Johnny Thunders: Murder or Overdose?

about self fulfilling prophecies and stacks of missing cash. This is a story about Johnny Thunders, which means it's a story about great music, some of the greatest and most authentic music to come out of the punk era and beyond. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop for my melotron called second Line Stompbox MK.

to write itself. On this episode rock and Roll myths, self fulfilling prophecies, Heartbreakers, Junkies, and Johnny Thunders.

think of Johnny Thunders. He's your favorite rock and rollers, favorite rock and roller, whether you're down with Joe Strummer, Nikki six, Paul Westerberg, the Cults, Billy duffy Ear, social distortions, Mike Ness first in The New York Dolls and later in The Heartbreakers. In his own solo career, Johnny Thunder's distilled rebellion attitude and god given musicality down to a

high I proof red hot essence. But one of the reasons that Johnny Thunders was this mythic avatar was because he embodied the whole package of rock and roll, the good, the bad, and the ugly. He was an addict he was self destructive, and at the age of thirty eight, he was dead. Chapter one. The body in Room thirty seven. The Saint Peter House hotel, these days known as the Inn on Saint Peter sits on the corner of Saint Peter in Burgundy Streets, in the heart of the French

Quarter in New Orleans. Built in the year eighteen oh five, it's a quintessential Crescent City building with Spanish style architecture and a wrap around second floor balcony. It was here on the afternoon of Tuesday, April twenty third, nineteen ninety one, that housekeeper Mildred Coleman was going from room to room making her usual rounds, swapping out towels and trash bags and so on. At three point thirty she arrived in Room thirty seven. She knocked on the door. There was

no answer. The room number stuck out in her mind because earlier that morning, at around eight am, the front desk clerk had called Room thirty seven after a series of loud, disturbing noises. The occupant had answered and the noises had ceased, But now there was an absence of sound coming from inside the room. Mildred knocked again and nothing. Now, this wasn't unusual. Hotel guests were in and out at all times of the day and night. So she pulled a key from her pocket, slid it into the lock,

turned the handle, and pushed the door open. The rank smell of sweat hit her nose first, and there was something else too, something rancid, but she couldn't put her finger on it. The room was a mess, the sheet's been ripped for the and what appeared to be empty prescription pill bottles were strewn across the floor. And then Mildred saw him, the occupant of Room thirty seven one, John Gonzale aka Johnny Thunders. He was lying on the floor,

stuffed halfway under the dresser. His body was bent into a shape like the letter U. Mildred gasped instinctively, throwing her hand up to cover her mouth, and the next thing she knew, she was screaming. Across the street from the Saint Peter House, singer songwriter Willie Deville, formerly of CBGB Mainstay's mate, Deville, sat on a stoop outside his apartment, strumming an acoustic guitar. Just one year prior, Willy had beaten Johnny to his dream of coming to New Orleans

making an R and B record with local musicians. But now it was Johnny's turn to beat Willie. Johnny Thunders over here, burning out while Willie Deville merely faded away. Willie watched as police cars began flooding the corner outside the hotel. A short while later, the cops carried Johnny's body out. Willie had seen a lot of things, but he'd never seen a body contorted into a shape like a pretzel before. It was so undignified. But Willy knew his friend deserved more, and he also knew that rock

and roll was nothing without its myths. So when the local press started to sniff around when they asked questions, Willie Deville lied and told them that Johnny had died with his guitar in his hands. In reality, though Johnny Thunder's guitar was gone, Johnny had been robbed blind, so it appeared. But New Orleans PD they didn't care about a dead junkie's missing stuff. All they were interested in was closing the case and closing it fast.

his guitar, weren't all that surprised. For others, however, not only was the CoP's conclusion wrong, it had all the signs of a cover up. And that's when the truth came calling. Dede Ramone picked up the phone while scratching away at his BedHead. His bleary eyes could hardly make out the time of the clock. Yeah, he snarled into the receiver. Dede. A voice was saying, it's Stevie. At this Dede Ramone sobered up a bit enough to comprehend what Stevie was about.

could sell it for more drugs. And at some point d d Ramone had just had enough, so he poured Dreno or chlorox or some chemical cleaning agent he couldn't exactly remember. He poured it all over Johnny's stuff, and then he pissed on Johnny's clothes, and then the piece there was the stalls. He took Johnny's guitar, one of those cheap less Paul Juniors that he loved so much,

and he broke that fucker in half. These were the thoughts running through d de Ramon's head as Stevie was telling him all about what had happened at the hotel in New Orleans. That when the cops got to Johnny's room, all they found were empty bottles of methadone and a single syringe floating in the toilet. Everything else was gone, his guitars, those nice silk suits that he bought on the road, his drugs, his passport, and here was the

real kicker. Thousands of dollars in cash just disappeared. We're talking ten, maybe twenty thousand dollars total. And the pieces of trash who stole all those things, These vultures, disguised as so called friends. They made Johnny Thunders their mark. As soon as he rolled into town wearing those nice threads, his pockets lined with money, they took him out, stroked his ego, This punk poet laureate who never really got his due, especially here in the States, but he got

it that night. And once they gave it to him. Once they lulled him into a doped up complacency with hero worship and drugs, that's when they went in for the kill. It was true what the cops said. Johnny did die of an overdose, but the overdose wasn't delivered by his own hand, and he was given a hot shot by some thieving degenerates. To put it plainly, Johnny Thunders was murdered. Chapter two, Born to Lose, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Who the fuck are those guys? Were

the heartbreakers? Jerry Nolan, one of Johnny's closest friends and his drummer, first in the New York Dolls and now a member of Johnny's new band, the Heartbreakers. The original Heartbreakers that is not that big toothy Tom Petty, his so called Heartbreakers. Jerry Nolan. He was reading all about this Tom Petty character in the paper and getting more and more pissed off with every word. It was nineteen

seventy six. Johnny Thunder's Heartbreakers were everything that Tom Petty's Heartbreakers were not.

the world at the time. As one critic wrote in the UK after seeing a Heartbreakers show, quote, the band plays rock and roll like guns, fire bullets, like steamrollers, flat and tarmac like thunder, rolls like trees, fall like hell like you've never heard before. Unquote. It's ironic because besides the music, all the other things that made Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers super authentic were the same things

that made them a bad investment. They were, as Johnny sang in one of his trademark songs, born to Lose, Tom Petty clearly could not relate Tom Petty, Jerry Nolan said, was born to be punched. Fuck it, Johnny said, let's call ourselves the junkies instead. Are you fucking kidding man? We'll never get airplay with a name like that. Who needs airplay? Johnny left, I'd rather get a reaction, getting a reaction, getting attention. That was the true meaning of

rock and roll in the eyes of Johnny Thunders. And when attention finally came, it didn't come from America, but instead from across the pond, first in the form of the Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who got the Heartbreakers booked on a tour with The Pistols and The Clash, and then via Chris Stamp and Kim Lambert, the Who's former managers who signed the Heartbreakers to their labeled track records.

Johnny and Jerry, along with guitarist Walter Lore and bassist Billy Rath, who'd replaced original member Richard Hell, soon found them in a London recording studio making a record. That record, LAMF, which was a notorious New York City graffiti tag that Warren gangs used to scare each other off with and which stood for like a motherfucker, which is also permanently

inked on my arm. But I digress. LAMF should have been one of the biggest records of the newly emerging punk rock movement when it was released in nineteen seventy seven. I mean it is one of the greatest, but it's not as ubiquitous as records by the Ramones, the Clash and the Pistols. And there are a few reasons for this one. The band wrestled over how the record should sound, which resulted in a really muddy mix when it was

first pressed two LAMF never got a US release. In fact, it wasn't issued stateside until just a few years ago. In three Track Records went bankrupt shortly after the album hit store shelves. Unlike Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, Johnny Thunder's Heartbreakers

did not survive. They were over before Tom's second album even dropped, and so Johnny Gonzale, a one time teenage baseball prodigy from queens who gave the cold shoulder to Major league scouts so that he could court a life out on the skids, where self sabotage was a badge of honor, a boy who re christened himself Johnny Thunders, anome de rock stolen either from a DC Comics character or a Kink song, depending on which version of the

story speaks to you today. The Great Johnny Thunders made his equally great solo debut album, So Alone, in nineteen seventy eight, at the age of twenty five. So Alone is tremendous stuff. It's got instant classic original songs like

you Can't Put your Arms Around a Memory. It's got covers of tunes by surf and girl groups like the Chantas and the Shangri Las, and it's got supporting performances by who's who of rockers at the time, the Pretender's Chrissy Hine, the Sexpistols, Steve Jones and Paul Cook, Did Lizzie's Phil Linet, and Steve Marriott from The Small Faces

in Humble Pie. But like Lamf before it, So Alone never got released in the States, and despite the noise being made out on the margins by punks like Johnny Thunders nineteen seventy eight was actually ruled by the Beg's Saturday Night Fever in Billy Joel's fifty second Street, at least in America. Whatever America could have its Tom Petty, it's Billy fucking Joel, and it could have John Travolta

peacocking down the streets of Brooklyn. Johnny Thunders meanwhile, went looking for action in a part of the world that paid him some well deserved respect, and that paid him in cash. And it was there that Johnny wasn't just a hot ticket, he was a front page news nineteen eighty two, Stockholm suite. Johnny Thunders tried to ration out the dope so that it would last him three four days at least. But this time, just like every other time, he couldn't help himself. He did it all, and doing

it all doesn't mean he to too much. He knew what he could tolerate, exactly how much would get him off without taking him too far over the edge. But now as the plane hit the tarmac, he was no longer holding, and none of the other guys in the band were either. He downed the last of the methadone like a cold cherry coke. And speaking of coke, coke, the powdered kind that was gone too. Someone had told him that Sweden put little stashes of valume in the

medical emergency boxes on airplanes. So now he and his bass player at the moment, Luigi Scortia, were trying to break open the little red box like a couple of dope sit prospectors at the head of a rumored gold mine. And they were doing this despite the very loud and urgent protesting of the stewardesses who were reminding Johnny and Luigi and broken English, the passengers were not allowed to tamper with the emergency kits. The stewardess has figured something

like this would happen. Johnny Thunders had been in the country for only a few days and already he was the talk of the town, as they say, but not in a good way. The local papers set it all A drugged human wreck, read one such headline, and stark black faunt and another simply said burnt out wasted. Just days earlier, Johnny had performed on a popular primetime Swedish television show.

was somewhere else. The punk junkie nightmare was never ending, and now here was Johnny Thunders, the villain and the victim, stepping off the plane in Stockholm, thinking he was about to go play another show, only to walk into the arms of several impatient police officers who had been no id ahead of time by the concerned stewardesses. Johnny had no dope, not even that elusive, fabled stash of value, and if they were taking him away, then the tour

was canceled for sure, which meant Lesto coming in. All while, that other more famous heartbreaker, Tom Petty, was writing a big video hit on the Idiot Box with his song you Got Lucky. Johnny laughed just thinking about it. He had Tom, You're one lucky fuck one lucky MTV approved fuck and Johnny Johnny was born to lose. That wasn't just a song or a manifesto. It was a prophecy, but was it a self fulfilling one? As the weeks

and months and years rolled on. That's what audiences wanted to know, and that's what drew them to the shows. More than Johnny's talent, or his legend or any of it. They wanted to be there when it happened, watching it like a car wreck in slow motion, Watched Johnny Lou's control, watched Johnny fall down, Watch Johnny die, We'll be right back after this. We're We're, We're Chapter three, Hard Times and the Big Easy. Johnny Thunders was in Japan, but

he was dreaming of New Orleans. He was playing his friend Willie Deville's latest album, Victory Mixture on repeat on the tour bus. Willy made the record in New Orleans with local legends like Doctor John Alan Hussaint and the Meters. You never know that the guy singing these tunes got to start playing grimy New York institutions like Maxis Kansas City.

Willy sounded like the real article, and what he created with this record was a exactly the sort of thing that Johnny had wanted to do for some time now, but Johnny had no time at the present. He was preparing to record an album of sixties cover songs with some Japanese musicians, and he had plans for an acoustic album as well. He continued to use but once again as supply had run out and he became so dope sick that he had to be checked into a hospital

in Tokyo. If doctors there saw the lump on his neck, they didn't say anything. People were used to seeing all kinds of abnormalities on Johnny's skin. Heartbreaker Walter Lore once said that Johnny's arms and legs were covered in so many track marks that they looked like pizza slices, which means that some strange new lump was going to have to work overtime to really stand out as a problem. Besides, Johnny had other problems like this need for a fix.

going to go next. By the time Johnny Thunders arrived in New Orleans for what would be the last night of his life, the evening of April twenty second, nineteen ninety one, he was both everywhere and nowhere. His style, his swagger, even just the way he held the guitar was reflected across the entirety of the rock spectrum, from Guns n' roses is he straddling to Johnny Marv the Smiths to a veritable Rogues gallery of big hair having charp mainstays like Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. But although

his influence ran deep, it ran silent too. Few knew that Johnny Thunders was such an inspiration on nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties rock and roll, and fewer still knew his name. It wasn't for lack of trying. At one point he formed a new group called Gang War with Wayne Kramer, the MC five, who was fresh out of federal prison at the time, and later he assembled another group called Kosinostra with a few of his former heartbreakers,

and neither band lasted. The simple reason this brother Wayne Kramer, once put it was due to the fact that quote Johnny was impossible to work with because he had another job that was more important Unquote. Then that other job was his dope habit. It kept him scrambling from playing to plane, gig to gig, one cash payment to the next, always cash. It kept him ignoring the sores, the lumps,

the pains that had at this point become commonplace. And when the money stopped coming in for a spell, when he blew it all on another cold, sweaty palmful of handshake drugs, he got desperate, and desperation made him ugly. It's been alleged that he once hunted down as a strange wife Julie, who had long since bailed with their two kids and who was also pregnant with a third, and when he found her, he beat her up and stole her welfare money.

New York was similar, but his hometown had become hazardous to his health. He knew all the right places to get all the wrong things in New York, and he knew exactly who to talk to for a bendal of this or a vial of that. Here in New Orleans, like in Japan in Germany, the temptation wasn't so easy to locate, or so went the magical thinking of the punk junkie nightmare. Because temptation vice bad decisions of all kinds.

Johnny attracted these things like a magnet. The all black city was wearing only emphasized his ghastly white skin, and the sweat running down the sides of his gaunt face told a story of desire, submission, and detachment. He turned to his left, and then to his right, and here was temptation and vice sitting on either side of him at the bar. Here were two brothers, Mark and Michael Rix, two locals Johnny had met when he checked into the Saint Peter House Hotel. Two guys now getting shit faced

with the flush, Johnny thunders they weren't alone. The brother's friend, Stacy, Michael's X, came along to see where the knight would take them. She had seventy bucks burning a hole in her pocket from turning tricks earlier that day on the seatier side of the French Corner, the same side they were all on. Now, decide where you could get whatever you wanted for a couple of bucks, For a few bucks more, you could get more than you ever thought possible.

Johnny knocked back the rest of his brandy, slammed the glass down on the dirty bar in front of him, and turned to his new friends. Where to next Pat O'Brien's Kagan's. The night was young. In fact, in Johnny's line of work, there was only night. Hours later, once the sun had come up and the shadows of temptation advice had disappeared for yet another day, Johnny Thunders was

dead almost immediately. There was pushback on the official party line provided by New Orleans police that, based on the amount of methadone and cocaine and Johnny's body, it was a clear overdose, which is what the City Corner's Office investigator John Gagliano told the public at a press conference six days after Johnny's death. For many in Johnny's circle, including his one time guitarist Stevie Clayson, who allegedly called did Ramon shortly after Johnny's body was found, the cops

were full of shit. Reported sightings of the Ricks brothers, Mark and Michael walking around New Orleans wearing Johnny's clothes only fueled the going theory that Johnny had been given a hot shot by low level street criminals so that they could rob him. But Mark and Michael Rix have been interviewed by the police and were subsequently released from custody. In The Times, Picky un stated in an article the contrary to the word on the street, not everything was

taken from Johnny's room. In fact, some of his guitars, as well as some of his cash, were still there. Weeks later. However, on May eighteenth, the City of New Orleans released their full autopsy in toxicology results, and what was found turned the whole thing upside down. Now, those official results did prove that Johnny had tested positive for methadone and kociine, but the revelation here was that there were only small amounts of both, nowhere near the levels

that would have been necessary to kill him. By releasing the full results, the city had effectively contradicted itself, rendering John Gagliano's conclusion of overdose to be nothing short of impossible. So if it wasn't a hot shot, then how was Johnny thunders murdered. LSD say he was drunk, a little fucked up on methadone and coke and then was knowingly

or unknowingly given a dose of acid. The interaction between the drugs could have caused him to panic, his heart to race, triggering some sort of cardiovascular stress that pushed

him over the edge again. According to De d Ramone, the LSD hot shot, for lack of a better term, is what Stevie Classen told him had been administered to Johnny that night, and this theory was stoked when just a short while later, in early nineteen ninety two New Orleans cops picked up Michael Rix, who was charged and convicted a first degree robbery after he pulled a gun on some Taurus in the French Quarter who had refused

to buy drugs offer. And what exactly was Michael Rix pushing at the time of his arrest?

And just why on earth the guy like Wayne Kramer who had just gotten out of prison and was looking for a second chance, Just why would he hang that second chance around a gun that so many could see was already gone. You can hear all about this in this week's brand new mini episode of Disgray Sand, but to do that, you have to be an all Access member. Just go to disgrayslandpod dot com to learn more and

to sign up and start listening right now. All right, let's get back to our story on Johnny Thunders.

flip side of that particular coin. He was the haggard, pitiful result of all the rebelliousness, the inevitable tragedy, the very thing that every teenager's mother feared would come to pass when their boy ran off to join a band on the Lower East Side or wherever, a cautionary tale dumped on the doorstep of history by the addictions at Plate. But there was more to Johnny Thunders than that, and

there it was in his autopsy. Specifically, the autopsy report revealed that Johnny had been suffering from cirrhosis from lymphoma, a pulmonary edema, and leukemia. The fact that Johnny Thunders had leukemia was later confirmed by one of his final girlfriends, a Swedish hairdresser named Suzanne Blonquist. Johnny and Suzanne had one daughter together, and shortly after her birth in nineteen eighty seven, Suzanne said that Johnny was diagnosed with the

deadly disease. This would explain the lump on his neck, and honestly, it explains what happened in room thirty seven of the Saint Peter House Hotel in New Orleans. Johnny's body, his immune system had been systematically weakened by illness, by cancer, and by chronic hard drug use, and so the most likely scenario is not that he was given a debilitating dose of LSD that led to his death, but simply that his body finally gave out, helped along by non

lee full amounts of methadone and cocaine. Was he hanging out with certain members of the New Orleans underworld who may have stolen from a memphro who took his last breath? Yes? Did the cops use the overdose angle to investigate a little less than they should have? Probably, But was Johnny Thunders murdered? No? Johnny Thunders was consumed by his lifestyle, the bad and the good, walking the walk, walking that

razor's edge between self mythology and self destruction. That's where he lived and what he sang about in songs like One Track Mind and pirate love, which next to born to Lose was the unofficial Johnny Thunder's anthem for those

who refused to compromise themselves creatively or authentically. The conspiracy theories that said he was murdered only proved that others expected him to go out in a blaze, a knife, a needle, a gun, a hotshot, something dramatic and something befitting the punk junkie nightmare he turned his life into. The truth, however, is much quieter than all that, and it's much sadder too. His body just couldn't carry the

weight of his myth any longer. And in the end, that's the part that couldn't be stolen, Like his clothes and his guitars and his money. Johnny Thunders died in Room thirty seven, in disgrace and so alone. But the myth he created walk right out the door like a.

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