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Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music, early and ad free on Amazon music included with Prime.
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It'S Alan here and since we're still a few weeks away from new episodes of the ongoing history of New Music, I want to share something with you from my other podcast. It's called Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry on Uncharted. I have all kinds of unbelievable stories to tell where true crime mixes with with music. That includes murder, assassination attempts, predators, stalkers, cults, heists, the mob, plane crashes, and a lot more. The episode I want to share with you today is about the wild story of the death of Nancy Spungen and the questions that remain decades later. Did Sid Vicious actually kill Nancy or was it someone else? There's a lot of tragedy and weirdness in this story. I'll have brand new episodes of the ongoing history of New Music in January, but please enjoy this episode of Crime and mayhem in the music industry. And if you're not following Uncharted, you might wanna we have dozens of episodes for you to enjoy. Just download and go. The Chelsea hotel sits at 222 W. 23rd St. In Manhattan. Since it was completed in 1884, the place has been a hangout for some very colorful characters. Most were New York City eccentrics and bohemians who just needed a place to live. But it also attracted some very famous people. At one point or another it was home to sci fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote a big chunk of 2001 A Space Odyssey in his room. Later, Stanley Kubrick, the producer of the movie version of the book, would also stay there. Other long term guests included photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. So did beat writer Jack Kerouac, playwrights Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard, actors Dennis Hopper, Uma Thurman, Elliott Gould and Jane Fonda. Plus for extra color, poets William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, not to mention Andy Warhol and some of his crew. Painter Jackson Pollock was a resident for a while at a luncheon at the hotel organized by art collector Peggy Guggenheim. He proceeded to get very wasted and thought threw up all over the carpet in the dining room. Somebody suggested that they cut that out and hang it on the wall because that piece of carpet one day would be worth millions of dollars. The Chelsea was also a favorite haunt of musicians. Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Tom Waits, Jim Morrison, Jeff Beck, Joni Mitchell, Alice Cooper, the guys in Pink Floyd and many, many others. Composer John Kleinsinger brought in 12 foot trees from Madagascar along with birds, a monkey and an eight foot snake to turn his room into a jungle. I wonder how he got along with dancer Catherine Dunham. She once brought two full grown lions into the hotel to help with a rehearsal. She was evicted and a lot of people have died at the Chelsea. Poet Dylan Thomas spent his dying days there. Some jumped to their death out of a window or the 11 story roof. In 1922. A woman named Nadia threw herself out of a window after she deliberately cut off her right hand. And there are stories of her one handed ghost trying to get back into the hotel. A photographer named Billy Maynard was beaten to death in his room on the eighth floor in the mid-1970s. But the most notorious floor was the first one. It was designated the junkie floor. The place where guests with drug problems were placed so that the staff could keep an eye on things. This is where ex Sex Pistol Sid Vicious and his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen checked in. They were given room 100. It was in that room that Nancy died. It looks like she was murdered, but by whom? Sid was charged with killing her. But did he actually do it? This is uncharted crime and mayhem in the music industry. And this time it's the wild, wild story of the death of Nancy Spungen. And the questions that still remain decades later around whether Sid Vicious actually did it. Something brutal, bloody and deadly happened in room 100 of New York City's Chelsea Hotel on the night of October 11, 1978. Nancy Spungen, a Philadelphia girl, died in the bathroom under the sink. She'd been stabbed in the abdomen with a Jaguar Wilderness K11 knife with a 13 centimeter blade. That knife had been purchased by her boyfriend, Sid Vicious earlier in the week. He was definitely the owner. But does that mean Sid killed Nancy? Stay with me because the answer isn't very clear and we may have the name of the actual murderer. We'd better start at the beginning because there's a lot of tragedy and weirdness in this story. Sid Vicious real name is John Simon Ritchie. He was born on May 10, 1957. His mother, Ann, was a high school dropout who met Sid's father while she was enlisted in the army. His father, John, was, believe it or not, a guardsman at Buckingham Palace. He was also a semi pro trombone player. When Sid was born, Mum whisked him to the Spanish island of Ibiza. Dad never followed and didn't supply any support. Ma became a pot dealer to pay the bills. Eventually she sought the help of the British Embassy to get her and Sid back to England, where she married a man named Christopher Beverley. But six months later, he was dead of kidney failure. Sid and his mother moved a couple of times. By 1973, mom was also a hardcore heroin addict. She barely knew what Sid was up to. She didn't even know what school he was attending. Sid, now going by the name John Beverly, made some friends at school. There was John Gray, John Wardle, and, critically, John Lydon. They were known as the Four Johns. All of them quit school and began taking to squatting in various abandoned buildings. And here's where the hamster comes in. John Lydon, the future Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, of course, had a pet hamster named Sid. One day, John Beverly was poking at Sid and he got bit. Who knew that a hamster could be vicious? And from that day on, John Beverly had the nickname Sid. The Vicious came later, after the Lou Reed song. Sid and John Lydon picked up some spare change, busking, usually by playing covers by Alice Cooper. It was Lydon on vocals and violin, and Sid on acoustic guitar and tambourine. The joke was that they'd played these Alice Cooper covers until they were paid to stop. All four hung around a clothing shop called Sex on the Kings Road in Chelsea, which is where owner Malcolm McLaren recruited John Lydon to be the singer of a group that would be a living, breathing advertisement for his store. He called them the Sex Pistols. And that's what John Lydon became Johnny Rotten. Sex also employed a young American named Chrissy Hind. She was working in the UK illegally. She paid Sid two pounds to marry her so she could get a work permit. And it almost happened too. But the day they went to get married, the office was closed as the Sex Pistols did their thing. Sid tried to learn to play bass by listening to the first Ramones album. He also started going to a lot of gigs. In June 1976, he went to a Pistols gig where he got into a fight with musical journalist Nick Kent, a writer at the nme. Sid Went up to him and said, boy, I don't like your trousers. And bashed him up pretty good with the rusted bicycle chain that he carried with him. Sid escaped that without being charged with anything. Malcolm McLaren, though, was mortified. He told Ken, oh God, that guy's a psychopath. He'll never be at one of our concerts again. I promise that, right? Sid was considered for lead vocalist of the Damned, but he forgot to show up for the audition. Eventually he found his way into a band called Flowers of Romance, but that didn't amount to anything. On September 20, 1976, Sid somehow ended up playing drums for a very early version of Susie and the banshees at a two day punk event called the 100 Club Punk Special, where the group improvised interminably on the Lord's Prayer. On day two of the festival, Sid showed up super high on speed. The Damned were playing that night and Sid was still very annoyed that Dave Vinnion had gotten the job he wanted to. So he threw a glass at the stage aimed at Dave Vanion. As the group covered the Stooges, 1970. He missed hitting a woman in the face and blinding her in one eye. That led to Sid's first taste of prison in February 1977. The pistols needed a new bass player when Glenn Matlock was thrown out of the group for allegedly committing the crime of liking the Beatles. Malcolm McLaren, now managing the band full time, thought it would be very cool if the new bass player was a fan who had been promoted to band member. How very punk. Enter Sid. It was also around this time that Sid met Nancy Spungen. Nancy was American born Nancy Lauren Spungen on February 27, 1958 in Philadelphia. She already had a pretty tragic life. Even though she grew up in a nice middle class Jewish family. She almost didn't survive her own birth because the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, almost choking her on her way out into the world. Was there oxygen deprivation? Maybe. Nancy was born jaundiced as a result of cyanosis, meaning that she didn't have the proper oxygen in her red blood cells. The only thing that saved her was a series of immediate blood transfusions as the little baby was strapped to a hospital bed. She was an emotionally disturbed child throwing tantrums starting at three months. A doctor was worried enough to prescribe baby Nancy barbiturates when she was just three in hopes that would stop her from always screaming. But it didn't work. By age 4, she was getting psychiatric treatment. But the older she got, the more she tipped into violent behavior. A babysitter was threatened with a pair of scissors and she physically attacked her psychiatrist. She was expelled from school at 11. She ran away from her next school and attempted suicide by cutting her wrists with scissors. She was enrolled in a home for troubled kids, but escaped. She loved to trip on lsd, and she conducted at least one do it yourself abortion on herself. Nancy was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 15. Although she was quite brilliant, she enrolled in university in Colorado. When she was just 16, Nancy was thrown out of college because of her bad and weird behavior, which included an arrest for trying to buy some pot and accusations of being a thief. As a result of her issues with the University of Colorado, Nancy was banished from the state in exchange for escaping any legal issues. She moved to New York, where she worked for a while as a stripper. And when she needed extra money, she turned tricks. She was just 17. Sucked into the punk scene. She hung out with the bands of the era at places like CBGB and Max's Kansas City, sometimes carrying drugs for the bands. But then she decided that her future was in London and moved there in February 1977. She determined that that's where the action was. She needed to be there. And Nancy embraced everything she could about the groupie lifestyle. And her target was the Sex Pistols. She showed up in London, swollen and puffy from drug use, with brittle, frizzy hair that ranged in color from bright yellow to dark roots. She wore a lot of makeup because of bad skin and always defaulted to bright red lipstick. At first she tried to cozy up to Johnny Rotten, but when he rejected her, she just moved on. And by the spring of 1977, it's said that they first met on March 11, or maybe March 15. Sid and Nancy were an item. They would be inseparable for the next 19 months. By this time, the Sex Pistols were infamous and constantly in the tabloids. Nancy, who inserted herself everywhere, was dubbed Nauseating Nancy by the press because of her loud American attitude. She and Sid also settled into a serious addiction to heroin. And here is when things started to go off the rails. Very far off the rails. Soon Nancy would be dead and Sid in jail and accused of her murder. Amadeus. Yeah, that Amadeus shows up in Vienna at 25. He's jobless, totally free from his dad and ready to make some noise. He finds love in an amazing partner, Constance Weber, and suddenly he's dropping beats that nobody can ignore. Salieri was convinced that Amadeus was God's chosen one, so he had to be silenced. Tune in to the Story of history's most infamous musical rivalry. Amadeus. All new Mondays on Showcase Stream on Stack tv. When Sid Vicious signed on with the Sex Pistols, he was paid £25 a week. If he needed more, he'd just find ways to steal it. A friend had a connection to some brown Persian smack through a group known as the Singapore Boys. Sid and Nancy were inseparable, demonstrated by a couple of grand gray metal padlocks that they intertwined. They bonded over books, records, whatever was in the music papers, and, of course, drugs. But they'd also fight like two pit bulls on steroids, often with each other, sometimes with people outside their circle. Nancy ended up in court at least once, charged with possession of a weapon. This sort of thing wasn't conducive for the rest of the Sex Pistols. Nancy always seemed to be attached to Sid, causing tensions with everybody else. And of course, again, there were all the drugs. Sid wasn't a very good musician. He barely knew how to play his bass. But some nights were better than others. Here they are in Stockholm in July 1977. By the end of 1977, Malcolm McLaren thought the sex Pistols were ready to tour America. But there were problems. First, the paperwork. Getting working visas for these jobs proved to be very difficult. Johnny Rotten had a minor drug charge on his record. Guitarist Steve Jones was a known thief. Drummer Paul Cook also had some theft in his past. And then there was Sid. Drug charges, assault of a police officer, attempted grand theft auto, criminal damage, and possession of a dangerous weapon. As a result of all the visa delays, the Sex Pistols weren't able to appear on Saturday Night Live as scheduled. Their slot instead was filled by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Once the visas were all sorted out, there was, in fact, a tour. But instead of hitting all the major markets, McLaren thought it would be very subversive. It was very punk. If the Pistols made a big swing into the punk, unfriendly Southern U.S. this did not go well. Sid was often so strung out that the roadies didn't even bother plugging in his base. He was always looking to score and sometimes disappeared for hours. McLaren had him on a weekly stipend of $14, thinking that maybe a lack of cash would keep him straight. Well, it sort of did, sometimes. At one point, Sid was drinking two bottles of peppermint schnapps a day. The crowds were beyond hostile, throwing things at the band. Sid got hit in the head with beer bottles routinely. He often carved himself up with a broken beer bottle on stage. He wrote Gimme A Fix across his chest and Black marker and then with a blade. There was an incident where a groupie, not Nancy because she was left back in England, made a play to give Sid oral sex during a show. Another groupie named Helen Keller. No, really drove all the way from Los Angeles to climb up on stage to headbutt Sid right in the nose and there was blood everywhere. There was also a one night stand with a woman who was still in the process of transitioning from being a man. And that apparently got very confusing. And at one point Sid's bodyguard had enough of him and actually beat the crap out of him. And here's an interesting bit of. In Dallas, the Sex Pistols played the Longhorn Ballroom. In its previous incarnation it was called the Carousel Club and was run by mob connected Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, live on Television in 1963. The longer the tour went on, the more Sid engaged in self destruction and self mutilation. Here's Malcolm McLaren on the infamous truck stop encounter when on the way to Tulsa. This happened at around 3 in the morning.