Last week Gibson Lifestyle introduced Part I of our distinguished Baddest Badasses of Rock list, which details the hard-living exploits of legends Robert Johnson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, and James Brown. But we couldn't stop there. With too many rowdy tales to tell in just one sitting, we split up the list to bring you another batch of rock’s rebels.
Now Gibson brings you Part II of our list of rock and roll’s baddest badasses.
KEITH RICHARDS
The blood of a poet and a saint—and, if one believes the tales of his transfusions, possibly dozens of others—flows through the Rolling Stones guitarist’s veins. Actually, the reports of Richards’ periodic oil change-like hemoglobin swaps are greatly exaggerated. But there is a loose basis for that weird myth. He did have dialysis in Switzerland in 1973 as a part of a detox effort.
How well did it work? Four years later, he caught his most notorious drug bust. Mounties grabbed Richards in Toronto with 22 grams of heroin, and he was charged with importing drugs, which carried a seven-year minimum sentence.
Richards got out of serving time as only a rock star can, or at least could nearly 30 years ago: by performing two benefit Stones concerts for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
Richards’ background is in blues. Heroin addiction was more a jazz tradition. But, like Charlie Parker before him, it didn’t seem to impair his ability to write great tunes and great riffs, from "Satisfaction" to "Gimme Shelter." At least not until 1978’s Some Girls, when he earnestly sought the cure.
Richards’ other famous drug bust, among many, was at his Sussex estate along with Mick Jagger and other friends in 1967. The police raided his home, and he served two days in prison before the public outcry in Richards’ defense caused the Crown to overturn his conviction.
Today Richards’ tastes reputedly hew closer to Jack Daniels. And his father's ashes.
IGGY POP
According to Pop, many of his most legendary adventures in self-destruction were accidental. Sure, he smeared peanut butter and raw meat across his chest, shot a lot of heroin, and occasionally exposed himself, but the broken glass just happened to be on the floor when he rolled in it. Many of Pop’s bloodiest concert injuries were the product of his sheer abandon as a performer. He invented the stage dive playing Detroit halls alongside the MC5 in the 1960s, a good decade before it became a punk rock ritual and years before crowds were always ready to catch him.
What makes Pop a badass isn’t just the lack of a survival instinct that marked the first two decades of his career. He was rock and roll’s original nihilist. The sonic brutality and troglodytic arrangements of his early albums with the Stooges, packed with songs like the sneering "1969" and "Search and Destroy," telegraphed a contempt for all aspects of straight society. And his behavior on and off stage displayed a brand of self-loathing rock we wouldn’t see again until the emergence of Sid Vicious.
Today, Pop’s a wiser, straighter 60-year-old with nagging knee and back injuries, but he’s still a maniac once the first drumbeats and guitar chords kick in, diving shirtless into crowds (who are now willing to stop his plunge to earth) with his pants as unzipped as his attitude.
JOHNNY ROTTEN
John Lydon and his stitched-together troupe of cronies didn’t invent punk rock. The Ramones did. And theatricality and hype have been part of the music since Guitar Slim died his hair blue in the 1940s, if not since the days of the Moulin Rouge’s Le Pétomane. What Lydon did as Johnny Rotten, frontman for the Sex Pistols, is rob rock of its innocence.
Even the disco age, and the West Coast Babylon that produced the Eagles’ Hotel California and the love pentangle within Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac were idylls compared to Lydon’s world. He proclaimed himself both anti-Christ and anarchist, and cawed out with a fury and impatience that struck a nerve in disaffected youth on both sides of the Atlantic. Not all youth though. The Pistols didn’t sell many albums or play many shows during their initial go-’round. But Lydon was like the first vampire. It took just a few bites to breed a new generation whose disaffected influence spread to fashion, politics, and the music business. Especially the music business.
The Sex Pistols disbanded after just one studio album, but their post-mortem release was called The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, and Lydon’s closing words at the original Pistols’ last concert were "do you ever feel like you’ve been cheated?" With that, he set a new standard of self-awareness in rockers—both musicians and fans. Yes, we had all been cheated. Lydon and his fellow Pistols were robbed of a living by their management and the media, stripped of their meaning by a carnival they helped create, and then became trapped inside. The band cheated listeners and themselves by including Sid Vicious, whose sole claim to fame was his inability to function as a musician or human being.
Sid got caught up in a lifestyle that cheated him and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen out of existence. And those who bought Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols were sold an anti-corporate agenda by a corporation that had the power to pull the plug on the Pistols when it realized it had created a monster. But like Baron Frankenstein, EMI was too late.
When Johnny Rotten informed us we’d all been cheated, he began the process of toppling the corporate record monoliths. It’s been a slow crumble, starting with bands pressing their own 45s in the late 1970s, going on to amateur engineers shutting down studios as multi-track cassette recorders evolved to digital media, and so on. Today musicians have the means to make their songs available to every computer user in the world without the interference, judgement, or cheating of record companies. It just took 30 years for the dragon to realize that Lydon had slain it.
N.W.A.
Gangsta rap burst out of the underground with 1988’s Straight Outta Compton, a wake-up call as searing as the Black Panthers’ Ten Point Platform had been two decades earlier. But Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy E, DJ Yella, and MC Ren didn’t think of themselves as gangsters. They called their music "reality rap," and the hard truth is that in the gulf of political and social leadership that followed the Civil Rights movement, America’s racial and economic divide was allowed to widen once more.
For these rappers, the streets of their California hometown were hard, poor, and dangerous, and N.W.A. fought back. The most daring salvo was the Ice Cube- and MC Ren-written song "F#$@ tha Police," a protest against law enforcement brutality and racial profiling.
Sure enough, the Man fought back. The F.B.I. complained to N.W.A.’s record company, local police departments refused to work security details on the group’s tour dates, and their album received no airplay. Nonetheless, the song made racial profiling an issue of national debate that still rages today and Straight Outta Compton sold two million copies. Proof that it’s always badass to stand up for what you believe is right.
KID ROCK
Sure, Kid Rock’s red-eyed rap-rock-country bag is a blast, but he’s no innovator. What he is, however, is an individual. In an age when too many rock bands sound the same and their biggest desire seems to be scoring guest appearances on reality TV shows, Rock is comfortable veering away from the pack. He is a man who has his own convictions and follows them, whether they lead him to marry Pamela Anderson or punch Tommy Lee. He’s also the kind of rock star you’d like to be. Just this October he bought breakfast for everybody in an Atlanta Waffle House and gave the wait staff a $300 tip.
The flip side of that story is that Rock, his crew, and a patron’s posse got into a brawl when that patron started mocking the Kid, but, hey, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Badass.
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