Debbie Harry, Joan Jett, Slash, Billie Joe Armstrong, Alice Cooper mourn death of punk fashion icon Jimmy Webb

Joan Jett, Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Guns N’ Roses’ Slash and Duff McKagan, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, E Street Band members Max Weinberg and Steven Van Zandt, Alice Cooper, Sebastian Bach, and many other rock stars took to social media Tuesday to mourn the death of beloved punk-rock stylist and fashion icon Jimmy Webb. Not to be confused with the singer-songwriter of the same name, Webb was best known as the longtime manager of the famous East Village emporium Trash and Vaudeville. According to Rolling Stone, Webb died of cancer. He was 62.

Webb, who was born and raised in the small Upstate New York town of Wynantskill, ran away to New York City at age 16 in 1975 and soon found his spiritual home at Trash and Vaudeville, which opened that same year. He long dreamed of working at the shop he called “rock ‘n’ roll heaven,” but fell into drug addiction and became homeless for many years, even living in a cardboard box in Tompkins Square Park for a while. However, after he got sober for good, he wrote a letter to the store’s owner, Ray Goodman, asking for a job; much to his surprise, Goodman took a chance and hired him. Webb quickly worked his way up to become the store’s star employee, manager, and buyer, styling everyone from Beyoncé to Iggy Pop.

Webb remained at Trash and Vaudeville until 2017, when he left to start his own boutique, I Need More, named after an Iggy song. During his time at both Trash and Vaudeville (which relocated from its original St. Marks Place location to East 7th Street in 2016) and I Need More, Webb established himself as a New York City legend and a “rock star” in his own right, with his signature look of shaggy peroxided hair, skintight bondage trousers, piled-on jewelry, and copious tattoos. But despite this bad-boy image, he was known for being a perennially positive and cheerful sweetheart. His colorful Instagram was packed with smiling pictures of him hanging out with everyone from Alice Cooper, KISS’s Ace Frehley, and Slash to actor Ewan McGregor.

At a party for I Need More, held just this past February, Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry placed their handprints in concrete on the store’s floor; McKagan, the New York Dolls’ David Johansen, and Henry Rollins were among the event’s rock ‘n’ roll guests. “I flew out from L.A.; I had to be there for Jimmy,” Rollins told The New York Post. “He was not doing well, and I had no doubt that it would be my last time seeing him. Cancer is a hell of a thing.”

Webb remained punk-rock until the very end, seemingly unbothered by the gentrification of his old St. Marks stomping grounds or the mainstreaming of punk style. “You can take the boy out of the gutter, but you can't take the gutter out of the boy,” he once told Vogue. For 2013’s punk-themed Met Gala, he even helped Vogue style various celebrity attendees, and he explained his life philosophy to Fashionista at the time:

"I think not giving up the fight, being the real deal when it comes to punk rock. It shakes me up a little seeing the streets so different, but I always say, 'You can pave the streets with gold, but you can’t take what it is away from it.' There’s people like me or my boss around that just remember all of it and it keeps us alive. We’re the real deal. You can’t kill it. Can you kill an Iggy Pop? Can you kill a Debbie Harry? We’re not easy to kill.”

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