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Johnny On The Split: "I'm A Free Man!"

Susan Whitall, Creem, April 1978

JUST AS we were going to press, pasting up pictures of Messrs. Rotten, Vicious, Jones and Cook, the news broke. The band had broken up in San Francisco, Johnny revealed in an interview with Rupert Murdoch's N.Y. Post. To add to the confusion, Sid Vicious O.D.'d on the plane from S.F. to New York — he'd reportedly been given a two-day dose of methadone to last him until he got to London, but had taken it all at once, managing to land himself in a Jamaica, N.Y., hospital. Johnny was waiting out the NYC blizzard at photographer Joe Stevens' apartment (a fact reported in the Post), so in the course of talking photos with Joe, we started asking questions of Johnny through him ("John says..." "Well ask him if..."). After a few minutes of this, John took the phone himself, and despite his protests that he didn't want to comment on anything, the gak went as follows:

Total word count of piece: 581

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