Dust Off Those Grooves (Chapter Three) Johnny Thunders' So Alone

Johnny Thunders would have turned sixty years old today. In tribute to one of my major musical heroes, I am re-posting this look at his greatest album that I wrote in the early days of Moon in the Gutter.


Memory is a strange thing, specifically what we remember. I have over 3,000 records and cds. I've been collecting, passionately, since I was in my early teens. I have had girlfriends that I can't even remotely remember anything about but I can pretty much pull any of my records, or discs out, and recall not only where where I got them but what was going on in my life at the time. I couldn't tell you what I was doing last week but I could tell you my first 45 was Blondie's "The Tide Is High" and that my first lp was Elvis Gold Records Vol. 5. I mention this because, even though I remember these things clearly, certain albums seem to be almost part of my DNA...while I remember the first time with them, I can't imagine ever really being without them.
I found Johnny Thunders then out of print solo debut, SO ALONE, on vinyl in a tiny Manhattan record store in 1992. I had discovered JT at the perfect age of 16 when I bought the first New York Dolls record and even though his guitar playing had been copied a million times over at that point there was still a freshness and raw energy that made it totally unique and unbelievably compelling to me.
Southern Indiana in the late 80s early 90s was not the most ideal spot for finding Johnny Thunders solo records; so for several years it was just those Doll sides, some scattered live recordings and articles that I found in old music magazines.
I'll never forget getting the news that JT had died my senior year of high school. My friend Ryan coming into the cafeteria and simply saying, 'Johnny died'.
A year or so later my father took me up to Queens to see Johnny's grave, by that point Jerry Nolan was gone also and the groundskeeper was very helpful in helping us locating both markers. Johnny's grave was covered with stuff fans had brought...I added a pack of Lucky Strikes..
It was on that same visit that I found SO ALONE, a near mint original British pressing with the insert sleeve. The original Rolling Stone review was entitled 'The Promise Of Rock and Roll' and all these years later that still seems fitting. It's not only one of the great rock albums but it's an album that's in love with the idea of rock itself. It's because of this record that when I think of Johnny I don't think of drugs, his early death or any of that shit, I just think of the passion and humanity that he injects on SO ALONE'S 10 tracks. Humanity might seem an odd word to use in describing Johnny but like the line goes in "Great Big Kiss", "Bad but not evil". Hell, even the notorious Sex Pistols put down "London Boys" has a certain honor to it...like a kid talking trash on the playground because he's been insulted in front of his friends.
The album open with what sounds like a call to arms with Thunders storming version of the classic instrumental "Pipeline". What other 'punk' album would have worn it's heart on its sleeve so much? Johnny on this album right up to his final work COPYCATS would always, at heart, be that kid who grew up listening to rock in the 50s and 60s. One of the main things that always separated the New York punk scene from the British one was New York's willingness to tip their hat to what had inspired them. A lot of the British bands from the time seemed to take this holier than thou attitude that they were doing something new, when of course they had all been influenced by the same stuff the NY scene had. While Joe Strummer was singing 'No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones' Patti Smith was covering "Jailhouse Rock" and Richard Hell was doing "Ventilator Blues". It all works out though, and the influences that punk carried are more and more known. I think it might even get to the point where I can say no one was more punk than Elvis in '55 or The Who in '66 and not be looked at like I was crazy.
SO ALONE includes a mixture of covers, originals and a few older redone Dolls tracks and yet it feels completely cohesive. "You Can't Put Your Arm Around A Memory" is the most famous and probably rightly so, but listen to the way he sings David Johansen's incredible lyrics to "Subway Train" or that cover of the Otis Blackwell penned "Daddy Rolling Stone". It sounds like a greatest hits album to me and if the closing late period Dolls track "Downtown" doesn't make you miss what used to be New York City, nothing will.
A lot has been written about Johnny Thunders, highly recommended is Nina Antonia's bio 'In Cold Blood' (plus her work on The Dolls) and books like 'From The Velvets to The Voidoids' and 'Please Kill Me' are essential. For newcomers, I would recommend three things over any of those: The first Dolls album, SO ALONE and an essay Richard Hell wrote after Johnny died called 'Johnny Thunders and The Endless Party'. It's available in Hell's must have 'Hot and Cold' book. There isn't a finer piece of writing on a rocker that's ever been written. The most famous quote comes when Hell describes him as the 'the rock and roll Dean Martin of Heroin' which is of course dead on but it's his description of Thunders as a guy who wanted to be 'as good as Frank Sinatra and Elvis' that really gets me. After reading that I saw that guy staring at me from that isolated corner on the cover of SO ALONE differently. He was no longer that doomed rock and roll loser that everyone is so quick to cast him off as. He was just a kid who grew up wishing he could wear a great suit, play music that he loved so much and be as good as good ever got. Through the ten tracks on SO ALONE Johnny Thunders got his wish.

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A Vernon Sewell Double-Feature: The Blood Beast Terror and Burke & Hare

Among the most notable releases this month are two films making their Blu-ray debut from the late British cult filmmaker Vernon Sewell, courtesy of Kino Lorber’s Redemption label. These two films, The Blood Beast Terror and Burke & Hare, are given great upgrades on these new discs and they are an ideal introduction to Sewell’s most unique style.
The often-maligned Vernon Sewell was born in London on the fourth of July in 1903. Before passing away in Africa just before his 98th birthday in South Africa, Sewell directed nearly forty feature films as well as numerous British television series. Beginning with Morgenrot (a film which Sewell co-directed with Gustav Ucicky that was the first screened under Nazi-ruled Germany) in 1933 and ending with Burke & Hare in 1971, Sewell’s career was a varied one that saw him working in a large number of genres and with a great number of Britain’s most famous players.
While his early films often found him working mostly in dramas his 1947 comedic-chiller The Ghosts of Berkeley Square (a film whose tone predates the lewd Burke & Hare by more than two decades) saw a shift to more genre-oriented pictures. Sewell especially became aligned with action-packed thrillers throughout the fifties and early sixties, so he was a fairly natural choice to become one of Tigon British Film Productions go-to directors in the mid-sixties.
Tigon was founded by producer Tony Tenser in 1966, shortly after he had produced two of Roman Polanski’s great masterpieces (Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac). Looking to capitalize on the Hammer and Amicus empires, Tigon had just released two films (including Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers) before signing up Sewell to direct two pictures in 1968, the uber-strange Curse of the Crimson Altar (a cult favorite starring Barbara Steele and Christopher Lee) and The Blood Beast Terror (a film its star Peter Cushing would call the worst he ever made).
The Blood Beast Terror came to life via the pen of Peter Bryan, a less than prolific screenwriter who managed to deliver three of Hammer’s most distinctive features (The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Brides of Dracula and The Plague of the Zombies). The Blood Beast Terror was the last completed screenplay Bryan would come up with (his final two credits, Trog and Seven Deaths in Cat’s Eye, saw his source material being adapted) and while it doesn’t stand up to his great Hammer trio it’s an entertaining script and offers up a fairly fresh take on the classic monster film.
Cushing stars as Inspector Quennell, a detective working on a case involving a number of mutilated bodies that have turned up in a once peaceful British country-town. Quennell’s murder case takes an extremely odd turn when he meets up with a local entomologist named Mallinger (played nicely by Robert Flemyng), a man whose cracked experiments lie at the heart of the local bloody mystery.
The Blood Beast Terror has never been a particularly revered film, mostly due to how much Cushing publicly despised it, but it’s a better work than most have ever given it credit for. While it is undeniably silly, and it never fully comes together as a cohesive work of horror, The Blood Beast Terror benefits greatly from Sewell’s sometimes stylish (occasionally workmanlike) direction and a really great cast, which sees Cushing and Flemyng joined by Wanda Ventham, Glynn Edwards, Vanessa Howard and Roy Hudd.



Redemption’s new Blu-ray (and DVD) of The Blood Beast Terror looks really splendid and it is a major upgrade compared to their older release (put out as part of their Euroshock collection). Mastered from the original 35mm negative, this new release of The Blood Beast Terror really shows off cinematographer Stanley A. Long’s photography quite well and the new print allows us to at least enjoy the film as a visual treat during the sections where Bryan’s script drags. Long, a filmmaker in his own right, had also photographed Reeves’ The Sorcerers for Tigon and his work on The Blood Beast Terror is the most notable aspect of the film along with the performance of Peter Cushing, an artist who could be sublime even when working with material he hated.
Neither The Blood Beast Terror (released in The United States as The Vampire-Beast Craves Blood) nor The Curse of the Crimson Altar proved the hits Tigon so desperately needed in 1968 (the company would fold by the mid-seventies with Reeves' Witchfinder General, Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire and Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw being their greatest releases) and Sewell wouldn’t work with the company again. Sewell’s career was coming to a close as the sixties came to an end and it seemed like some work on the legendary British series The Avengers would mark his final chapter but then came the surprising Burke & Hare, easily one the best films Sewell ever signed his name to.



The West Port Murders occurred in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1827 and 1828. The serial killings were attributed to a couple of Irish immigrants named William Burke and William Hare, who sold the bodies of well over a dozen of their victims to local doctors for dissection and experimentation. While the real life case is among the most grizzly on film, Sewell’s film based on the two killers has much more in common with the bawdy British sex-comedies of the seventies rather than a typical serial-killer film. Burke & Hare is an incredibly strange work filled with as many exposed breasts and cheap-laughs as blood and dead-bodies. A tasteless but incredibly entertaining film, Burke & Hare finds the aging Sewell at his most confident and creative behind the camera and suggests that the best period of his career might have been ahead of him had he persevered.
Like The Blood Beast Terror, Burke & Hare benefits greatly from a talented cast and crew. Prolific cinematographer Desmond Dickinson really comes through for Sewell here giving the film’s more violent moments a dingy quality while the sexy boudoir sequences are positively opulent. Special mention must also go to the film’s title-track (from writer Norman Newell) that plays throughout the film. Sung by The Scaffold, this barroom blitz ditty takes the already strange Burke & Hare into the realm of the surreal and lends the film an extremely distinct flavor.
While the cast is filled with noteable British character actors (including Derren Nesbitt and Glynn Edwards), the films real stars are Francoise Pascal (looking absolutely stunning) and Yutte Stensgaard (seen here just after she made her unforgettable appearance in Hammer’s Lust for a Vampire). Burke & Hare really lights up when both Pascal and Stensgaard are on the screen, with a particularly crazy bedroom sequence providing the film perhaps its most memorable moment.
The bewitching Pascal, who would turn in one of the most moving performances of the seventies in Jean Rollin’s The Iron Rose about a year after Burke & Hare, is given an ‘introducing’ credit at the beginning of the film even though she had already appeared in almost half a dozen features by the 1971. Pascal is charming, funny and energetic and is the best thing about the film. The great lady is also featured on the disc’s supplementary material via a brief interview where she recalls working on the film and her fondness for Stensgaard, who would all but disappear from the screen after her appearance in Burke & Hare.



Some print damage is on hand throughout Redemption’s new Blu-ray for Burke & Hare but the film has never looked or sounded better and the Pascal interview (as well the featurette with Dr. Patricia MacCormack) make it among the most desirable releases of the year. More information on both Burke & Hare as well as The Blood Beast Terror can be found at Kino’s site and copies can be pre-ordered here at Amazon.