Living with Legends

Rock and roll is here to stay.  Responding to Steven Kurutz’s dis of the Chelsea, several readers wrote in to recount their rock and roll experience at the Chelsea.
    Former resident Bluehour tells us, “One day maybe I’ll write about the very nice rock star (Dee Dee Ramone) who peeled me off a sidewalk and helped me get back to my room, after, um, too much drinking.”  We can’t wait to hear!  And, funkydollarbill tells us of “trashed halls and rooms with bed sheets tied in knots, flooded bathrooms, burnt carpet, angry neighbors, furniture used as firewood, broken condoms, broken mirrors, broken windows, broken souls and very hungover musicians and directors.”  Funkydollarbill you see directs  produces music videos by such groups as The Utah Saints, Feeder,  Lorraine, Eye to Eye, Mortis, and Bob Sinclar. After the Devendra Banhart shoot, Stanley Bard said the room was “the worst he’d ever seen in his lifetime.”  And that’s saying a lot.
          Several readers wanted to make sure that I mentioned that Dee Dee Ramone was a long time resident as were Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen.
            And my neighbor from down the hall, who delivers her comments in person, told me a story about a friend – or maybe a friend –of-a-friend, as they say – who checked into Room 100 in the mid-eighties.  The mattress was lumpy, the springs poking through (standard issue here), so she decided to flip it over to see if that helped – only to find a horrorendous blood stain on the other side!
     Told of any other building in the world, this would be easy to dismiss as an obvious specimen of urban folklore.  But it rings true in the Chelsea for a couple of reasons: one is the almost unimaginable uncleanliness of certain corners of this place; the other is the legendary cheapness of our illustrious proprietor, Stanley Bard.
            Besides that, the Chelsea is such a weird, mythological place, that known laws of the physical universe – not to mention of commons sense and decency – are routinely suspended.  Even if it didn’t happen in the “real world” at the Chelsea, it did anyway.  As reader Jay Hails wrote, “If the Chelsea isn’t Rock & Roll, then there is no Rock and Roll.” (Ed Hamilton)