It wasn’t long after The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle was finally finished that another movie project came up. I went straight from a twisted cartoon version of the story of the band I had actually been in, to a movie about an imaginary band which turned into a real one. This would have been enough of a head-fuck even if I wasn’t going cold turkey in Canada at the time.
The second film was called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, and although there were loads of people involved in it who had been – or would become – really big, it was a weird low-budget thing. It felt like it was going to be shit at the time. It never really got a proper release, and for years no one had heard of it, but gradually a bit of a cult built up around it and if you watch it now you can see why, because it’s actually pretty funny.
The director, Lou Adler, was a famous old hippie who’d produced the band Spirit, and one of the producers, Joe Roth, would end up as head of Disney – though I don’t think he’d have talked about this film too much at that job interview, as it wasn’t the sort of thing Uncle Walt would’ve approved of. The reason me and Cookie got involved was that Caroline Coon was the music consultant. Her job was to give the film a punk feel. She was certainly an expert in that field.
The main story was about this teenage girl band – led by Diane Lane but with Laura Dern in it as well – who become really big by basically being a bit like Lady Gaga. They wanted two other bands as a contrast – one was a kind of worn-out hippie rock band led by Fee Waybill from The Tubes, and the other was an English punk band called The Looters, which was me, Cookie, Paul Simonon from The Clash and, on vocals, the actor Ray Winstone (who’d just done Scum and Quadrophenia). Ray didn’t have a clue what he was doing at first, but he did all right in the end. We showed him some moves and I think he got away with it.
We were filming in Vancouver, because they wanted a lot of rain. The plan was to make out it was set in Pennsylvania or some kind of industrial American place, and we had to get there about three or four weeks before the filming to record some of the music. I was so strung out when I arrived, I thought, ‘Oh, Canada, it’s just like America – I’ll be able to score, no problem.’ But I couldn’t get so much as a sniff. I’d been on heroin and methadone, so I was just out of my fucking tree with no sleep for about a month.
They had a couple of local punk bands in Vancouver – obviously it was a small-time scene but one of them, D.O.A., were actually pretty good. Once, when I was kicking, me and Cookie went to a club where some band or other was playing and there were all these long-haired cunts wearing flares and satin jackets. Talk about America being a year behind. In Canada it was more like a decade. I remember sitting in there shaking from the withdrawal, looking at these wankers with their beards and moustaches and just wanting to fucking die.
I didn’t really take to the Canadians as a people. They seemed a bit slow to me. If you asked them for something it would take them about a minute to catch on, but I suppose it was probably because I kept begging them for some heroin and none of them had any. I can’t have been very easy to be around then, and Cookie probably got the worst of it. But that trip wasn’t a total bust. The songs we wrote and recorded with Paul and Ray as The Looters would end up being the foundation of our next band, The Professionals, and once I’d come through the worst of the kick – they don’t call it Jonesing for nothing – I even started to have a pretty good time.
There were a lot of cool people in that cast and crew, and a fair amount of swapping of hotel rooms went on. Plus the place we were all staying in was the Denman, which was as close as Vancouver got to a rock ’n’ roll hotel, so all the other bands passing through on tour would stay there too. I got in the habit of going up Grouse Mountain, the big local ski resort, to have hot toddies at ten in the morning, and ended up becoming a kind of tour guide for visiting members of the rock and pop aristocracy. Once I took Gary Numan up Grouse Mountain (now there’s an enduring image) and I’ve got funny pictures somewhere of us messing about in the snow.
It was fun, and I suppose it paved the way for what I do on Jonesy’s Jukebox now – I’ve always had that kind of sociable vibe when it comes to other people in bands. There was a fair bit of free time, and playing the guitarist in an English punk band wasn’t too much of a stretch for me in acting terms; I’d been doing it ever since the Grundy show anyway. The only real nause was Diane Lane’s mum, who I remember being a classic nightmare stage mother. She may have been Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in October 1957, but that didn’t stop her being a major pain in the arse.
Me and Cookie had written some decent songs – ‘Kick Down the Doors’ was a good one – and we were still in demand at that time, so Virgin were happy to sign The Professionals, but by then I was in no shape to make the most of the opportunity. To say the heroin was clouding my judgement would be putting it mildly, and you can tell how not on the ball I was by the fact that we ended up having three different managers.
First there was Fachtna O’Kelly, this Irish bloke who used to manage The Boomtown Rats, then there was Dave Hill, who managed the Pretenders. They were both good guys who did their best for us, but I was becoming a bit of a lost cause by then. Finally came a big, menacing old-school promoter called John Curd who used to have a boat by the Albert Bridge. He was a mistake that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been on the dope, but when you’re as loaded as I was you kind of lose track of what your own best interests are.
Even Curdy – who wasn’t renowned as a philanthropist – had a go at straightening me out. He sent me to the Canary Islands with this other bloke as my minder to get me away from the dealers, and I did stop doing dope for a bit while I was there, but we were still doing blow and getting pissed, which kind of defeated the object. It was the same when The Professionals went out on the road. That was the only time I would stop doing heroin, but then I was just constantly, belligerently drunk, which wasn’t much of an improvement. That was my concept of being fucking sober at that point: getting off the dope. Heroin was the problem area. Doing blow, getting drunk, shagging everything that moved and stealing everything that didn’t was all fine. This was level 1 Steve Jones sobriety – I hadn’t yet grasped the concept that to be sober, you actually had to stop it all.
I had a lot more damage to get through before I’d be ready to do that: my work was not yet done. The short run of two and a bit years from John joining to the Pistols imploding was such a whirlwind that when it ended we were left reeling. Much as I’d been ready to say, ‘Fuck it, I’m out of here,’ in San Francisco in January ’78, it was like breaking up with a girlfriend. Even though it might be your choice not to be with someone, you’re still devastated they’re not there any more. I didn’t process that feeling in the best way – I dealt with it how I always dealt with things: by finding a way to blot them out.
You could say The Professionals were unlucky, but I guess we – or at least I – made our own luck. Alongside the contract troubles and the album that wasn’t as good as the demos, the worst thing that happened to us didn’t affect me directly. Somehow, and I can’t remember precisely how, but it probably had more to do with sex or drugs than with rock ’n’ roll, I managed not to be in the van when the rest of the band were in a really serious car accident in Minnesota on our first American tour in 1981. It took some of them months to get over that, but I was too wasted to notice.
Something else that happened in the USA that I wouldn’t technically be fully present for – and I will deny all knowledge if questioned about this under oath – was the lagging-on-Elvis’-grave incident a few months later. I did mention this on my radio show once, but kind of skipped around the topic, hoping no one was really listening. Even then I could hear them panicking in the control room, as it isn’t something I’ve talked about in public too much. So let us say hypothetically that such an incident might have taken place, while not making an absolute commitment to the fact that it did.
If it had happened, it would probably have been in the daytime, and the perpetrator would’ve definitely have had a drink. The time frame we’d be looking at would be the Tennessee leg of The Professionals’ US tour in 1982, and it would be important to emphasise that the Graceland of that time was very different to how it is now. It hadn’t been tarted up as a big tourist attraction, which is what happened when Elvis’ wife or the daughter took the place over and turned it into a money machine. You couldn’t go in the house – all you could do was go and look at the grave. In fact, the place was such a mess back then that you could think of the piss that might or might not have taken place as a protest about the facilities – maybe it was even the piss that changed everything.
Another factor to bear in mind in defence of the sexy pisser (assuming that he – or she – was sexy, which of course they were … probably) is that it’s good to urinate near a grave because it keeps the coyotes away. So maybe this frontier character only did it – if they did do it – to protect Elvis from coyotes. The reason I am being so discreet about all this is, first, because I do actually love Elvis and, second, because there is a bit of form when it comes to these liquid offerings of affection and respect from visiting British rock royalty to their American hosts being misunderstood. Remember Ozzy at the Alamo? If those angry Texans had only realised he was trying to protect that historic monument from chihuahuas by pissing on it, they’d have probably gone a lot easier on him.
The Professionals’ relationship with the guy who produced our album was up there with Ozzy and the people of the Lone Star state when it came to getting off on the wrong foot (although I think Ozzy actually missed his foot). His name was Nigel Gray, and he had a lot of hits with other people – The Police, the Pretenders, Siouxsie and the Banshees even – but not with us. Maybe the heroin gave him a good reason, and there was also an incident with me nicking some of 10cc’s guitars from his studio out in the country which probably didn’t help, but I just didn’t feel as if he liked us.
One night, Nigel drove me and Cookie home from his studio. He was going to drop us off at Paul’s house, but just as we were getting near Hammersmith, a cop car pulled us over and searched us. They found a bit of dope in the car that was obviously mine but at first I didn’t want to own up to it. When the police made it clear they were gonna do someone for it, and Nigel was pretty upfront about not wanting that someone to be him, I put my hand up and got nicked. Between that time and the case coming to court, I fucked off to America and didn’t come back, so I was never found guilty. But the charge really naused up my visa, so it was touch and go for a while whether I was going to be allowed back to the US.
Fuck knows what would’ve happened if I’d had to stay in the UK. The way I was heading at that time, I don’t think I’d be alive now, let alone writing my autobiography as LA’s best-loved rock ’n’ roll punk radio personality. The funny part of it was that I always resented Nigel for what happened. For a long time I even harboured a crazy suspicion that he’d maybe had something to do with us getting pulled over that night, which would have been a real shit-cunt thing for him to do. I just had a feeling that he had some connection to the law – like he’d been a copper, or his dad had, or something. It was only when I was thinking about this book that I realised what this law enforcement connection was. Nigel hadn’t been an informer for The Police, but he had produced them.
Some people might say that’s reason enough to be suspicious of him, but Sting and the boys did have some good tunes. Of course there were no mobile phones then, so how could he have set us up from the motor he was giving us a ride home in? I suppose this just shows how far someone who is taking heroin will go not to face up to their own part in anything bad that happens to them.
By the time we left England for what turned out to be The Professionals’ last US tour, I had bigger problems than a bullshit possession charge hanging over me. The only question in my head at that time was, ‘Where can I get some dope from?’ In pursuit of – always temporary – answers to that question, I had sold just about everything I owned. Canfield Gardens had been stripped pretty much bare by my relentless quest for drug money, and I even had to give up my guitar and amp to John Curd to pay a debt he’d come up with. It’s never a good sign for a musician when your manager is taking your instruments off you. One of the last things I did before leaving for the US in 1982 was playing on ‘Dancing With Myself’ at Air Studios in Oxford Street with my old Bromley Contingent mate Billy Idol. He was heading to America too, but he was going to be a lot bigger there in the Eighties than I was.
If I was to try and add up my reasons for staying in England, it wouldn’t take me very many fingers. In musical terms, me and Cookie were totally surplus to requirements by then. I went down to the Blitz club a couple of times – where all the New Romantic kids who were into dressing up used to go – and it just felt like punk was old news. No one gave a shit whether we were there or not. The charts were full of Kajagoogoo music. If not quite them yet, it was all Adam Ant and Big Country and The Human League.
I get that the world changes and people move on; I think I got that even then. But now even my old friends were turning against me. The bad feeling Jimmy Macken had (understandably) felt about not being a part of the Pistols had started to come out in ways that turned things ugly between us. Sometimes it feels like the flipside of that working-class attitude to success is always resentment. Cookie had been doing his best to hold the whole Professionals thing together against the odds, but even he was getting fed up with me. And if there’s a clearer way of showing that your rock ’n’ roll race is kind of run for the moment than (possibly) pissing on the King’s lasting resting place, then I for one don’t know what it is. The way I was going, things could have been a lot worse – at least I didn’t shit on it.