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Wayne Kramer, photographed by Leni Sinclair, 1969

JOHNNY THUNDERS

“The brilliant but hopelessly drug-addicted guitar player for the New York Dolls and his own band, the Heartbreakers, Johnny Thunders helped determine the musical and stylistic directions that punk took in the mid-1970s. Born John Gezale, Thunders joined the embryonic New York Dolls in the early-1970s and quickly helped them establish their reputation as stylishly glam proto-punk pretty boys ready to do anything in the service of rock ‘n’ roll (excess). When the Dolls splintered in 1975 after their disastrous Florida tour, Thunders, along with drummer Jerry Nolan, left to concentrate on their shared tastes for more aggressive music and heroin. They returned to New York, gathered up guitarist Walter Lure and bassist Richard Hell (recently booted from the art punks in Television), and formed the Heartbreakers. Marketed by manager Leee Black Childers as out-of-control lunatics (using the catch phrase “catch them while they’re sill alive”), the Heartbreakers did their best to live up to their reputation, playing around New York unsuccessfully for a time before briefly joining the Sex Pistols, the Damned, and the Clash on the ill-fated 1976 Anarchy tour. Although most of the gigs were canceled, Johnny Thunders was credited with one lasting effect of the tour: introducing British punks to heroin. 

After the demise of the Heartbreakers, Thunders recorded sporadically as a guest artist and worked on his own music. His first solo album, 1978′s So Alone, was a haunting, melancholic piece of work that contains the signature tune, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” The album featured guest appearances from Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, the Damned’s Paul Grey, and Peter Perrett from the Only Ones (not to mention contributions from Steve Jones and Paul Cook, fresh from the ashes of the Sex Pistols). Thunders toured and recorded sporadically throughout the 1980s with different aggregations of musicians--most notable were collaborations with Wayne Kramer of the MC5 on Gang War sessions and Patti Palladin of Snatch on the Copy Cats album, developing an increasingly damaging addiction to hard drugs all the while. 

An ill-fated attempt by Thunders in 1990 to form a punk supergroup in Paris with Stiv Bators (Dead Boys and Lords of the New Church) and Dee Dee Ramone ended in acrimony when Dee Dee accused Thunders of theft, throwing bleach over Thunder’s clothing and smashing his guitar. Thunders returned to the United States, and moved to New Orleans, where he died under mysterious circumstances, apparently of a heroin overdose, in 1991.”

- Brian Cogan, The Encyclopedia of Punk, (2006)

THE HEARTBREAKERS

1975-1979

“One of the most thrilling and self-destructively drug-addled components of early New York punk, the Heartbreakers were a quartet of bad influences led by Johnny Thunders, late of the New York Dolls, and Jerry Nolan. Their seminal songs like “Born to Lose” and “Chinese Rocks” got them almost as much attention as their seemingly unlimited appetite for drugs and self-destruction. Thunders and Nolan formed the band after becoming dissatisfied with the way the New York Dolls were going under new manager Malcolm McLaren, bringing in the important addiction of Television’s Richard Hell on bass (though Hell would later be replaced by Billy Rath after fighting with Thunders; after all, the band was often known as Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers). Their blend of early punk and glam (they were one of the few American bands to mix the styles), with a little Chuck Berry-style, blues-based rock tossed into the mix, was brash and electrifying--one more reason they should never be confused with the other Heartbreakers, Tom Petty’s backup band. 

The band split for the first time in late 1977 after releasing their one studio album, the punk chestnut L.A.M.F., and also taking part in the dismally disastrous Anarchy tour of England with the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned. The Heartbreakers reunited in 1979 without drummer Nolan for a live album recorded at Max’s Kansas City. Although it would have been commercially more successful to get the original Heartbreakers back together, in years afterward Thunders proved too erratic or unmotivated to do so and worked on various projects by himself, as did the other members. After years of touring solo, Thunders died of a heroin overdose in 1991. Weakened by years of drug and alcohol abuse, Nolan died of meningitis a few months later. Oddly enough, Walter Lure, who still tours with his band the Waldos, later became a success on Wall Street. A beautiful, wonderful disaster, the Heartbreakers packed a lot of great music (and hard living) into just a few chaotic years.”