Original subtitles

♪ Yeah baby it's a mystery

♪ The things you do to yourself ♪

♪ Night time, it's a mystery

♪ You're all by yourself

♪ You cry tears

♪ You crawl out

♪ Get paid your future's made

♪ But your life, it goes not at all ♪

♪ Ten ten's got no bright light shining ♪

♪ Nowhere honesty

♪ Ten ten's got your life now baby ♪

♪ Nowhere honesty

- Hey Kathleen, it's Stiv calling from Paris.

Why don't you phone me back?

Just like to say hello.

Give me a call back.

I'm at 3-3-1

4-0-2-6,

7-1-0-1, in Paris, bye.

- Yes, he was happy.

Definitely happy.

They were walking the streets of the city hand in hand,

hand in hand.

Fuck, hand-in-hand.

- But she was cool.

I think they were very,

I think during the session,

she read like Edgar Allen Poe, by flashlight.

She was a real goth chick.

I liked them, I though they were a good couple.

- She made it worthwhile.

And that's what it's all about.

I finally found love.

When you love someone, you can love yourself.

- They were into bondage I think.

They gave me a lot of information,

about Eric Stanton,

the drawer.

They were into that culture, for sure.

- Yeah, he liked Elvira.

If he had his way,

the whole band would have been done up in PVC,

and wearing women's stilettos, and stuff,

but that was just him.

Just mainly for the look of things.

- It was the next stage of his life,

so he was finding himself,

and he was incredibly happy with Caroline.

They absolutely adored each other.

They had a flat in central Paris,

and they seemed to really take to Parisian life, as well.

- It was strange to know someone

for such a short time,

yet you felt like you knew them longer.

So the first time really was the party on the boat.

So you're going to his 40th birthday party

on the River Seine,

and we had a great time.

It was great.

There was a little piano on the boat and everything.

There was only seven or eight of us.

Myself and Jim,

who is the singer in the Hypnotics,

and that was our band that we had started,

that Stiv was championing really.

He was really quite righteous

in championing us and,

take the torch the baton forward

for rock and roll,

and you get to hang out in Paris,

at Carol's place, Stiv and Carol's place,

their penthouse flat-type thing,

where you could sit on the roof

and see the view of Paris and the Eiffel Tower,

it was a beautiful flat.

And we'd hang there and watch AC/DC videos and things,

and Stiv had many plans forwards, going forwards.

Many plans, I mean he was only 40.

We went to his 40th birthday party.

- Paris influenced people, you know,

I never wrote before I arrived in Paris.

It's a city, but that's up to you.

To me, been more,

concentrated,

if I may say, spiritual, not in,

God, and, no.

More thinking about life,

about creating different stuff.

♪ Let's rock it out

♪ Here stands on my right

- We had the video clip with our band, Jad Wio,

with a song called Priscilla.

He said, oh,

we all like this video clip.

I like the song too.

Once if you play in Paris,

I would like to play with you.

- One, two, one, two, three!

♪ Here stands on my right

♪ The glamorous Priscilla

♪ She's the queen of escape

♪ She plays with dangerous fate ♪

♪ Here stands on my left

♪ The vicious Leona

♪ She's the animal trainer

♪ Come on in you can see them

- It was really after the Sputnik had finished

in the very late 80's.

We were all looking around for the next thing to do,

and Tony said, look Stiv really

wants something to work with,

and to write some songs with.

So Tony and I tried writing a couple of numbers for Stiv,

and that's where we really got to know him better,

and hung out a bit more.

And eventually I went to Paris to make the record,

which became The Last Race with Stiv, in 1990.

- I remember, was it Sounds or Melody Maker,

Carol Clark ran a story about

the new New Lords of the New Church.

Okay, because Stiv ostensibly

was gonna get a new band together,

which was Vom who'd been in Doctor and the Medics,

and Kris Dollimore, who had been in The Godfathers,

and he was gonna have Neil X on board, to produce as well,

but it was gonna be a supergroup,

so over from New York,

we were gonna have Dee Dee on bass,

and Johnny playing obviously, guitar.

That was gonna be Stiv's dream team

for the Paris sessions.

- Dee Dee was all psyched up about that,

and yeah let's do a record.

So, it was all planned for Paris.

But then we had the slight problem with Dee Dee,

flipping out a bit.

- He stayed for some with Stiv and Carol,

and sometime Johnny, he left his gear over there,

so in a moment he through a tantrum.

He through liquid on the pickups

of Johnny's Gibson Les Paul Junior, and he burned it.

- He had destroyed Johnny's guitar,

and poured bleach all over Johnny's clothing,

and Johnny obviously got freaked out

and ran away from Stiv's apartment.

- Stiv was really really straight,

for this record.

He was really on it, it was his,

it was his solo album that was gonna

make or break everything, I think.

- We went in, Stiv said,

here's a couple of songs I want to try.

We cut them in the first couple of hours.

So he got us out, and he said,

I've got this other one I'd like to learn,

played us a bunch of songs

which he'd had in mind for years, I guess.

I've always wanted to record this.

And we just went through and recorded everything.

- He came from Girard, Ohio,

which is a suburb of Youngstown,

which is the biggest town of rock and roll Cleveland,

close to that, so they all had this like,

it's old steel town.

- I met his parents a number of times.

He'd lived in what was a permanent

like a trailer home.

And they were very

middle American, I would say, typical from Ohio.

His dad was amazing, very funny, just like Stiv.

And his mom was the traditional housewife.

- His parents were like total opposites,

you didn't know what attracted them to each other.

And they really represented

Stiv's bad side and his good side.

But his dad was like a joker, a practical joker.

His name was Steve Bator.

He sang in a polka band,

as the front man.

He was just a really really really sweet guy,

and as I got to know them I went over once,

to their house, and they were showing me photos of Stiv,

growing up as a child,

and one photo, this black and white vintage photo,

you see Stiv, with his pants completely down,

and his mother's trying desperately to pull them up,

and the neighbor children are running up

but they're behind them in terror.

And that was the kind of pictures

that were in his family album.

I always got a very strong impression

that his dad was really happy for his career choice,

and his mother wasn't.

- His idols were the three stooges.

And they would spiteful things to each other,

and Stiv would make up lies and stuff like that,

and then if you sussed him out,

he'd go, pricked you, pricked you.

And he'd fooled you, you know.

- Even at that age I could tell he was something special.

He was gonna go places.

He was just that kind of a character,

very magnetic personality,

people were just drawn to him, like that.

Even when I brought him on the stage for the first time,

it was in the late 60's, in Canfield, Ohio.

It was an outdoor concert,

and I got a pickup ad and just brought him up.

I'd never seen him play before.

But he had one remarkable talent.

He could play a harmonica,

but he didn't have a harmonica.

He would cup his hands,

and do this blues stuff and it was amazing.

- Stiv Bators and Mother Goose, they were crazy.

I met 'em, well I saw them,

I encountered them, first time, Mother Goose,

at my high school,

after a football game they used to have dances for the kids.

And one night they showed up,

the band Mother Goose showed up.

And so me and my buddies from our band

went in there to check it out.

We'd always check out the other bands,

and we see Stiv and these guys,

torn jeans, torn t-shirts, long hair,

come out, it was like, whoa.

And they start breaking into like Rolling Stones,

Iggy Pop, Sonics,

all kind of crazy cover tunes, rock and roll.

Stiv was rolling around on the floor,

spitting, cursing.

He was into a lot of different stuff.

Well he liked the theatrics of Iggy,

and Alice Cooper, especially.

Those were his favorites.

And then he invited me to his house,

his gothic mansion, a week later.

So me and my friends showed up,

and there was a full-on party going on,

the place full of people.

I'm sure there was a lot of stuff going on.

Stiv comes flying down the steps of this mansion,

with a road flare, completely naked,

starts blasting out all this weird poetry,

turns around, runs upstairs, and that's it.

So that was like one of my first experiences with Stiv.

The Rockin' Tomatoes were formed,

after Stiv's final incarnation of the Mother Goose band,

which was an institution around Youngstown for a while.

He'd had enough of the Youngstown scene.

He was living out in a place called, Rogers, Ohio.

He rented a room in this house, from these bikers.

And every time Stiv would leave his room,

and go out, we were out on the road,

the bikers and the girlfriends

would go into his room, and steal his clothes,

the girls would wear 'em.

So he had had enough, and just one day he said,

I'm done with this whole thing.

I'm moving to Cleveland, I'm going to the big city.

- Cleveland had a lot of clubs,

a lot of bands,

and there was a lot of places to play,

if you were a cover band.

They really didn't care too much

if you were an original band.

Blue Ash, we lucked out, or The Raspberries,

because we had an album out,

so we could go and get by.

- I'm not outgoing with people I don't know,

but turned out he was, and he came over to me,

and he introduced himself,

and he was dressing according to his name at the time.

He first introduced himself to me as Stivian Scarlet.

And true to his name,

he was dressed in scarlet from head to toe.

And then to top it all off,

he had this died mane of black hair,

obviously a Thunders fan,

I picked that up before he said a word.

- And I went and saw the Stooges, in Detroit.

That's when I realized,

rock and roll has nothing to do about music.

It's just attitude,

and social change.

- And how tight your pants are.

- Exactly.

- And at that point I learned,

it was the wintertime,

and I learned that he was no longer

in Youngstown at all, he was in Cleveland,

and he was living in his car.

But he looked immaculate.

When I met him he was already lying about his age,

and what was hilarious was,

I noticed that without me prompting him,

he started lying about my age, to people.

And I go, what are you shaving years off my age for?

And he goes, you'll thank me some day.

Stiv wanted to form a band called the Atomic Bums,

and we had kind of a real loose blueprint

that was based on The Stooges.

So, we didn't get anywhere with it,

we couldn't find any musicians that had any desire

to participate in, particularly Stiv's, plans.

Because he was really the leader.

- So that's when he went to Cleveland,

and then Frankenstein began to form at that point.

I remember he met Eugene, Cheetah.

He kind of fell in with Cheetah and those guys,

and Blitz, they were playing with Rocket from the Tombs,

and Stiv would go in and start

hanging around with these guys,

and they'd let him get up and sing one or two songs

at the end of their sets.

- Cheetah and Johnny were the guys

most like Stiv and I would have wanted to do musically,

out of all the guys, in that band.

And we were interested in them.

But Rockets was a disaster area.

I didn't hear from him for a couple of weeks,

and he called me up on the phone,

and he goes, I joined Rocket from the Tombs.

And I felt betrayed.

Why didn't you tell me you were gonna do that?

I felt betrayed.

And I got hurt by it, to tell you the truth.

But anyway, he called me up about a week later,

and he goes, I broke up the band.

He didn't break them up,

that was the Stiv thing.

- And so he kind of worked his way in there,

and eventually him and Cheetah, and Blitz,

were working on their own project,

which eventually became Frankenstein.

- He goes, I got Johnny, and at the time, Gene,

'cause Cheetah wasn't going by Cheetah then.

He goes, I got them to form a band.

Frankenstein was the same lineup that would occur

after The Dead Boys recorded their first album.

It was Jeff Magnum,

Cheetah, Johnny, Stiv and me.

We were doing pretty much the same material,

only it was kind of like

there was a little bit of overlap with the glam era.

We had long hair, and we dressed kind of fancy.

♪ But daylight kills me

♪ No love can kill me

♪ So please kill me

- Stiv infiltrated the Ramones.

They came to Youngstown and played,

and they had to get to Cleveland,

so he said he would show them the way.

So he was going down the Ohio turnpike,

and we're going about 70 miles an hour,

and Stiv gets out of the car,

he's driving the car, and he gets out of the car,

and goes up on the roof and moons the Ramones.

- And he like starts mooning us.

And I thought at the time,

this was like the sickest thing I'd ever seen,

so we became friends, you know.

- And Stiv lied, because Frankenstein had broken up.

We didn't even have a band.

And he said, oh yeah, I got a band together,

we're called this and that and you know.

And Joey said he would talk to Hilly

and get us a Sunday night show.

Nothing spectacular, a good slot or anything.

We said sure Stiv, so Stiv calls up everybody on the phone,

and we all meet him at Cleveland airport.

And he said, listen I just got back from New York.

This place, we would finally have a place to play.

He didn't say we were gonna become

big rock stars or anything.

It was just, we'll have a place to play,

CBGB's, we can play there easily,

with what we're doing.

Stiv was really ambitious,

and nothing was gonna stand in his way,

of what he wanted,

and he could infiltrate a scene,

any scene that he entered,

he could infiltrate it, real easily.

It was effortless to him.

- Honestly for me, the Dead Boys

were the only real American punk band in New York,

and by that I'm not trying to offend other bands,

but the Ramones were like the Beach Boys,

Blondie were very pop,

there was the whole art scene

with Patti Smith and Television,

and you had Willy DeVille,

and the New York Dolls,

that were more on the glam, or the R and B side,

but the Dead Boys,

if I were walking down a dark alley in the city,

I would rather have Stiv and Cheetah there with me,

than probably any other guy in a band in New York.

- We were going up there,

we were driving up there once a month to play.

We played at CBGB's, Max's Kansas City.

And we started to gain a little momentum.

- They were it, they were just so hard,

and just so on it,

and they were really good musicians.

- The Dead Boys had the attitude.

Punk is an attitude.

And Dead Boys had it in spades.

- The Dead Boys brought,

for the generation

of 1977, you know,

they brought the core of what was going on,

which was the rawness of the streets.

Like that real raw gang violence to the stage.

- What we do onstage is just

releasing a lot of energy and frustration.

Where is it best to do it?

Here, or out in the streets?

That's how most of the kids get it out.

They watch TV,

and the see the violence there,

and they get it out of them that way.

But that's not full like you can here.

Here you can break a bottle, or jump around,

or something like that, or just watch us get it out for you.

So what we're doing is really healthy.

- When Stiv does what he does onstage,

he enjoys people to laugh.

He doesn't feel slighted by it,

it's all in the spirit of having fun,

and we want people to be able to vent

their frustrations, and angers, and violence,

but not on each other.

♪ Can I describe what it's like ♪

♪ To have sex with the lights on? ♪

♪ And would ya feel right if I did ya tonight? ♪

♪ And put the bite on?

♪ All this and more little girl ♪

♪ How bout on the floor little girl ♪

♪ No time to implore ya girl

♪ I'm just a dead boy

♪ You know that I'm just a dead boy ♪

♪ I wanna be a dead boy

♪ I'll die for you, if you want me to ♪

♪ Got feeling in my knees that tell me the degrees ♪

♪ I been loved on

- We started drawing people.

And then, we were gonna break up,

because we couldn't do that anymore,

drive up to New York, drive back,

drive up to New York, drive back,

especially in the worst winter in 50 years,

or whatever it was.

And so we were gonna break up,

if we didn't find management,

and Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGB's,

began to notice us,

that he was making a lot of money off the bar,

whenever we played.

And he thought, hmmm.

So he said, do you guys have a manager?

And we said, no.

And he goes, would you like me to manage you?

And we said, yeah.

Sure, it was like manna from heaven,

it saved us from ourselves.

So anyway, he put his money where his mouth was,

and he booked us into Electric Lady Studios

in New York City,

and we did a three-day demo,

and Genya Ravan was nice enough to produce us.

- They had never been in a studio before.

Everything was pending on Hilly Kristal

paying for everything.

And when Hilly recommended me to produce them,

of course they said yes.

Even if I was a stepping stone.

Turned out to be, that was one of their best albums.

- We recorded it real real fast.

We were very very very very high, and drunk,

and real fast.

We went into the studio,

and Hilly said, what do you need

to do what you guys do?

Would mean be the Dead Boys.

And we said, lots of whiskey and beer.

And so they had literally every three or four hours,

a caravan coming from CBGB's,

with Schlitz Beer and Jack Daniels.

We were also taking a lot of speed at the time.

In fact, I went outside,

and I was in an amphetamine psychotic state,

and saw Peter Frampton,

who was in recording his followup

to Frampton Comes Alive.

And I doubt that he'll ever see this,

but I'd like to apologize to him,

because he was at the coffee machine getting coffee,

and I saw him, and he was at that point,

he was the biggest rock star in the world,

the biggest.

And I saw him, and he's rather a small little fella,

and I came up behind him and I was

completely out of my mind,

on drugs and alcohol,

and I stuck my chin on the top of his head

and started growling like I was this wild beast.

He turned around and looked at me,

and left the studio,

and went on vacation, and there was a sign that said,

we'll be back.

And he found out when we were gonna be booked till,

and he was gonna come back.

So what did we do?

We went in,

and he had the most advanced guitar gear in the world,

so we borrowed it, to use it on Young, Loud and Snotty.

- I think they got mixed reviews though.

A lot of critics just hated punk rock,

so no matter what great punk record came out,

it would get bad reviews.

♪ I don't need anyone

♪ Don't need no mom and dad

♪ Don't need no pretty face

♪ Don't need no human race

♪ I got some news for you

♪ Don't even need you too

♪ I got my devil machine

♪ Got my electronic dream

♪ Sonic reducer

♪ Ain't no loser

♪ I'm a sonic reducer

♪ Ain't no loser

♪ People out on the streets

♪ They don't know who I am

♪ I watch them from my room

♪ They all just pass me by

♪ But I'm not just anyone

♪ Said I'm not just anyone

- I saw the Dead Boys play,

and I saw Stiv,

curled up in a ball, in front of the bass drum,

with the mic on the floor,

and I thought it was so cool,

and when I did meet him about two years later,

I told him the story.

Said it was a great anti-rock star moment,

it was so punk rock, it was so cool,

and he was like, well, I took Quaaludes before the show,

and I passed out and kind of couldn't sing,

and I couldn't stand up.

So that's why I did the show laying down.

- I think he had a hard time finding validation

as a musician before the Dead Boys.

I think we all did,

all of us in the band.

And it validated him, and all of a sudden

people were admiring what he did.

They liked it.

He was getting good positive response.

People were paying attention to him.

And I think he found a validation in it.

And also, it was really a lot of fun.

My God, we were like kids in a candy store.

- Yeah Stiv was always so nice,

and so professional,

and seemed to be very intelligent,

even though they were doing this crazy, nutty

self-destructive stuff onstage,

I always thought Stiv was kind of

the brains of the outfit.

- Some of the crazy times I would say,

would be when Stiv was on the road,

and starting to get

messed up about us being apart,

and he would phone me

with crazy threats about being depressed,

and telling me that we climbing

out on the ledge of the hotel,

the window ledge of the hotel,

and then I wouldn't hear from him,

it was before cell phones,

and there were a few times that I called Cheetah

at the hotel and asked him

to get him in from the window ledge.

♪ All my boyhood friends told me I'd fail ♪

♪ Spend my lifetime friendless or in jail ♪

♪ And all the girls at the school dance ♪

♪ Wouldn't give me a second chance ♪

♪ But I won't look back

♪ But I won't look back

- The second album was weird.

It was just kind of a negative thing from the get-go.

Felix Pappalardi had put up kind of a feeler

to Sire Records.

There was no guitars on the record,

and the more that Cheetah and I would,

particularly Cheetah,

Cheetah didn't waste any time protesting that.

And I agreed with him, he was right, 100%,

and the more he protested, I think the more

Felix said, screw you,

and got rid of him even more.

- The second album is like a lot of bands go through this.

They're together for a year or two,

they write a lot of songs,

and then they put out the first record,

which is all their best songs.

And then it's like, the second album

is due a few months later.

What do I do?

What do we do?

And they end up writing everything,

more hastily and they don't perform it onstage.

- So they had just finished

their second album, in Miami,

and he was really distraught, heartbroken.

He said the whole thing was kind of a heartbreak.

The band was fighting, there was fighting within the band,

they weren't happy with the recordings,

and he was actually kind of considering

leaving at that point.

- We lived in various places,

throughout our relationships.

Stiv would come and stay with me in Toronto,

when he was not on the road.

We lived at the Chelsea for about three months, in 1978,

and our neighbors were Sid and Nancy,

and we did a cable TV show two weeks before Nancy died.

- We were living on the edge.

We were approaching violence.

We had those knives, we got one for Sid Vicious.

Those knives, those double-O-7 knives.

They were big.

Stiv had one, I had one.

I think Blitz may have had one.

Yeah, he was stabbed really really horribly.

I mean they weren't expecting him to make it.

In fact, this one doctor more or less

brought him back from the dead.

And I threw mine away that night,

because I thought, who am I kidding?

Walking around the streets with a knife?

It's gonna end up being used on me,

so I got rid of it.

- It definitely gave a sense of,

the danger that was coming,

and the increasing substance, like drug use,

that was also causing chaos on the lower east side.

- Cheetah was really really falling,

as a person.

Thank God he got back together,

and picked himself back up,

but he was really doing a lot of serious heroin, by then.

And, his wrist was broken,

so he couldn't do the gigs we had lined up.

We went to Keith Richard's birthday party,

as you have already asked,

and he had broken his wrist, roller skating.

And he went to the hospital, Keith gave him his limo

to take him to the hospital.

Best trip the hospital Cheetah's ever had.

So we got George Cabinus,

who was a guy from an Akron band,

and we were friends with him,

and he was gonna fill in for Cheetah,

until Cheetah got better.

We were swamped with people who wanted to manage us,

and we were in way over our heads with these people.

We had the guys, Pink Floyd's attorney was courting us.

It was heavy hitter people.

They thought we were gonna be the next Stones,

which I could have told them that we weren't.

But this one guy said, I will manage you.

I won't give his name.

I will manage you, if you can tell Cheetah

to just get off the dope.

You'll never make it with him on the dope.

So Stiv called Cheetah up on the phone,

and said, you have to choose.

This is what really happened, I was there.

You have to choose between

heroin and the Dead Boys.

And Cheetah said, fuck you.

Just did.

And that was the end of the Dead Boys right there.

I knew we couldn't replace him.

♪ I am an evil boy

♪ I am an evil boy

♪ I am an evil boy

♪ I am an evil boy

- It was weird the way it happened.

Jimmy was still there,

and all of a sudden Cheetah was gone,

and they've got their little stripey blazer jackets.

He appreciated really good poppy,

poppy garage songs from the 60's.

Like It's Cold Outside,

and all that nuggets kind of stuff.

That's what he wanted to do,

instead of just being a straight on punk band, forever.

- That's what the Dead Boys had been

morphing into.

Stiv was done with punk rock.

He was done,

and he was bored with it.

He didn't like the way the people looked,

that did it, and he didn't like,

he thought the sound had been worn out,

and he wanted to go back to the 60's roots,

and he had a perfect partner in Frank Secich,

who was a fabulous songwriter, musician,

from the Youngstown area.

♪ I am an evil boy

- And then it kind of became

a Stiv Bators Dead Boys thing,

and we toured for the next year like that,

with different personnel changes.

- So we did a lot of shows,

before we recorded Disconnected,

and most of those shows were done with Jimmy Zero.

So we toured quite a bit with that band.

Jimmy left, and that's when we went

to California to record Disconnected.

I got this call from him,

and he said, I've tickets for you,

I want you to come down to LA

to record this new single that I'm doing.

And that was with Frank Secich,

his friend from Ohio who was in Blue Ash,

and his friend Eddy Best.

- Eddy, met Jeff Beck.

Loves your guitar playing,

get back out here, Stiv.

- We would rehearse

at a rehearsal studio all night,

usually up until six o'clock in the morning,

until we felt comfortable.

We didn't do a lot of these rehearsals.

A lot of the work was done in the studio.

We had a hell of a lot of freedom,

that was given to us by Greg Shaw, at Bump Records.

And we were able to experiment a lot,

and pretty much do what we wanted to do.

Not all of us were able to stand up straight

all the time when we were doing it,

but it was a hell of a lot of fun,

and there was a lot of laughter.

- The sessions went on way too long.

There was a lot of, me driving Stiv

up to Beverly Glen to score,

and then come back and do

many many many takes of the same song and stuff.

But it was fun.

- Stiv and Frank, in particular,

were more influenced by 60's pop music.

They loved Paul Revere and the Raiders.

Everybody liked the Raspberries from Ohio.

Frank's band, Blue Ash.

So I think a lot of the power pop influences

came from 60's pop,

and from early 70's pop.

It wasn't like, oh we're out to make this big hit album,

or anything like that.

We were just doing what we were doing,

and it was gonna produce whatever result

it was gonna produce.

It wasn't like sitting around

and trying to conquer the world.

There was very little talk about commercial success,

or anything like that,

it was just to make a great record

that, quite frankly, we liked.

- Well, you know, Stiv was very ambitious.

He was always trying to do the best he could do.

He was very serious about his music,

and all I can say is, his expectations,

where he expected it to be the best,

and he expected everybody to give their best,

and he always did, and that's why live,

the guy would give out his soul.

He was a great performer, and he loved music,

and he believed in it.

- So on Disconnected, he was breaking away

from the Dead Boys,

and he was Stiv, the solo project, that was a great record.

And the B-Girls actually sang backups

on one of the songs, on that record.

And we were all living at Stiv's bungalow

at the Tropicana Hotel at that time.

- When we'd go onstage, he would take off his sunglasses,

and I realized one night,

that he's completely blind when he's performing.

He doesn't know what the hell's going on.

He was knocking into shit, all over the place.

- You knew that he was one

of the funniest people in the world,

and did such insane things.

We all saw him car surfing,

which on one hand I found to be funny,

and on the other hand, very very frightening.

He did it with me at the wheel,

in a 1969 Cutlass, on the 405, in Los Angeles.

He climbed out of the car, and got on top.

And what I found out later,

is he was not only on the roof,

but he had his pants down.

- He's car surfing,

and people are beeping and everything going by.

I thought, oh my God, this guy's nuts.

- So he honed in this telephone voice,

so what he used to do is he'd call restaurants and whatnot.

- After Sham was splitting up,

Jimmy wanted to do a solo career,

and the three remaining members of us said,

let's stick together, we like playing together but,

we need a good singer.

What were we gonna do?

We couldn't think of anyone in England,

but the drummer was American,

and he had a contact for Stiv,

and he said, what about Stiv Bators from the Dead Boys?

I'm sure it's not gonna happen, but let's give it a try.

Ricky, the drummer, phoned him up,

and to our total surprise, he said, yeah!

I've just finished my solo album, blah blah blah,

bored with America, love England, I want to come over.

I love Sham 69, let's do it.

So he came over, unexpectedly, and we formed The Wanderers.

- That's basically how it all came together.

It worked, and we decided to go on in.

Stiv had brought over with him,

these tapes.

Now this was the main concept for the album,

because he was a very interesting guy,

and lot of his positive points was,

he was very sussed, and he had his finger on the pulse,

and he was very interested in future things,

and he brought over with him these tapes.

- So you had all these audio tapes,

and he would get them mailed over

from this mad guy in Texas.

It could have been a complete phony.

Apparently he was one of the aides of President Kennedy,

and his name was Doctor Beater,

and the track on the Wanderers album, Peter Beater,

is a little double entendre, because in America,

slang for your dick is a peter.

And peter beater is a bit like a masturbator.

- I mean one of the first songs we wrote was.

The subject matter just flew out,

with the help of these tapes.

- He was over there doing something,

and I reconnected with him,

and I think he was a little bit stranded in London.

So by that time,

we had had a little bit of a success,

and we had our own place that we lived.

Lee Rocker and I had a little flat,

and Stiv would stay there,

he couch-surfed a little bit.

I think we had a cot.

- We were hanging out with The Stray Cats at the time.

The record company has thrown a big party,

in some big restaurant down Westborne Grove, I think it was,

and we were invited, so we went down there,

and the whole thing degenerated

into some massive great food fight.

And we were ejected from the restaurant,

never to return again.

So anyway, we were back in my Jag,

and we were driving back into London,

and I was talking to Stiv in the back seat.

I turn around and Stiv's not there.

What the fuck?

He's flipping climbed out the window,

and he's on the roof, and he's flipping body surfing

along Westborne Road on top of the Jag.

I'm shouting out, you scratch my fucking Jag,

I'll flipping brake.

- When Stiv first came over he was all very up

the whole time, you know, a very positive person,

and then there was one incident

where he couldn't somehow get his money from the manager,

and Stiv got on a real downer,

and he pulled out all his remaining money from his pocket,

which was quite a lot of money,

and just was saying, fuck Tony Goode, and fuck England,

blah blah blah, and burned his money,

and that's when I saw like the little bit

of the other side of Stiv,

as I'm sure many very talented people,

they have problems as well,

and that's when I first saw that Stiv's got

a little problems with depression maybe,

and being down.

So he wasn't all this up guy.

- He was living in my house,

and every single day the phone would ring.

I'd run downstairs, pick up the phone,

hello, oh it's Brian James,

hello Brian, how are you, is Stiv there?

Yeah yeah, hold on, I'll get Stiv here.

Next day, same thing, same thing,

day after day after day.

When we were recording The Wanderers album,

Stiv had introduced me to smack.

And we were recording at Trident Studios,

where Bowie did Ziggy Stardust.

One night I crashed down, and Stiv woke me up,

and he says, he says Dave,

I think it's time for you to try some smack.

Oh fuck,

then we went out and left on an American tour.

And when we got to the States on this American tour,

Stiv introduced me to

probably New York's most notorious junkie,

a guy called Spacely.

He was hanging out with Thunders, and people like that.

And of course Mister Spacely

introduced me to the old needle.

So, I'm not saying anything against Stiv on that.

I flipping take responsibility for my own actions,

but anyway, I was now flipping shooting up,

and flipping drinking,

and flipping everything to excess.

By the time the tour finished,

I got back home, and I ended up in isolation ward,

in hospital, people coming in to see me,

had little white masks,

and flipping gloves.

This is in the days when they

didn't really know that much about

the different types of hepatitis and stuff.

- It was a very brief period in time.

He fell out with the manager really.

Thinks weren't right with it.

People didn't accept it easily,

but I think it was a sea change in Stiv's life,

because he came to England,

and he came up with some very different style lyrics

for that Wanderers album,

that really stand up the test of time.

- They released me from hospital,

and Rick Goldstein came over,

and said, it's a shame about the band isn't it, Dave?

I said, what do you mean?

Dave Tregunna and Stiv have gone off with Brian James.

There you go fucking, it all fell into place.

And, at that point, I was fucking gutted, you know.

- Stiv's lyrics, were really kind of ahead of their time.

There's a song called, Open Your Eyes,

which is, the opening lyrics are.

Now that was written,

in the early 80's,

and 35 years on, it seems just as relevant,

or even more relevant, today.

- He was a great lyricist,

and he was also a great borrower of lyrics,

so I only realize lately,

because I had never listened to the Lords of the New Church,

that a song that I had written in 1977,

yes 1977, called, The Little Boy Who Played With Dolls,

that Stiv had actually taken that,

and many of the lyrics are the same,

so I was shocked to hear that,

a friend had played it for me.

- When it came to songwriting credits,

he would steal songwriting credits,

and you wouldn't know it until the record was printed,

and it was too late.

- We're part of the Beatles, we're from London, England.

- They had everything going for them.

They had the album, they had the deal, they had

Miles Copeland, who was backing them,

and everything was going really well.

The first album, the whole goth image was,

I think they found it difficult to live up to,

because none of them were really

came from that goth area at all.

- They succumbed a lot to 80's cheesiness.

They kind of looked like they were wearing costumes,

and not clothing.

The production values, the Lords

weren't the only band guilty of it.

Their production techniques were very cheesy.

At the time I had mixed feelings.

I was happy for Stiv,

because he'd worked so hard to get

that kind of recognition, that kind of success,

but I was jealous of him, too,

because I was back in Cleveland

struggling with my own music, and getting nowhere.

And all of a sudden, I see Stiv on MTV,

so I'm very ambivalent about him doing this.

On one hand, wow, look it, there's my friend on MTV.

Look at that.

On the other hand, that son of a bitch is on MTV.

- To me,

it was Stiv and the guys,

Dead Boys, everybody.

The difference was, The Dead Boys

were all very fine musicians,

very very very fine musicians.

The Lords were just typical drummer,

James, he was not the guitar god.

Cheetah was a guitar god.

So, what do you have?

You have Stiv is the lead performer,

big voice, bigger than life persona,

and he was carrying the show on his shoulders.

- There was one number we played called, Holy War.

So, all of a sudden in the middle bit of Holy War,

where Stiv got something,

when the band carried on this riff, jamming.

Stiv leaps off the stage,

and goes and grabs one of the people out the wheelchair,

and starts dragging them, and trying to get them onstage.

And they're kind of freaking out like this,

and I'm playing the bass thinking,

Stiv you've really gone too far this time, you know.

So he manages to drag this guy up,

who couldn't walk, onto the stage,

and starts blessing him,

and all of a sudden the guys gets up

and starts leaping around like that.

And it had been a big windup,

Stiv had had one of his mates sitting in a wheelchair,

all through the set, not tell anything to the band,

and dragged him up to freak everyone out,

including the rest of the band.

So Stiv had this brilliant sense of humor.

- Stiv was married to a lady by the name of Stacy,

who, although she was an interesting lady,

she was very good for Stiv,

and although there were issues there,

and particularly at the end,

and I think in a way, unfortunately, she broke his heart.

I think that was his soulmate in many ways,

and I think he lost the focus,

I think he lost his raison d'etre,

and I think it hurt him, and after that,

and this is around Method to the Madness,

the lyrics weren't as focused,

and the sound wasn't as focused,

and he wasn't as passionate about all this stuff.

- And at that time, Andy McCoy, from Hanoi Rocks,

had formed a band called The Cherry Bombs,

and wanted me as bass player.

Stiv was living with Mike Monroe,

and the two of them were total movie freaks,

so they would love to stay up for many days,

helped by substances that keep you up for many days.

And then they would crash for, in Mike's case,

probably a day, and Stiv, five days.

Stiv was in a bad way I thought,

he was really, didn't seem to care.

He'd lost it, and he was doing a lot of heavy stuff.

And he said, Dave, I think you're doing the right thing.

Good luck.

And that was it.

- The first tour I did with them was the,

promoting the Lords really,

which was like the compilation of the three,

let's say, a greatest hits, by any other name,

but like the first three albums.

As I say, massive tour of the States,

practically sold out wherever we went.

I mean, fantastic shows.

There'd been some kind of argument,

and we were all in a van,

sitting outside to leave this show,

and Stiv was messing around outside, in his normal fashion,

and the band were getting pissed off.

Then suddenly he got on the kind of front,

of the, it's like a mini-van we were touring around in.

And he was sort of just jumping about on that,

and I say, I think it might have been Nick who said,

Stiv get in!

And you just watched, like he sort of disappeared

for a split second,

his legs went up in the air,

and then he just came crashing through the windscreen.

And he sort of landed, and all the glass was all over us.

And it's just that, I was like,

what the fuck?

And then suddenly, it's Stiv what the fuck are you doing?

He says, oh you guys, I thought you was in a hurry.

- And Stiv was heading down

unfortunately into sort of a cul-de-sac,

which was really hard to watch.

Brian had his own issues, as well,

and the two of them weren't getting along.

None of us were getting along, it's the truth.

I mean we were just self-destructive.

We'd play in LA, and we wouldn't be very good.

All the press would be there,

MTV would be there, we weren't great that night,

but boy the next night in Pomona, we were incredible.

- I hadn't heard from him in a while,

and I was living in LA,

and I saw in the paper they were playing

in a couple of bars around LA,

but I noticed one of them was this truck stop

out towards Riverside, or Barstow, California.

Just this out of the way truck stop motel place.

Things weren't going well,

I think the Lords were,

he was getting tired and burned out on it,

and things weren't going well.

And he didn't seem very happy.

And then I said Stiv, what's wrong,

how you doing man?

And he basically looked at me, and he said,

you know, if I had to do this all over again, I wouldn't.

- Steph, shock, horror,

I can write.

No, it's not Johnny.

I'll be in the States by the time you get this.

The Dead boys rise from the grave.

Halloween's Eve at the Ritz in New York City.

I may be in Ohio at my mom and dad's.

You can also track me through Geoff Jones.

Get me, if you can, Stiv.

- When you had a band like the Dead Boys,

they're so high energy,

they're so aggressive,

I don't think you can just pick up your instruments,

and rehearse a few times and then achieve

what you did

when you were young, loud, and snotty, you know?

- I think we all wanted that, to have that,

for the rest of our lives,

what we had in the Dead Boys, the good parts of it.

We were a gang,

and we wanted that, and we knew

we would never have that again,

because we were too old, and that was of its time.

But we never stopped wanting to go back to that time,

and it caused us,

those emotions caused us to make a lot of bad decisions.

We tried to recapture the past,

and I think he learned,

more than anyone, that you couldn't.

He was also in a long decline,

that started I think, I noticed it personally,

when he was in The Wanderers, before the Lords.

He started a decline, he started to change,

and by the time he left the Lords,

when we would go on the road,

it was really depressing for me,

only because I, by then, really loved him.

And he was kind of like Elvis.

Stiv was worn out.

He was kind of done with the Lords before he left,

and I think, from what I've heard,

there were kind of done with him.

But, he didn't know what else to do.

- This is Stiv Bators, of the Lords of the New Church.

I'm here with Brian James, Danny Fury,

and Dave Tregunna.

- And then when Stiv and Brian decided that

they wanted to reform the band, and Nicky, the drummer,

was already in Los Angeles,

and wasn't coming back to England,

so Dave, you wanna get back together?

We need a drummer.

And I'd hooked up with Danny.

- And we've recently reformed the group,

with a new drummer.

- Mister Danny Fury.

- And we're going back to our original sound.

That's the best thing to say about the group.

We've gone back to

the original act of the band,

and the original identity.

- Yeah, that was the plan.

And then it all went wrong.

- I remember Brian saying to me,

all right you're in the band,

we're gonna go on tour very soon.

How many rehearsals do you need, one or two?

♪ There's no savior out there

♪ There ain't nobody else who cares ♪

♪ Don't look to me for absolution ♪

♪ There ain't no clandestine solution ♪

♪ Life's a crime of passion

♪ Designed for direct action

♪ There ain't no justice out there ♪

♪ This is the Lord's prayer

♪ Ain't nobody actually cares

♪ This is the Lord's prayer

- Stiv and Brian were the force behind the music,

and I think they separated.

There might have been some issues,

with Brian, not wanting Stiv to do what Stiv was doing,

and Stiv not wanting Brian to do what Brian was doing,

namely different kinds of substances,

and I don't think Brian, or his wife,

warmed to Stiv's girlfriend at the time, Caroline.

That started to make a rift,

but it was totally exaggerated,

when we had booked a whole European tour.

Stiv was living in Paris,

and the rest of us were in London,

and Stiv suddenly called up and said

that he couldn't do the gigs of the tour,

he'd hurt his back.

- He was definitely always going to the limit,

to his limit you know,

sort of giving it his all, and more you know,

and actually to the point

where he really hurt himself physically,

just banging himself up onstage.

- Brian came to me and said, I've spoken to Stiv,

and I'm pissed off with him,

because someone told me they'd seen him out clubbing,

and he's supposed to have a bad back,

yet he went out clubbing.

- And apparently Stiv said to Brian,

I can't do those gigs,

why don't you get someone else to stand in for me?

And that's what Brian told me Stiv had told him.

Later on, Stiv denied that.

Stiv said that Brian had just gone

and advertised for a new singer,

so Brian said to me,

we've got to do these gigs.

Why don't we get a different singer in?

And I was thinking well,

how are we gonna replace Stiv?

I said, let's at least give it a try.

Let's go into a rehearsal room,

audition a few people.

So, Brian put this advert out.

- I think Stiv saw that ad,

and got really really really upset.

- He said to me, Stiv had said,

why don't you go ahead?

Now maybe Stiv was being sarcastic,

maybe he misunderstood it, or what.

Anyway, we auditioned a load of people,

and we thought, no way.

There's no way any of these live up to Stiv,

we ended up canceling the bloody tours anyway,

but Stiv had said he'd do the Astoria.

When we did the Astoria gig,

Stiv didn't turn up for the sound check or anything,

he just turned up late,

and he said he was gonna be late,

and he turned up, and he was quite friendly to us,

didn't give any hint that he was gonna do what he did do.

- He slipped and put on a T-shirt with a printed ad on it.

And fucking walked onstage and walked up.

Name band, singer.

- So I did laugh and just thought, what a fantastic stunt,

and only Stiv would do that.

Unbelievable.

- And then he just fucked off right after the gig.

He didn't even go backstage.

He was out of there before we knew what was going on.

And that was the end of the Lords.

- I spoke to him a lot the last couple of years of his life,

like maybe two or three times a month,

which is a lot, when he's living in Paris,

and I'm living in Cleveland.

He had changed drastically.

I think he was giving in to a reality that he was dying,

physically, dying.

I think he was giving in to a reality that

he wasn't sure if he had the energy,

or the desire even, to do another project.

I'm not assuming any of this, he told me this stuff.

- She tried to get him to go to the hospital,

because he was hit by a car.

They'd gone out shopping,

and he was hit by a taxi, I think.

And he just thought he'd had an out-of-body experience,

and he was gonna be all right.

- I think the postmortem situation was

that it was internal bleeding, hemorrhaging, and so on,

and the next thing I know,

I've get me and Jim at .

- He always had this dangerous thing about him,

his whole career, the whole time I knew him,

where he thought that Jim Morrison dying,

really made Jim Morrison a bigger,

larger than life legend than he would have been,

had he lived.

And he would tell me all the time,

I thought he was joking.

I have to die soon,

so that I can make sure my legend lives on.

And I would go, yeah sure.

But, I think that part of him actually did want that, death.

- At the end of the 80's, he was kind of burned out on life.

He was burning the candle and both ends for decades now.

That guy did more than most people would do in 10 lifetimes.

So I think it was almost inevitable

that something would happen.

He had always pushed it to the limit,

and then went beyond the limit.

- It was like 50, 60 people waiting,

fans, friends.

Waiting at the columns by .

When the hearse arrived,

the band, his band, the Lords, and some friends, six people,

they were goosestepping the coffin into the room.

I was shocked.

- I remember, as do several other people I've spoken to,

at some point, when you're in a van with Stiv,

traveling for miles and miles on the road,

and Stiv starts chatting to you,

and at one point he says to you,

you know what, I've taken so many drugs in my life,

I think when I die I want to be cremated,

and I want you to snort my ashes, to see if you get high.

So, I can't remember exactly when he said it to me,

but he definitely said it,

and then after he died and was cremated,

his wife said, Stiv wanted people to do this,

and we all said, well yeah he said that to me,

he said that to me.

So let's snort your ashes, so we did.

And it hurt like hell.

- Boy it hurt real bad, that really hurt bad,

because he was cremated in his leather stuff,

with all his skull jewelry, his jewelry, his silver jewelry.

So you can only imagine what we were snorting,

it really did hurt for some hours.

- So Steven J Bator, Junior,

the most infuriating, impossible, frustrating,

little evil weasel I've ever come across.

I miss him every day.

- Stiv to me, I loved the mystery of Stiv.

That dichotomy of characters between

the little prick and the fascinating,

intelligent, guy he could be,

or the daredevil Stiv.

- If he was like he was onstage, all the time,

he wouldn't have lived to be 18 years old.

He was very different than people think he was.

He was nice.

I think as front man he had the kind of,

genuine, do what it takes, go for it, kind of thing.

He would hang himself,

he would crawl into the bass drum,

he really had the reckless abandon

of a true front man.

- He was really really entertaining to watch,

and I think like,

other than maybe a few other guys,

like Iggy Pop, and maybe Alice,

and guys he looked up to,

he was definitely up there with those guys.

He was unbelievable to watch.

- I think he was a truly touching and legendary person,

who like a very small group of people,

from that space and time,

gave everything that they had to rock and roll,

were the spirit of rock and roll,

understood the spirit of rock and roll,

and we're not gonna find,

there's gonna be no more Stivs, that was it,

he was a one off, and an absolutely joyous creature,

and I'm very glad that I had the opportunity to meet him.

- Stiv used to go on about conspiracy theories,

and this idea that three men controlled the whole world,

and that corporations

were really in charge, not politicians.

And you can go back and listen to some of his interviews,

where he talked about this,

and we all rolled our eyes at the time,

and now we know that it's actually true.

- A real prankster,

and a real, like a permanent juvenile delinquent.

If he was alive today,

he'd be like a 70-year-old juvenile delinquent.

- And I think had he lived today,

he'd be one of those forefathers of punk,

and maybe have more respect than he did.

- And Stiv was very unique,

he was,

I'm sure a lot of people who don't know the guy,

would think he's just whatever.

But he's a real sensitive guy,

and he was really pretty special.

- The nicest, sweetest guy, really.

As I say, lunatic nonetheless.

When I got to play with him and tour with him

and travel with him, that revealed itself,

on a daily basis.

- I believe in what I'm doing.

I always have.

And when there's no compromise,

there'll be no regrets.

♪ Baby baby I need you so bad

♪ I need something that I never had before ♪

♪ I've been lonely from the time I was small ♪

♪ Now it's time for me to walk through the wall ♪

♪ Help me find a way

♪ Help me find a way

♪ Help me find a way

♪ To be with you to hold you

♪ To love you

♪ Become you to kiss you to love you ♪

♪ To love you to hold you

♪ To love you

♪ Baby baby I want you so much

♪ You've got something that I couldn't touch ♪

♪ Before I was looking and I answered your call ♪

♪ Now it's time for me to walk it all ♪

♪ Help me find a way

♪ Help me find a way

♪ Help me find a way

♪ To feel you to hold you

♪ To love you

♪ To touch you to kiss you

♪ To love you

♪ To love you to hold you

♪ To love you

♪ I can see a laser that's shining brightly ♪

♪ Can I even know what I need to be ♪

♪ I only knew that you're the chance that I've been given ♪

♪ Baby I'm yours and I won't stop thinking about you ♪

♪ Do you remember those days

♪ When we were teenagers

♪ And got high on toxic fluids and flavors ♪

♪ Life was exciting while listening to dirty rock'n'roll ♪

♪ Even when we were kids, it was all about losing control ♪

♪ Life takes you down

♪ Life takes you down

♪ When all we wanted to get high ♪

♪ Born with an

♪ A creature of the night

♪ Forever turn a revolution

♪ He shivered of the fight

♪ Stood up and lean into the studio ♪

♪ Then conquered London town

- New Orleans,

that's where I'm from.