Bob Gruen
Legendary rock photographer and chronicler of New York, interviewed at his studio in the West Village in 1989. Very helpful and forthcoming, with a sharp eye. Gruen was involved with the Sex Pistols at two crucial points in their career, when he visited London in early autumn 1976 and joined the American Tour party in January 1978. He has published several books of his photography, including Rockers, The Clash, and John Lennon: the New York Years, as well a great DVD of his New York Dolls footage, All Dolled Up. For more, including an interview with Carlo McCormick, go to his web site.
How had you got into photography, Bob? Are you a New York native?
I was born in New York, and my mother’s hobby was photography… so I was in the darkroom as an infant, practically. I liked it, and one thing led to another, I took pictures of my friends and my friends ended up as musicians, then publicists and managers started asking me to do pictures. This was 69/70, the early people were Ike and Tina Turner, that led to other things. I saw Iggy at the Fillmore, that was the first time I saw the Stooges.
They were outrageous, he covered himself with peanut butter, oil and glitter. There was a famous picture of him at the time, where he had walked off the stage over the audience who was holding him up. He tried it in New York and he stepped off the stage and just hit the fucking floor, eight feet down. Everybody’s like, don’t step on me, man. All backing up and looking at this jerk on the floor.
I did Elton John, John and Yoko later about ’72. I was already doing videotapes by the time I met the Dolls, it was the publicist for the Elephant’s Memory that introduced me to the Dolls. I went down to the Mercer Arts Center, walked upstairs, I saw boys with makeup and I left. Some guy walked by me with like, eyeshadow and lipstick and I went, no-o-o-oo.
But Tony said I gotta come back, so I went back, it was every wednesday night or something… with Elephants Memory I was introduced to the Hell’s Angels down 3rd Street, a real macho kind of crowd. Boys in makeup was not part of my scene. But I came back, and there was videos set up, it was supposed to be avant garde, I thought it was very repetitious, noise on TV. There was a boutique in one room where you could buy weird clothes, and there was a bar in the middle and a show room in the back there.
I was standing down by the bar cos I thought the band was going to play there, and it never happened, an hour went by and finally I went up to the back, and I think I saw the end of Wayne County’s show, which was a guy retching in a toilet bowl, and pulling out what appeared to be shit. He had peanut butter in the toilet bowl, and he would reach into the toilet bowl and pull out this brown stuff and stick it in his mouth. So I left. This was not something I was into, but Tony says, you gotta see this band.
So I came back again and there was the sexiest girls I’ve ever seen, wearing their underwear, not even clothes. I notice a door in the front part, and people coming in and out, and this is the third time I’m here waiting for the band to come on, and I thought this door was the mens’ room, so I go through. There’s a wall full of people up on the left, a stage on the right, its kind of Fellini-esque, a stage against this really steep wall, and then a stage on the right that had more people standing around onstage than were sitting in the audience.
In the middle of this crowd was this band, going nuts. Wearing weird clothes; people said the Dolls used to dress like girls, but I didn’t know any girls that dressed like that. They were wearing the oddest assortment of stuff. And they were great, the music was real rock’n'roll. I remember coming back at New Years Eve to Mercer, and that time I was with the Elephants Memory horn player and drummer, and I remember the horn player being introduced to Arthur, who came by with his glitter stockings and his yellow plastic tutu and yellow engineer boots up his legs.
I was with these macho guys in leather, you know, who carried knives and drank beer? Arthur goes up and I introduce them and Arthur goes on and Stan says, what the fuck was that? and I tell him, that was the bass player, man. Stan ended up being the horn player on Human Being, he later played on their albums, he loves those guys. But that first night it was such a shock to see anybody dressed like that.
Why did the Dolls not happen?
They were on drugs. At the time, it didn’t seem so bad, everybody was. Or so it seemed. To be cool, in a band, you were supposed to be drunk, supposed to be on drugs. But the fact is they would never play on time, they would show up two or three hours late and towards the end, you booked a gig for eleven o’clock and at three in the morning the band hasn’t even gotten there. You don’t get any more bookings, because the club owners who were also on drugs were not on as much drugs. The record company in Chicago was not on any drugs. They had no idea what was going on.
I made a video tape one time, in a dressing room at Max’s to send to Chicago. They wanted to give a pep talk and say hello to their record company, and it was a novel idea, to make a video in the spot and send it to the company. The company had to rent a screening room, so there’s eight guys in Chicago wearing suits and ties at a screening, watching these drunken lunatics, no-one with their shirts on, women all over the room, cursing… we thought it was funny. They were shocked. They couldn’t believe they were associated with people like this. It really didn’t work.
Did you meet Malcolm when he came over in ’73?
I met him at the end of the Dolls which was winter of ’74-75. The Dolls were having a hard time. He came over to show clothes, and Marty Thau had dropped out of the Dolls and they were in between being world famous and having no management. They were on the cover of all the magazines but nobody would book them, it would turn into a disaster. The fans loved it but the clubs didn’t.
The record company hated them, Steve Leber didn’t know what to do with them. So Malcolm came in and took over, booked some shows for them, the Hippodrome show, the manifesto. There were some pictures I’d taken of them and he went and made some colour xeroxes of them. He’d made a bunch of them and put them up at the club and people took them. They went to Florida a week or so after that show.
Jerry’s mother owned a motel and they played there, that was their last gig, at this motel in Florida. When they broke up, Jerry and Johnny got on a plane back to New York to cop, and David had said, if you leave now, there’s going to be no band, so they left and he left and Syl and Arthur and Malcolm were left there. Syl and Malcolm took the station wagon and left Arthur with the equipment which he sold, some there, flew to California and started a band with a young kid called Blackie Lawless.
Syl and Malcolm ended up with the rented car. So they headed for New Orleans to pick up some musicians there for a new band, cos Syl still wanted to play, to continue the idea of the Dolls, as an alternative music. They were listening to serious country music down there in America, and in order to get across the country they bought army uniforms, so they would look like two guys off an army base, so they wouldn’t get arrested for being weirdos, and they drove to New Orleans.
They bought a lot of records, listened to the country music a lot. I don’t think they found their musicians, cos they came back to New York and Malcolm sold his samples. The idea was that Malcolm would go back to England and get a group together and Syl would go over and teach them to play and he would be the leader. That took longer than expected, and a trip to Japan came up with Johansen, so Syl went with David to Japan and Malcolm went and formed the other group.
I used to get the Melody Maker and NME and Johansen used to come over a lot, and David read this great little paragraph which was the first review of the Sex Pistols. We couldn’t believe the name. Back then that was an incredibly dirty word. It was saying sex in public, with macho: pistol. It was verging on obscene, but since nobody had ever said it before, it was like a new obscene word. All the bad words had been defined. But this was a new obscenity…
Did Malcolm actually manage them? David disputes this.
Yes, well, he didn’t manage the band, although he did book a couple of shows. But the band broke up before his management decisions were acted on. He could have been manager but there was no group left. They were falling apart, he’d book shows and there was no band to back it up. I credit Malcolm with saving their lives: he put Arthur in the hospital, and Johnny on a program – introduced him to the idea of a program as an alternative to drugs, anyway…
How did the Communist idea go down?
That was another thing that didn’t work in their favour. Lisa Robinson was a big supporter of the Dolls but I was there when Clive Davis told her that if you wanted friends uptown and work in the music business, you don’t go round admitting that you see the New York Dolls and the CBGBs scene. Seeing the New York Dolls was equivalent to saying you had friends that were homosexual. It was not popular in mainstream society.
The fact that the Dolls wore lipstick connotated homosexual, which they weren’t. There was a funny line which Bowie later picked up where somebody asked Johansen if he was bisexual, and he said no, man, I’m tri-sexual, I’ll try anything. This was their attitude, but they were not gay. It turned out later that the Dolls were the most macho men I knew. Behind the soft pose, they were glamorous so the girls would like them, they were putting on makeup because these young beautiful girls liked it.
Were there any gay groups in that scene?
Wayne [County], but even then it wasn’t gay. The word had not come up yet. It was not openly admitted. The only gay person who actually played with the Dolls was Chris Robison, who made a record called It’s Not Unkind To Love Your Own Kind. He ended up playing piano with David on the tour of Japan, in the Dollettes. He was the first openly gay person who admitted and celebrated it.
When did the whole Dolls scene die and the CBGBs thing take over?
The Dolls finished in early ’75. The last shows were at the Hippodrome, then they went to Florida and that was the end. The CBGBs scene was starting up around the same time, Patti Smith and Television were the first ones there. The Dolls never played there, the Dolls were over by then. Johansen always played at Max’s and there was a rivalry going on there. Since they fed him and gave him free booze every night and it was a block from his house, he chose Max’s.
Was the CBGBs scene very different?
I don’t think so, not until much later. It seemed like a natural extension. It was the same people and it was tuesday instead of thursday. The Dolls all went there, but individually, cos there was no band left. Johnny started his band with Richard Hell, Richard was in Television and they wouldn’t let him do his own material. He wrote Blank Generation with Television, I remember seeing it the first time, and David told him to leave out the word ‘blank’. The first time we saw it was down CBGBs.
Were they good?
Richard Robinson loved the band, someone described them as musicians who went to college. So that they made noise with lyrics rather than just noise. I was never a fan of the Deep Meaning, I’m more into the rock’n'roll high school drop out school. I don’t need meaning late at night. The Dolls were different, they had deep meaning, but in very simple language.
Did you hear about the band that Malcolm was putting together before you read the review? Did he keep in touch with anybody?
Not with me nor with David. We found out through the newspapers. Syl was supposed to go and he didn’t, and it was a year later when I went over, and Syl said, ask Malcolm what he did with my piano and guitar and send me the money he owes me. When I showed him the pictures of the group, he said, that’s my guitar!
How did you get to shoot the Sex Pistols?
I was working for the Bay City Rollers when they came to New York. I made a lot of money out of those pictures. My son, who was three years old was in Paris, and I got it into my head to go to Europe, I’d never been yet. So I went to Paris, spent a week there, met some magazines and flew to London. The only person I knew in London was Malcolm. so I called and said, what’s going on? He took me to Club Louise, and he told me about the band and said, take some pictures of them. It was October ’76.
What was your impression of the scene?
I thought they were really odd, as people. That girl, Sue Catwoman, things happened fast. In the week I was there, her hair was combed back and black on the sides and blonde on the top. Then a couple of days later shed cut the whole top into a crew cut, and the sides were combed up like wings. Yet they seemed just like normal people. That guy Marco said, gee, I wish I had a band. The attention in the room seemed to be more on the Sex Pistols and the guys in the Clash. I said to him, well it seems pretty easy, everybody’s doing it, just do it.
I didn’t see the Sex Pistols, they didn’t have a gig, but they played an audition, they liked Roxy magazine and Creem, and I did a lot of pictures for those two magazines, and because I’d worked with John and Yoko. The one person they respected was John Lennon.So they talked to me, that’s how I had access.
I went to Denmark Street, the rehearsal studio and loft, and it had taken a couple of days to meet Johnny, he was home resting his throat, he’d just been diagnosed with polyps on his throat, he couldn’t sing for a while cos he’d been screaming so much at gigs, and when we got to the loft I said, how about if I take pictures of you rehearsing? and Johnny said, I can’t sing, and I said, you don’t have to, this is a photograph, you don’t have to turn on your amps even.
But they weren’t into that posing idea. They said, we’ll just play and you can take some pictures. So they played, and he started singing, and it was strange: they had this reputation for being odd and outrageous, and they started playing and the first song they did was Substitute. And I’m a Who fan, and I’m thinking, well, what’s so weird about this? This is the music I’ve always loved, and they did it really well. I didn’t think it was outrageous. On the tour later, we’d be on the bus listening to Don Letts’ reggae tapes, it would be a very mellow scene and we’d get to some town and they would open the door and there would be four TV cameras. The Sex Pistols, the weirdest group in the world has just arrived, somebody would spit at them, and that was the evening news. What happened?
Somebody spat at the guys, told them to go away? This is politics? This is what’s shocking everybody? I couldn’t understand why everybody found them so interesting. They say it was Malcolm packaging it, but I saw Malcolm on the side, watching it all with the same kind of amusement. It didn’t seem to me that he was any Svengali who created this. He didn’t seem to be creating anything, it just seemed to be happening, and he was standing there laughing. It wasn’t like he was in a hotel room making things up. He wasn’t calling up the newspapers with false stories or anything. He threw a party on a boat, they played very loud and everybody got arrested, and he stood there and watched. It was hard to place what he actually did to make it happen.
Fast forward eighteen months. How did you actually get onto the Sex Pistols American tour?
I went to the opening gig. By then they were big news over here, they’d picked up notoriety. All the press was there in Atlanta. I just had my camera bag and the clothes I stood up in, I was going back the next day to New York. Then in the parking lot saying to Malcolm too bad I can’t come with you, I’ll see you around, and he says, that’s right, the bus only holds twelve and we’ve got… he counts them up… eleven. There’s room on the bus, Bob, why don’t you come along?
I was standing in front of Joe Stevens, and the bus held twelve, and there was room for me on the bus. I was on the bus and the next hotel, they’d called up the record company and they agreed to pay my hotel rooms. That was it. The only mistake was they were talking about video equipment, and I said, round the corner for $800 we could buy a 8mm camera, and they didn’t do it.
What were they like in Atlanta? Did they play well?
It was very chaotic, louder and faster than before. I liked them better in London. They didn’t play as well with Sid as with Glen. By the time I saw them with Sid, the show was the thing, not the music. It was a spectacle: Johnny spitting, people spitting back. Him cursing them out, insulting them.
This picture of Sid covered in blood is from Randy’s Rodeo, these girls had driven in from LA. These were the ones that took Sid off at the end of the tour and gave him drugs. Anyway, they showed up in Dallas, down at the front, and Sid was talking to this girl and he looked up at me, and there was blood pouring out of his mouth. I thought he’d put a blood capsule in his mouth. But no, he was bleeding.
The girl had motioned him to come over, and he had leaned towards her, and she smacked him in the mouth, and he loved it, he thought this was personal contact. He spat the blood at her, and she spit it back, and for a few minutes they were spitting blood at each other, and meanwhile he’s not playing a lot. The band is going, hey Sid?
Then he would hit the bass a few times. The blood has dried up, and he takes a beer bottle off the amp, cracks it open on the side of the amp and scrapes the glass across his chest, to make cuts. Then Noel Monk, the leader of the bodyguards runs out and grabs his arm, takes the bottle off of him. Then he goes to play again. When he’d hit the amp, he’d turned off the amp and didn’t even know it. He wasn’t paying any attention to the music.
There was that line at the end in San Francisco, Did you ever get the feeling you’re being cheated? I was surprised he was being that honest and open. The band was terrible, the place was full, and I’d never seen anyone admit something like that. Sid was out of it, it was like the end of the Dolls when Arthur was out of it, and the roadies would be behind the amp, playing, and Arthur would be standing there on stage, with a bass. I saw shows where Arthur, who was supposed to be playing bass, would go behind the amp and throw up. The music tends to lax if people aren’t playing at all.
How did he get the scar on the arm?
That was the second night of the tour. He went to some girl’s house and Noel went with him, and Sid took 500mg of something strong, and he asks to see Noel’s knife. Noel gives him the knife, and he wants to see how deep a cut he could make, and he makes a half inch deep gash in his arm. The bodyguard flips out, takes him to the hospital. It isn’t hurting him, cos he’s on the drug, and there was something about him being really obnoxious and dirty, and the hospital wouldn’t deal with him. The wound was too deep to sew up, or something, and they ended up just cleaning it and sending him away without even a bandage.
What were the others doing?
Paul and Steve would take the plane to get away from the obnoxious bodyguards. Malcolm was flying too. I was on the bus, cos nobody was paying for my plane ticket. Johnny was on the bus because of his sinuses, and Sid because it was the easiest thing to do.
Sid was never obnoxious to me after I bought him some dope. We would sit on the bus talking. I thought the vicious part was a joke, cos the guy was such a pansy. He was a sweetheart. He talked a lot about Nancy, he wanted to know was she really a call girl in America, and I said, well, yeah. Why lie? Nancy was another strange one, a nice person, a sort of rock’n'roll nurse. But she was so ugly that everybody treated her mean and she had to be mean back. She was a very horrible looking person.
On the tour, Sid didn’t have any drugs, he became infantile. Since the band and the roadies would take care of him, to the extent that these two guys filled a tub, put him in the tub, washed him like a baby… if someone’s going to treat you like a baby, you’ll regress. As long as people were going to take care of him, he let them.
What was Johnny like on the bus?
Pretty quiet. The bus was pretty quiet: just these ex-Green Berets talking about their macho life, Sid talking about Nancy, Johnny listening to his reggae tapes and looking out the window. It was really boring on the bus, actually. You’d almost forget there was something weird going on until the door would open and there would be four TV cameras. Outside of the bus it was like a zoo.
After the knife incident, the roadies were really nervous about Sid. Noel Monk handcuffed himself to Sid at one point, so Sid had to stay next to him for a whole day. They wouldn’t let him out of their sight cos when they did, in Memphis, the guys from High Times magazine took him down to their room and gave him dope and we’re out in the parking lot waiting to go to the gig, and when they found him twenty minutes later, he was high, and they were on the way to a gig.
That was Tom Forcade?
Yeah, he followed the bus in a sports car. He was just curious, and he was really interested in a band that was into anarchy and taking drugs, and would admit it. They wanted to party with Sid, give him drugs and see what would happen.
The band had to eat on the bus, the roadies they wouldn’t let the band interact at all with Americans, getting in trouble. I thought, what trouble can they have in a cafe? One night we stopped at three in the morning and all the guards were sleeping, and I said, come on, let’s get a burger. We go into the place, order a burger and one of the roadies comes in, going, what are you doing? We’re getting a burger, what’s the big deal? He was freaked out that Sid was off the bus, in public.
It’s three in the morning. Some cowboy is sitting there with his wife and kid, and they start a conversation with Sid, Sid sits down at their table, and he’s got his steak and scrambled eggs, and the guy says Sid Vicious? If you’re so tough, can you do this? And the cowboy sticks his cigarette in the palm of his hand, flicks the ashes around. Sid is eating, and he says, yeah, and he cuts his hand as he’s eating, and the blood drips onto his plate with the steak and he keeps eating.
The guy grabs his wife and kid and goes screaming out of the restaurant about how weird Sid was. I thought, well, you started it man. But it was a lesson to me that even in the least likely circumstances, something odd would happen with these guys. Nobody stubbed cigarettes out in their hands in front of me, you know?
When those girls showed up in Texas they spraypainted the whole bus. They’re the ones who wrote Anarchy and Sex Pistols in America and stuff, and We’re So Pretty – the bus driver got down there in the morning and flipped out. I thought it was great, it looked terrific. Malcolm didn’t mastermind those kind of things.
So we were driving through America with his label all over us, until the guy found something in a store in Nevada that took the paint off. He was afraid. In Oklahoma he drove for eighteen hours straight or something, he didn’t want to stop somewhere and have another night with the band, so he stayed awake and drove rather than stop and have another adventure.
In Oklahoma we pulled into this truck stop, and there was a guy there with a fifteen year old daughter. A real Okie kind of American, golly, gee, wow, you know. We saw you guys on TV. As we were getting back on the bus, he said, would you take my daughter with you? I remember the scene of this father wanting his child to have a shot at something famous. I looked at him and thought, man, you gotta be kidding!
Boogie starts telling him something about the insurance regulations not allowing it… this guy was saying, take my daughter, let her see a little bit of the world. I was amazed. Just because these guys had been on TV, this guy wanted his daughter to have some connection with it…
The whole trip sounds very weird.
It was, although as I say, to be there most of the time was boring. The day was not a lot different from other bands. There was four hours sitting on the bus before we met that guy and his daughter, and another three hours afterwards. That was the highlight, that thirty second interchange.
What was John doing most of the time?
He was getting on politely, pleasantly with Sid. They didn’t yuk it up a lot, but it was alright. I heard a funny thing later from Joe Stevens. Sid really liked my engineer boots from New York, and while I was sleeping, Sid took out a big hunting knife and held it to my throat and said to Johnny and Joe, if I kill him, I could have his boots, and Johnny didn’t say anything, he just watched him, to see what he would do. Sid changed his mind, apparently, and didn’t kill me. But when I woke up, he was wearing the boots.
Were you surprised when they split up?
Yeah. I didn’t understand what they were going to Brazil for, and meeting the Great Train Robber. I didn’t know much about Ronnie Biggs, being American. I couldn’t understand why a band wanted to go and hang out with a criminal in the first place. I came home and spent the next two days developing twenty five or thirty rolls of film, and I had this enormous story ready to go out, it was going all over the world, three or four pages in Rolling Stone, and I met Johnny at CBGBs.
We were all given these shirts saying “I Survived The Sex Pistols Tour”. Johnny was wearing his, but underneath he had written, “but the band didn’t”. He shows me the shirt and says, that’s the story, the band broke up. I remember these words echoing in my head, I had spent two weeks working for free, on spec, I spent hundreds of dollars, this big box of pictures at home waiting to go out, and he tells me the fucking band broke up. Whaddya mean? I wanted to kill the guy.
After that everyone wanted to run one picture instead of twelve, if they ran anything. They don’t run stories on bands that break up. Now, of course, people are writing books about it, but at the time it seemed to be over.