The mysterious death of Johnny Thunders in 1991
The fact that punk rock guitar legend Johnny Thunders lasted as long as he did was something of a miracle.
In a 1970s punk scene populated pretty much exclusively by talented trainwrecks hurtling towards an early grave, Thunders impressively stood out as both a talent and a trainwreck. Not many people in the punk scene made their name as musicians for obvious reasons, but Thunders was a genuinely great guitarist.
Perhaps he didn’t quite have the chops that a David Gilmour or a Jimmy Page did, but he compensated for that with a signature sound and playing style. In the three-chord world of punk, he stood out like a sore thumb.
Yet he was also up there with Iggy Pop and Sid Vicious as architects of complete and utter chaos. This was a guy who could have gone on to major things with a different mindset. He had the look, the sound, the connections, but above all of those things, he had an apocalyptic heroin addiction. There are some who claim to be high-functioning heroin addicts while still able to make some of the best music of their entire career. However, Thunders was not one of these people.
At a time when he could have had an Elvis Costello-like shot at post-punk stardom, Thunders threw it away in a drug-fuelled haze. Yet unlike many people in that situation, he still lived through it. He never got a hundred per cent clean, but he got clean enough to have a (relatively) steady career in music through the 1980s while raising a family with his wife, Julie Jourden. It wasn’t ideal, and he needed to live a fairly itinerant life with his wife and daughter, moving from London to Paris to Stockholm, but it was a lot better than some of his peers had.
Then it all came to an end in 1991, and despite all his misadventures, it was still genuinely shocking. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Thunders was starting to experience health problems that were getting in the way of his live performances, yet he still was committed to working, heading to New Orleans to work on a song with the German punk band Die Toten Hosen. Then, 36 hours after finishing the recording, Thunders was found dead in his hotel room at the St Peter Guest Hose.
It took time for his body to be discovered, so long in fact that rigor mortis had set in and his neighbour Willy DeVille described his corpse as “pretzel shaped”. Immediately, rumours began swirling that his death was the result of foul play. Dee Dee Ramone, of all people, said he’d been told by Thunders’ guitarist Steve Klasson that “Johnny had gotten mixed up with some bastards … [That] had given him LSD and then murdered him” fo they could steal his considerable supply of methadone.
But the truth is murkier than that. There’s so much he-said-she-said revolving around the death of The Heartbreakers’ mainman (not that one), that it’s hard to know what happened for sure. It probably wasn’t a gangland execution (sorry Dee Dee). But it also might not have been the drug overdose most would expect, which was the cause reported by the Orlando Sentinel, citing the New Orleans coroner’s office as proof. Yet other reports have said that the autopsy showed a non-lethal amount of drugs in his system.
Thunders’ biographer Nina Antonia stands by this, as does Thunders’ sister Mariann Bracken, who told Pamela Des Barres (of all people) that the autopsy had shown that the cause of death was actually an undiagnosed battle with leukaemia that Thunders had been struggling with for years.
Sadly, any attempt to work with the authorities of New Orleans for the official release of his autopsy has come to nothing. The local police seemed to view the case as yet another junkie going out in a “blaze of glory” in New Orleans.
So, perhaps we’ll never know the true story of the death of Johnny Thunders, an end that a man of his stature never deserved.