In 2000, the owner of 5 St. Marks Place, a tall brick building near Third Avenue, decided to paint over a sixty-by-hundred-foot mural that had decorated the side of the edifice for over fifteen years. The mural, by the East Village artist Art Guerra, was originally conceived as a clever act of guerrilla marketing: the filmmaker Lech Kowalski had made a gritty film called “Gringo,” released in 1985, chronicling the struggles of a heroin addict searching for his next fix. The film was touted as fiction, but it borrowed heavily from the life of its star, John Spacely, an addict known around St. Marks Place as Gringo. Guerra’s mural was a caricature of John Spacely on a grand scale, his bleach-blond hair, signature eye patch, and dangling cross earring blaring in neon colors against a black background.
By the time the mural disappeared, St. Marks Place was already a radically different block than it had been when Guerra painted it. Spacely had died, of AIDS, in the mid-nineties. A new wave of gentrification in Manhattan was in full swing—this was peak “Sex and the City” era—and only the most stalwart punks continued to linger on St. Marks. One of these was Jimmy Webb, a buyer for the legendary punk-clothing boutique Trash & Vaudeville. Webb had started working at the store a year earlier, in 1999, after several peripatetic years around the neighborhood. He loved St. Marks Place, and he cherished its history; with his sinewy, tattooed limbs and rangy puff of platinum hair, he looked not unlike the visage of Gringo himself. According to Ada Calhoun’s book “St. Marks Is Dead,” from 2015, which chronicles the countercultural history of the street, Webb took the erasure of Guerra’s street art particularly hard: “When they painted over the mural of Spacely,” Webb told Calhoun. “I stood on the stairs in front of the store and cried.”
Webb, who died last week, of cancer, at the age of sixty-two, was a stalwart of St. Marks Place for decades, as consistent a presence on the block as the bong dealers and the discount piercing stands. At Trash & Vaudeville, he became more than a salesman; he was a mascot, a time capsule, a preening peacock from a more colorful era. In a 2007 profile in The New Yorker, Webb told Alec Wilkinson that he once tried to go to Cape Cod but started having doubts the moment he left New York City. “Sandpipers rock,” Webb said, “but how long can I look at a sandpiper? I was back in two and a half days. Counting travel time.”
Webb grew up in the small upstate town of Wynantskill, New York, where his father owned a two-pump gas station attached to the family home. When he arrived in New York City, via a brief hitchhiking adventure to Florida, in 1975—the same year Trash & Vaudeville opened—his clothes were stuffed in a pillowcase. To make ends meet, he worked the bar at a gay club, and soon became entrenched in the decadent after-hours scene downtown. He would go above Fourteenth Street to frequent Studio 54, but the East Village became his main stamping ground; after developing a heroin habit, he slept for some time in a cardboard box in Tompkins Square Park. (He later embraced sobriety with the same vigor he had hard living.) Webb told Wilkinson that he would walk into Trash & Vaudeville and dream of working there some day. After writing a letter to the owner, Ray Goodman, he finally landed a job as a salesperson.
Trash & Vaudeville had gained an early reputation among rock musicians as a place to stock up on silver platform shoes, leather fringe jackets, and slim-cut black jeans. It was also popular among the teen-agers who haunted St. Marks, as a place to stock up on T-shirts bearing the names of long-defunct bands they would never see play live. For Webb, making customers feel like rock stars—even if they were taking the bus back to their parents’ houses in the suburbs—became a life’s calling. He was fluent in latex, lace-up boots, chaps, dangly pendants, and the proper way to break in Doc Martens. Trousers, he believed, should fit like a second skin. Styling musicians was a special passion. He dressed Slash and Alice Cooper; he sold his longtime friend Iggy Pop his many pairs of pubic-bone-baring leather pants. In a remembrance posted online, Pop recalled how Webb would shower him with gifts, which were “invariably wrapped in pink leopard skin, spritzed with glitter and little gold stars like the kind you get in kindergarten for being a very good boy.” (According to Goodman, Webb often endeared himself to stars and other customers by giving out freebies from the store, a practice that annoyed the boss but remained true to Webb’s punkish ethos.) “The brilliant thing about Jimmy Webb is he was in everybody’s band,” Michael Des Barres, an English rock musician, actor, and radio host who was a regular Trash & Vaudeville shopper, told me. “He was a rock-and-roll instrument that people played, and the game was the right trousers.”
Webb told Wilkinson that he planned to never leave Trash & Vaudeville: “I want to have them stuff me like—what’s it called?—taxidermy, and put me in a corner. They can rig it so someone can pull a string and I’ll say, ‘You rock,’ or ‘Tighter, tighter, those pants need to be tighter’—the things I say every day.’ ” In the end Webb did leave, after the store moved off of St. Marks Place, in 2016. The following year, he opened his own boutique on the Lower East Side, I NEED MORE. (The name, borrowed from an Iggy Pop song, was also tattooed across his back.) The store was an extension of the Trash & Vaudeville aesthetic—you could still buy bondage harnesses and motorcycle jackets, under hot-pink neon lights—but it was also full of Webb’s many souvenirs of a life lived among rockers. There are two signed electric guitars, a skull chandelier and a bulletin board covered in band pins, from Mötley Crüe to Jem and the Holograms. If you so wanted, you could purchase a hand-knit, bright-yellow sweater featuring Debbie Harry’s face for thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. But the store’s most popular item was its signature “I NEED MORE” T-shirt, which became a semi-cult object after Slash wore one during a Guns N’Roses concert at Madison Square Garden.
Matthew Aquino, who for the last two years worked as the photographer and graphic designer for I NEED MORE, met Webb when he was wandering around downtown Manhattan. “I saw giant pink L.E.D. lights and they dragged me in,” he told me. “I saw Jimmy pop up behind the counter, and I dropped my phone. I was like, ‘Dude, you’re the punk-rock guy everyone knows!’ I fell in love with the guy. He took me in like one of his own.” Aquino said that he and Webb would talk on the phone most nights, often until three in the morning. When Webb found out he had cancer, Aquino said, he disclosed the illness only to his close friends. “He would call me the night before an event and say, ‘Matt, I’m so sick, I can’t move, I’m wearing sweatpants.’ But then he would always make it to those events, dressed for his star moment.”
Webb lived his life in public, but the coronavirus pandemic has made it hard to commemorate him in a public way. A proper sendoff, Aquino said, “would have bright lights, a lot of people, and vegan cookies.” In the meantime, he added, he is choosing to remember one of his great days with Webb, stalking the block his friend loved. “He took me to St. Marks Place to eat falafel at Mamoun’s, and then we went to see Basquiat paintings.”
