| articles |
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| JOHNNY THUNDERS &
PHIL LYNOTT at the
CHELSEA HOTEL
An extract from the book
CHELSEA HOTEL MANHATTAN
ISBN 9781900486608 191pp Headpress
by Joe Ambrose
The Chelsea hotel is part of New York's cultural fabric. In it author Joe ambrose has strange adventures.
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| JOHNNY THUNDERS’ APARTMENT/ BATTLE FOR BEIRUT
This story goes back a few years. A boxed set. A track from the vaults. Previously unreleased material. Six newly discovered tracks plus a whole CD of live material. Three thin but strong brown lines chopped out on the box’s cover.
I was once in the apartment of Johnny Thunders in the company of that other great needlepoint maestro Phil Lynott. It was the time of that great atrocity, the Battle for Beirut. I was always seeing on my colour TV fresh news of the bombed out basements and the torn apart habitations of the onetime Beirut bourgeoisie.
I’d bumped into Lynott earlier that afternoon in a small soul food place on Chicken Street that I used to frequent in those days, called Chicken Little. I was arguing with my girlfriend so Lynott couldn’t help but pick up on my Irish accent. Turned out we had mutual pals like members of Irish rock bands, midget junkie music biz publicists, and seven or eight of the more enterprising drug dealers in Dublin. He had to go, that very day, to hang out with Thunders who was, temporarily, billeted at the Chelsea in the apartment of a former girlfriend who’d split for Europe for a year, leaving Johnny to protect her home!! And did I wanna meet Johnny Thunders? Yes. So see you in front of the Chelsea at 2.30.
Lynott was very much a stylish customer and considerably further up the food chain, with all Thin Lizzy’s European hit albums and sold out stadiums under his belt, than poor old Thunders who was more or less at the end of his "career." Lynott, despite the bangles and beads of his Top of the Pops triumphs, was a good person and a notable songwriter not to mention being a worthwhile noisesmith with his bass. He assured me that Thunders was an interesting dude and pleasant too.
We met in the Chelsea lobby, took the elevator to Johnny’s floor, fobbed off two Chinese junkies who were panhandling on Johnny’s corridor. The place was really run down then, as dangerous as Alphabet City. A lot of people were paying very low rent and some of them were paying no rent at all. We shared the lift going up with a transvestite who, it subsequently turned out, made home deliveries of heroin to some of the more infamous residents.
Philip was anxious to get indoors because he had a fat baggie of smack on him that he’d just scored and needed to party with. Despite frantic Dublin knocking and shouting, there was no response from Thunders’ room. We were knocking on Johnny’s door for a good ten minutes, getting nowhere. Lynott was all set to go downstairs and flash his platinum card to get us a suite of rooms of our own, right there right then, when these sorta spider-like scratchings emanated from around the area of Mr Thunders’ door lock.
(I had a novel extract published in a German anthology of prose by writers who are also in bands or musicians who are proper writers. My fellow contributors included Nicky Sudden, one of those who once grabbed, in the confusion of life, for the mantle handed down by Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders. In the German book Sudden writes about Thunders. He mentions being backstage at a Prince Charles charity gig at Hyde Park, the very epicentre of reactionary rock values, infested with Sting, Elton John, and suchlike vermin and poisonous snakes. At this legitimate target of an event Mr Nicky Sudden bumped into the moronic Jeff Beck.
Sudden says to Jeff Beck that he’d once handed Thunders a copy of his Live at Max’s Kansas album to have it autographed. Thunders’ comment was that he hated the sound on that album; the only good thing about it was the photograph of himself on the back cover because, in it, he looked like Jeff Beck during the epoch of The Jeff Beck Group. The real Jeff Beck, decades later, turned to the real Nicky Sudden and said, "Johnny Who?"
" ‘How the fuck did a lowlife like Nicky Sudden get backstage at a Princes’ Trust gig?’ is the first thing that comes to mind with me when I hear that story." said Frank Digger correctly, when I recounted the whole incident to him. My own thoughts exactly. Three months later I repeated the story and the comment to Nina Antonia, the biographer of both Thunders and the New York Dolls. "Well, I can answer that question for you." said Nina while we were hunting for cheap sneakers together, "Nikki Sudden was going out with 70s superstar BBC DJ Annie Nightingale at that time." So Sudden had access to every Old Guy backstage pass known to man, Rolling Stones U.S. tours, you name it, and must have been in hog heaven.)
The spider-like scratchings emanating from around the area of Mr Thunders’ door lock came to an end, and were replaced by seven or eight twangy human sounds such as Huh?, Cun?, and Wha? From behind a black door with the number 216 painted on it, we could hear a chain lock being put into place, Lynott all the time shouting "Johnny! Johnny! It’s Philip. Phil Lynott. Let us in for fuck’s sake, man. I bought a birthday cake for you. Got some cake right here right now man." Which caused an extraordinarily efficient mustering of energy and resources inside number 216. Very soon keys were turning, throats were being cleared, and lights were being turned on. The day had just begun. Next thing I knew us two Irish lads were inside and the door was being locked behind us.
Thunders looked good. You could have cut bread with his chirpy cartoon accent. He looked like Keef just like he was supposed to do and like Jeff Beck from the epoch of the Jeff Beck Group. He got that much right. The apartment looked like the Battle of Beirut, all hope had been abandoned. The smell from his kitchen mixed over ripe water melon, three day old rubbish, some prawn shells fit to get up and start walking of their own accord, sour red wine, and the 16 year old chick who was responsible for the fine-smelling lasagne baking in the oven.
Lynott was 12 months dead when, years later, the punk band I managed, the Baby Snakes, were doing a gig in London. One of the other bands on the bill, not a very convincing outfit, were mainly junkies, and pretty young junkies at that. Their guitarist Zack was a charming, mean, and well read youth aged 17. Of course he was old beyond his years like some junkies can be but also with proper lips and hips. Zack came from an Up There Notting Hill family and he told me how his folks booked him into this upmarket rehab clinic to detox one time. He was going out for a walk around the grounds at midnight when the next thing he sees is this big slick car pulling up into the driveway. Two big tough roadie types hauled Phil Lynott, who looked green and like he was dead already, into the foyer.
"Man, I just loved Thin Lizzy so you can imagine my amazement at seeing Lynott," Zack told me still bug eyed with the recollection, " and the state he was in, how ill he was… they were bringing him to this place, little more than a drying out farm. He stayed there about three days, just got worse and worse. He was just in a room like a hotel bedroom with a family doctor coming in every day to take his temperature. You could smell the death off of him, coming out of the room. I called in to see him twice but he was way too sick to talk. He just smiled nice at me, seeing my long hair and tattoos, seeing that I looked like a musician I suppose. Eventually they moved him off to a sort of old people’s home where they had to do emergency surgery. When they opened him up to have a look at his liver, they found his organs were rotting already though he was still alive. They just sowed him back up. Within the week he was gone."
LOVER AND LEVIS
This is how it feels to be lonely. This is how it feels to be small. This is how it feels when you’re world means nothing at all.
I hate doing this to her, it makes me feel squalid. I don’t hate doing this because I hate doing this to her. I hate doing this because I hate doing it to myself now that at long last I have found a warm funny womb to crawl into.
"You meet me?" said in a voice of childish concern.
"You meet me?" like it’s the last thing on earth.
"Now you are the happy nigger, Irish." says Longtree. We are sitting in my rooms listening to one of the five-for-a-dollar rap CDs I bought earlier. It’s a great Jah Screw one Not rap of course but a compilation of reggae ragga dancehall shit produced by Jah, whose name is so cool that I once borrowed it and used it for the name of a character in a novel. The man in question, the man upon whom the Jah Screw character was based, took some obscure offence but then we Irish like to take obscure offence. We’re like the Spanish in that regard.
Us Catholics. When we die our celestial chambers will be decked with gold and we will ascend to Heaven on cumulus clouds wrapped in sky blue garments similar to djellabas.
"I want to stay here in this world until the end." says Longtree out of the blue when the CD ends and there is nothing new going on.
He pulls this CD out of his pocket that his best pal in Harlem has just done with some DJ. It’s weirdly interesting. I don’t know. One song goes
To lose your lover and your Levis? Your t-shirts and your paintings? Please say "Help" and come.
PERSONALITY CRISIS
I must be going crazy because I keep thinking I’m running into Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls in the Chelsea lift. It must be the drugs, though I know he is pencilled in to do a CBGB’s benefit gig in the Bowery Ballroom that I’m going to on Saturday. He is in the lift with me, asking his lady friend if she has any cash for a taxi, somewhat embarrassed that I’m overhearing their domestic conversation.
SUCKING THE IRISH
Nathan was on tour with U2, filming their East Coast shows for the making of a hi tek documentary for VH1. What a shame that a farouche boy like him who started off so well in a penniless way documenting the psychobilly and garage bands of Dublin on Super 8, when Dublin was just the world’s biggest unemployment exchange, should have ended up being sucked into that vulgar Protestant money machine but, on the other hand, thanks to God that Nathan can make a living.
There was a tour break of three days in New York and Nathan got himself invited to a dinner party at the Chelsea. There were members of U2 present, plus all sorts of worthies from the worlds of rawk and Irish America. Some retired punque roquers. Various younger Kennedy women who like being fucked by young Provos. Members of Talking Heads that nobody gives a shit about or can even remember their names.
Nathan was lucky enough to sit around the dinner table next to Debbie Harry who took a shine to him.
"Can you speak Irish?" she asked Nathan, who is a shy kid, for all his prettiness.
"Just a little. I learned it at school, but I forget the most of it." he replied.
"Did you have an Irish teacher at school?" inquired Miss Blondie.
"Yeah. Our Irish teacher was Miss Murphy." said Nathan.
"Well, why don’t you pretend that I’m Miss Murphy? I’ll stick my tongue down your throat and see if I can suck some of that Irish out of you."
HAUNTED HOUSE MUSEUM
Two Latino brothers, who pretend not to know one another though they’re identical twins, are making deliveries from two different restaurants, an organic Japanese and a plebby burger joint, to two separate rooms. One of them — the Japanese organic kid — gets off the same floor as me and heads in the same direction as me. It is obviously his first visit to the hotel because he looks around in complete amazement. The interior of this place is quite something in terms of gothic Victorian dank atmosphere. He quickly gets on his cellular and calls his girlfriend to tell her, "It’s like a cross between a haunted house and a museum. You seen that video, The Shining? With, like, Jack Nicholson? It’s like The fucking Shining. "
AVENUE C
Suicide King and One Eyed Jack, who lived in reduced circumstances in small rooms alongside one another on the Chelsea’s tenth floor, were the best of friends. Every Friday night they tried their hands at the poker game that Hannah Reed ran on the third floor. So when Suicide needed money one day, One Eyed Jack pulled out a roll of tens.
Later they fought because Suicide King refused to pay back the loan, though his circumstances had greatly improved.
"Un hombre duro!" Suicide King said sarcastically about his old pal, when Jack got annoyed and threatened to do something about it.
"Despotico!" One Eyed Jack replied, sad to have lost his friend over so very little money.
BOWERY BALLROOM
Garland Jeffries is onstage. First I heard of him he was getting a namecheck on John Cale’s first solo album after he quit the Velvets. Friend to Lou Reed, obviously, given his appearance at this Reed-sanctioned benefit gig for some old black guy who used to be a go go dancer or a bitch-fucker in the Max’s Kansas City back room. Jayne County, who used to have a yen for Frank in London in the 80s, is the DJ. Somebody, I think Danny Fields, announces to the three hundred or so folks gathered (rich looking guys in colour supplement threads), that this whole event would have been impossible without the support of Lou Reed. This causes a few begrudged claps and grunts from the audience. It’s still very much Fuckin’ Lou Reed! in New York. Then the MC goes into a soliloquy in praise of Reed’s entire career, how Reed has made a remarkable array of solo records. The crowd don’t seem all that much more convinced so it’s almost embarrassing when it becomes obvious that the next thing up is Lou Reed, who takes to the stage to some applause, singed and wincing at his poor reception.
He does a sharp version of Waiting For My Man about standing on the corner with lots of suitcases in his hands. Then he takes a background role while Garland Jeffries does some ancient doo wop shit. Reed seems pleased to be drifting into the background on those tunes. I hate doo wop. Sentimental attachment to this music is a bad thing. That was Sylvain Sylvain I was running into in the Chelsea lift.
Three days later I’m back in the Bowery Ballroom with Frank to see Ash, who’ve had loads of hit singles in Europe but who’re still working on America. Frank has known Tim Wheeler for a while now so after the show I get introduced. Tim arranges to come see me at the Chelsea two days hence. He has changed his clothes after coming off stage and is sporting a Lou Reed Transformer t-shirt. I tell him about the Max’s Kansas City Benefit.
Later we take the Subway north to make an after midnight visit to Ira Cohen.
WARHOL FOUNDATION/ THE ANITA PALLENBERG STORY
Sometimes I stare at myself in the mirror and forget who I’m becoming. When the old men do all the fighting and the young men just look on.
The assignation at The Andy Warhol Foundation was organised about two months ago. Peter Playdon from Coventry School of Art is working on this project concerning the movie Performance. Somewhere on the internet or through academic connections, I don’t know which, he has arranged for us to go see this film called The Anita Pallenberg Story at The Andy Warhol Foundation. Seems one of the women involved in making it works there and she has graciously agreed to organize this screening just for us.
I’ve arranged to meet Tim Wheeler from Ash back at the Chelsea so my time is kind of tight. I have a 2pm appointment to meet Tim in the lobby and the movie screening is scheduled for 10.30am so this should be OK, I’m as interested in this thing about the Stones and androgyny as a man could be without being perverse.
It’s a freezing morning as I walk from the Chelsea to the Warhol Foundation on Bleeker Street, arriving early and hungry so I head into a diner across the street. None of the people Peter has arranged, by round robin email, to meet outside the Foundation’s ground floor entrance have shown up yet. In the diner I order a roll and a tea and sit on a stool looking out onto the street. I can observe the entrance from there. This is a real Simon and Garfunkle vibe, steamed-up windows, the smell of coffee, the smell of toast, the lonely people. All I need is an acoustic guitar, a duffel coat and maybe some snow falling. I am a rock, I am an island.
I see a black girl loitering outside the Foundation and, since the group who’re going to view the movie consists of me, Peter, a musician called Frederick, and a woman called Kandia Crazy Horse, I hazard a guess that this may be her. I finish my roll but take my steaming hot tea with me. By the time I get across the street the freezing wind has rendered the tea drinkable.
I’ve just started talking with Kandia when Peter and Frederick show up and we head in.
The walls are as extravagantly covered in Warhol works as the walls of an adolescent boy’s bedroom might be covered with Slipknot or Britney or Tupac posters. There is an attractive enough looking oriental fag behind the reception desk but that’s about the only vaguely Warholian thing about the joint, interior decorated like one of those hip boutique hotels. A serene silence, similar to that once found in a smalltown Catholic church in Ireland during a midweek afternoon in 1973, dominates the atmosphere. All we’re lacking is a leftover smell of incense. This is different though; this is the adult silence achieved by the presence of serious money, Yoko Ono-style money.
Back in the hotel Tim and his girlfriend are waiting for me. She is a beautiful looking woman whom I subsequently learn is a model. We go rambling the Chelsea corridors. Tim says he was backstage at Ryan Adam’s gig last night and that Adams offered them his room in the hotel since he was heading out on tour. I show them the bicoastal bisexual movie star’s place. (Carter tells me that he intends to use it more as an office in future. Coulda fooled me.)
Sylvain Sylvain and his girlfriend are putting their suitcases into the back of a smart family car when I walk Tim to the front door. Sylvain looks like he has a normal life, whatever the fuck that means. God bless him. He fought out his war. Now it’s Tim’s turn.
Suitcases? Me, I feel you must have the whole thing, go the whole way. You got to have rock’n’roll luggage like you got to have rock’n’roll clothes, records, and attitude.
[top]
| "Johnny Thunders’ Apartment" et al are taken from the book Chelsea Hotel Manhattan
by Joe Ambrose, published by Headpress. Buy» | 
Bob "Righteous" Rudnick and Ken Kelley, White Panther Party, Ann Arbor 1970. Photo: Leni Sinclair
| BOB RUDNICK
Remembering the Righteous One
by John Sinclair
John Sinclair talks about his friend Bob Rudnick, music columnist for the East Village Other in New York City, founding coordinator of the Underground Press Syndicate, Minsister of Propaganda for the White Panther Party. |
| GOING TO Chicago last September to help celebrate the life and times of the late, great Righteous One—Stanley Bob Rudnick of Pottsville PA, Coral Gables FL, New York City, Detroit, Chicago and the West Coast—felt particularly apt for me, because Bob really gave me what I know of the Windy City and made for me a second home there in the poetry bars and gin mills of the modern era, in what Rudnick always referred to as the city of Nelson Algren.
I go back a long way with the Righteous One—all the way back to the Winter of 1967–68, when I was managing the MC5 in Detroit and Rudnick was music columnist for the East Village Other in New York City and founding coordinator of the fledgling Underground Press Syndicate. A devout follower of Lenny Bruce, his lifetime idol and role model, Rudnick hustled his music columns and other demented writings to Cavalier, Circus, and diverse other large-circulation publications.
I was writing an arts column called ‘The Coat Puller’ for the Fifth Estate in the Motor City and sending out inflammatory press releases detailing the daring exploits of the MC5, who were drawing as much attention from the police and other authorities as they were beginning to win the affections of thousands of alienated post-industrial youths.
My modest writings soon captured the already well-inflamed imagination of the Righteous One and his partner in crime, the young Dennis Frawley. Together they penned the weekly ‘Kokaine Karma’ column in the Other and hosted one of the first truly creative “free-form” radio programs at WFMU-FM, the voice of tiny Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey.
When we released the MC5’s 45 rpm single of Looking At You/Borderline on the A-Square label in the Spring of 1968, Rudnick and Frawley immediately slapped it on the WFMU turntables, where it joined the heady mix of music by Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Jim Pepper, Larry Coryell and Howlin’ Wolf that the two scenesters had devised for their listeners.
Big Apple radio exposure for our single—pressed in an edition of only 500 copies—was combined with almost weekly mentions in the East Village Other as part of Rudnick and Frawley’s personal crusade to ensure that everyone they knew was aware of the MC5. This resulted in much big-label interest in the band and the particular attention of a young A&R man at Elektra Records named Danny Fields, whose opinion at the label had been held in high esteem ever since he had suggested that Light My Fire be lifted from The Doors first album, edited and issued as a single.
Danny Fields also did an air shift at WFMU following the Kokaine Karma Show on Friday evenings, where Rudnick and Frawley’s repeated spins of Looking At You had kindled his interest in the MC5. Bob and Dennis introduced me to Danny one night while I was visiting the station during a typically kamikaze venture into New York City in hopes of landing a record deal for the MC5, and we hit it off at once.
Soon Danny convinced his employers to sign the 5 to an Elektra recording contract and gave us the beginning of our national career, serving unselfishly as my principal mentor and guide through the maze of the music business for the next two years. Danny also got Elektra to sign James “Iggy” Osterberg and the Psychedelic Stooges—the 5’s close associates—following Rudnick and Frawley’s repeated raves and a trip to Ann Arbor to see the bands in action at a Draft Resistance benefit at the Union Ballroom.
I can’t recall the exact date when Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley came out to Michigan to join our commune, Trans-Love Energies Unlimited, and take paying jobs at Detroit’s first ‘underground’ radio station, WABX-FM, but I know we were together in Chicago for the Festival of Life at the Democratic National Convention in August 1968, where the MC5 was the only one of the many bands committed to playing that actually performed in Lincoln Park, and they were there for the recording of the MC5’s first album, cut live at the Grande Ballroom on October 30–31, 1968.
While Rudnick was in Michigan he helped me with national publicity for the MC5 and generally carried out his duties as Minister of Propaganda for the White Panther Party, furthering the cause of “rock & roll, dope, & fucking in the streets” and “every thing free for every body” which was the unholy mission of the only revolutionary organization in American history to be led by a rock & roll band.
A founding member of the WPP, the Righteous One was with me one ugly evening in the early summer of 1969 when the MC5 dropped the bomb on Jesse “Brother J.C.” Crawford and myself, relieving us of our respective responsibilities as road manager/emcee and personal manager. They had decided to pursue a more conventional path to popular music glory than the one they had blazed as founders of the White Panther Party, and the three of us were the first to be cut loose.
The Righteous One was always close at hand to provide genius media manipulation support for my court battles in Detroit in the summer of 1969, and Rudnick’s is one of the last faces I saw when the Recorder’s Court bailiffs dragged me out of the courtroom into a holding cell to begin serving my nine and a half to ten year sentence for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. Righteous had been closely following the proceedings with a microphone up his sleeve and our first-generation cassette machine strapped to his body, providing the defense with an accurate recording of each day’s testimony. At night he would champion my cause on the airways, which soon led to the precipitate departure of Kokaine Karma from WABX in the summer of 1969.
The next two and a half years are a blank to me as far as happenings on the streets are concerned. I was incarcerated in Michigan’s maximum security prisons without appeal bond while Rudnick and scores of others worked selflessly upon my behalf to get me out.
When our organization, by now known as the Rainbow People’s Party, staged a massive rally and benefit concert at Ann Arbor’s Crisler Arena on December 10, 1971, drawing 15,000 marijuana advocates to the University of Michigan campus to demand my release from prison, Rudnick was on stage to host the show and bring on people like John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Archie Shepp, Commander Cody & the Lost Planet Airmen—sort of a live version of a Rudnick radio program.
The Righteous One and I were together again in Ann Arbor during 1972–73, and for a short, glorious period we were both on the air at WNRZ-FM, spinning out hours of freeform, black music-based programming...until Rudnick reported for his shift one Sunday afternoon in 1973 and phoned to save me a trip out to the station: the new owners had locked the doors and changed the format to country and western music.
While I was in prison Rudnick had established a new base for himself in the Windy City, and for the next few years he went back and forth from Detroit or Ann Arbor to Chicago as events dictated. I called him there one night in 1974 to invite him to join us as house emcee and deejay at the Rainbow Room, a nice little joint in the basement of the Shelby Hotel in downtown Detroit where Rainbow Productions was presenting a continuous blues and jazz festival onstage, featuring artists like Howlin’ Wolf, Charles Mingus, Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, Albert Collins, Sun Ra & His Arkestra and Sunnyland Slim. A free room at the hotel was included in the deal, you could sign for your food in the coffee shop, and the lounge in the lobby boasted the Motor City’s finest jazz ensemble, the Lyman Woodard Organization, six nights a week.
The Shelby Hotel turned out to be a very interesting place indeed, but—as always—the good times had their limits, and soon we were back in Ann Arbor while John Petrie and Lisa Gottleib ran the nightclub (now called the Savoy Room) until the hotel itself folded in 1975. Rudnick split for Chicago, I moved back to Detroit with my family, and I lost touch with the Righteous One for quite a few years.
One Sunday afternoon in 1986 I accompanied three Detroit-area poets—M.L. Liebler, Errol Henderson, and the late Larry Pike—on a trip to Chicago, where Liebler had promised we would do several poetry performances. After fifteen years as a political and cultural activist in Detroit and Ann Arbor, including three long years in prison, I had returned in 1982 to my original calling as a poet and journalist and had resumed reading my works in public, usually enjoying the musical accompaniment of a band of jazz and blues players I titled the Blues Scholars in honor of the late Professor Longhair’s splendid ensemble from New Orleans.
This was my first trip to Chicago as a poet in twenty years, ever since I had performed at the University of Chicago and other venues with Joseph Jarman and his band in the mid sixties, and I was eager to make a good showing. Our first night was a Sunday at No Exit, just around the corner from the Heartland Cafe, and we were scheduled to appear at the Monday night set at Butchie’s Get Me High Jazz Lounge, one of Mark Smith’s early venues.
When I walked through the door at Butchie’s the first face I saw belonged to the Righteous One, who had been lying in wait for me along with my old friend John Petrie. It turned out that both were now poets themselves and would read their works there before the night was over. Rudnick had this particularly great piece about the scene at Butchie’s in which he remarked on the practice of charging the poets a dollar to enter and wondered if he could read five poems if he paid $5.00.
Another of Rudnick’s striking works in verse was called ‘Food Fascists of the North’, addressed to his former co-workers at the Heartland Cafe, where this old-school, Lenny Bruce-inspired, hardcore dope fiend and meat eater had labored at constant ideological loggerheads with the resident vegetarians under the employ of our old comrade from Rising Up Angry, Michael James.
Everything I heard Rudnick read that night was bright, well-written verse coming from his own uniquely twisted take on the world and rooted in the particulars of daily life, and my first impression remains true today: Bob Rudnick was a very fine poet with magnetic stage presence and a wildly effective delivery.
He was also in considerable trouble as a person: dodging a narcotics warrant from New Jersey, living off General Assistance and the occasional weird job, drinking too much alcohol, hustling for drugs and living just one step ahead of the game at all times. Bob was rich only in friends and in his own creative potential, which he sold as cheaply as the market demanded.
But his many friends cared about the Righteous One very, very much, and time and time again I was blown away by the depth of devotion and the unconditional love and tolerance evidenced by people in Chicago who took care of Bob in the eighties.
Rudnick’s sweep was vast: he hooked up a lot of people, relentlessly but quite unobtrusively, and brought friends together with friends in ways and places that enhanced the lives of all concerned. He stayed connected to our old pals from the sixties who remained active and vital in modern Chicago life—people like Warren Leming, Mike James, Abe Peck, Kate Nolan, Marshall Rosenthal, John Petrie and Skip Williamson—and continued to make and share new friends in the postmodern era, a number of whom have become important persons in my life.
After that night at Butchie’s Get Me High Jazz Lounge, Rudnick took over my case in Chicago and arranged appearances for me at a great number of establishments during the next five years, including the Heartland Cafe, Estelle’s, L&L Lounge, the first Frankie Machine Festival in Wicker Park, the Green Mill, Links Hall, and my favorite nightspot, Weed’s—the world’s greatest tavern—where the Righteous One, Sergio Mayora and I conspired to bring poetry to the club in a series of group performances Rudnick called “The Nights of the Cookers”.
Rudnick was at his finest as a producer of collaborative poetry events, and his several historic series—like the legendary Literary Bouts (the forerunner of Mike Smith’s Poetry Slams), the Erotic Poetry Festivals, the Nights of the Cookers, the tribute to William Burroughs at Lower Links—made important contributions to the development of the contemporary literary scene in the Windy City.
These events brought together a great many disparate poets and presented them intelligently, with great humor, in a dynamic setting. Rudnick was not a person to manage a continuing enterprise, but he was a fantastic starter—he got good things going, and then he stepped out of the way, back into the shadow world where he preferred to live, and let his ideas live on in the work of others too numerous to count.
During the eighties I pursued my calling as a poet and performer in the time I could spare from my duties as a Detroit-based artists manager and booking agent. I was personal manager for a horn-led dance band called the Urbations, which was desirous of entering the Chicago nightclub market, and I importuned Rudnick until he got us our first gig in Chicago (I can’t remember the name of the place) and supervised our many subsequent bookings in the Windy City, which took us from Weed’s and the Heartland Cafe to the Park West, Biddy Mulligan’s, Fitzgerald’s, and other finer establishments.
Rudnick was such a beautiful street-level cat from the old school: he knew everybody in every joint in town that was worth a visit, and he reveled in amassing weird groupings of people whose only common contact was Rudnick himself—working out vast details of logistics over the phone, wrestling everyone into vehicles and propeling each small mob from place to place, mixing with the inhabitants, regrouping (“All right,” he’d whisper in each person’s ear, “we’ll be leaving in ten minutes and—let’s see—it’ll take us exactly twenty four minutes to get there from here”), and lurching off into the night, always unbelievably attentive to every social, sexual, recreational drug and musical need of each member of the party.
By the fall of 1987 things had pretty much bottomed out, each in our own way, for Rudnick and myself. My younger daughter had graduated from high school in Detroit and left to attend college in New Orleans. My companion and I had separated, the band I was working with broke up, leaving me in considerable debt, and I was living alone in a loft in downtown Detroit from which I was about to be evicted.
Rudnick had burned out most of his support network in Chicago and had been offered rent-free lodgings by an old friend in the Motor City who had somehow developed into a low-level slum lord with several properties in the Cass Corridor, a desolate post-industrial wasteland that stretched north from the wreckage of downtown to the campus of Wayne State University.
Rudnick immortalized his first night in the Motor City—October 30, 1987—in a brilliant poem called ‘For Gavin Whose Night It Was’:
Walking down Woodward at 1:57 a.m. when Detroit bars close and no one is on the street but me—
The wind chilling to the bone like the Hawk, Chicago’s Hawk, welcomes me to the Murder City on Devil’s Night.
A smell of burning wood in the air Only a hooker and me witness the burning pausing paranoid to hear if there are any screams
And from abandoned Victorian townhouses the cries of copulating cats echo through the Cass Corridor bouncing off my consciousness sounding like the helpless pleas of abused hillbilly children
Tonight is Devil’s Night One thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven years after the Common Error even the word Detroit feels cold
And Geraldo Rivera missed an exclusive interview with Jesus
and last call by three minutes and a field goal Murder in the Motor City is up 10% Think we’ll pass Hank Aaron’s home run record by Christmas
As things started to pick up for both of us—Rudnick energized by the companionship and devotion of a young woman from suburban Detroit named Jenny—we hooked up in Detroit on the poetry issue. First at a place called the Mansion, then at the Union Street Bar, Alvin’s Detroit Bar, the City Arts Gallery, 1515 Broadway Theatre and other venues we hosted several well received poetry series showcasing the great contemporary bards of the Motor City: Ron Allen, Mick Vranich, Lolita Hernandez, Trinidad Sanchez, Rayfield Waller, Leslie Reese, Jose Garza, Nubia Kai, Melba Boyd, Glenn Mannisto, Dennis Teichman, George and Chris Tysh and others.
In the fall of 1988 I went to work for the Detroit Council of the Arts, an agency of the City of Detroit, as editor of City Arts Quarterly magazine and director of the City Arts Gallery. Rudnick was an important collaborator during this period, always coming up with exciting ideas for fresh presentations and helping bring people together in a common artistic purpose.
At the same time he was living a life of utter penury, staying in crash pads or people’s basements and scrambling for what he called “turd money”—enough to put something in his belly to hold the beer, wine and spirits which dwelled there in such abundance. His drug use was cut way down—he’d definitely cop every two weeks, though, when his GA check arrived—and by the time I left Detroit to resettle in New Orleans in the summer of 1991, Bob’d started having trouble with his liver.
During the next four years I’d get calls from the Righteous One in the middle of the night. “This is your rabbi,” he’d croak, “Why haven’t you called me?” And we’d laugh and carry on like we always did, but his report on what everybody was doing would be laced with horror stories about operations, stays in the hospital, doctors’ ultimatums, and the vain hope of a liver transplant.
Things were happening to his body that terrified him, but the desperate, degenerate lifestyle to which he’d been committed for so long wouldn’t allow any escape. He shuffled back and forth between friends in suburban Detroit and hospital beds and borrowed pads in Chicago, still hopeful of getting a new liver, but without the resources to guarantee even his next meal.
In the summer of 1995, by now unable to process what food he did eat, Rudnick checked into the hospital to get his bloated stomach drained, but the swelling wouldn’t go away. Then they diagnosed cancer in Bob’s pancreas, and we all knew the time of his departure from this earthly plane was nigh upon us. Jo Jaffe and John Petrie rescued the Rud from the dreadful hospice to which he’d been condemned and got him comfortably back into the hospital, where another tirade by his friends resulted in a steady flow of morphine into his veins to ease the pain.
By mid July people were flying in from around the country to hold Bob’s hand and say goodbye. Richie Stoneman came out from New York one weekend; Skip Williamson arrived from Marietta, Georgia and stayed by Rud’s bed around the clock. When I called one night a week before Bob passed, Skip told me how the Righteous One had scrabbled around the room that afternoon looking for his purported stash: “I know I’ve got some heroin in here somewhere,” he cawed, pawing through toilet paper rolls and discarded tissues. “I love heroin.”
So, after twenty five years of half expecting nightly to hear of Rudnick’s death from an overdose of drugs, the Righteous One finally passed away, a week short of his fifty third birthday, in the hospital, surrounded by friends, of more or less natural causes—or at least the natural results of his dedicated lifetime of beatnik degeneracy. He lived every minute exactly the way he wanted to until the illness took over his life, and he died as happy a death as anyone could ever have wanted for him.
Now the long night of pain and suffering is over, and the Righteous One is safe in the spirit world. His poems and his many key contributions to the cultural life of our nation in the second half of the twentieth century will live here with us as long as we have breath.
Goodbye, dear friend. We miss you like crazy.
New Orleans October 21, 1995
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| “Bob Rudnick: Remembering the Righteous One” by John Sinclair, is taken from the book It's All Good. Click here to order a copy
|  | TEN FILMS
& ONE INTERESTING FACT ABOUT EACH OF THEM
by David Kerekes
NOTE: I was asked to contribute to a book of film lists. Each contributor selected ten films on a theme of their choosing. My list, which follows, was rejected.
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| 1. BOXOFFICE (Josef Bogdanovich, 1982)
Boxoffice is a low budget movie that I kept for years on videocassette as one half of a double bill with No Way To Treat a Lady starring Rod Steiger. The Steiger movie is loosely modelled on the Boston Strangler case, while coincidentally Boxoffice features Peter Hurkos as “himself,” the real life psychic detective in the Boston Strangler case.
2. CHLOE, MY LOVE IS CALLING (Marshall Neilan, 1934)
This 1934 movie advocates racial tolerance, an unusual stance and topic for the era in which it was made. Chloe is a white girl of black parentage, whose brother (or boyfriend or both) dives into the swamp with a knife between his teeth to do battle with an alligator.
3. SOUND OF HORROR (José Antonio Nieves Conde, 1964)
Sound of Horror has an invisible dinosaur that wreaks havoc and gruesome makeup effects. The sound the dinosaur makes is more laughable than it is horrible. Horrible would be the sound created by the matter transporter in another film, The Projected Man, which is earsplitting and must have rattled everyone when it played theatres in the late sixties.
4. SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY (John Trent, 1964)
Before widescreen came to videocassette, films on tape often suffered from pan & scan, an ugly business concerning incorrect aspect ratios and the tracking of action around the TV screen by way of compensation. Some companies were too cheap to bother with pan & scan and consequently, in these movies, anything that takes place to the left or to the right of dead centre is completely lost. The worse example is Sunday in the Country. Newspaper headlines on screen are rendered illegible as letters on the peripheries are missing, and many times only the very tip of Ernest Borgnine’s nose can be seen as he engages another nose in dialogue. Sunday in the Country appears to have been the inspiration for Frederick R. Friedel’s Axe.
5. HENNESSY (Don Sharp, 1975)
An all-star cast that includes Rod Steiger (as a mad bomber), Patrick Stewart (playing an Irish thug with a pate, later to become Jean-Luc Pacard in Star Trek: The Next Generation), Trevor Howard and Richard Johnson. Trevor Howard blows a gasket at everyone he meets (“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”) and Richard Johnson looks like he is about to get on the boat that will take him to Zombie Flesh-Eaters. Hennessy ran into problems because of its inclusion of footage of the Queen, which is edited to suggest Her Majesty is reacting to events unfolding around her, notably a bomb exploding.
6. KWAHERI (Thor L. Brooks, Byron Chudnow, 1964)
This early “mondo” documentary shows natives of a jungle tribe in Africa pulling a motorboat up a waterfall, a sequence that predicts Werner Herzog’s Fitzcaraldo.
7. HUNTING GROUND (Jorge Grau, 1983)
From the director of Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, a brutal crime drama with some hi-fi tips. A gang of thugs case the home of a woman upon whom they wish to make violence, and pause to consider the heavy rock music that is playing within the house (a version of O Come All Ye Faithful). One of the gang deliberates: “Sounds like they’re really into rock. I don’t mean the record, man, it’s the speakers. They’re heavy on woofers. You put on classical music and you won’t hear it on that system. I’m sure they’re Gauss or JBL maybe. And that stereo? Ah, Nakamichi, or something like that.”
NOTE: During the mid to late 1980s I was in correspondence with a French film buff and historian by the name of Jean-Claude Michel. I lost touch with him over time and miss his letters filled with wonderful and arcane film facts and insights into French film lore and custom. Here are three excerpts from his letters taken at random.
8. ALIEN MASSACRE (David L. Hewitt, 1967)
Jean-Claude Michel: “I noticed the release of an oddity titled Alien Massacre aka Horrors of the Red Planet, with John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jr. The short synopsis is of a scientist and his daughter who are purchased [pursued?] by aliens. Naturally, the first title to mind is Horror of the Blood Monsters/Creatures of the Red Planet/Vampire Men of the Lost Planet, but it has only Carradine, not Chaney Jr. Another Adamson film, Dracula Vs Frankenstein, has Chaney not JC. After some research I discovered the name of David Hewitt as director (sometimes a collaborator of Adamson). Hewitt made some movies with Carradine, but only one (to my knowledge) with Carradine and Chaney: Dr Terror’s Gallery of Horror aka Return from the Past, but it has no massacre in it or aliens! So perhaps another Hewitt film was made with them and didn’t surface until recently?”
9. BLACK SABBATH (Mario Bava, 1963)
Jean-Claude Michel: “I recently saw Black Sabbath on video (a British tape) and was amazed to see a longer version than the French one. In the French print (both in theatres and on video), Karloff appears only in the prologue, and as an actor, in the Wurdalak segment. In the British print he also appears in a short prologue for each story. Unfortunately in both British and French versions, the epilogue (also with Karloff, and containing a joke with a mechanical horse) is missing. Also, the musician credited on the English language print is Les Baxter, not Roberto Nicolosi. I cannot tell if Baxter simply made a re-recording of the original music, or if he really made another one. The Telephone segment (with Michele Mercier) is longer in the British print!”
10. COLONEL MARCH OF SCOTLAND YARD (various, 1956)
British TV series starring an elderly Boris Karloff. Terence Fisher directed one episode. Jean-Claude Michel: “In France they were popular and played in theatres as the first part of a programme, and were often better than the feature film. Chris Lee was in one of the episodes, so it was the first confrontation between Karloff and Lee, years before Corridor of Blood. In Britain, three episodes of the series were mounted together as a feature: Colonel March Investigates. I hope it’ll be shown on TV some day. Twenty-six episodes were filmed, including the three released as a feature. Here in France, the twenty-six were shown separately, on TV and in theatres. They were shown until recently. I saw one in Paris in 1983!”
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