by Iggy Pop
on his new album: Every Loser
Illustration by Bruce Carleton
Appearing in the new issue of PUNK Magazine #22
WHERE TO BUY PUNK #22 WITH IGGY’S NEW CD:
EVERY LOSER: https://store.iggypop.com/
Here’s the true story behind the "Strung Out Johnny" image, from Bruce’s blog Jaded Gates:
“The last time I saw him was, I think, Thanksgiving in '81 or '82. I had recently broken up with my girlfriend, and I think he thought I needed company for the holiday. So he called me up and invited me to go with him to some friends of his place for a repast. I didn't know anybody there, and Spacely was never much for amenities, so I didn't get introduced. There was no time for that anyway--within five minutes of arriving he had his works out and was shooting up speed. Another minute or so later he was passed out on their couch with the needle hanging out of his arm. Everybody looked at me like "What have you dragged into our home?" Fortunately dinner was served. My only attempt at smalltalk was to compliment the cook on the stuffing. Her reply was short and heavily laden with contempt: "It's Stovetop Stuffing." That was the last thing anybody said to me, although they might have grunted when I said goodbye (at the first opportunity). Spacely was still on the couch.”
Bruce has more to say about Spacely, working at PUNK and SCREW magazines, traveling around East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, and a lot more. Check out his work as soon as you can!
JADED GATES: http://www.brucecarleton.com/
“In his review of Gringo (aka The Story of a Junkie, a documentary about Spacely’s drug addiction), Matthew Hays called him a "fast-talking, charming weasel." That's a pretty good description of Spacely. He was also a basically good guy... just somewhat misdirected.”
The first time I met him, he was selling office supplies door-to-door. He still had both of his eyeballs intact and wore a nice, but cheap, suit. He announced himself as “Spacely, as in Spacely Sprockets!” He was going door-to-door to businesses selling office supplies. I said “No thanks,” but he kept trying to talk us into it.
Elin Wilder (who was helping me run the post-Dump PUNK office at 225 Lafayette Street), took me aside and talked me into letting her buy a shitload of office supplies from him. “Since we’re going out of business and I’ve never been paid for anything, I’d like to get something for all the work I’ve been doing here,” she explained.
Who could argue with that? As I remember, Elin got a drawing board, a shitload of pens and pencils and a bunch of other stuff (around $125.00 in total, $581 in today’s value). We were going out of business since High Times magazine had recently dropped us: Tom Forcade was deposed as publisher and owner, so we had no way to pay the leftover printing bill that he set up for Mutant Monster Beach Party (which was around $20,000 back then--$93,056.13 in today’s value). Although it is now considered to be some kind of weird masterpiece, at the time it was a sales (and production) disaster.
I said: “We aren’t.”
“What do you mean, you’re not going to pay me?”
“We can’t. We’re going out of business.”
“WHAT???” Spacely didn’t believe me at first. When I started to explain the dire circumstances, Spacely turned dead serious. “No, you’re not! I’ll become the publisher and I’ll put you back in business!” At that point, I was so beat down by the events of 1978 that I figured we had nothing to lose, so I said “Okay.”
And dammit, Spacely was true to his word. His optimism was a salve for our beaten-down staff, who were devastated by Mutant Monster Beach Party’s poor sales, and the lack of any consistent revenues, and the $20,000 lawsuit we had been served for the print bill ($93,056.13 in today’s value).
At first, the worst part about hiring the guy was that he pushed Elin Wilder out of her position, since Spacely insisted that his wife Cindy should do her work, and the small office only had room for two desks. The second worst part was that the two of them were going to live in the office (a serious taboo with the management office, which was located next door).
Tom had been in a funk recently, during my last visit at his office his depression was so overwhelming it was like an invisible fog in the room. Since Spacely was a member of the infamous “STP Family” I thought it might cheer him up that we finally found a Business Manager who could put things together and had similar, outlaw hippie roots.
The tragedy was a huge loss to me and everyone Tom worked with. His staff was very loyal and faithful to him (even though he was bipolar and prone to rages and manic fits that lasted for days). Whenever you were around him, you were aware that he was a very special person: A creative and business genius. At his memorial service atop the World Trade Center at the Windows of the World restaurant, a few High Times people angrily accused me: “YOU KILLED TOM! If it wasn’t for all that punk shit, he’d still be alive!”
The truth about Tom's suicide was a lot more complicated than that, which is a story for another day. However, Tom's determination to produce the Sex Pistols/punk rock film (which was completed in April 1981 and released as D.O.A.: A Rite of Passage), was among many things Forcade was involved with that were all having problems).
D.O.A. Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRyiIiw4YsY
Spacely also set up a meeting with one of our printers, Eastern Press. Spacely took the train to New Haven, showed up at the President’s office in a leather jacket with a six-pack of Colt .45, opened a couple of beers and nailed down a sweetheart deal to publish six issues on a bimonthly schedule in return for advertising and distribution revenues. (This was a common practice for printers, since their biggest expense was workers’s salaries, so the only costs they incurred were paper and ink—while if a magazine went out of business, they would never get their money back.)
It only took Spacely a few weeks and PUNK magazine was back in business! And guaranteed to be around for at least another year!
He also started selling a lot of small business advertisements. He had a great opening line: “Hi! This is John Spacely with PUNK magazine! You know: PUNK! Like your little brother.” The problem with these advertisers was that Spacely would insist on cash upfront, which he’d quickly spend. (So much for paying the printer.)
We got to work on a new issue, and to knock it out fast Bruce Carleton, Ken Weiner and I did a comic strip parody of Saturday Night Fever with an inspired cover image. Lech Kowalski, the director of D.O.A.: A Rite of Passgae, also gave us transcripts of the Sid and Nancy interview to run with an image from the film. This became the best-selling issue of all time! Things were going great.
Spacely phoned “Ronnie” (as he called him), who was gregarious on the phone, and he promised to send along some photos of Niagara, suitable for a centerfold. I was totally knocked out! She was like the “Veronica” to Debbie Harry’s “Betty,” the dark-haired villainess of punk rock to Debbie’s super-hero persona. We printed the centerfold in PUNK #17, featuring a cover story on The Clash, who were keeping the spirit of British punk rock alive while so many bands were breaking up.
Spacely was already becoming a bit of a mess, but this threw him under the bus for good. He had already been constantly fighting with his wife Cindy, usually when flirted with a woman at The Mudd Club. Their arguments would get heated: She’d put a cigarette out on his arm, they’d scream and yell, Cindy would throw a drink in his face, etc. There was a drug scene at the Mudd, which is where Spacely started indulging too much. It was a weird scene: People had sex in the bathrooms, snorted coke all over the place, while Jean-Michel Basquiat (called “Samo” back then for his street graffiti) was constantly getting kicked out for spray-painting on the walls while the Club 57 crowd held theme parties and art exhibitions. This was called the “New Wave scene.” Punk was dead. Life sucked.
Things got a bit better when Cindy became pregnant, and Spacely had dreams of raising a family. He vowed to get sober and raise the kid right, since he never knew his father (a traveling salesman, according to Spacely), and Spacely wanted to be the kind of father he never had.
Then she suffered a miscarriage… in the office. In typical Spacely fashion, he made it sound no big deal, but… It was. (He and Cindy were going to have a boy.)
Spacely continued his downward spiral. One night he got into a drunken fight with a drag queen outside The Mudd Club, where he was whipped with a chain across his face, permanently injuring one of his eyes. We all tried to convince him to go to the Crime Victim Assistance Program to get the money to save his eye, but he refused. He decided he would just wear an eyepatch. The guy was like a walking, festering wound: He was in terrible emotional pain but trying to ignore it, while visibly displaying it in so many ways.
I managed to open a new office space on East 10th Street, across the street from my apartment. Spacely would visit us a few times, often to use the sink for a “birdbath.” I kept after him to return the back issues so we’d be able to publish a new issue, but he always refused. After all, he was selling them all over St. Marks Place and covering his heroin expenses with the money. Sometimes, crime pays.(By the way, the thing I have been asked the most over the last 47 years is: "Do you have any PUNK back issues I could buy/beg/borrow?" So now you know why I do not.
One day, I received some heartbreaking news: His estranged wife, Cindy, had died in a motorcycle accident. When I told Spacely the news he pretended not to care, but it affected him deeply. That was the way Spacely dealt with his problems. It was like the t-shirt meme: “I don’t have a drinking problem! I drink, I get drunk, I fall down: No problem!”
I didn’t see him much after that, but he was constantly hanging out on the scene, making friends with a lot of musicians, street kids and drug addicts. He was always at the Mudd Club, Club 57, and St. Marks Place, skateboarding and begging for spare change. He fit neatly into the club scene back then, since so many people were using drugs. Where the 1970s were full of excitement and hope, and people expected the CBGB scene to become a big deal, the 1980s were like a bad hangover, and people were numbing themselves.
He was a changed person. He deeply regretted his past heroin addiction, and often said he wished he could track down every copy of Story of a Junkie and burn them. He still drank too much and gambled on sports, but he also invested in baseball cards and sports memorabilia.
As usual, the bad news sent him into a tailspin. He started using again. He and Beth broke up (although she continued to try to help him until the end). He had amassed a large baseball card collection
A group of his friends: Juan Gonzales, Bob Gruen, Dana Beal and I also tried to help him fight his disease and keep him as healthy as possible, but he continued to drink and soon started using heroin again. It was difficult to talk him out of it, since he needed drugs for pain management.
Dana Beal, the YIPPIE leader who was involved with Act Up (the AIDS/HIV activist group) helped him get housing: a crappy welfare room up in Harlem with just a bed and a TV set. It didn’t last long and John ended up in the hospital a few times.
The last time I spoke with him, he phoned from the Holiday Bar on St. Marks Place. He insisted on giving me a large TV set in return for everything I had done for him, so I met him there to pick it up. It was an odd situation: He was dressed in a hospital gown. He had just “escaped.” We drove to his Ludlow Street apartment and he jumped out of the cab, then quickly walked over to the building while I paid the cab fare. When I got to the building lobby, it was obvious that he was trying to buy drugs, and then told the dealers that I would pay for them! After I refused, one of them pulled out a gun and pointed it at my head. “Give me all your money!”
I calmly opened my wallet and asked that they take the bills but leave the credit cards. Which they did. So we left. I started screaming at Spacely for setting me up and almost having me killed! He didn’t say a word… He was out of it by now: AIDS dementia.
The next time I saw him he was in a hospice, unconscious and a few days away from his death. Sadly, his last film appearance became when Story of a Junkie director Lech Kowalski shot some footage of Spacely lying in the morgue.