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Iggy Pop paid tribute to Jimmy Webb — the punk style icon and New York City boutique owner beloved by rock royalty — in a statement to Rolling Stone following Webb’s death Tuesday at the age of 62.
“Jimmy was a ragged ray of sunshine in a world that’s getting darker,” Pop wrote. “Being close with Jimmy involved a deluge of flowers, gifts, voice mails, texts and very long telephone conversations. The flowers tended to be fantastically huge floral arrangements and the gifts invariably wrapped in pink leopard skin, spritzed with glitter and little gold stars like the kind you get in kindergarten for being a very good boy.”
Pop also reminisced about meeting Webb for the first time. “I first heard of Jimmy from a couple of frightened co-workers at Trash and Vaudeville, the New York rock boutique he managed for years,” he wrote. “They told me I had a stalker but Jimmy wasn’t that bad, just a relentlessly enthusiastic fan who enjoyed your fame and oddity so much he wants to be you, and why not?
“This is the kind of guy who you don’t think you would miss until you do and then you miss him a lot, kind of Proust in streetwear, showing his asscrack.”
Webb died Tuesday following a bout with cancer. Following his death, artists like Billie Joe Armstrong, Duff McKagan, Sebastian Bach and more shared remembrances of the longtime Trash and Vaudeville manager who later opened his own NYC shop, I Need More. “I knew he had been battling an illness for a long time and he showed incredible stamina and pluck in the fight,” Pop added. “This is someone whose grave will be visited with flowers, cigarettes and love.”
Read Pop’s entire tribute to Webb below:
Jimmy was a ragged ray of sunshine in a world that’s getting darker. He became close with my wife Nina and I over the years. Being close with Jimmy involved a deluge of flowers, gifts, voice mails, texts and very long telephone conversations. The flowers tended to be fantastically huge floral arrangements and the gifts invariably wrapped in pink leopard skin, spritzed with glitter and little gold stars like the kind you get in kindergarten for being a very good boy. Both in texting and long hand, Jimmy never used the cursive or any smaller case letters, everything was in full speed caps with unending exclamation points. I first heard of Jimmy from a couple of frightened co- workers at Trash and Vaudeville, the New York rock boutique he managed for years. They told me I had a stalker but Jimmy wasn’t that bad, just a relentlessly enthusiastic fan who enjoyed your fame and oddity so much he wants to be you, and why not?
This is the kind of guy who you don’t think you would miss until you do and then you miss him a lot, kind of Proust in street wear, showing his asscrack. For some years now, Jimmy lived alone in a basement apartment in Murray Hill and dedicated his life to his store ‘I Need More’, and to the people he collected through that theatre and a theatre it was, and he was it’s star, gossiping, laughing, cackling but always encouraging and spotlighting what he thought was beautiful about the people and world around him. It was his dream to have a store-as-theater like this, in the tradition of let it rock, manic panic and Trash and Vaudeville, also to be somebody and he really was so, he got where he needed to go. I knew he had been battling an illness for a long time and he showed incredible stamina and pluck in the fight.
This is someone whose grave will be visited with flowers, cigarettes and love.
Featured via: Rollingstone
