Who is ‘Johnny Yen’ on Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’? mrjyn
Who is ‘Johnny Yen’ on Iggy Pop’s‘Lust for Life’?
Ray Manzarek and Danny Sugerman identify
In 1995, the Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, and biographer, Danny Sugerman, appeared on the Australian music video program rage, smoking rigs on the couch and telling stories about Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop.
In the first clip below, Sugerman describes sharing his home with
Iggy in the Seventies (“sort of like staging the Vietnam War at
Grauman’s Chinese Theater”), and checking him into the mental hospital
after a Quaalude overdose.
He credits the quick thematic transition from
“Death Trip” to “Lust for Life”
to Iggy’s personal growth under the care of Dr. Murray Zucker.
In the
second clip, “Iggy’s Homosexual Ballet Dancing Heroin Dealer,” they
reminisce about “Gypsy Johnny,” the real-life heroin dealer immortalized
as “Johnny Yen” in “Lust for Life.”
Ray Manzerak & Danny Sugerman "Iggy's Homosexual Ballet Dancing Heroin Dealer!
Sugerman:
His black Porsche said “Gypsy” on it, and he wore a scarf
around his head. He used to be a ballerina, and he was homosexual, and
very hot for Iggy’s parts—body parts—and “yen” is a term that William
Burroughs uses a lot describing the craving for heroin. So in “Lust for
Life” there’s a line,
“Here comes Johnny Yen again, with the liquor and
drugs and a sex machine,” and that’s Gypsy Johnny coming up to
Wonderland Avenue with his scarves and his drugs and his motorized
dildos and whatever else he had - his balloons full of Mexican heroin
that was killing all of us.
Sugerman chronicled his years of debauchery with Iggy and the Doors in the memoir Wonderland Avenue.
