Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (46 page)

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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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The routine went on and on. Only now there were bigger venues, more money, grander parties, more eager women, jet planes, and never-ending, heaping mounds of cocaine.
Lenny was always pissed off about something. She didn’t see Stevie enough. He didn’t know how to handle his money. She didn’t get enough of it. It was all going up his nose. He was barely coherent half the time. He gave her some kind of venereal infection. He appeared to be having a long-distance infatuation with a seventeen-year-old model, Janna Lapidus. Really it seemed like he was too fucked up to care about anything but the music. But even the music was starting to suffer. The third album,
Soul to Soul,
was a pain in the ass to record, and though his fans flipped over it, the album didn’t satisfy Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Stevie Ray (right) and brother Jimmie Vaughan. Stevie died a few hours later. (ROBERT KNIGHT)
His addiction got so bad that before and after gigs wasn’t enough—Stevie started dissolving a gram of coke into his Crown Royal, imbibing throughout the set. But nobody could help him. He was everybody’s meal ticket and too damn stubborn to listen. Brother Jimmie wasn’t any help. He was fucked up, too.
A fourth album was due, but Stevie was in no shape to deliver it. The easiest way out was to do a live record, and
Live Alive
is full of some pretty jacked-up, meandering tracks. The guitar solos are ragged, tragic, and full of tears that Stevie needed to cry. He was a total wreck. When Big Jim had a heart attack and died, Stevie still didn’t weep. He played the blues instead. On tour in Germany Stevie threw up bloody vomit and was rushed to the hospital, saying all he needed was a drink. His diagnosis was severe internal bleeding. The alcohol laced with coke had been tearing Stevie’s guts apart and in another month he would have been dead. On September 29, 1986, Stevie went to the London Clinic to take the cure with the same doctor who had helped Eric Clapton get healthy. He reached out to his mother and she came to her son’s side. Eric Clapton came to visit, encouraging his friend in recovery.
After 242 dates with Double Trouble that year, the rest of the tour had to
be canceled. On the plane to Charter Hospital in Atlanta, Stevie had his last double Chivas, then collapsed sobbing in his mother’s arms.
Stevie grabbed hold of recovery the way he did his music, with every ounce of his being, holding the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in the same esteem as Albert King’s guitar playing. The program forced him to stop running, stop hiding behind his Strat, and be brutally honest with himself and the other recovering addicts. “There were a lot of things I was running from,” he told a writer. “ … I was scared that somebody would find out I was scared. And now I’m realizing that fear is the opposite of love.”
Out of Charter, Stevie lived one day at a time. He filed for divorce from Lenny, which turned out to be a long and bitter experience. He moved eighteen-year-old Janna Lapidus in with him, and attended several AA meetings a week. He got healthy and stopped eating red meat. Stevie Ray was happy to be sober but nervous about picking up a guitar and playing the blues—after all, the term came from “blue devils,” a description of the hallucinations caused by getting too high—but the music didn’t fail him. Stevie started embracing people, saying with a huge, goofy grin, “Hugs, not drugs.” When old coke buddies swore Stevie’s passion had disappeared with his habit, he proved them ragingly wrong with his fifth album,
In Step,
a passionate mixture of hard-learned lessons and solid steamy riffs, which went gold, then platinum, earning him another Grammy, for Best Contemporary Blues Recording of 1989.
Big brother Jimmie was still getting way too high and his career had started to backslide after the Fabulous Thunderbirds’ Top Ten hit, “Tuff Enuff.” There had always been underlying rivalry, but surrounding it was a deep brotherly love. More than anything, Stevie wanted to get his brother straight and suggested that the two of them finally record an album together, which intrigued Jimmie enough to enter rehab. When he completed the program, the brothers Vaughan went into the studio to make the record of their lives. They played from their hearts and got closer than they had ever been.
When Stevie collected a crate full of honors at the Austin Music Awards, he thanked God he was alive, adding, “I want to thank all the people that loved me back to life so that I could be here with you today.”
Some of Stevie’s fans swore he had a healing gift. “I’ve seen that kind of sound heal me and other people,” Stevie once remarked. “I’m not saying that I am a healer; I’m saying that wherever those kinds of feelings and emotions come from, or through, music is a healer. If I hadn’t had the music to play, I probably would have been dead a long time ago.” Stevie seemed grateful and surprised to have made it through his addictions. Onstage in Kansas City he told his audience, “Every day I live now, it’s kind of like borrowed time.” He was going to make every day count. To a journalist at
Guitar World,
Stevie pointed out the Hendrix pin on his lapel. “See this? You know there’s a big lie
in this business. The lie is that it’s okay to go down in flames. Some of us can be examples about going ahead and growing. And some of us, unfortunately, don’t make it there and end up being examples because they had to die. I hit rock bottom, but thank God my bottom wasn’t my death.”
Stevie and Double Trouble were added to Eric Clapton’s lineup for a gigantic gig at Alpine Valley resort in Wisconsin on Labor Day weekend 1990. The first night Stevie stole everybody’s thunder, causing Eric Clapton to say the following night, “How am I going to follow this guy?” Opening with “The House Is Rockin’” from
In Step,
Stevie got the audience jumping and gyrating, and when brother Jimmie came onstage for the last three numbers, the entire house was on its feet. At the end of Clapton’s set, he made an announcement: “I’d like to bring out to join me here, a big treat, the best guitar players in the entire world: Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, Jimmie Vaughan.” A monster jam ensued, in which Stevie Ray lifted off the stage. “He just sort of kicked everybody’s ass and nobody seemed to fight back,” Jimmie later recalled. “Stevie was on a cloud or something.”
After the set Stevie was in a hurry to get on a helicopter, get back to his hotel, and call Janna. There was a single seat left on one of the Bell 206B Jet-Rangers, and Stevie fastened himself in along with Clapton’s agent, Bobby Brooks, tour manager Colin Smythe, and Nigel Browne, Clapton’s bodyguard.
The helicopter lifted up through the thick fog and seconds later crashed into a three-hundred-foot-high hill. Nobody heard a thing. All the passengers on board died instantly. It was August 27, 1990, the fourth anniversary of Big Jim Vaughan’s death.
At 6:50 A.M. two sheriff’s deputies discovered the wreckage, judging the crash site as “a high-energy, high-velocity impact at a low angle.” In the chilly morning sun, Jimmie Vaughan and Eric Clapton quietly identified the bodies. Somebody found Stevie’s cross necklace, and his big brother put it around his own neck.
A few days later several thousand people mourned the loss of Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Laurel Land Memorial Park in south Oak Cliff. Dr. John played piano while Stevie Wonder sang the Lord’s Prayer. Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne joined Stevie Wonder in an aching a cappella version of “Amazing Grace,” then the local preacher read the Serenity prayer, concluding with the Prayer of St. Francis, which was found folded up in Stevie’s pocket. (“ … For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”)
The ruins of Stevie RayVaughan’s helicopter—“a high-energy, high-velocity impact at a low angle.” (AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)
The Vaughan brothers’ album,
Family Style,
released after Stevie’s death, shot straight into the
Billboard
Top Ten and won two Grammy awards.
As always, rumors were whispered that there were drugs on the helicopter, that Stevie Ray had been getting high again, but the coroner’s report told the truth: Stevie’s aorta had been severed. There was no evidence of drug use. Stevie had been clean and sober for three years, 317 days, and forty minutes.
SID VICIOUS
S
id woke up in a blood-soaked bed. Staggering through the chaotic mess to the bathroom, he was horrified to see his precious Nancy in her black lacy underwear, curled into a fetal position under the sink, white as a ghost, which is what she was. Except for all the blood. A hunting knife was sticking out of her side, the same knife she bought for Sid in Times Square the day before. Sid Vicious stood there slack-jawed, in a state of stun-eyed shock from which he would never, ever recover. The only person who gave a shit about him was dead on the floor, killed with his own knife. Though he couldn’t remember how it had happened, when the cops arrived Sid admitted to stabbing Nancy. “I did it because I’m a dirty dog,” he announced in a tragic monotone before being handcuffed and taken away to prison.
Born John Simon Ritchie on May 10, 1957, Sid Vicious left home—such as it was—at fifteen. His air force father disappeared when Sid was two, and his mum, Anne Beverley, shuttled him from place to place, barely making ends meet, sometimes rolling joints for a living, dragging her son through the drug-torn
hippie haze of London’s flower power. Later Sid would pick fights with aging hippies, harassing them with, “Do you remember the magical summer of ’68?”
During a brief stint at Hackney Technical College, Sid met John Lydon, a like-minded, pissed-off, scrawny young outcast who had suffered with meningitis as a child. Together they went “squatting” in abandoned London dwellings, took fleeting odd jobs, and wandered up and down the King’s Road in Chelsea—the trendiest street for fashion in the universe—often hanging out at Sex, a hard-edged fetishwear shop owned by Malcolm McLaren.
McLaren sold his naughty-sloganed, studded T-shirts, rubberwear, leather knickers, and brightly colored zoot suits to the likes of Jimmy Page and the Kinks but, always on the lookout for something to snazz up his world and make some cash, the frizzy redhead started managing a fledgling band, led by a thieving young street kid, Steve Jones. Almost all of the band’s equipment had been stolen: most of the PA from a parked van, the drum kit from BBC studios, a strobe tuner from a Roxy Music concert, two guitars from Rod Stewart’s mansion, and—the biggest coup—almost all of David Bowie’s equipment from a Hammersmith Odeon gig.
Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen on the set of the documentary
DOA,
nodding out and barely coherent. (COURTESY OF LECH KOWALSKI)
Contrary to the myth that McLaren was the band’s Svengali creator, it was in fact Steve Jones who approached Malcolm when he and drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock needed a place for their band to audition and rehearse. When Jones realized he needed a front man, Malcolm invited Johnny Lydon down to try out. Decked out in full punk safety-pin fashion, Lydon, hiding his fears with snarling attitude, caterwauled and croaked his way through Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen.” “We knew he couldn’t sing,” McLaren said, “but he had this charm of a boy in pain, trying to pretend he’s cool.” He was hired. The rest of the band were suspicious of Lydon, but Malcolm believed that the antagonism would create just the right combustion. “They’re like young assassins,” he stated with pride. The newest member had a disgusting habit of picking at and inspecting his rotting teeth. Steve found this nauseating and used to say to Johnny, “Your teeth are rotten, you look rotten,” and the name was obnoxious enough to stick.
England was in a recession, with unemployment at its worst since World War II. Sullen and brooding, coming from the working class, the teenagers in Britain weren’t able to get jobs, many of them squatting in central London on the dole. And music was nowhere. Glam had faded fast—Marc Bolan had his own chat show. Synthesized and heavily marketed, rock had
turned into streamlined, promotable pop or insipid nostalgic rehash. It was the end of 1975, and Steve Jones’s band had decided to call themselves the Sex Pistols.
The Pistols started playing out to immediately charged crowds. It became clear right away that the band was acting out the angst for their pent-up audience. When they opened for a band called the Hot-Rods, the headliners weren’t even mentioned in the
New Musical Express
review, which warned, “Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming.” “Actually, we’re not into music,” Steve Jones had growled at the reporter. “We’re into chaos.”
Since their rejection of values was mutual, these dangerous urchins weren’t out to make their audience like them. Quite the reverse. There was spitting, “gobbing” (the reaction to Rotten’s constant stream of snotty phlegm), “slamming” (butting heads, inflicting pain on each other), and “pogoing” (a stiff upward pogo-stick leap, to get a better view of the band). Punks in the know say that this action was started by the Pistols’ number-one fan, John Simon Ritchie—newly named “Sid Vicious” by Johnny Rotten (some say the moniker was taken from Lou Reed’s “You’re So Vicious,” but Sid was actually christened after Johnny’s evil pet hamster)—for his chain-wielding attacks on unsuspecting audience members.
Malcolm McLaren was in his element, grabbing hold of the novelty-geared British press, determined to stir up a sensation where one was direly needed—and make a few pounds in the process. He took his band into the studio, where they recorded seven explosive original songs, one of which, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” broke two taboos at once: “I am an antiChrist /I am an anarchist.” With these tapes Malcolm attacked the record industry, finally convincing EMI to take a chance on his menacing brute boys. Nobody bothered to read the contract. “At that age you’re naive, you don’t think of these things,” said Lydon years later. “You just see: contract, the big time. You think of the hundred pounds you’re going to get out of it, not how it’ll be an albatross for the rest of your life.” There would be years of lawsuits with Malcolm before the Pistols finally got their fair share.
The Sex Pistols—anarchists, anti-Christs, “foul-mouthed yobs.” (ROBERTA BAYLEY)
“Anarchy” came out to very mixed reviews, but after appearing live on Bill Grundy’s TV chat show, on which Steve Jones called the host “a dirty bastard” and a “fucking rotter,” the Pistols’ publicity storm turned into a tornado. Headlines blazed FURY AT FILTHY TV CHAT, THE BIZARRE FACE OF PUNK ROCK, THE FOUL-MOUTHED YOBS. Chaos ensued, but that’s what the Pistols had asked for. Gigs were canceled. The entire country was aghast and afraid. “Anarchy” reached number twenty-seven on the charts before plummeting. But hopping-mad punk bands were springing up everywhere.
Twenty-year-old Sid Vicious had been singing in a band called Flowers of Romance, and when bassist Glen Matlock received his Pistols walking papers, Johnny Rotten insisted that the Pistols’ number-one fan take his place. At almost exactly the same time, Sid met Nancy. Already into pill popping, Sid joined nineteen-year-old Nancy Spungen in her heroin haze, where he remained ensnared for the rest of his life.
A highly hyperactive child, Nancy had all but toppled her suburban family back in Philadelphia, entering the first of several psychiatric institutions at the age of eleven. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, she was into drugs very early, turning both of her siblings on to the joys of pot smoking when they were barely twelve. Two suicide attempts later, Nancy was shooting smack at fifteen, constantly claiming that she would go out in a headlining blaze of glory before she hit twenty-one. All she wanted was to grab hold of a famous guy in a band and fly along for the ride. She claimed to have had sex with every member of Aerosmith, every member of Bad Company, some of the Who, a few of the Allman Brothers. Once her mother found all of the Pretty Things in Nancy’s childhood bedroom. When she met the New York Dolls in Manhattan, Nancy followed them to London, where she met her prize, the infamous Sex Pistol, Sid Vicious, glomming on to him hard and fast (though she was originally looking to score top gun Johnny Rotten). From then on, Nancy called him “my Sid.” The rest of the band vilified Nancy as a strung-out tramp and a scumbag, calling her “Nauseating Nancy,” which made Sid want her all the more.
Sid and his beloved Nancy. He promised to join her if she happened to die first. He killed her by accident and kept his promise. (LONDON FEATURES INTERNATIONAL)
Sid drops his leather trousers … (ROBERTA BAYLEY)
The Pistols signed their second record deal with A&M in front of Buckingham Palace, wreaking havoc, before disappearing to the offices for a meeting about the single “God Save the Queen.” In the limo Sid and Paul had a fistfight about who was more “Sex Pistol,” and by the time they arrived at A&M, Paul was cut up and Sid, scuffed and shoeless, passed out comatose on the couch. Somebody threw wine in his face, and when Sid discovered his feet were bleeding, he proceeded to the bathroom, where he smashed the toilet and crashed through the window, finally bathing his battered feet in the shattered toilet bowl. Sid was already trying to prove he was more “Sex Pistol.”
 
… then sheepishly pulls them back up. (ROBERT BAYLEY)

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