On a September afternoon in his East Village apartment, Jesse Malin was learning to stand up in front of a microphone. He pressed his right hand on his knee and grabbed a mic stand with his left. A physical therapist stood behind him in case he started to fall. He wore a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with a Lion of Judah, a Rasta symbol that gave him inspiration.
At the count of three, he lurched forward and up, clinging to the stand for balance.
“Let’s get me down,” he said. “I’m scared.”
Malin, 57, has been standing at microphones for 45 years, first as a 12-year-old punk pioneer, later as leader of the ’90s glam-rock band D Generation and for the last two decades as a touring singer-songwriter.
But on this day, he was preparing for a concert like no other in his career. On Dec. 1 and 2, he will perform in public for the first time in a year and a half, following a rare spinal stroke that left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Joining him at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan will be some of the friends he has made over his career: Lucinda Williams, Rickie Lee Jones, the Hold Steady, J Mascis, Fred Armisen and a host of others. Proceeds go to pay his medical bills and expenses.
He eased his body gingerly back into a chair. “Let’s do that again,” he said.
So he did. And then again.
In the New York rock world, Malin has been a fixture for so long that it is hard to imagine the scene without him. His teenage punk band, Heart Attack, made what is considered the first New York hardcore record. He slam-danced on “Saturday Night Live” in 1981.
He has toured incessantly, building a modest but ardent following — sometimes opening at arenas for bigger acts, sometimes performing solo in people’s homes to pick up a little money.
And he is a partner in a handful of East Village bars and rock clubs, including Niagara and Bowery Electric, that have become essential places of connection for local and touring musicians. Martin Scorsese even cast him as a nightclub doorman in “Bringing Out the Dead.”
“He’s been a great, genuine connector of people,” said Eugene Hütz, leader of the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, whom Malin helped get a recording contract and a major tour spot.
Steven Van Zandt, who signed Malin to his Wicked Cool label, said simply, “He does seem to know everybody.”
In the first half of last year, all of that seemed to be coming together for him. He played a successful overseas tour and a sold-out show at Webster Hall in Manhattan. He was in great physical shape, jumping off bars or stages at his concerts, running five miles several times a week. He was writing a memoir of his early years.
“I felt like my career was getting bigger, and my voice was getting better,” he said.
On May 4, he organized a dinner and party to commemorate his friend Howie Pyro, the bassist in D Generation, who had died a year earlier, after a liver transplant. Midway through the night, he started to feel a stabbing pain in his hips and back.
Finally he had to lie down on the restaurant floor.
“Everybody’s standing above me like in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘Go over there and eat.’ So they’re eating the rest of this fancy meal. It’s cash only, and I threw the thing, so I’m on the floor paying the bill.”
His friend Jimmy G, from the veteran hardcore band Murphy’s Law, helped him crawl outside for an ambulance and rode with him to the first of several hospitals and rehab centers that would keep him over the next few months.
He never again set foot in his East Village walk-up apartment.
A medical mystery
A spinal stroke results from a blockage of blood to the spinal column. It is exceedingly rare — fewer than one percent of all strokes, by some measures — and can be maddeningly hard to trace. Malin’s doctors told him they did not know what caused his, or whether he would ever walk again.
“They didn’t offer a lot of optimism,” he said.
At the hospital, friends rallied around him. Bruce Springsteen — with whom he had performed at several benefit concerts, and who sang on one of Malin’s albums — called regularly and visited when he was in town. “He put all the nurses on the guest list and took pictures with everybody,” Malin said. “Just walked right in, no guards, no hoopla. Sat down, brought me a book, had a banana off my hospital food tray.”
Laura McCarthy, one of his partners in the bars, threw herself into searching for alternative treatments. “What I learned is that most doctors don’t know anything about spinal strokes,” she said. She talked to 40 doctors, by her count, before settling on a clinic in Buenos Aires that offered stem cell treatments for spinal traumas, with the aim of rebuilding neural pathways that were cut off by the injury.
Malin had health insurance, but it did not cover all the physical therapy and nursing care he needed. Argentina had the virtue of being both cutting edge and cheap.
He went for three months, navigating airports in a wheelchair, not speaking the language, staying in hotels not set up for people with disabilities. After decades on the road, he was confined to a bed or a chair, dependent on others. Though friends visited, he was often lonely and homesick.
“My view of myself and where I was supposed to be started to look really different,” he said. “I felt like some crippled guy in a wheelchair who should be thrown into the East River. I guess I didn’t feel secure and cool.”
His former manager Diane Gentile helped organize a benefit album, “Silver Patron Saints,” corralling luminaries from his circle — Springsteen, Billie Joe Armstrong, Elvis Costello, Bleachers — to record his songs. Each time one finished a cut, she’d send it to Malin in Argentina.
“I’d be really down sometimes, or in pain, and suddenly the email would come, and it’d be Counting Crows doing ‘Oh Sheena,’ and I’d put it on. It really was an emotional and spiritual boost,” he said.
The album, which came out in September, is quintessential Malin: 27 songs of urban ghosts and battered dreamers, lonely hotel rooms and charmed nights in the city, spread across different genres and styles.
“What makes me smile the most is that it has Agnostic Front and Bruce Springsteen on it, and has Murphy’s Law and Lucinda Williams,” he said. “It’s a world I want to live in. Any day, I’ll take those people.”
He and Williams share a particular bond. She produced his 2019 album, “Sunset Kids,” and when she suffered a stroke the following year, he wrote songs with her and played guitar for her, something she could not do.
“I just love him,” she said, from a tour bus somewhere between Tucson and Oklahoma City. “We trade strokes stories — are you still having trouble with this or that, are you using the walker or a cane?”
She was on her own path back, learning to walk again, to perform seated when she couldn’t stand. “I like to think he gets inspiration and encouragement from me,” she said. “I think now he’s been in recovery long enough to realize that he can still be the same guy he was before, just with a few limitations. But the essence of who he was is still there.”
A perilous journey
Through daily physical therapy, Malin has started to gain a little mobility. The upcoming concerts give him a goal to work toward.
The writing, though, has been difficult. “So much of my creative process was based on the energy of just being out walking, and then coming in and picking up my guitar, and stuff would just pour out of me,” he said.
“I guess I felt unworthy,” he added. “I’m trying to figure out what I have to say, what the narrative is, how I fit in the world. I get down on myself. I like downbeat music, but I always wrote songs that had that kind of melancholy thing, but were hopeful in some way.”
In September, I accompanied him on his first walk outside using canes rather than a walker. He reached the corner, ducked briefly into a store, then walked home.
It was a perilous journey, even with his physical therapist holding on to a belt around his waist. Any sidewalk shopper could have knocked him over without noticing it. “You got me on a good day,” he said. “I’m not stinking up the joint.”
Earlier in his recovery, he organized a benefit concert for his friend H.R., the singer in the punk band the Bad Brains — heroes from his hardcore days and beyond. It was the kind of gesture his friends have come to expect of him.
“If you needed money, he’d give you money,” said Jimmy G, a friend since their teen years. “If you needed a place to stay, he’d get you a place to stay. If you were hungry, he’d feed you. If your band was having a problem, he’d get you the equipment, or give you a room. Anything you needed, that guy would do for you. Anything.”
But it has been harder for Malin to accept help from others. “I like to be the guy setting stuff up and putting things on, and it’s just hard to receive,” he said. “I don’t know who to call when I’m upset. I only know how to take the call.”
In early October, he invited friends over for movie night, one way he’s been able to maintain some social life, and read them a chapter from his almost-finished memoir. It described his days as a rigid 16-year-old anarchist, holding marathon discussions of Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” and letting a friend harangue him into selling all his sexist albums. “Not the Iggy,” he pleaded. Yes, the Iggy. (He later bought another copy.)
“This was just the beginning of us young anarchists becoming judgmental jerks,” he read.
It was funny and candid, a slice of a downtown past as gritty as his songs.
For the Beacon show, Malin plans to stand for at least one song. His doctors don’t know how far his recovery will go, whether the nerves will reconnect or he will have to adjust to a permanent disability.
With his arms, he pressed himself up from his wheelchair, something he does frequently to avoid pressure sores. “I keep trying to go back to what I always preached at a young age, which was that positive mental attitude,” he said. But some days, it’s hard.
The night before, he had dreamed of walking around in a fall coat and cap. So he made a point to wear the hat. “Even though I can’t run or go for a walk or get in a car, I still feel driven every morning,” he said. “I still wake up hopeful,” he added.
“And I think of the people that I lost, the friends that didn’t have an opportunity to live and be part of this. And I want to beat the odds.”
The post A Stroke Paralyzed Jesse Malin. Next Month, He’ll Stand Onstage Again. appeared first on New York Times.
