Walter Lure - Special Interview
By Chris Rockson
Walter
Lure former guitarist in the Heartbreakers and now The Waldo's, talks
about life, drugs, guitars and Wall Street.
I caught up with Walter and asked him things I've always wanted
to know about his time with the best rock n roll band
in the world, and to find out what's keeping him busy these days.
Enjoy !
: Hi Walter! Since I last spoke with you, I have had quite a lot of
interest from the readers,
asking about what you're up to these days. I know you play with
the Waldo's in NYC quite often,
do you wanna expand a little for us?
There have been several versions mostly because people keep on dying when they play with me in a band -
this also goes for the Heartbreakers. These days it's mostly natural causes that kill them as opposed to the
unnatural ones in the earlier years if you can call any death unnatural. The NYC music scene has evolved
from being pretty lively in the '90's into a morass of sludge today. There has been a revival of sorts in the
last year or 2 that included gigs as CBGB's and Continental shut down ( more like funeral gigs) and more
people seem to be interested in that era of Punk origins i.e. the 70's and 80's.
I also have had a day job for the last 24 years or so working at a few Wall Street Firms in various operations
areas whose functions are too arcane to explain here in a punk family magazine. I imagine you guys in the
UK have noticed lots of changes in and about London as all that money has migrated there from all over the
world.
It can get tiresome at times but it does pay the bills quite nicely and can even get close to a low level of
excitement in certain rare situations.
as well as the disposal of a few bad habits but it worked out.
anything new since then apart from the 2007 Live in Berlin CD I'm working on now that should be released in
the coming months. ( more about that later).
You recently played some shows over here in Europe. Who organised the
tour, where did you play and what was
it like coming back after the Heartbreakers last played over here
in the 80's?W:
It
was a brief 2 week tour thru France and Germany - mostly small clubs
but one fairly large hall in Nimes.
It actually started with a rock rag writer, Thomas Goze, living
here in NY who would come to the shows and
talk to me. He asked me at one point if I'd like to go back to
Europe for some gigs someday. I answered yes
of course but knowing the economic realities of touring Rock
bands I didn't really expect anything to come of it.
Lo and behold, a few months later he puts me in touch with Dee
Jaywalker In Belgium who had previously
arranged some tours with Mark Ramone thru Europe and others. He
proposed 2 weeks of gigs with him
on guitar and a few other Belgians on bass and drums and another
guitar. Using the natives would decrease
the cost of plane fares for a whole band of Waldos from NYC. I
was a little nervous going over there on my own
to meet people I never knew and play gigs with guys I never
played with before. I really felt naked and had
visions of being chopped up in some Belgian serial killer's
cellar after months of torture. But, phantasmagoric
premonitions aside, it turned out quite well, they didn't chop up
my corpse, they could play very well and
it was really good to see the continent again. I'd forgotten how
different the people and the lifestyle is over there -
such a relief from the obnoxiousness of a lot of Americans. The
towns also have much more character over
there as opposed to the strip mall mentality of most US cities.
Of
course, the gigs were on a different level than the Heartbreaker
forays into Europe but they were great fun
nonetheless. The people all seemed to enjoy it and I managed to
attract quite a number of young kids as well
as the relics from earlier days. They used some 30 year old
pictures of me on tour posters that were funny
because I don't really look that young anymore. I was afraid
people were going to ask who the hell is on
stage and where is the guy from the poster?
So,
in spite of myself, I really enjoyed myself and saw some places I
didn't get to previously. We played Dijon,
Nimes, St' Etienne, Rennes, Lille, Strasbourg, Dresden, and
Berlin where the show was recorded and should
be released on CD in a few months. I might have missed a town or
2 on the itinerary.
Did you record any of the shows and are there any plans to release anything soon?
Yes, were recorded the
last show in Berlin. I'm just about done mixing it and sending it back
to the label.
It will be coming out on Nicotine Records, some label from Italy
that is supposed to be pretty good from what I hear.
I'm hoping it will be out by the summer.
You told me
once about a trip you made to my hometown Manchester on the Anarchy
tour. Can you remember what
it was like on the tour, with all of the press and media attention
going on all around you?
at Pete Shelley's sawed off guitar whose dials were permanently frozen on 10! I also remember that Pub
Tommy Ducks with all the knickers and stuff on the walls and ceilings. I think us and the Pistols and Clash
all stopped by there for a drink before or after the show. I think the Heartbreakers returned once or twice to
Manchester later on but the first time was probably the best.
of the 24 or so that were scheduled. We spent most of the time in hotel bars drinking and telling stories.
The Press was everywhere and it was funny to see how certain of the guys would change personalities when
the press was around. However all the Bands were great company treated us like one of them.
No Yankee - Brit rivalry, in the open anyway.
few curse words on some idiotic talk show ( Bill Grundy I think). People didn't curse on TV normally in the US
but it wasn't such a big thing when it sometimes got past the censors - in fact it's worse today than it was back
then ( that's a result of the Bush Republican religious right bullshit). But to see the whole country in an uproar
with front page covers of all the newspapers screaming about this horrible event just blew us away.
Nobody got that excited in the US about anything! We were all sort of jealous - that kind of attention is priceless
and can make careers overnight. We only wished we did it!
preaching to the town adults in a parking lot across from the theater with loudspeakers and all about how the
Devil was in the theater and not to let their kids inside. Trouble was, all the kids were already there and having a
ball!
You lived in a rather nice house in London at the time you were
recording LAMF, there must have been
some cool parties there?
Actually we lived in a
few different houses in London. I think that most of the time we were
recording LAMF
we were all in Pimlico. Yes, there were quite a few parties there
but unfortunately I can't remember any of them!!
( just joking). No we did have lots of people over and we'd be up
all night. There were all sorts of goings on,
mostly illegal and immoral but we had a grand old time. New Yorkers
would visit from time to time or one or 2
of us would end up in a new paramours house for a few months and
then come back after it was over.
Siouxsie Sioux and her band would crash there sometimes after we'd
come back from some local gigs and
Nancy Spungen stayed a few days before she met Sid Vicious. It was
great fun and I always loved to see the
cleaning ladies faces when they would show up in the mornings twice
a week or so to clean us up!
Their favorite expressions were " Heartbreakers!- Shitmakers!" or "
God, he's in the bed with 3 of them -
how do we clean this mess up" and all sorts of other exclamations
of shock and disgust but I bet they were
just a bit jealous of us in the end. Anyway, it was great to do
this stuff when we were young and really stupid.
In any case, nobody ever died there while we were at the place
although I think a few came close.
On stage,
there was a chemistry between Johnny and yourself, where you both
kinda instinctively knew what the
other was going to do next. The overall sound was extremely good
and many contemporaries often said that
the Heartbreakers were easily the best rock n roll band around at
the time. Did you ever think that you'd make
the big time and have a hit record?
( I think) John
and I did have some sort of chemistry together, mostly because our
guitar styles were so different.
He was more visceral while I was more thought out if you can call
that stuff thought out at all. We definitely were
the best rock band in London at the time, mainly due to the fact
that Jerry Nolan was such a great rock drummer
and we all were a little older than the average brit Punk at the
time and had a lot more live playing experience
than they did. God, most of the locals were still in their teens
and playing in their first bands.
The Pistols had the best combo of a great rock sound and also the
image politics that put them at the top of the heap.
They always had a great stage sound but most of their songs had
the same beat. They didn't have much variety
at the time but what they had was great. I remember when John was
recording his solo album he couldn't
get Steve Jones or Paul Cook to play a '50's style back beat -
stuff that Jerry knew in his sleep.
After LAMF sort of fizzled the cracks started showing up in the Band - Jerry had already left before the release
because he didn't like the mix ( although he worked on it himself for a few weeks and couldn't get it right either)
and people were snooping around John convincing him to go solo and drop us. John loved the idea because
he could keep the larger share of any money that was made and would keep him supplied with drugs.
A hit record might have forestalled a lot of that but in any case the substance problem would only have
gotten worse ( which it did anyway).
Johnny could sometimes make or break a live show, did it ever bother
you that you never knew which
version of him would turn up for a show?
I
never really worried about how John would show up although when he was
really out of it, it would just be
more work for us to try and work around him. There were actually
very few shows where he was so bad that we'd
have to pull the plug on him - I can really only remember one in NY
at Irving Plaza sometime in the '80's.
But there were different levels of him being wasted and some shows
would sound a lot better than others
depending on his state. There were lots of times when he would be
unconscious in the dressing room drooling
bubbles out of his mouth and we'd actually start the show without
him, but every time we did that he'd always
come stumbling thru the audience a song or 2 into the set and jump
on stage and start playing. It was amazing
how he'd wake up every time although his playing was usually pretty
bad in those situations. The only time it
really hurt us was when someone from the Industry would come to see
us and walk away disgusted. it might
have affected our careers in ways we'll never quite know about.
I recall seeing you at the Hacienda in Manchester on the reunion tour.
Was there ever a time when you thought that you
would reform for good, or was that not an option?
You
mean the quick reunion tour in 1984 when we released that videotape "
Live at the Lyceum".
I vaguely remember playing in Manchester but I can't quite picture
the club. At that time I had already started
working on Wall Street but only on a temporary basis so if there
was any real hope of getting back together I would
have jumped at it. Johnny never really broached the subject though.
Chris Giercke was managing him at the
time and they just thought a reunion tour would generate some press
and buzz. John didn't really want to start
over again and I don't think Jerry was up to it either. John's
habits weren't getting any better and none of us
were exactly in the best of shape so the idea really was never
discussed. Again, if some sort of hit record popped
out of any of it, things would have probably been a lot different
but that didn't happen. The Industry also
was afraid of us because of the reputation which wasn't undeserved.
So, by that point I think a permanent
reunion was not an option.
I have a DVD of a show from Max's Kansas City, recorded around the
time you did the Live At Max's record.
The band were as tight as they'd ever been. Was that how you saw
it too?
I actually forget when
the Live at Max's album came out - probably 78 or 79 sometime. The
time were were
tightest as a Band was 1977-78 during the UK and continent Tours.
When we played the Village gate in Manhattan
summer 1977 it was probably one of the best shows we ever did -
even the audience was saying how tight we were.
Just playing so much together over those years was enough to make
us so tight we could play in our sleep -
which was what we did a lot of the time, if not sleeping then in
various stages of consciousness.
By then we had stopped rehearsing because we were playing so much -
we'd only rehearse to work out a new song.
In later years like all thru the '80's we'd have to get together
before a show to rehearse because we weren't really
playing together anymore - just doing one off shows to raise money
for rent and drugs.