During its heyday, the Chelsea Hotel in New York City was a home and safe haven for Bohemian artists, poets, and musicians such as Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, Alan Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, and Dee Dee Ramone. This oral history of the famed hotel peers behind the iconic façade and delves into the mayhem, madness, and brilliance that stemmed from the hotel in the 1980s and 1990s. Providing a window into the late Bohemia of New York during that time, countless interviews and firsthand accounts adorn this social history of one of the most celebrated and culturally significant landmarks in New York City. "Exuberant oral history...Drug-fueled debauchery and artists living 'close to the bone' in service to their work fill these reminiscences along with nostalgia for the enclave of 'freaks and weirdoes.'" PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY "the book mostly tells fantastical yet real-life tales of many of its lesser- or unknown residents, adds depth to some that the public knew only peripherally, and shares many wild, unhinged anecdotes that marked a very different era of New York City life." LARRY GETLEN The New York Post "Junkies, beats, smugglers, punks, dealers, lowlifes, artists, it's a look behind the doors of the Chelsea Hotel in its final glory years - fascinating and riveting." GILLIAN MCCAIN co-author (with Legs McNeill) of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk "...a colorful oral history ...(that) often focuses on lesser-known faces of the landmark... making this a good option for fueling the fire of serious Chelsea obsessives." HAZEL CILLS NYLON Magazine "...a wonderful picture of the lives of some of the hotel's latter day famous guests ... wonderful descriptions of the building itself... Lough's writing belies a true passion for this 'beautiful old whore' of a building. His research is clearly a labor of" DAVID WILLS Beatdom "It's a pleasure, with lots of great loopy stories." JED PERL of The New Republic "Rife with colorful anecdotes, the book is sure to find a place in the homes of artists, writers and thinkers of all stripes." ERIKA JO BROWN Savannah Morning News "James Lough's book, THIS AIN'T NO HOLIDAY INN: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel, touts Bohemian failure as creative impetus, blurs the line between starving artists and the criminal element, and thoroughly explores the historic pairing of creative-types " JENNY DUNN ConnectSavannah James Lough is the former director of the creative writing program at Savannah College of Art and Design, where he currently teaches full-time. He is the author of Sites of Insight, which won the Colorado Endowment of Humanities Award. He is also the winner of the Frank Waters Southwestern Writing Award for short fiction. He lives in Savannah, Georgia. This Ain't No Holiday Inn Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995 By James Lough Schaffner Press Copyright © 2013 James Lough and Robert Campbell All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-936182-52-7 Contents INTRODUCTION, Chapter 1 : CHECKING IN, Chapter 2 : CHELSEA WILDNESS, Chapter 3 : THE THREE WISE MEN OF DOPE: Beat Writers Huncke, Corso, and Matz, Chapter 4 : THREE CHORDS AND A GRUDGE: Dee Dee Ramone and the Chelsea Hotel Blues, Chapter 5 : GETTING BY, Chapter 6 : STANLEY BARD: Steel Fist in Velvet Glove, Chapter 7 : CHELSEA PORTRAITS, Chapter 8 : CHECKING OUT, Chapter 9 : 21ST CENTURY AFTERMATH, Epilogue : FAUXHEMIA: Does the Death of Bohemia Matter?, WHERE ARE THEY NOW?, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, ENDNOTES, CHAPTER 1 Checking In It is strange how people seem to belong to places — especially to places where they were not born. — CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, The Berlin Stories THE LOBBY: A ROGUE'S GALLERY When the spiky-haired tourist had taken his photograph and proceeded out the big glass front door, I hurriedly grabbed my bags and stepped out from under the candy-striped awning and inside the Chelsea's famous lobby. The place was stone quiet and more cramped than I'd envisioned. Artwork was ubiquitous, paintings crammed up and down the yellow walls. There was the ornate Victorian fireplace, its mantelpiece sporting Rene Shapshack's bust of Harry Truman. Of all people to honor on the mantel of the anti-establishment Chelsea Hotel! The little bullet of a president from Missouri who dropped the atom bomb on Japan. The symbol of true blue America fair-and-square, showcased prominently here at Bohemian Central. No doubt the hotel's manager and part-owner Stanley Bard had long-since transcended the irony. No doubt he could wax on about how, back in the day, he had bartered X amount of Shapshack's rent for the statue and how much its value had multiplied over the years. The quality of the Chelsea's lobby art is up for dispute. Its placement on the walls didn't seem to follow any organizing principle. Larry Rivers' pop-art masterpiece "The Dutch Masters" hangs prominently in all its glory, but what's with the huge, goofy, amateurish painting of a black flowerpot? To the right of t