Danny Garcia’s documentary about the life of the legendary guitarist Johnny Thunders “Looking for Johnny” suffers from a problem hinted at in the title: it goes in search of Johnny Thunders and it ends with the same question: was Thunders an enigma or a cipher? When you get past the drugs and the music, was anything left? Garcia doesn’t know, but he doesn’t shy away from the questions and never more so than during the harrowing story of how Thunders beat up his wife for her welfare check. Steve Crawford wrote an excellent review here, but I finally got around to watching it myself and I must admit I enjoyed it more than Crawford.
I met Thunders any number of times (my friend Richard Fantina played keyboards for his tour band) and I found him just about exactly the way he appears in this movie, a completely out of it junkie who was, unlike the Thunders referenced in the movie, astoundingly charmless, and yet I don’t care. I was having a discussion about who is better Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly when a woman piped in that she didn’t like Berry because he was a creep -referring to his putting cameras in women’s restrooms at his restaurant to film them defecating. Yes, a creep, how does that effect “The Promised land”?
The two New York Dolls albums were hurt through poor production, yes both of them, and the sole Heartbreakers album was destroyed through a failure to master it correctly; Nolan tried to fix it but he was no producer and it was so bad he quit the band. None of this harms Thunders legacy as one of the most influential guitarists in the entire New York scene, the Godfather of punk rock. As Robert Christgau noted,Johnny’s buzzsaw of a guitar sound will be emulated by metal lovers forever and if he won’t be remembered as a songwriter, he will be remembered as a seminal musician who invented a sound that changed the face of rock and roll. Unfortunately, his recorded career is a mess and nothing I’ve heard really captures the man.
Something else is lost: the nyc of the 1970s, where there were Max’s bands and CBGBs bands and where the city was a violent, turbulent cesspool of inspiration. I was 18 years old in 1975 and the first time I visited the city I fell in love, the place seemed to boil over even in the dead of winter and the sound was Johnny Thunders: a mix of Keith Richards and the girl groups his big sister loved.
Danny Garcia’s clear eyed labor of love went looking for Thunders, and what he found was an OD and a little later a corpse which would have probably decayed and died from the leukemia that was killing him any way, And though he didn’t, if Garcia had looked further he would have found the two boys he left behind, troubled junkies spending their life in and out of jail and then if he looked further still, he would have found bands and bands and bands on Ludlow street emulating Thunders whether they know they are or not.
And then finally, Garcia would have heard a Gibson Junior howling into the night, bending Berry chords and brushing through feedback to the sound of rock and roll living forever.
Garcia would have found all that and he did find it, “Looking For Johnny” was everything it could possibly be, it respected the story as best it could where no one else seems to bother, an excellent memory of a great guitarist,a legendary musician, a towering New Yorker and an influence for every other rock band playing the 7pm set at Arlene’s grocery.
Comments are closed.