Louder AAA
The story begins on December 19, 1991 at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.
The Smashing Pumpkins were headlining the storied venue, touring in support of their debut album Gish. Hole, who'd just released their own debut Pretty on the Inside, were supporting.
Among the 500-capacity crowd, Henry Rollins and his roommate Joe Cole were in attendance. In Talking from the Box, a spoken word show which was filmed at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on May 28, 1992, the former Black Flag vocalist calmly describes in detail the beginnings of his friendship with Cole – recounting the story in third person for devastating narrative impact – and the events which unfolded that day.
"It could have been Black Sabbath in 1972, their common favourite band, and they still would have bagged on Ozzy because everything was funny when they were together," he said. "So the two of them are watching a band at the Whisky, laughing until they urinate their pants at how funny the band is, when actually the band is kicking ass. They’re making it into the worst gig on Earth and having the greatest time."
After the show, the two friends make their way back to their home on Brooks Avenue in Venice "with their middle fingers out the window flipping off all of West Hollywood and Westwood. Very immature, but they thought they were the funniest fuckers on Earth – and they were", he continued.
The plan was to grab some food and rent Rocky V and laugh themselves stupid at Sylvester Stallone's fifth instalment of his boxing story.
As the pair neared their home, two armed robbers stepped out from the shadows and informed them that this was a hold up.
After offering the robbers around $50 from their pockets, Rollins and Cole were ordered to enter their home and get more money. As the Black Flag frontman imagined that they were both to be executed in their own home, he thought that giving away their TV and video player would help spare their lives or at least deescalate the situation. He heard a "slight scuffle" and a gunshot. Cole had been killed in front of his home.
Rollins was inside and unaware of his friend's fate, but after hearing the gunfire, he ran to safety and called the LAPD to report the robbery.
In a 2001 interview with Howard Stern, Rollins said that a home visit by Rick Rubin attracted some unwanted attention to his home. The producer was keen to hear the Rollins Band's latest recording The End of Silence a few months before its release, and duly arrived in a Rolls-Royce and brandished a mobile phone.
"It's a crack neighbourhood – it's pretty intense," said Rollins. "I loved that neighbourhood. [Rick] comes over with that huge Rolls, he leaves my place. This long-haired guy with an early cellphone in his back pocket; the whole neighbourhood is checking him out. I wrote in my journal that night: 'My place is going to get popped.'
"Word got around and someone had the misguided thought that there's stuff in that house that's worth something, which honestly, was not the case," he added. "I had 11 grand publishing advance and all I knew was that I could pay my rent without writing my mother a letter. Three days later, it went down."
After the LAPD detained Rollins for questioning, he was released without charge after several hours. He then faced the task of cleaning up his friend's blood and called "every single fucking number in that phone book from A to Z and tell them the most horrible news [he] could think of."
Shortly after the shooting, he put his belonging in storage, slept in a friend's office space until Rollins Band began their tour in City Gardens, Trenton, New Jersey on February 1, 1992.
Cole was well-loved in the Los Angeles music scene and spent that summer touring Europe with Hole. That summer was documented on the Sonic Youth documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke which featured Babes in Toyland, Dinosaur Jr., Nirvana, Bob Mould, Ramones and more; Cole is featured in the film, which was also dedicated to him upon its release a year after his murder.
Sonic Youth were friends with Cole, who appears in their video for My Friend Goo. Kim Gordon received a call from Brooks Avenue.
"When Henry called to tell me about Joe, I burst into tears," Gordon wrote in her 2015 autobiography, Girl in a Band. "I didn’t get over it for a couple of years, to be honest. The senseless, random act of violence against someone so full of life and innocence, was mind-blowing, and I hated Los Angeles for a long time after that."
His tragic death inspired not one, but two songs on their album Dirty, which was produced in New York City by Butch Vig: JC and 100%.
"I wrote the song JC about Joe, while Thurston wrote 100%," explains Gordon. "It was hard to sing without tearing up."
The poppy garage rock of 100% opens the album with Thurston Moore singing, 'A blast in the underworld, I stick a knife in my head, a-thinking 'bout your eyes but now that you been shot dead, I got a new surprise.'
He was a dear friend of a lot of people on the scene, especially around SST Records.
Thurston Moore
"There was a couple songs in the record that were all about like a good friend of ours who had been murdered in Los Angeles by gang violence," Moore told Steve Lamacq during a session on BBC Radio 6 Music. "He was a dear friend of a lot of people on the scene, especially around SST Records. That was really heavy for us."
The video was made by Tamra Davis (wife of Beastie Boys' Mike D) and Spike Jonze. The narrative doesn't dwell on Cole's murder but instead focuses on the friendship between two skateboarders (one being actor and one-time professional skater Jason Lee).
JC, on the other hand, is made of washes of droning chords and underpinned by Gordon's bass lines. The grief is palpable in her voice as she sings: 'Ocean spray the candle said, it's dripping in my hand, you're dead...'
Joe Cole 1961 – 1991.
