DOA: The Full Story of the Sex Pistols Tour/Punk documentary
Chapter One: Meeting Tom Forcade
Okay, it’s time to tell the whole story about how I went on the 1978 US Sex Pistols tour, worked on the DOA: A Rite of Passage film, had the grand adventure of a lifetime and somehow lived through the many disasters that took place from beginning to end.
Let any Sex Pistols fanatics (or any punk rock fans) about this newsletter so they can read the whole story. Watch Out! Lots of Rare PUNK Stuff is Coming! (I project this to be at least 15 chapters!
Meeting Tom Forcade
To read a full-length biography I wrote about Forcade, visit this link:
https://hightimes.com/culture/high-times-greats-life-high-times-tom-forcade/
July 1976: I was doing some lettering at the large shipping desk left over from A&A Trucking located in the middle of the Punk Dump. (The former tenants at 356 10th Avenue left behind a lot of office furniture). Suddenly some guy burst through the front door, strode over to the table, took a seat, and put his cowboy boots on the table in front of me. As I remember, he was dressed in an impeccable white, three piece suit. He definitely got my attention, and I gave the guy a dirty look.
“I’m going to make you rich and famous.” He calmly stated.
As Ged Dunn Jr. (publisher and co-founder of PUNK magazine) and Eddie “Legs” McNeil (Resident Punk) gathered around, Tom went into a lengthy spiel, describing how incredibly successful High Times magazine was. I don’t remember anyone interrupting him. Also, I didn’t learn about his twisted history in the hippie counterculture until many years later.
At the end of the meeting, Tom handed a crisp $100 bill to each of us. This would be like receiving $1,000 in today’s money, and more than any of us had seen for a while. Of course, Eddie and I spent our money in one night on a dinner at Pete’s Tavern (so much fun!). Ged spent his at Barney’s, the late, lamented men’s store.
On August 11, Tom took Ged and I to My Father’s Place on Long Island to see The Dictators. A stretch limousine picked me up at the Dump, then drove a few miles away to pick up Ged. He always said that this was the greatest moment of his time at PUNK: Ged exited the Playboy Club after finishing up a meeting with Joe Armstrong, the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine.
Going to see the Dictators on Long Island was quite the trip—I had never been in a limo before. When Tom passed around a joint, I got super-stoned right away and could barely speak the rest of the night. (I rarely smoked pot back then. The weird thing about Tom was that he held the joint like a cigarette, and rarely passed it. Outside the club there was a lot of excitement: “Who’s in the limo?”
The Dictators were great, as always. By the end of the night, after a few pitchers of beer, Tom was loudly banging the glass pitcher on the table—I was sure he was going to break it.! (Probably paranoid after all that marijuana!)
After the show we drove back to Tom’s large, floor-through loft on University Place (just below Bleecker Street, a few blocks west of CBGB). We sat down on his couch and he played the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, their live debut album, on the huge speakers he had “liberated” from an air-raid station a few years earlier. This was punk rock in 1976! The only other LPs that had been released until then were Patti Smith’s Horses and the first Dictators and Ramones albums (besides The Stooges, Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, etc.). In a way, the MC5 started it all, since they got the Stooges, their “little brother band, signed to their first record deal. The MC5 paid more dues for being outrageous, crazed, radical and changed music more than any 1980s west coast pop-punk bands. It wasn’t “proto-punk” (a stupid term that should be banished from our vocabulary). If the MC5 weren’t the real thing, no one was.
Rob Tyner’s rant while introducing “Motor City Is Burning”:
“Brothers and sisters, I wanna tell you something, I hear a lot of talk by a lot of rich honkies sittin’ on a lot of money, telling’ me they’re high society. Well, I’ll let you know somethin’: If you ask me, THIS is the real high society!” (Meaning the audience, of course.)
While he continued to smoke, Tom explained how that quote was the inspiration to come up with the name High Times. (It was billed as “The Magazine of High Society”). Looking back, I think maybe he was trying to impress us with his punk rock credentials. Then again, maybe he just felt like he was among fellow punk rockers! Tom didn’t like hippies very much.
Although I was not a reader of his magazine, Forcade was a fanatic for PUNK magazine. In fact, he told me more than once that he wished he had started PUNK, and at one point tried to destroy High Times, taking an axe to the phone switchboard and firing everyone. We didn’t know it happened at the time, but afterwards he met with us at a bar in the West Village. Tom had a long, private talk with Ged Dunn Jr., who sadly took the secret of what Tom revealed about the incident with him to the grave.
The Legend of Nick Detroit and the High Times/PUNK magazine supplement
Soon after, Tom and Ged came up with their plan to relaunch PUNK magazine. It called for an 8-page, full color supplement in High Times as well as a new issue… Within just a few weeks! The burden for everything as usual fell on me. We had nothing in the pipeline for a new issue. I wasn’t happy. I left the office with Eddie, who pitched his idea to do a detective photo comic as a continuing story. He already had Richard Hell lined up to play the lead character.
A few months earlier, Richard and Lisa Robinson had shown me a copy of Artchie Strips, a photo comic book published in 1970 that starred Jane Fonda, The Rolling Stones, Brigid Berlin and other Warhol scenesters such as Gerard Malanga and Candy Darling. (This is a valuable collector item now, worth around $10,000). Photo comics are a rare thing, but one with so many celebrities was utterly amazing!
Since I’ve always had a fascination for photo comics, this had a huge impression on me and so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. “Let’s not run it as a serial,” I said to Eddie. “Let’s do it—as the entire magazine!
This made my life easier, since now all I had to do (aside from laying out and lettering Nick Detroit) was produce 8 pages of color material for the first time in my life. (Black and white is a lot easier, believe you me!)
Meanwhile Roberta and Legs set up photo shoots with Debbie Harry, Anya Phillips, David Johansen, Helen Wheels, Bob Quine, Robert Romagnoli and a long list of people from the CBGB scene.
Don’t ask me how, but we somehow traveled to Cheshire, Connecticut (where it all began for Ged, Eddie and I) for an interview. (I am leaving out two pages due to copyright issues). We also shot a photo comic with Blondie, and got Nick Detroit finished in time to go to Wilmington, Delaware for the First Annual World Sleaze Convention on Labor Day weekend. It’s hard to believe that we were able to get so much done in just a few weeks. Roberta Bayley was the workhorse for the issue, shooting and printing out almost all of the photographs and putting up with Eddie/Legs, who was acted like a dictatorial Hollywood director at times.
The Blondie fumetti came out great. They were soon signed to Private Stock for their first album. And Forcade became a huge fan of the band (especially Debbie) and hired famed fashion photographer to shoot her for a cover story!
I didn’t like the High Times/PUNK mini-issue at the time. It was uncomfortable trying to explain punk rock to a readership that I already knew was hostile to rock ’n’ roll music and leather jackets. But in retrospect (except for the interview with Legs), maybe it’s not so bad. What do you think? Can you leave a comment below and let me know? And maybe leave a “like”? Thanks!
LINK to the John Holmstrom podcast:
And I received this email:
“Been a big fan without really knowing you as the source. are any of the images on tees for sale? I know soooooo many folks who would jump in. — Josh in Brooklyn.
Yes, you can buy John Holmstrom t-shirts, and please do! I need the money—putting together this newsletter is becoming a. lot of work.
https://www.wornfree.com/search?type=products&q=John%20Holmstrom*
My current favorite (which will be worn during an upcoming TV episode in New Zealand):
I can't remember where that came from... So long ago...
And thanks!
I like that caption for the photo of Legs: “He's a poet and a profit.” I assume it’s a Taxi Driver reference since a Kris Kristofferson reference back then would have been inappropriate.