Thunders was in Germany recording a track poetically titled ‘Born to Lose’ with a Berlin punk band he helped to spawn called Die Toten Hosen [The Dead Trousers]. Mark Reeder – the man who used to smuggle punk records across Checkpoint Charlie to ensure rock ‘n’ roll reverberated with liberation on both sides of the divided city – worked extensively with the band, so I reached out to him for the details of that final day.
He spoke to frontman Andreas ‘Campino’ Frege, who was with Thunders recording ‘Born to Lose’ 36 hours before his death, and told him: “Yes that’s true! The last photo of him was taken in the studio standing next to me. After the session, he took the plane back to the USA, went to his hotel and was found dead the next morning.” What happened in the interim remains somewhat a mystery, known only to Thunders.
However, 36 hours before that, his sole focus was on the music even despite his ailing health. “He wanted to record his guitar in the bathroom because he thought it had a great sound,” Campino recalled. “He didn’t look well and needed loads of breaks when singing ‘Born To Lose’. But he was in good spirits and kept on joking about himself and his drug addiction…”
The duality of Thunder’s character was clear to Campino even then. His scratchy style gave the track exactly what they had hoped, but the fact that the former New York Dolls rocker experimented with the echo of the bathroom is indicative of the fact that he was actually a rather studied carelessness. Meanwhile, his determination to get things right, constantly being upended by his drug problem, which he both laughed off and bemoaned, is also indicative of a star whose own carelessness was more than he could handle.
The final performance below is a fitting snapshot of a man who lived to perform as much as he performed to live. Even these dying embers are dripping with the experiential quality that gave his rugged guitar more life than just about anyone.
