Danny Garcia’s documentary Looking for Johnny, about doomed punk rocker Johnny Thunders, has its world premiere Saturday, May 3 at 7:15 PM with Garcia in person. Andy Markowitz, of our media partner and best damned music film site on the planet MusicFilmWeb.com, interviewed Garcia as he was putting the finishing touches on the film in preparation for his trip to the U.S.
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Save for Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders is punk rock’s most notorious smack casualty, a stone junkie who wore his habit on his sleeve (or, in one famous photo shoot, in his hatband). But unlike Sid, whose one great skill was making a spectacle of himself, Johnny Thunders had talent—some would say genius. First with the New York Dolls, where he played Keef to David Johansen’s Mick, then with his own band, the Heartbreakers, which toured Britain with the Sex Pistols and the Clash in 1976, he laid the foundation for the slashing guitar sound that’s woven into punk’s DNA.
Looking for Johnny, the new music documentary from Catalonian punk filmmaker Danny Garcia (The Rise and Fall of the Clash), is the first film to comprehensively tackle Thunders’ life and musical legacy, from growing up fatherless in 1950s Queens to his death at age 38 under still-muzzy circumstances in a New Orleans hotel room 23 years ago yesterday. (Lech Kowalski’s little-seen 1999 doc Born to Lose is less a bio than a subterranean portrait of junkie Johnny.)
Garcia’s doc doesn’t shy away from its subject’s legendary self-abuse—it hardly could have—but its heart is in the music: not just Thunders’ seminal guitar-slinging but his singing and surprisingly tender songwriting, which drew from across rock ‘n’ roll history to produce sensitive gems like “You Can’t Put Your Arms Round a Memory” alongside churning shouters like “Born to Lose.” (In his later years he even did solo acoustic tours.)
After CIMMfest, the film rolls out to cinemas across the US and elsewhere, including screenings at Garcia’s own music and film festival, Transmissions, this summer in Madrid and Barcelona. Having interviewed Garcia back in 2012 when his Clash doc came out, we wanted to check back in to talk about his latest punk history lesson—with a brief foray into his other cinematic obsession, spaghetti westerns, an example of which called Six Bullets to Hell he shot last summer in Spain’s Tabernas Desert.
MFW: You going back out into the desert to shoot some more?
Danny Garcia: Maybe in July. We’re looking at it. We had so much fun shooting that western. It was hilarious. For two weeks we were completely full of dirt, unshaven, smoking weed out in the desert. It was just crazy—you got all these horses, you got guns. They shoot blanks, but still, you’re living in another world, in another time. It’s pretty fucking amazing.
Is that finished?
The directors, Tanner Beard and Russell Cummings, they’re editing in Austin, Texas, right now.
What’s your role?
I’m producing. And I play a bandit. I get blown up in, like, five minutes. It was so much fun, man. We want to shoot another one.
Why did you call the Thunders film Looking for Johnny? Do you feel like he was lost?
No, it’s just because I never got to meet him. Maybe that was a good thing, because when you meet your heroes, sometimes they’ll tell you to fuck off and you get pissed off. The idea was to find out who the real Johnny Thunders was, besides the public persona that we all know. And also because I’m a Ken Loach fan and he had a movie called Looking for Eric [the Eric being former Manchester United star Eric Cantona].
I grew up with Nina Antonia’s [Thunders biography] In Cold Blood, so I was familiar already with the whole story, and I had all the records. When I was 17 I was a total Thunders maniac, like I was with the Clash a few years earlier. So it was a really natural choice for me to make a Thunders documentary. I love the guy, the sound of his guitar, his music, the songs—it’s something very familiar.
What makes him stand out for you?
There’s some musicians, you take a look at them and you can see they’re real. You’re getting the real deal with Johnny Thunders. You buy a Johnny Thunders album, you know what you’re getting. He came from a different time. Obviously the ’70s was a time of—you know, Lou Reed was shooting up onstage. Crazy shit was going on. In the ’80s that was shocking for a lot of people, when he would take photographs with syringes or whatnot, but you have to remember, that’s the time also when you have a guy like Ian Dury singing “Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Today none of that would be politically correct. We’re living in a sanitized era. What’s outrageous these days? The response you get is Miley Cyrus, Rihanna. Well, then we’re fucked, ’cause that’s nothing. But that’s the world we live in. I understand why a lot of kids find some sort of relief to find that once upon a time there was a guy called Johnny Thunders who made real music and spawned a whole style. The sound of Johnny Thunders’ guitar is the punk guitar sound.
Do you think one of the reasons there’s a different and narrower kind of “outrageousness” you can deal with in pop and rock music is because of what happened to people like Johnny Thunders?
People like me or you, we’ve grown up with the Rolling Stones already making records. We don’t know a world without the Rolling Stones. What I mean is, we’ve grown up knowing that Brian Jones was killed when he was 27 in his swimming pool. We’ve grown up knowing Jimi Hendrix died when he was very young, Sid Vicious, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison—all this stuff. We’re not outraged anymore by anything [laughs]. We’re living in different times.
In your last film you took the guy who’s probably the most sainted figure in punk, Joe Strummer, and looked at him a little more critically, at least in terms of the decisions he made that ended the Clash. Is Looking for Johnny a mirror of that—trying to take a more nuanced view of a guy who’s looked on as one of the ultimate punk sinners?
Not really. All of this stuff, I really do it unconsciously. I didn’t go to film school or anything. I just look at it and try to put it together in a graceful way and to make sense out of the whole story. Looking for Johnny doesn’t have anything to do with The Rise and Fall of the Clash, [which] was me looking for an answer as to why my favorite band broke up the way it did. Looking for Johnny is really a tribute to Johnny Thunders. What I’m doing is really telling you his life story and talking about his work, his guitar style, his songwriting style, the way he was.
Obviously we talk about his addictions too, because that was part of his life, but we’ve done it with a lot of respect. I would do the same thing with Hank Williams or Charlie Parker or Keith Richards, anybody who had substance abuse problems. And it’s made me appreciate Johnny Thunders a lot more as person and as a musician. I’m really amazed that against the whole grain, against everything that didn’t go his way and all the problems he had, he managed to create this body of work which is pretty outstanding. He changed the face of music without even knowing about it. Obviously he knew [Sex Pistols guitarist] Steve Jones was copying him from day one—he knew that. But when you look at rock history before punk and after punk, everything changed. His guitar sound influenced all these people that changed the game forever. He’s very much part of it, and he should [get] credit for it.
Danny Garcia (photo by Kathy Findlay)
Have you seen Born to Lose, the Thunders movie from ’99?
I’ve seen one or two parts, yeah. It’s not what I go for, but it’s interesting. I like [Lech] Kowalski’s work. I like Gringo—I thought that was a great movie. But with [Born to Lose], because I like Johnny Thunders, it’s kind of hard for me to sit down and look at Johnny scoring drugs and getting ready to shoot up. I don’t need to see Johnny Thunders getting his fix ready. But I respect his work. Originally Gringo was gonna star Johnny Thunders, but the story goes that Johnny took the money and ran, so he had to use what’s his face, [John] Spacely. It’s on YouTube. It’s the life of a junkie in New York, which is basically what Lech Kowalski wanted to do, I suppose.
There are people who have been able to maintain that lifestyle for a while and it didn’t stop them from achieving what they wanted to achieve—Keith Richards is a perfect example. Did the drugs stop Johnny from achieving what he wanted, from getting bigger?
Well, he couldn’t get a major [label] deal. And the press had a field day with Johnny Thunders, because he would blow up. He’d blow up big shows in London or New York when all the press was there—boom, he would fall over, fall unconscious and stuff. He worked hard at getting that reputation. Keith was a millionaire, man. He was not a street junkie. It’s not the same thing. Of course, loads of musicians have suffered from this. [In clips in the film] Johnny says this himself—watch out, this is not a game. If you think it’s cool because this guy does it or the other guy does it, then you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. The lesson I get from Johnny Thunders is precisely don’t do what I do, if you want to stay alive. He’s like a walking anti-drug advertisement.
There’s still some mystery about his death, with signs that he was using but also that there was some foul play, or people he was with who weren’t good folks. What do you think happened?
What I think happened is what Nina [Antonia] says: he was hanging out with some lowlifes, and they just took everything when they witnessed him dying in front of them. I don’t think there was any foul play. He took some methadone, there were traces of cocaine. He had a huge tolerance for substances, that guy, but I think his body gave up, basically. I think his body said stop, that’s it. The evidence points to him being a very ill man by time he gets to New Orleans. The doctors in Japan [during Thunders' last tour] said they couldn’t do anything for him and he had to go home.
It’s pretty clear he had incipient tumors.
Yes, and acute leukemia, which can kill you from one day to the next, like that.
One of the really sad takeaways from the film is that even if he had managed to kick—and he was on methadone, he was trying to kick—it doesn’t seem likely he would have lived much longer anyway.
No, he was a very ill man. It’s just a real shame that he couldn’t get to record the last album in New Orleans.
Are there tapes floating around?
Yeah, yeah—demos, loads of live takes from those last tunes that he wrote. They’re really sweet songs, really great stuff, like “Children Are People Too” and “Society Makes Me Sad,” “Help the Homeless.” He was throwing all these messages at the last minute. Which is pretty amazing coming from a guy like Johnny Thunders.
Well, with the acoustic stuff late in his career he was getting very sentimental and melancholy.
He always had that side. “So Alone” is one of his earliest tunes. “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory,” that’s very early—late ’60s, when he was learning to play guitar. He always had that side because he always had that drama within of being an abandoned kid. He always had that thing going on.
Have you got another punk movie up your sleeve?
I’m working on a Sid Vicious film, Sad Vacation, which is a collection of anecdotes [from] people who met Sid or Nancy or both of them. The story’s been told before, I don’t think I’m gonna solve any mysteries at this point regarding the Nancy murder, but I’m gonna try to collect anecdotes regarding these two that I haven’t heard before. That’s one of the things I like to do. When I meet old punk rockers, people who were in the scene back in the day, I always end up asking them about Sid.