Mojo - The Music Magazine

An object lesson in how not to crack America…

So you were off the Who your, becalmed in LA. And that’s where you ended up on the wanted list?
Yeah, I’ve cleared that up now. The guy accepted $15,000 I think. The car rental firm whose car I used to run the guy over, they paid $7,500 and we paid the other half and that meant his complaint with the police was dropped, which meant they had no witness.

How did he incur your wrath?
He physically assaulted me, grabbed me by the throat and pushed me up against a wall, and he was like 6’4”. I didn’t like bullies, it was ingrained from boarding school, so if anyone tried to bully me I had a real anger management problem. I was used to having big people around me to protect me but this time there wasn’t and the only weapon I had to hand was the car.

The way it started was he was standing outside a car park and I’d parked just outside the entrance and he said, You can’t park there. But he didn’t just say it, he grabbed me. So, I reversed and I don’t know whether he thought I was going to drive off or park it in the car park, but I just slammed my foot down and drove straight at him. He had a smile on his face and in slow motion it changed to a look of total horror and then the last I saw of him, he disappeared over some bins. Then I drove off and felt really great, and then it dawned on me what I’d done.

Meanwhile Zena and the rest of the band were in the coffee shop having breakfast. They didn’t know what happened but suddenly there were all these ambulances and they saw this man being carried into an ambulance. They kind of knew it must have had something to do with me.

We’d already checked out of the hotel but I thought I’d better go back there because it was the only meeting point we had, and they thought the same. So we booked a room where we all crowded in and phoned up a solicitor and he said the best legal advice he could give was get out of the state as soon as possible. If you’re foreign you’re a flight risk so he couldn’t guarantee bail. Luckily the next gig was in New York, so we just flew to New York.

I can understand people rethinking their careers after touring the States. Lots of people get really hung up about not breaking America. It’s sort of a drug, getting jealous of other people’s success. But really, if you’ve got one territory that’s paying the bills, you should be happy with that. Once people get a bit of success, they want to conquer the world and they bash their heads against a brick wall trying to conquer America. I think it’s demeaning in a way. Who needs America?

The other problem on that tour was that you were trying to kick heroin while John was getting back into it…
Well, I was still determined to not let it interfere with my art, so I went to America without any drugs, just a little bit of medicine, and determined to see it through. Besides, in America I could spend $500 a day and not even get straight because the heroin was so weak. The street stuff there, it was between two and six per cent heroin because it had been controlled by the Mafia and organised crime for so long and that was how they cut it. That’s why so many American junkies OD’d when they came to England. When Johnny Thunders stayed in England, he couldn’t believe the strength of the drugs over here. In England, we were awash in this Iranian brown heroin, on account of the rich Iranians fleeing their country, taking their money out in drugs. It was easier than smuggling gold.

You see, in the ’60s junkies got most of their stuff from doctors, pharmaceutical stuff, which isn’t the same. There was the occasional white heroin, which was from the [SE Asian opium nexus] Golden Triangle. That was normally quite weak, but there weren’t that many junkies around and there just wasn’t a black market in it. Plus, you had to inject that stuff, and it seemed a big step to go from smoking a joint or snorting a bit of coke to sticking a needle in your arm.

But, with the brown heroin, you could snort it, or just smoke it, and smoking it just seemed less threatening. That’s the one thing… I have always been scared of needles. The first time I got injected by anyone in America, I got Hepatitis B. That’s another thing. Within a week of getting back from America, I went bright yellow. I was in bed for eight months, and that’s when I first lost a lot of weight. I didn’t even have the strength to lift my head off the pillow.

So, really that’s the reason why we didn’t see each other at all, because after announcing the split we did a couple of British farewell shows and then another at Dingwalls which was our final gig, then I got sick. That was in April ’81. I felt bad about the Dingwall’s show because people had travelled from all over the continent but couldn’t get in because the venue was so small. I thought it was unannounced but people got to hear about it. It was also filmed, and if I’d known I would have had a shave, and would have tried a bit more. The first number we did was My Way Of Giving, which we had never ever played live before onstage, only once in the studio! We’d just do things like that because it’s fuckin’ rock‘n’roll, isn’t it?

Click for Part V: a tale of drug busts, the joy of oxygen, and the truth about Pete Doherty