Freddie Mercury Wasn’t Nearly
As Gay As You Are

© Brandt Hardin

You call Freddie a faggot.  You think his mustache was pure trash.  You are disgusted by the glans flexed in his spandex. You dig into the details of Mercury’s mercurial libido, but I’ll tell you right now that being that concerned about a rock star’s sex life is fucking gay, man. Vicarious hairy ass.

You fantasize about the sloppy meat between a superstar’s sheets like an imaginary groupie choking on phantom fellatio.  You feed on rumors like a junky at a pain clinic fire sale.  You’re a bottom-feeder sniffing at the hem of a musical Messiah’s garment, cowering in the shadows of his ball sack.  Not only would Freddie Mercury not fuck you, he wouldn’t be flattered that you care who he fucked.  So call him a faggot if you want to.  No one denies he was gay—he was the frontman for QUEEN, for Chrissakes.  He just wasn’t as gay as you are.

That doesn’t mean that Mercury never slept with women.  Men don’t grow mustaches like that and not get down with the ladies at some point.  He probably had a hundred women, which is ninety-nine more than you will—if we count self-administered handjobs, anyway.

Reading through the quotes in Freddie Mercury: His Life in His Own Words, it becomes clear that the singer was passionate about women, especially the only love of his life, Mary Austin.

“I’m gay as a daffodil, dears.  But I couldn’t fall in love with a man the way I could with a girl…”

“I treat Mary as my common-law wife and we’re getting on fine…We believe in each other, so fuck everybody else.”

Maybe fucking everybody else was the problem, because Freddie certainly did a lot of that—men, women, midgets, wombats, God only knows what else, who cares?  It’s none of your business.  Stop snooping.

After seven years of living together, he and Mary called it quits.  But Freddie would carry on (carry oooon…) because nothing really matters…

“Sometimes a good friend is much more valuable than a lover.  Apart from Mary, I don’t have any real friends.”

I’m sure his buddies didn’t appreciate that, and you can be damn sure that his hairdresser and lover of over a decade wore a squished up sour face after hearing it.  Jim Hutton lived with Mercury for the last six years of his life, remaining by his bedside like a loyal pet, and yet Freddie had the gall to say: “If I go first, I’m going to leave everything to [Mary Austin].  Nobody else gets a penny—except my cats.”  And Freddie followed through, like a true-to-life, thuper thweet, find-em-fuck-em-and-give-em-AIDS rock star.  Freddie lived life on his own flamboyant terms.  Fuck everybody else.

Yeah, Freddie performed at Bob Geldof’s globally-broadcast, egalitarian charity ball in 1985.  But Freddie didn’t get guilt-tripped into doing Live Aid.  Those starving Ethiopians couldn’t piss on his fabulous parade.  Causes are so gay.  No, he played Live Aid because playing the biggest humanitarian concert of the century is just sooo Freddie Mercury.

“To be honest, let’s face it, all us rock stars still want to be in the limelight and this is going to showcase us.  Let’s be open about it…it’s going to be a worldwide audience, an all over simultaneous broadcast…I doubt there is one artist that’s going to appear who hasn’t realized that fact…

“Even if I didn’t do it, the poverty would still be there.  It’s something that will always be there.  We’ll do all we can do to help because it’s a wonderful thing.  But as far as I’m concerned, I’m doing it out of pride.”

It was all about entertainment.  Left wing musicians hauling millions off to their mansions or right wing writers peddling psuedo-empowerment to the servant classes—Mercury was beyond such hypocrisy and pretention.  Having a message is for fags.

“We think a show should be a spectacle and we’ve been slagged off in the press for our flamboyant stage show.  But that’s the whole point…

“I feel incredibly strong on stage…The adrenaline’s there, you feel like the devil and it’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful.  But I know in myself that I would never misuse it…I’m much too wonderful for that, darlings!”

Mercury’s honest appraisal of his exalted status was refreshing to realistic rock fans.  This was an age that viewed the martyrdom of John Lennon as a precursor to a cultural apocalypse, a generation bred to worship anyone with a TV face and a microphone.  Mercury was a shallow breath of fresh air.

“I’m not the Messiah or anything—I don’t want to preach to [the audience]…My job is not to teach them, my job is to make music.  I don’t want to change their lives overnight, I don’t want to involve the audience in peace messages or anything like that.  It’s escapism…”

Queen was the rare result of talent, will, and greed.  They crafted songs with the care of a jeweler cutting a diamond, producing both snappy hits and epic ballads.  The audience could never be too big, the lights could never be too bright, the showmanship could never be too superficial.

“I was once thinking of being carried on stage by Nubian slaves and being fanned by them…But where to find a Nubian slave?”

Freddie wasn’t about to take himself too seriously.  He was all laughter and leather.  Topless tarts and bottomless mic stands.  Macho men and mustaches.  Overbites and undergarments.  White tights and spotlights.  Like fat bottom girls, he made the rockin’ world go round.

It made him miserable in the end.  He became distrustful of the hanger-on hobnobbers who slipped into his life just to slurp on his fame like psychic vampires fighting over an infected used tampon.

Freddie had risen to the height of social approval and material wealth.  He had an eight-bedroom Victorian-style mansion built in Kensington, West London.  Marble floors and mahogany staircases.  Shopping sprees to Harrods, Cartier, and Asprey.  Lalique and Galle vases.  Midgets serving trays of cocaine.  You couldn’t attract more rats with all the cheese in Wisconsin.

“It’s like I’m handicapped, because people immediately go for my so-called stage persona.  No one loves the real me.  Inside, they’re all in love with my fame and stardom.”

Freddie became more and more emotionally isolated and shackled by the cold chains of betrayal.  He trusted no one further than he could smack them with his cock, so that wound up being the only personal connection he could hope for.  The sad part is, his sordid love life is all you ass-hammers even care about.

“My sex drive is enormous.  I sleep with men, women, cats—you name it.  I’ll go to bed with anything!  My bed is so huge it can comfortably sleep six.”

Does that titillate you?  Captivate you?  Are you happy now that you’ve had a peek beneath his sheets?  I’ll bet you want to know who now.  What are their names?  What positions did he prefer?  What did his lovers look like?  What did they smell like?  Did their wiry mustaches ever get stuck together like velcro?

You ask too many questions, and Freddie was never one for answering questions, anyway.  Questions are fucking queer.  In the last years of Freddie’s life, people were always asking probing personal questions.  Why doesn’t he play shows anymore?  What happened to the wild parties?  Why does he look so unhealthy?  Is he love sick?  On drugs?  HIV positive?

Freddie had nothing to say about it.  He became somewhat reclusive. He “stopped having sex and started growing tulips.”  The clock ticked by slowly.  Inquiring minds wanted to know.

Then suddenly, on November 23, 1991, Mercury came clean with a public statement that he indeed had AIDS.  A thousand gay assholes simultaneously slammed shut in abject terror.  The next day, Freddie was dead.

I know, I know, you say he got what he deserved.  Promiscuity leads to decadence.  The wages of sin is death.  Sodomy causes pain in the end.  God hates fags.  And maybe you’re right.  AIDS is a nasty way to go, generally reserved for certain proclivities, so that has to mean something.  Ask yourself this, though:

If God kills queers because he hates their man-loving ways, and none of us live forever, then does God hate us all, each for our own special reasons?

Death cuts every one of us down, but life only raises up so many rock heroes.  How ironic that Freddie Mercury became one of the brightest stars in the world because he was so fantastically flaming, and yet you’ll just sneer from the sidelines because you’re so fucking gay.

[In memory of Seth Putnam]

© 2011 Joseph Allen

Queen — “Another One Bites the Dust
1981

Michael Hutchence:
Don’t Hold Your Breath

© Brandt Hardin

If there is such a thing as too much pussy, then Michael Hutchence must have gotten it. Remember the topless girl with the stunning green eyes from Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games” video? Hutchence hit that. Or the ghostly girl with the ruby lips singing in Nick Cave’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow”? Hutchence hit that, too. Television interviewers, supermodels, pop starlets, and an endless stream of groupies playfully dubbed “INXS-ories”—Michael took primal lust to extremes that the average porn addict couldn’t approach vicariously.

Michael was on that sweet love-makin’ sadomasochist mack daddy on crack tip. He tied them up and tortured them with pleasure. He snorted drugs off their toe-nails and tongued them down til they wanted to die. He probably ate grapes off their butt cheeks. They don’t call it a “Hutchence steamer” for nothin’. Described by those who loved him as warm and charming, the smooth-talking Australian had a habit of charming his friend’s lovers into a warm bed. Just a day in the life of a dirty rock star, until the paparazzi caught Hutchence doing the wrong man dirty.

Bob Geldof was a saint, canonized by the media and knighted by the Queen. From 1985 on, he could do no wrong. That year he organized Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert to relieve famine-stricken Ethiopia, which was performed in London and Philadelphia and broadcast across the planet. Bob and his wife-to-be sat next to Prince Charles and Princess Diana in Wembley Stadium while nearly two billion viewers received his all-star pop showcase via satellite, including Bob Dylan and Queen, along with the crushing guilt that comes with eating a burger while Africans starve to death. The event raised upward of £50 million that day, much of which inadvertently went to fund Ethiopia’s genocidal Communist dictator Mingitsu Haile Miriam and his guerilla army. All saints must suffer, and such an ironic misappropriation must have ground Geldof’s gears, but not nearly as bad as the humiliating and highly publicized cuckoldry inflicted by his reckless wife ten years later.

Bob began romancing Paula Yates when she was barely eighteen, back when she was just a little fan girl following his band, the Boomtown Rats. Thinking himself to be older and wiser—eight years to be exact—he struggled to keep her wild oats out of the feeding troughs of the rich and famous. After their protracted courtship resulted in a daughter, they were finally wed in a $50 Las Vegas Marry-Mart. Paula would bear Bob three daughters in all, naming them Fifi, Peaches, and Pixie. And that was before she started getting high.

Aside from authoring self-help books on motherhood and posing for Penthouse, Paula’s greatest claim to fame was as a UK music television personality. She was highly regarded for her engaging interviews with pop stars on the ascent. It’s only natural that she’d develop a little crush here and there.

Michael Hutchence’s handsome photograph suddenly appeared on the Geldof family refrigerator after Paula interviewed him on The Tube in 1985. But Bob was a trusting husband. He kept his cool. Nine years later, Bob’s suspicions—and the rest of the world’s—were finally roused during Paula’s sultry “on the bed” interview with Hutchence for The Big Breakfast. The jealousy drove Bob bonkers, and after Paula indulged a few too many late nights out, he confronted Michael at a party, telling the star to leave his wife alone. Paula denied everything when she found out. She even insisted that Bob call Hutchence and apologize, which Bob did reluctantly, his gloomy penis staring down at his feet.

The chemistry between Michael and Paula couldn’t have been more obvious, but it took front page photos of the cheating couple leaving the Halkin Hotel together to tear the wool from Bob’s bleary eyes. It was Sunday morning, February 11, 1995, and Geldof was pissed off. Two and a half years later, Michael was found naked and dead.

It had been a wild ride up to that fateful night. While INXS’ music may have been somewhat bland and forgettable, Michael’s performances exploded with such slick sexual savagery that every guy in the audience wanted to be him and every girl wanted to be with him—hence the Hutchence curse. He also wrote a poignant pop track addressing the nasty business of human nature called “Devil Inside,” so stop calling him a mediocre merry-maker, you Aussie-hating asshole. The international market may only have loved Hutchence passionately for the album Kick, but Australia remained loyal to their star while the rest of the world jeered.

The whole business with Bob and Paula had been nasty from the start. One alpha altruist, two chatty cheaters, three cartoon-named babies, and an army of tabloid photographers with film to spare. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for Michael and Paula to have their sordid lives documented and devoured by the yellow press and their insatiable public, from that first hotel headline to the Geldofs’ bizarre divorce proceedings (which left Paula and Michael living in Bob’s house, and Bob living in Michael’s old apartment) to the birth of Michael and Paula’s daughter (named Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence—no kidding) to the police investigations after their nanny found opium in the crazy couple’s house to Paula’s sorry suicide attempts to that iconic Brit Awards moment in ’96 when Michael presented the Best Band award to Noel Gallagher, who sneered back, “I’d just like to say that fucking has-beens shouldn’t be giving awards to gonna-bes!” It’s no wonder Michael was always punching out paparazzi photographers—it must have been the only enjoyable pastime left to a man numbed to life’s little pleasures.

A random encounter in 1992, years before all the trouble started, may shed some light on Michael’s twisted peanut. He had been walking in Amsterdam with his supermodel girlfriend on his arm, and stepped in front of a taxi. The cabbie had clearly been having a bad day when suddenly this arrogant, swaggering rock star type walks in front of his cab at a leisurely pace, fucking up the driver’s schedule and sporting a highlighted perm to boot. The cabbie snapped, got out of his taxi, and shoved Michael to the sidewalk. Michael cracked his head on the concrete, causing minor brain damage. In the blink of an eye, the natural sensualist had lost his sense of taste and smell. Perhaps, as is common in such cases, he homed in on other senses to compensate.

It was November 22, 1997—the 35th deathday of JFK—and Michael was having a distressing night in Australia. His rock n’ roll rollercoaster had begun in Sydney’s dive bars two decades before, taken him around the world in a death-defying spiral, and left him wrecked in a Ritz Carlton hotel room in the same city on the eve of a small venue tour, bringing him full circle. Besides partying with a local couple, he’d been on the phone all night, feeling sorry for himself to Paula, chatting with a new lover in LA, and going off on Geldoff about child custody issues. By early morning, Hutchence was lonely and fucked up. He’d consumed a cocktail that included cocaine, champagne, Valium, and Prozac, but that’s not what killed him.

Michael was the type who needed excitement to calm his nerves. He could have called a hooker that night, but how boring. Maybe he could call two—twice as boring. He could go down to the street and start a fist fight, or arrange to go skydiving, or maybe just pick the phone back up and prank call at random. Boooriiing.

A belt can be used for a lot of things. Put it through your belt loops, and your trousers won’t fall down to your ankles. Double it over, and you’ve got a kinky disciplinary tool. Tighten it above your elbow, and you’ve got the perfect tie-off for a soothing shot of heroin. Slip it around your neck, and suddenly bold new horizons open up.

Michael’s body was discovered in his hotel room by a dumbfounded maid. His leather belt had been tightened around his neck and tied to the door handle. He was as naked as Adam in Eden, but not nearly so innocent. According to Hutchence’s brother, forensic investigators found small amounts of semen on Michael’s body, indicating an auto-erotic asphyxiation sesh gone horribly wrong. Despite the coroner’s verdict of suicide, there is every reason to believe that out of desperation for one sweet moment of relief, Michael decided to choke himself while tugging one out, then suddenly lost control of the enterprise.

Earlier in the day he’d told an interviewer for Adelaide’s Sunday Mail:

“The press, especially in England, makes a construct of a human, and then they either do two things with that person. They make them beyond human, or they dehumanize them…

“See, it’s against the law to destroy Jews, blacks, people for religious causes. The law and Parliament have stopped discrimination like that. All we have left is celebrity, and every society has to kick a dog, it’s a fact. Someone to raise and someone to burn. It’s human nature…”

After gorging oneself on the all-you-can-eat buffet presented to superstars, the only thing left to do is eat the silverware and flash a broken smile to the public. That strangled gurgle heard around the world was Michael saying, “Cheese!”

© 2011 Joseph Allen

INXS — “Devil Inside
1987

If there is such a thing as too much pussy, then Michael Hutchence must have gotten it. Remember the topless girl with the stunning green eyes from Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games” video? Hutchence hit that. Or the ghostly girl with the ruby lips singing in Nick Cave’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow”? Hutchence hit that, too. Television interviewers, supermodels, pop starlets, and an endless stream of groupies playfully dubbed “INXS-ories”—Michael took the satisfaction of primal lust to extremes that the average man couldn’t approach vicariously in porno-stacked warehouse and a pack of bubblegum. Michael was on that sweet love-makin’ sadomasochist mack daddy on crack tip. He tied them up and tortured them with pleasure. He snorted drugs off their toe-nails and tongued them down til they wanted to die. He ate food out of their butt cracks. And they don’t call it a “Hutchence steamer” for nothin’. Described by those who loved him as warm and charming, the smooth-talking Australian had a habit of charming his friend’s lovers into a warm bed. Just a day in the life of a dirty rock star, until the paparazzi caught Hutchence doing the wrong man dirty.

Bob Geldof was a saint, canonized by the media and knighted by the Queen. From 1985 on, he could do no wrong. That year he organized Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert to relieve famine-stricken Ethiopia, which was played in London and Philadelphia and broadcast across the planet. Bob and his wife-to-be sat next to Prince Charles and Princess Di in Wembley Stadium while nearly two billion viewers received his all-star pop showcase via satellite, including Bob Dylan and Queen, along with the crushing guilt that comes with eating a burger while Africans starve to death. The event raised upward of £50 million that day, much of which inadvertantly went to fund Ethiopia’s genocidal Communist dictator Mingitsu Haile Miriam and his guerilla army. All saints must suffer, and such an ironic misappropriation must have ground Geldof’s gears . But not nearly as bad as the humiliating and highly publicized cuckolding inflicted by his reckless wife ten years later.

Bob began romancing Paula Yates when she was barely eighteen, back when she was just a little fan girl following his band, the Boomtown Rats. Thinking himself to be older and wiser—eight years to be exact—he struggled to keep her wild oats out of the feeding troughs of the rich and famous. After their protracted courtship resulted in a daughter, they were finally wed in a $50 Las Vegas Marry-Mart. Paula would bear Bob three daughters in all, naming them Fifi, Peaches, and Pixie. And that was before she started getting high.

Aside from authoring self-help books on motherhood and posing for Penthouse, Paula’s greatest claim to fame was as a UK music television personality. She was highly regarded for her engaging interviews with pop stars on the ascent. It’s only natural that she’d develop a little crush or two.

Michael Hutchence’s handsome photograph suddenly appeared on the Geldof family refrigerator after Paula interviewed him on The Tube in 1985. But Bob was a trusting husband. He kept his cool. Nine years later, Bob’s suspicions—and the rest of the world’s—were finally roused during Paula’s “on the bed” interview with Hutchence for The Big Breakfast. The jealousy drove Bob bonkers, and after Paula indulged a few too many late nights out, he confronted Michael at a party, telling the star to leave his wife alone. Paula denied everything when she found out. She even insisted that Bob call Hutchence and apologize, which Bob did reluctantly, his gloomy penis staring down at his feet.

The chemistry between Michael and Paula couldn’t have been more obvious, but it took front page photos of the cheating couple leaving the Halkin Hotel together to tear the wool from Bob’s bleary eyes. It was Sunday morning, February 11, 1995, and Geldof was pissed off. Two and a half years later, Michael was found naked and dead.

It had been a wild ride up to that fateful night. While the music may have been somewhat bland and forgettable, Michael’s performances with INXS exploded with such slick sexual savagery, every guy in the audience wanted to be him and every girl wanted to be with him, hence the Hutchence curse. He also wrote a poignant pop track addressing the nasty business of human nature, “The Devil Inside,” and that has to count for something. So stop calling him a mediocre merry-maker. The international market only loved Hutchence passionately for the album Kick, but Australia remained loyal to him to the bitter end.

The whole business with Bob and Paula had been nasty from the start. One altruistic alpha male, two chatty cheaters, three cartoon-named babies, and an army of tabloid photographers with film to spare. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for Michael and Paula to have their sordid lives documented and devoured by the yellow press and their insatiable public, from their first front page leaving the hotel together to the Geldof’s bizarre divorce proceedings (which left Paula with Bob’s house, and Bob living in Michael’s old apartment) to the birth of Michael and Paula’s daughter (named Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence—no kidding) to the police investigations after their nanny found opium in the crazy couple’s house to Paula’s sorry suicide attempts to that iconic Brit Awards moment when Michael presented the Best Band award to Noel Gallagher, who sneered back, “I’d just like to say that fucking has-beens shouldn’t be giving awards to gonna-bes!” It’s no wonder Michael was always punching out paparrazi photographers—it must have been the only enjoyable pastime left to a man numb to life’s little pleasures.

A random encounter in 1992, years before all the trouble started, may shed some light on Michael’s twisted peanut. He had been walking in Amsterdam with his supermodel girlfriend on his arm, and stepped in front of a taxi. The cabbie had clearly been having a bad day, when suddenly this arrogant, swaggering rock star type walks in front of his cab at a leisurely pace, fucking up the driver’s schedule and sporting a highlighted perm to boot. The cabbie snapped, got out of his taxi, and shoved Michael to the sidewalk. Michael cracked his head on the concrete, causing minor brain damage. In the blink of an eye, the natural born sensualist had lost his sense of taste and smell. Perhaps, as is common in such cases, he homed in on other senses to compensate.

It was November 22, 1997—the 35th deathday of JFK—and Michael was having a distressing night in Australia. His rock n’ roll rollercoaster had begun in Sydney’s dive bars two decades before, took him around the world in a death-defying spiral, and left him wrecked in a Ritz Carlton hotel room in the same city on the eve of a come-back tour, bringing him full circle. Between partying with a local couple, he’d been on the phone all night, feeling sorry for himself with Paula, chatting with a new lover in LA, and going off on Geldoff about his refusal to allow his daughters to go on vacation with Michael and Paula. By early morning, Hutchence was lonely and fucked up. He’d consumed a cocktail that included cocaine, champagne, Valium, and Prozac, but that’s not what killed him.

Earlier in the day he’d told Adelaide’s Sunday Mail:

The press, especially in England, makes a construct of a human, and then they either do two things with that person. They make them beyond human, or they dehumanize them…

See, it’s against the law to destroy Jews, blacks, people for religious causes. The law and Paliament have stopped discrimination like that. All we have left is celebrity, and every society has to kick a dog, it’s a fact. Someone to raise and someone to burn. It’s human nature…”

A belt can be used for a lot of things. Put it through your belt loops, and your pants won’t fall down to your ankles. Double it over, and you’ve got a kinky disciplinary tool. Tighten it above your elbow, and you’ve got the perfect tie-off for a soothing shot of heroin. Slip it around your neck, and suddenly bold new horizons open up.

Michael’s body was discovered in his hotel room by a dumbfounded maid. His leather belt had been tightened around his neck and tied to the door handle. He was naked as Adam, but not nearly so innocent. According to Hutchence’s brother, forensic investigators found small amounts of semen on Michael’s body, indicating an auto-erotic asphyxiation sesh gone horribly wrong. Despite the coroner’s verdict of suicide, there is every reason to believe that out of desperation for one sweet moment of relief, Michael decided to choke himself while he tugged one out, then suddenly lost control of the enterprise.

After gorging oneself on life’s sensual buffet for so long, the only thing left to do is eat the silverware and smile at the.world with broken teeth.

Robert Johnson Opened the
Gates of Hell for Elvis Presley

The Devil and Robert Johnson

© Brandt Hardin

Even after the abolition of slavery, life in the Mississippi cotton fields was brief, brutal, and as boring as an aging preacher’s Sunday sermon. No wonder fieldworkers sought the fleeting comforts of cheap moonshine and loose women at the Saturday night juke joints.

Robert Johnson could mix it up with the best of them, but he was never one for hard work. His bizarre, spider-like fingers weren’t intended for cotton-pickin’ and penny-pinchin’. They were made for crawling across guitar necks, whiskey bottles, and the legs of middle-aged sugar mamas. If Johnson was going to suffer hell to make a dollar, it would be as a wayfaring musician. His road was full of adventure and ecstasy, but ended in hell just the same. On August 16, 1938, Robert Johnson became another silent corpse wrapped in the shrouds of rock n’ roll mythology.

As legend has it, Robert Johnson obtained his profoundly influential guitar licks after trading his soul to the Devil at a dark, isolated crossroads. As usual, Ol’ Scratch came through with the goods, but America was still dragging itself out of the Great Depression and debt-collectors were ruthless. Why should Satan be any different? Johnson had enough time to make his name as a blazing live musician and to record forty-two immortal tracks before Satan came to collect the player’s soul at the prime age of 27.

Like the crossroads myth, Robert Johnson’s handful of recordings would not surface until many years after his death. Also like the myth, these forty-two recordings have been open to interpretation and elaboration ever since. His slick slide guitar style was first taken up by black blues players. Son House, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker were among the many to follow those smoking hoofprints to notoriety. Ultimately, it was only when Robert Johnson’s work was unearthed and re-released during the Delta blues revival of the 1960s that the man and the myth came into their own. White rock stars—Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Paul McCartney—rode Johnson’s Afro juju to the top of international charts, where the fires he unleashed burned the soul of Western civilization.

As a journeyman guitarist, Robert Johnson was the laughing stock of his juke joint peers. His unorthodox style sounded like a stray cat shaken violently in a metal trashcan. After a brief hiatus, Johnson returned to the scene with a totally unique style in which he would hammer a rhythm with his thumb while picking a slide melody with his fingers. Johnson’s recordings may sound like the goofy meanderings of a slap-happy simpleton to the average listener, but in those days he was the bee’s knees. No one had done anything like that before.

An offhand and perhaps jealous remark by Son House was the start of the crossroads myth, when he said that Johnson had “sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for learning to play like that.” The location of this diabolical deal came from Tommy Johnson via his brother:

“If you want to learn how to play anything…and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to…where a crossroads is…. Be sure to get there just a little ‘fore 12 that night…. A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.”

Just as an enterprising black man of large stature might make a few bucks by hanging around a crossroads to dupe superstitious guitar students, so the media myth-making machine was able to turn a profit by misattributing Tommy Johnson’s statement to Robert Johnson. The rest is sketchy history, but as with many myths, Johnson’s crossroads story remains poignant.

© Jeffrey Bertrand

By all accounts, Robert Johnson was a diehard rake. His first wife was a girl in her early teens who died while giving birth to a stillborn child. After that tragedy, Johnson would not be tied down. He wandered from town to town, seducing local women for bed, booty, and breakfast. This song and dance took him from the reeds of Memphis to the towers of Chicago. Hopping trains with crisp suit and a guitar under his arm, Johnson knew how to get around cheap and still sleep in a warm bed. His usual prey were plain, aging bar-hoppers who could not resist his sharp dress and blistering guitar licks. Johnson was one of a special breed that sings while playing rhythms and melodies simultaneously—who knows what sort of sexual percussions he could hammer out in the bedroom.

The only thing he loved more than pulling another man’s woman was a stout glass of whiskey. Amped up on booze and ego, he frequently found himself in bar room brawls, usually over another man’s woman. He was just as quick to take on a gang as he was to fight one-on-one. Unfortunately, he was a skinny blues player in dapper attire, not a street tough, which meant that he took a lot of ass-whippings for his efforts—as did many of his friends who stood up to defend him. Apparently, victory in battle was not part of his deal with Ol’ Scratch.

Johnson’s solid reputation as a smoking live guitar player led him into the hands of ARC producer Don Law, who recorded Johnson’s first sessions in San Antonio, TX in 1936. The results were thrilling, and Johnson was as proud as a purple puppy. One night, as Don Law ate in a restaurant with his wife, he received a phone call from jail. Robert had been arrested for vagrancy and needed bail. Law made arrangements for the player’s release, and an hour later received a second call. Johnson had immediately found himself a hooker, but there was a problem. “She wants fifty cents and I lacks a nickel.” Rock n’ roll excess has come a long way since the Depression era.

Johnson left Texas with a hundred bucks in his pocket and his earthly immortality encased in acetate. After wandering the highways for a spell, he returned to Dallas in 1938 to record a few more sessions with Don Law. It was then that he laid down his nefarious tracks “Hell Hound On My Trail” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” They are both about the troubles of hopping from town to town milking old maids for muff and money, but the second is more direct—an infernal, if playful ode to the burning core of all phallocentric rock n’ roll shenanigans:

Early this morning
when you knocked upon my door…
And I said “Hello, Satan. I believe it’s time to go.”

Me and the Devil
walking side by side…
I’m going beat my woman until I get satisfied

She said you don’t see why
that I be dog her ’round
(Now baby, you know you ain’t doin’ me right…)
It must be that old Evil Spirit so deep down in the ground

You may bury my body
down by the highway side…
So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride

Robert Johnson was found dead in a Mississippi plantation house at the age of 27. He officially opened the doors of the 27 Club to all later members: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Pete Ham, Kurt Cobain, and most recently, Amy Winehouse. Rumors abound about the cause of Johnson’s death—everything from bad moonshine to poisoning by a jealous lover to syphilis—but one thing seems certain: he chased excess to its logical conclusion.

I have no doubt that Robert Johnson was among the multitude of artists who met Ol’ Scratch at the crossroads of the human soul. If the kingdom of God—on His better days, anyway—is benevolence, mercy, chastity, discipline, and unwavering faith, then the domain of the Devil must be the vast expanse of human potentialities between these virtues and the Void.

The fires of Hell burn in humankind’s lust, greed, gluttony, and wrath. The flames come on warm, like sweet liquor on a dry tongue, and everyone gets a little taste. Most turn back there, but plenty more linger until they are scorched into a disfigured husk of what was once human. You could say that Robert Johnson opened wide the gates of Hell for every rock star martyr to come.

Enter Elvis Presley.

Elvis Presley: The King of Dead Rock Stars

© Jeffrey Bertrand

Elvis Aron Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935—just an hour as the crow flies from where Robert Johnson would die a few years later. Elvis’ twin, Jesse Garon, was a stillborn herald to the King of Rock n’ Roll. Elvis would later claim that he took his dead brother’s power at the moment of his own birth, making Elvis a god.

The surviving Presley twin spent his earliest years in a shotgun shack—like ‘at genu-wine white trash. When Elvis was still a boy, the Presleys moved into Memphis’ Lauderdale Courts housing projects. His over-protective mother, Gladys, would walk him to school every day. She frequently took young Elvis to church and feverish Pentecostal revivals, where he would get his first taste of true showmanship. But this doting couldn’t stop the boy from finding his way to Beale Street.

Memphis night life exposed Elvis to every sin under the sun, if not in the flesh then at least in song. Presley grew up with gospel and loved country, but he was head-over-heels in love with the dark and dirty blues. Years later, his records would be shunned by white stations for being too bluesy and passed over by black stations for being too country. Such racial quibbling wouldn’t be enough to stop Presley, though. He was destined to become the King of Rock n’ Roll.

Still a fresh-faced teenager in 1953, Elvis walked into Sun Studios where he cut his first singles to bring home to his mother. Some time before, producer Sam Phillips had quipped, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” Phillips heard the Call of Cthulhu in Elvis’ early attempts and immediately brought the boy into the Sun Records fold. Within three years, Elvis Presley was the most famous motherfucker in the world at age twenty-one.

Many fans agree that Elvis’ early years were his most inspired. The rockabilly swagger of “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Heartbreak Hotel” had the nation swinging its hips in imitation of their lascivious leather-clad icon. Who knows how many pregnancies this lip-curling Dionysus inspired? Elvis was derided by pious commentators as an uncouth cuckoo, but the former carnival huckster “Colonel” Tom Parker knew exactly what that meant. Elvis was the goose who shot golden sperm, and Colonel Parker wasted no time taking the loony bird under his wing and managing his brilliant, if debaucherous career.

Then in 1958, Presley was called to serve his country. He got a clean cut hairdo, a uniform, and a rifle. Within a few months, he was on a plane to be stationed in Germany. For snooty connoisseurs—including John Lennon—Elvis’ enlistment marked the end of his meaningful contributions to rock n’ roll, but without a doubt, it was a fine stepping stone for a budding pussyhound.

Presley was known to fool around with the wild black girls of Beale Street and various squealing groupies in his youth, but Europe would take him to depths unknown. The photos of Elvis published in Private Elvis after his death show the young soldier between the folds of Moulin Rouge mammaries and under the tongues of various spooky-toothed Euro whores. Hey, man, be all that you can be, right?

As it happened, it was during his time in Germany that the twenty-three year-old singer met the pubescent American girl Priscilla Beaulieu, who at fourteen was offered up to the rising star by her mother as a sort of child bride. Dog will hunt! From then on, Priscilla would fool around with Elvis—even play “dress-up video sex games” with him—but they never had sex until the time of their wedding ten years later, when Priscilla became pregnant. According to her next lover, Elvis’ karate coach Mike Stone, the celebrity spouses never had sex again.

After the excesses of the 60s had desensitized the nation, Elvis’ gyrating pelvis seemed pretty innocent in comparison. He wasn’t there to burn wombs with great balls of fire—he was there to love you tender. At the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Elvis was widely regarded as the universal sex symbol for Miss Norma McNormalson.  Not the brightest eyes, but man, you could break a cinder block over his square jaw.

For the duration of his god-like superstardom, Elvis’ PR team labored to portray him as a sweet lil’ mama’s boy with an angel’s voice and a heart of gold—even when he wore mutton chops and gaudy rhinestones during his final, bloated Vegas years. No doubt this was true to some extent. He did move his parents into Graceland where they lived out the rest of their lives in comfort and splendor. He was known to write checks for many poor souls who needed his help—sometimes for four or five figures. “Nnnnnnew Cadillac!” I mean, goddamn, how many pictures did he take with feeble old ladies and snot-faced little kids? On his best days, the man was practically a saint!

Then there were his other days. For all of his spin as a good ol’ boy from tha holler, Elvis certainly had peculiar tastes behind closed doors, and I’m not talking about peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Albert Goldman’s Elvis is a tabloidesque lost gospel that peels the rhinestones off of Presley’s shades and replaces them with all kinds of dirty little gems.

According to blabbermouths within the Memphis Mafia—the King’s heavy-fisted retinue—Presley was a pervo of Pan-like proportions, plying his pretty polly with pillow fights and Placidyls. Like many rock stars, he liked ‘em in their screamin’ teens—you know, he couldn’t go on with suspicious minds—but unlike his peers, he mostly liked to watch. He threw orgiastic parties and regularly brought out the video camera for posterity’s sake.

Toward the end of his life, the tattletales of his inner circle alleged that the only thing that could rouse the King’s hunk ‘a hunk ‘a burnin’ love was to watch women—and occasionally men—love themselves tender and true. Listening to his flaming gay hair-dresser and “personal spiritual advisor,” Larry Geller—whose craftsmanship is responsible for that immaculate black mop in both life and death—lisp on and on about his intimate relationship with his patron, one gets the impression that Elvis’ pelvis was swinging every which way. Surely it was the drugs.

From Elvis’ first drinks on Beale Street to his first speed given to him by the Army to the cornucopia of uppers, downers, laughers, screamers, and the brain-blasting pants-creamers his doctors prescribed to him in his later years, the karate-chopping King stayed high as a plastic baby Jesus punted into orbit. No wonder he was shooting holes through television sets and dreaming of demolishing skyscrapers. He was a walking chemical bath. Of course, the rest of America was not far behind.

Of all the bizarre rooms in the King’s white trash palace, including the unnerving “Jungle Room,” I am most intrigued by the one they never show you on the tour of Graceland. I asked the tour guides, “Don’t we get to see the Death Throne?”  But they just rolled their eyes at me.  It seems like that would be the climax of the tour. After all, Elvis’ Death Throne is the rock n’ roll Golgotha. On August 16, 1977, the King climbed up and crucified himself on this sacred commode. The world will never be the same again.

A roadie friend of mine was working on Willie Nelson’s tour at the time. Willie took the stage in Memphis on August 16, 1977, but the audience was inconsolable. Willie turned to his tour manager and barked, “Never book me in Memphis the night Elvis dies again!” Little did he know that the weeping crowd would never let their King die.

My favorite appraisal of the religious significance of Elvis’ death and tabloid afterlife comes from Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto:

“Pop stars are the devotional fetish items of modern worship in ways identical to which saints were venerated in the Middle Ages. Dead pop stars all the more so. But unlike most resurrected idols, Elvis had already started to rot before he died…

“If he had lived, it wouldn’t have been pretty. Elvis with a grape cluster of hemorrhoids and a hearing aid. The Lord snatched him up not a moment too soon. Elvis wasn’t so dissipated or old at the time of his death that it’s impossible to imagine him in heaven achieving an erection. Up at the right hand of God, Elvis can stay hard forever.”

© Brandt Hardin

But many white trash believers refused to envision Elvis up in heaven. Sons of God don’t just die! Surely Elvis was pulling everyone’s leg. The tabloids which once graced every check-out aisle before the Internet rendered them obsolete—The National Enquirer, Weekly World News, The Star, The Sun—kept Elvis Presley alive with a new sighting every week, like Jesus in the last chapters of the Gospels. And millions of people bought it. Many of them even bought into it!

The most remarkable moment of my tour of Graceland, which Greil Marcus calls “a 1957-77 version of King Tut’s tomb” in Dead Elvis, was Presley’s gravesite next to his meditation shrine. A few other visitors stood or knelt silently before the supposed final resting place of the King. One of them, a woman in her forties wearing waist-high khakis, was on her knees weeping into folded hands. Scattered around the grave were numerous offerings left by reverent fans—mostly photographs and figurines—upon which they had scrawled direct messages to Elvis, like prayers to a saint or letters to Santa Claus. I asked one of the security guards how often these prayer offerings are made, and she told me that people still leave dozens of them every day. That must be one hell of a bonfire at the end of the month.

Elvis’ posthumous sales continue to fill record industry coffers. Between merchandising, television rights, books, CD/DVD sales, and legal downloads, the King’s estate still raked in upwards of $60 million last year. If Robert Johnson was the Devil’s phonographic child, then Elvis was the televised Son of God. The Internet Age has yet to produce such an Earth-shaking rock star martyr. But then, this tech era is still young, and the new media’s crosses are ready and waiting.

© 2011 Joseph Allen

Robert Johnson — “Me and the Devil Blues
1938

Elvis Presley — “Suspicious Minds
1969

Four Faces of Michael Jackson

© Brandt Hardin

The only constant is change: the seed becomes a tree, the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, the world-famous pop star whose indiscretions brought shame in life becomes a pixelated god after death. Even before his deification, Michael Jackson was transformed from a cute black boy in the 70s into what Dave Chappelle calls a “white, ghoulish-like creature” by the late 90s. Perhaps this is an ominous omen of the Post-Human Age that is fast approaching. As fans consume MJ’s corpse on this second deathday like autograph-hungry maggots, at least they can take comfort knowing that one day they will all become beautiful flies.

Baby Mike

When little Michael Jackson came to the forefront of the Jackson 5, the pop world stood still for his love songs. How could such a young boy be so grown up? What does an adolescent kid from Gary, Indiana know about romantic love and relationships that gives him such passion and insight on the subject? Of course, little Michael knew nothing of love—but he did know that one false note would earn him a belt-lashing from his father, Joe, so he quickly learned to perform a convincing charade.

Joe Jackson was one mean son of a bitch. He beat all of his many kids relentlessly, boys and girls alike. If you pissed him off, he would beat your ass. If you made him happy, he would beat your ass some more, just to make sure you didn’t think he was going soft on you. Michael attributed his excellence in song and dance to his father’s strict discipline, but the emotional scars would rise to the surface in time.

Michael was completely isolated by child stardom like a self-obsessed midget in a doll house. His days were spent rehearsing under threat of beatings, his nights were spent performing with Joe watching backstage. La la la, boogie boogie boogie—backhand to the chin. What a life. Any spare time he found in between was spent mulling over his own flaws, consistently pointed out by his sadistic father.

Joe Jackson made fun of his son’s acne and called him “Big Nose” because of Michael’s wide, African snout. Little Michael couldn’t even bear to look in a mirror. To the world he was the cutest little button in the bundle. To his own eyes, he was a fucking monster. How ironic that the tables would turn completely at the hands of various inept plastic surgeons and the kazillion photos that would make him immortal.

The King of Pop

© Jeffrey Bertrand

The 80s came like a foaming wave of pop obsession, with Michael Jackson riding atop on a sequined surfboard. We saw him knife-fighting his way through “Beat It.” We watched him attempt to moonwalk away from accusations of sexual irresponsibility in “Billie Jean.” We were terrified at his monstrous transformation on “Thriller.” The yellow eyes, the prominent cheekbones, the button nose. I am still scared shitless.

The theme of “Thriller”—in which an otherwise normal guy morphs into a blood-thirsty beast, then later on, into a rotten, urban zombie gyrating his pelvis with lascivious pop star sensuality—is a striking metaphor for the primal urges we all feel from time to time. Beneath the fur, fangs, and grunts of classic monster movie villains are the disturbingly mundane desires that overtake men with weak impulse control.

The Werewolf is a symbol of unbridled violence and sexuality. The seductive Dracula is the wealthy noble who goes after virgin village girls, draining them of life and making them into slaves. Swamp Thing is a fish-smelling coonass who carries his buxom victim off to the marsh to have his way with her. Frankenstein’s monster is a stitched up freak that only a child could love. No wonder Michael could relate.

Thriller remains the best-selling album in the world, though Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream may soon break Thriller’s world record as the only album to have five #1 singles. The success of the album rocketed Michael Jackson into the farthest reaches of space, where his quasar continues to pour radiation down to Earth. Jackson’s choreography is impeccable, copied from the black street dancers of New York and Los Angeles. His vocals are at once impassioned and totally under his control. The beats were no joke, either—unless you count “Weird” Al Yankovic’s renditions. Michael Jackson was a pop genius, pure and simple.

By the end of the 80s, he was raking in millions of dollars. The entire world knew his name. Fans would risk life and limb to touch the hem of his garment. Grown men wore single sparkling gloves in imitation of their idol. Women would burst into tears upon catching a glimpse of his white smile. Despite his pious rhetoric, which stemmed from a devout upbringing in the Jehovah’s Witness sect, Michael Jackson had become a god on Earth with a halo of flaming hair and a spirit animal, “Bubbles” the chimp, to guide him on his way.

Wacko Jacko

© Jeffrey Bertrand

As his music matured, the King of Pop began to inject Messianic visions of One World under Michael into his songs. We would save the children and heal the world with love and indiscriminate acceptance of personal idiosyncrasies. That’s pretty cynical—and clever—when you consider the allegations of child molestation which surfaced against the singer in the early 90s.

Of course, young Jordan Chandler’s claims that Jackson enticed him at 13 years-old into kissing, wanking, and felating were dismissed by the legal system after an undisclosed monetary settlement closed the case. But after that, many of us began to wonder if Michael Jackson was really a wholesome secular Messiah, or just another smooth criminal.

Absolute excess is nothing new to the entertainment elite, but somehow Michael Jackson’s increasingly bizarre appearance made the prospect of child molestation that much more disturbing—for those of us who cried “Guilty!” anyway. Others were more charitable. Like Christians who are willing to go to blows at the suggestion that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman centurion, or neo-Nazis who maintain that Hitler was just misunderstood, obsessed MJ fans refuse to believe that their hero would ever stoop to buggering children.

If I ever had any doubts about MJ’s guilt, they were completely dispelled when Living with Michael Jackson aired in 2003. At the opening of the documentary, we see Michael sitting beneath a fine arts painting of himself as a muscular pagan god with alabaster skin. Youthful cherubs caress the painted pop star as he stares impassively at the viewer. The effect is chilling.

Over the course of the film we listen to MJ lie through his teeth about his plastic surgery. He claims that he is the biological father of his three children, then finally he denies any sexual misconduct with the twelve year-old boy with whom he holds hands and cuddles with on camera.

By this point, the plastic surgery is beyond obvious—the guy looks like Marilyn Manson with Tinker Bell’s nose for Christ’s sake. His hair is as straight and black as Eazy E, his eyes are slanted like media reports on Biggie Small’s death, his lips are thinner than Karen Carpenter, his cheekbones are higher than Sid Vicious, there is a dimple in his chin as deep as Patsy Cline’s vagina, and his nose is barely hanging on. Yet he looks the interviewer in the eye and tells him that God made him that way. Unless “God” is a metaphor for medical ingenuity and millions of dollars, I call bullshit.

Strike one.

Michael parades his pale children through the streets wearing carnival masks. All three are whiter than the blue-eyed Devil. He dangles baby “Blanket” from a fourth-story balcony, then crams a bottle into the squalling kid’s peachy face the next day, saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” staring with psycho almond eyes. When confronted about the baby-dangling, he denies responsibility, arrogantly stating that he was just being kind enough to let fans see his veiled rug rat. The kicker: Later on Michael not only claims to have contributed his own thoroughly African sperm to Blanket’s genetic make-up, he insists that the unpigmented infant’s mother is actually black!

Strike two.

At the end of the program, Michael defends himself against suggestions that it is inappropriate for a middle-aged man to share a bed with adolescent boys in his magical Neverland mansion, but I have lost all sympathy for him at this point. When he says, “The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone”—particularly impressionable, prepubescent boys—my Pervo-Meter is spitting out sparks and springs.

Strike three.

Dedicated fans rallied behind their golden idol. They kept chanting in unison, “Fuck the press, you’re the best!” Over the course of the 2005 trial, it became clear that the accuser Gavin Arvizo’s parents were as shady and opportunistic as Jordan Chandler’s parents had been in 1993. And who would deny that any parents willing to accept money to allow their child to sleep over at a celebrity robber baron’s mansion are untrustworthy?

The media was equally calloused—after all, how cruel do you have to be to make multiple teenagers world-famous for getting molested by Michael Jackson? Still, only a rube would buy into Jackson’s bald-faced insistence that he was an innocent victim of a worldwide conspiracy to rob him of his Messianic destiny. Nonsense. MJ was just another billionaire lab monkey with a button wired to the demented pleasure centers of his brain, and he just couldn’t keep his sickly bleached thumb off of that motherfucker.

They don’t call it a sick, sad world for nothing.

Michael?

Even after the “not guilty” verdict, Michael was ruined. Bankrupt, humiliated, and perhaps hungry for some Arab action, he high-tailed it to Bahrain where he was hosted by the sheik in his palace. Decadent elites of a feather?

Then in 2006, the incorrigible King of Pop(ping man-cherries) was ready for a comeback. He began recording with the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am in Ireland. The next year, he did a final interview with Ebony magazine. In 2009 he rounded up the roadies and geared up for yet another world tour. The Earthlings still loved their fallen angel—within two hours, over a million tickets were sold for MJ’s first residency stint at London’s O2 Arena. Then came the grand finale.

Just when you thought the cult of dead rock stars was a thing of the past, on June 25, 2009 Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest. You have to wonder if the appropriately entitled This Is It tour was an intentional reference.  His personal physician stands accused of manslaughter for administering the anaesthetic Propofol, along with a cocktail of other pharmies, to relieve Jackson’s insomnia—which Propofol was never intended for.

The entire world went nuts. Every day, for days and days and days, all you heard were Michael Jackson songs. They played “Billie Jean” at bars. They bumped “Smooth Criminal” from their cars. They showed “Thriller” on TV. Billions of frantic searches for more information on the star’s death broke the fucking Internet.

Fans gathered to weep and mourn together at the Staples Center in LA, where MJ held his tour rehearsals. They left flowers and devotional prayers on his star on Hollywood Boulevard. Even now, they are gathering in his hometown of Gary, Indiana to honor their mutant Lord. Fans will forgive anything if you just make the hook catchy enough. Most people will cover their eyes and follow spiritual charlatans, corrupt political leaders, and yes, even pedophile pop stars over the edge of a moral precipice when the piper calls the tune. It’s just human nature. The technological creation that was Michael Jackson is no exception.

Fuck me once, shame on you. Fuck me twice… well, I guess that means I asked for it.

© 2011 Joseph Allen

Michael Jackson — “Thriller”
1983

Ian Curtis: In a Lonely Place

© Jeffrey Bertrand

Having followed his dreams and procured a length of solid rope, Joy Division’s vocalist Ian Curtis is now immortalized as the sad boy whose brief life amounted to a self-created death icon.  Born and raised in the small city of Macclesfield—situated between  hilly pastureland and the grey industrial husk of Manchester in north England—he saw little else to aspire to besides a world-famous tombstone.

Ian never got too far from home—and never for long.  Most of his intense rock n’ roll career was nurtured within a clinging arm’s length of his highschool sweetheart, Debbie—whom he married in his teens—and a pint glass’ throw from his childhood home.  Music was his only escape into a wider world.  By the time he closed the curtain on May 18, 1980 at the age of 23, he had only recorded two full-length albums and a handful of singles.  So he was damn sure to make every song count.

Like many boys in the bleak, economically depressed 1970s, Ian Curtis was immersed in the morbid iconography of martyred pop stars.  He loved James Dean and Janis Joplin.  Among his favorite songs were Jim Morrison’s “The End,” David Bowie’s “Rock n’ Roll Suicide,” and Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” (also written by Bowie.)  Ian frequently said he didn’t want to live past his twenties, and spent his few years with Joy Division writing songs to an oblivious world about why it was not worth living for.

Joy Division’s droning post-punk minimalism is a fitting compliment to Ian’s mesmerizing, if overly-affected baritone vocals—a voice that seems completely disconnected from the singer’s boyish face, like he was huffing keyboard duster before every song.  Curtis’ jerky, robotic dance moves were as disturbing to fans as they were thrilling—and made for a peculiar preview of the epileptic seizures that would wreck his health during his last years alive.

The band’s name is taken from The Doll House, a German novel about a Jewish girl sent to a concentration camp brothel provided for Nazi officers known as “the Joy Division.”  Ian’s raw-nerve sensitivity to the jagged edges of a cruel world is evident in their first full-length album, Unknown Pleasures, particularly the bitter distance that grows between two lovers:

Me in my own world, yeah you there beside
The gaps are enormous, we stare from each side
We were strangers for way too long…

Ian met Debbie when he was only sixteen.  Their first date was  to see David Bowie’s performance of Ziggy Stardust in Manchester.  Despite his father’s reservations, Ian sold his guitar to buy a wedding ring for his one true love.  He took a job as a civil servant and they bought a house together, though Ian’s rock n’ roll fantasies never wavered.

According to Debbie, her husband was consumed by incorrigible jealousy.  She claims that he only proposed to keep other men from showing her too much attention.  Ian did tend to freak out a lot, like the time he saw his wife-to-be dancing with one of her young uncles at their engagement party and threw a Bloody Mary in her face.  He was constantly worried that Debbie would meet someone else, and refused to let her wear anything remotely sexy out of the house.

Perhaps his fears were simply guilt-projection.  He later confided to a friend that he nearly backed out of the wedding because he felt sure that one day he would eventually be unfaithful.  Of course, a musician predicting his own philandering is like a hitch-hiker predicting a roadside molestation—it’s bound to happen eventually.

It was decided early on that wives and girlfriends had no place at Joy Division’s shows.  A rock star’s main squeeze always gets in the way of tour antics, and Joy Division’s endless pranks—which tended to involve their own shit and piss to an alarming extent—would have undoubtedly put off their lady friends.  So would the groupies.

Ian and Debbie’s daughter, Natalie, was born in the spring of 1979 during the recording of Unknown Pleasures.  Ian witnessed the birth, but it was a momentary connection for a young man prone to detachment.  While Debbie poured her affection onto her newborn baby, Ian’s eyes were fixed on the stars.

Annik Honoré was doing a bit of star-gazing herself, and after seeing Joy Division perform at Nashville Sounds in London, she decided to reach out and grab one of those crazy diamonds.  The lovely Belgian writer arranged to do an interview with the band for a fanzine, after which she and Ian remained in contact.  Ian was hardly a skirt-sniffing cad, but there was something about this exotic young woman that sparked an inferno inside him.  “There was some electricity in the air every time we would see each other,” she said after his death, “every time we looked at each other.”

Annik was everything that Ian’s wife was not: educated, articulate, well-traveled, and unwaveringly self-determined.  They would talk for hours about art, literature, and film, her sexy Belgian accent captivating the provincial English singer.  After their first kiss at London’s Electric Ballroom, there was no turning back.  Time was too short to waste on patience—yet Ian’s conscience was too strong to stave off the guilt.

Curtis tortured himself to death in the chasm between domestic responsibility and the romance of rock stardom.  He withdrew from his wife and daughter when at home, spending endless hours alone in his blue room with his notebook and little dog, Candy.  His grand mal seizures had also grown progressively worse, usually triggered by performances, though occurring more frequently at home.

Oddly enough, years before he suffered his first seizure in 1978 Ian had worked with a number of epileptics while employed as a Disablement Resettlement Officer, where he witnessed rooms full of pitiful patients wearing helmets and pads.  The song “She’s Lost Control” is apparently about one of these unfortunate souls:

And she screamed out kicking on her side and said
I’ve lost control again
And seized up on the floor, I thought she’d die
She said I’ve lost control…

Doctors fumbled in the dark to find a pill that could fix his brain, but effective treatments would not be developed for more than a decade. Too late.  The chemical cocktails began to fry Curtis’ circuits, sending him into long bouts of uncommunicative depression. Somehow he managed to take the stage night after night anyway, and in January of 1980 Joy Division embarked on their first—and only—European tour.

Debbie wanted to come along for the sights and adventure, but Ian stoutly refused, leaving her at home with the baby and their dog.  Despite Annik’s attempts to walk away from her impossible love, she would join him for six days in Europe.  It was to be the longest time they would spend together, and one of the last.

According to Annik, she and Ian never once made love.  Aside from her own guilt over an affair with a married father, she says she was a virgin, wary even of Ian’s modest sexual experience.  This apprehension, coupled with her lover’s rapidly deteriorating health, ensured that Annik’s nubile body would remain for Ian an unknown pleasure.  Their romance would continue in an urgent exchange of letters, but they could never come closer.

“You are the only thing that makes me truly happy at this moment,” Ian wrote, “when I’m with you, when I’m near you, when I think of you…

“I am paying dearly for past mistakes.  I never realized how one mistake in my life some four or five years ago would make me feel how I do.  I live beyond obligation and responsibility…. I struggle between what I know is right in my own mind and some warped truthfulness as seen through other people’s eyes…  I thank God I have my solitude…”

On the night of Ian’s return home, Debbie came home to find her husband pilled-out on the blue room’s floor and stabbing holes into a Bible with a kitchen knife, having already cut himself up a bit.  The next day she asked him if he didn’t love her anymore.

“I don’t think I do,” he said.

A few days later Debbie became desperate for answers and tore through Ian’s notebooks.  There she found Annik’s name and address.  She confronted him, and he admitted infidelity.  Debbie decided to get a divorce.

Upon considering the fact that Ian carried pictures of his dog instead of his family, Debbie decided that she was done taking care of little Candy and gave her away as well.  She then proceeded to call Ian’s parents and tell them everything.  Finally, she called Annik at her office to berate her for being a home-wrecker.

Joy Division continued playing gigs around England and started work on their second album, Closer, but their singer was teetering on the brink.  On Good Friday 1980 the band played two shows back to back.  Ian worked himself into a spastic frenzy as usual, but fell unconscious at the peak of both sets, bringing the performances to a grinding halt.  The drinking, lack of sleep, and flashing stagelights had become more than his electrified neurons could handle.

On Easter Sunday he wrote a suicide note and swallowed a handful of Phenobarbitone.  Upon realizing that he had not taken enough to die, he woke his wife to call an ambulance so as to avoid becoming a brain-dead zombie pissing blood all over himself.  His failed attempt to play a show the next night resulted in a riot.  Ian’s manager found him crouched upstairs afterward, weeping.

Despite Ian’s ragged state, the band decided to go forward with an upcoming American tour, and were set to leave on May 19.  Rock n’ roll slows down for no man—“there’s no room for the weak,” as the lyric says.

Ian stayed away from home for a couple of weeks to let things cool off, but on May 17 he returned to pick up some things and say goodbye to his daughter.  Debbie found him there that afternoon, and he begged her to call off the divorce.  She agreed to spend the night with him and left for a bit, but by the time she got back he had changed his mind again and told her not to come back until he was on his way to the airport.  Apparently he had spoken to Annik on the telephone and promised to honor his last letter and end his marriage for sake of true love.  She was on her way from a trip to Egypt to see him.

Alone again, Ian pulled out pictures of his wife and daughter, and wrote an impassioned letter begging Debbie for reconciliation.  He watched Werner Herzog’s Stroszek, a film about a European artist who cannot decide between two women and so chooses to kill himself.  He put Iggy Pop’s The Idiot on the record-player, drank a pot of coffee, and finished off the last of a bottle of whiskey.  Then he tied a cord to their old-fashioned clothes rack and hung himself in the kitchen.  Debbie found the letter first, then noticed his body.  The noose had cut deep into his throat and he had practically sunk to his knees. 

© Brandt Hardin

Ian Curtis was pronounced dead on May 18, 1980, and was cremated a few days later.  His friends and family were devastated and confused, but his fans were riveted.  The single for “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was released that June, along with a music video—the last footage of Ian alive:

When routine bites hard
And ambitions are low
And resentment rides high
But emotions won’t grow
And we’re changing our ways, taking different roads

Then love, love will tear us apart again…

This single was followed the next month by the release of Closer, which was recorded a mere two months before the singer’s death and is perhaps the most mystifying posthumous album I have ever heard.  It is a suicide note set to gloomy keyboard hooks.  The icy vocals describe public torture for entertainment, complete alienation, and tragic love, but most of all, Curtis’ lyrics speak of the soul-crushing guilt of a heart torn between domestic devotion and burning romance.

In truly grim fashion, Debbie had “Love Will Tear Us Apart” carved into her husband’s tombstone (which, incidentally, was stolen by some curse-thirsty jerkoff in 2008.)  The grave remains a pilgrimage site for dour souls who still gather en masse on five- and ten-year deathdays.

“In a Lonely Place” was Ian Curtis’ final recording, finally released in 1981 by Joy Division’s surviving members, now known as New Order:

Warm like a dog round your feet
How I wish you were here with me now

Hang man looks round as he waits
Cord stretches tight then it breaks
Someday we will die in your dreams
How I wish we were here with you now

They might as well have slipped straight razors into the album sleeves, just in case.

© 2011 Joseph Allen

Joy DivisionTransmission
1979