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A listener note, this episode contains adult content

and is not suitable for everyone.

Please be advised. In the 1970s, punk rock had blown through London and made landfall in America with equal force.

And in the clubs, dive bars, and back rooms of New York City, a generation of kids who felt

they had nothing to lose were making music that sounded exactly like that. And at the center

of it all stood the now legendary Chelsea Hotel. The Chelsea, 23

stories of red brick on West 23rd Street built in the late 1880s, was known for

housing artists, writers, musicians, and misfits. Bob Dylan wrote songs there.

Patty Smith lived there.

Janice Joplin slept there.

Leonard Cohen wrote a song about it.

Among the Chelsea's resonance in the fall of 1978, however,

were two of punk's most famous or infamous faces, Sid Vicious, bassist of

the sex pistols, and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungeon. Sid and Nancy had been together for two

years by the time they moved into Room 100.

Everyone who knew them could see where their relationship was going.

The heroin, the screaming matches, their inseparability, despite it all.

Nobody around them could stop it, and by most accounts, nobody really tried.

On October 12, 1978, their relationship would end in tragedy.

...