On the death of Heartbreakers guitarist Walter Lure: ecstasy and fall

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Walter Lure (left) with Johnny Thunders performing in London in 1977

Erica Echenberg / Redferns / Getty Images

With his flamboyant costumes he was in no way inferior to his boss. Walter Lure liked to wear wide, brightly colored ties under tattered pinstripe suits and battered melon hats on his dyed hair. But while Johnny Thunders, the star of the New York punk ensemble The Heartbreakers, stumbled across the stage or through the audience in his cut up ringmaster tails and marauded, Lure stoically kept the position and the beat under his bowler hat.

People who were there at the time keep telling that the Heartbreakers were the wildest rock'n'roll band in the world in the mid-seventies. Several videos on YouTube bear testimony to the intensity of the band. But the crash was always priced in in the ecstasy.

Lure uncompromisingly summed up this luck gradient in one of his songs: he wrote the furious heroin anthem "Too Much Junkie Business", in which he combined Chuck Berry's classic "Too Much Monkey Business" and passages from Bo Diddley's "Pills" own song combined. It is about the everyday life of injecting injections, about the anti-social aspects of junkie life, about the brief moment of intoxication that is followed by horror. And how it can be turned into a musician career: "Wrap it up, call it art, now your record makes the chart", Lure put it in the song. Pack it up, call it art, and your record will hit the charts.

Model for the Sex Pistols

The Heartbreakers were founded in 1975, Johnny Thunders had previously been with the New York Dolls. The Heartbreakers were considered one of the epicentres of early punk. The British fashion designer and music impresario Malcolm McLaren was inspired in New York by the elegant rag look and reduced rock'n'roll of the Heartbreakers, in order to later recreate the Sex Pistols as an almost satirical image of them in London and punk in this way to make it a global youth movement.

In New York, punk had always been an exclusive, serious event hosted by sworn rock and roll junkies and free-spirited artists. Commercialization and infantilization by the British music companies and media viewed Lure and Thunders with mixed feelings. Together they wrote the song "London Boys", in which they mocked the boom in sound and style they had come up with in the New York underground.

"London Boys" appeared on Johnny Thunders' first solo album in 1978. At that point the band had just split up - only to briefly reform themselves every now and then. An erratic course that prevented the Heartbreakers from enjoying great success. If this was ever wanted.

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Lure at a concert in 2017

Lure played alongside Thunders from time to time, but also had guest appearances with the Ramones and finally started his own ensemble with The Waldos. Although he had founded The Waldos in the late 1970s, it wasn't until 2018, 40 years later, that he released their first album. Perhaps because money was obviously no longer a problem for Lure later on: After his official punk rock career, he worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street. He already had the pinstripe suits for it; all he had to do was darn and iron them.

Johnny Thunders died in 1991 of complications from his heroin addiction. The other central members of the Heartbreakers have also been dead for a long time. As reported by the US magazine "Spin" among others, Walter "Waldo" Lure, the last musician of the legendary punk rock ensemble, has now also died. On Saturday he succumbed to the consequences of cancer of the lungs and liver. He was 71 years old.