Steve Jones has been a lot of things in his 61 years: a love-starved bastard, smooth criminal, an insatiable man-slut, a master thief, an insufferable prog-rocker, a would-be Yacht Rock A&R rep, SEX shop clerk, Chrissie Hynde's pre-Pretenders fuck-buddy; a teenage Sex Pistol, a 23-year-old has-been, a sticky-fingered junkie, a shit-hot guitar-slinger-for-hire, Iggy Pop's muse, a Fabio-haired solo artist, a buff and burnished Hollywood biker, a recovering addict, a childhood sexual abuse survivor, a jailhouse motivational speaker, an ascot'd elder statesman of punk, a beloved LA disc jockey, and—phew—a sexagenarian social media baller. All of which is confessed in absolute unflinching detail, with a nod and a wink and a pinch of Cockney slang, in Lonely Boy(published by Da Capo), his painfully honest, just-published must-read memoir, co-written with Ben Thompson.
Recently we got Mr. Jones on the horn to discuss just a few of the following: Stealing Keith Richards's favorite coat/Bryan Ferry's gold record/David Bowie's bass amp, his cloak of invisibility, his crap childhood, the tens of thousands of "birds" he's "shagged," his semi-tragic inability to forge a lasting relationship with a woman, and learning how to read, write and spell after 40. Then there's a bunch of other stuff like why he can't stand being in the same room with Johnny Rotten; watching Glen Matlock shag John Cale's wife; whether or not Sid Vicious kill Nancy Spungen; why Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols is the Dorian Gray of seminal DOA punk rock debuts.
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