No Matter What I Do

The Black Cat screened End of the Century last night so I went to see da Brudders. This post, though, is about the Heartbreakers.

There’s a moment in the film where Roberta Bayley and the other CBGB royalty talk about how the band Dee Dee really wanted to be in was the Heartbreakers — another gang, sure, but this one completely self-destructive and enabling in all the ways Dee Dee truly was and the Ramones, with Johnny enforcing discipline, truly weren’t. (Interestingly, Dee Dee equivocates in the film, as it appears he often did when pressed.) It got me thinking about the Ramones recording of "Chinese Rocks": flat and powerless, played too fast in order to overcompensate — or, perhaps, to undermine Dee Dee’s love/hate ode to heroin. The Heartbreakers’ version is one of the greatest songs in the history of rock and roll. 

And it’s not even the Heartbreakers’ best statement of intent. "Born To Lose," sure, or "One-Track Mind" — which Walter Lure swears, in the LAMF re-release liner notes, isn’t about heroin, but junkies are liars — or their brilliant cover of "Do You Love Me" probably are. But the greatest single revealing moment about what they truly are comes in a tossed-off lyric to a tossed off song on side 2 of LAMF called "I Love You." The song is completely saccharine and so formulaic it’s easy to stop paying attention by the time Johnny Thunders sings, in the chorus, "Oh baby I love you/no matter what I do." Wait, no matter what I do? 

Usually, of course, that style of lyric is a confession of powerlessness in the face of love: baby I love you no matter what you do I’ll endure anything just come back to me. For Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, it’s a confession of powerlessness in the face of addiction. And it’s an alibi: he knows he did some bad shit but baby I love you I know I fucked up but I don’t care about her and can I get five dollars. The more you think about it, the more chilling and dismal it gets.

The only people who romanticize junkies are obnoxious dilettantes who’ve never been addicts or have never been around addicts. But even knowing that, that lyric really shows the ways in which the Heartbreakers will break your heart.