Checking In - This Ain't no Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995 - page 9

But this didn't deter our young artists, for whom cleanliness was beside the point.
DIMITRI MUGIANIS
Moving in was great! There were all these other young people who were doing
things,creating things,andtheolderpeoplewhoweredoingthings,thosepeople
I had always looked up to. At one point, in the course of a single month, Tom
Waits was living there, Don Cherry 8 , Ornette Coleman's 9 trumpet player, was
there, and Gil Scott Heron 10 lived there too. You could talk to these people in the
hallway!
The very first day I lived there, I opened the door and was going to go out to
the store, and Julian Beck, 11 from the Living Theater, was opening the door next
to me. I looked at his face—which is a helluva face—and I just closed the door!
I was terrified! But I said to myself, “Wow, this is a great place!”
DAVID LAWTON
It was such a wacky universe, with little celebrities passing through! Anthony
Kiedis from the Chili Peppers for instance, and you'd see minor celebrities
passing through for short periods of time.
ROBERT CAMPBELL
EverybodywhomovesintotheChelseawantstoknowwhatfamouspersononce
lived in his or her room. Big Paul [Romero] had Bob Dylan's room, 319, where
Dylan wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” John Wayne had also lived
there. Sarah Bernhardt. Arthur C. Clarke 12 wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey at the
Chelsea. And Julian Schnabel, 13 the painter who made it huge in the 80s, lived
up there, the guy with the busted plates. And my friend Scott Covert had Dylan
Thomas' room, either that or maybe it was O. Henry's. 14
PAUL VOLMER
Therewasthisvibeofhistorygoingthroughthere.Therearetheplaquesoutside,
with the names of Brendan Behan 15 and all these luminaries. And you're in your
late teens or early twenties—even into your thirties—before you get your teeth
kicked in. You've still got the idealism. You want to write, and you want to per-
form, and you think your shit doesn't stink. It was a great place to do that with a
bunch of other people doing it at the same time.
In the hotel's long history, people moving into the Chelsea saw themselves as following a
light, or at least a rose-tinted glow: the Chelsea Hotel's glimmering, shabby romantic al-