Jimmy Webb, the longtime manager and buyer for Trash & Vaudeville who became an East Village icon and fashion guru for punk rockers, has died. He was 62. Webb’s friend Heart Montalbano confirmed his death to Rolling Stone, and said that the cause of death was cancer.
“We are all going to miss our wonderful friend Jimmy Webb,” Debbie Harry, the Blondie lead singer who was close with Webb, said in a statement. “There goes a lovely unique NYC character. I feel lucky to have known him.” Webb had just honored Harry and Iggy Pop at a celebration he called “Footprints in February" two months ago, putting their handprints, footprints and autographs in concrete on the floor of his Orchard Street shop.
Punk and rock luminaries including Blondie cofounder Chris Stein, Duff McKagan of Guns ‘N Roses, Henry Rollins, David Johansen of the New York Dolls, director Jim Jarmusch and legendary music photographers Bob Gruen and Mick Rock, many of whom he had styled for over the years, were all in attendance at that event.
Rollins told the NY Post that Webb was "one of the sweetest human beings" he had ever met. “I flew out from LA; I had to be there for Jimmy,” he said of the recent event. “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 with Debbie Harry at the “Footprints in February" event in February 2020
In a piece in The New Yorker a decade ago, Webb revealed that he grew up in upstate New York, and struggled with drug addiction and homelessness earlier in his life. When he first moved to the city in the '70s, he got a job “delivering cocktails in a gay bar [on the Upper West Side], and I could see where that would lead, and I wanted more. I wanted to dance and live, so I took off into the streets by myself with all the other runaway boys. No fear.”
He became addicted to heroin and lived in Tompkins Square Park for almost 20 years, left the city, and then returned in the late '90s. “It got worse before it got better,” he told the Times a few years ago. “They thought I was going to die. After rebuilding my body and spirit, I wanted to go back to the city I loved.”
Webb started working at Trash & Vaudeville, a St. Mark's Place institution since the late '70s, in 1999, and quickly became its manager, top buyer, and all around mascot. As Rolling Stone wrote, "With an eye for the perfect-fitting skintight jeans and authentic style, he pulled together looks for punk rockers and pop stars alike, including outfitting everyone from the Ramones to Beyoncé and Justin Bieber. The looks he had fashioned have been featured in Rolling Stone, Vogue, and on MTV."
As for his approach to style, he told the New Yorker, "Dressing is all about the whole look. If one thing stands out, you’re a beautiful coat walking down the street, or a pair of pants on the subway. With everything on, even if the elements are different from each other, it blends. You can’t cross that line to Bozo, though. That’s my new term, the Bozo line. You must never cross the Bozo line. I could look like Bozo right now, but instead I’m totally fabulous. I just happen to look fabulous with thousands of dollars of clothes and jewels and a $20 shirt.”
In 2013, Vogue called him the “reigning Mayor of St. Marks Place” and “punk rock’s unofficial shopkeeper.” He talked to them about how much St. Mark's had changed in recent years: "An expression I use a lot is, 'You can take the boy out of the gutter, but you can't take the gutter out of the boy.' I don't think you can take the history of St. Marks Place away, or the feeling or the energy. You'll always see a girl with a great leopard miniskirt and a boy with a great Mohawk. But you don't see it as much...I miss the diversity of all the clubs, the diversity of the lifestyles, of the cultures."
In 2016, Trash & Vaudeville moved a few blocks away to East 7th Street—you can see photos of it just before it moved here. In 2017, Webb opened up his own boutique in the East Village, called I NEED MORE, where he worked until his death.
You can see tributes to Webb from various musicians, friends, and patrons.
