The Sex Pistols: Still Rotten Thirty Years After Their Debut

A young woman on the sidewalk asked for a cigarette, and he snapped, "No, buy your own," before seizing the occasion to address a bee that was apparently in his boater. "I don't like kids who can afford things begging. That's an abuse of you." It was one more edict in an afternoon's trove of amiable, punning tirades about Green Day, the Hall of Fame, Virgin Records, Courtney Love, zoos, Malcolm McLaren, flared pants, face-lifts, Catholic school and the Ramones, each riff spinning out familiarly in the benign Pacific breeze. "Inducted," he said, apropos the Hall of Fame. "That's what you do to central heating pipes, you induct them. It's the music industry perpetuating the penguin suit and dickey bow, and it's unacceptable. It's not free-form. It's anti-social, really. It's us versus them, and us will win. 'Us' as in U.S."

You're a moralist, I said -- because that, after all, was another overlooked dimension of the Sex Pistols.

He looked offended, but just for a blink. "No, values. I do this because I have values. I would have used the word 'morals' years ago, but I would have used it badly. 'Morals' is religious-based, and I certainly don't want anything to do with that."

The story of the Sex Pistols begins properly at the end, January 14th, 1978, at the Winterland Ballroom, in San Francisco. Sid Vicious, the band's bass player, had descended into the role of walking emergency, with the plea GIMME A FIX carved on his bare chest and a hardening sense of his destiny as a Sex Pistol. "I wanna be like Iggy Pop and die before I'm thirty," he'd said earlier in the tour -- and though Iggy is still among us, Sid was gone in a little more than a year, of a heroin overdose thought to be provided by his mother. The guitarist, Steve Jones, was sick of Sid's uselessness and Lydon's unconcealed scorn. Lydon by this point openly despised the manager, the band and the state of things. "I don't like rock music, I don't know why I'm in it," he'd told a radio interviewer that afternoon. "I just want to destroy everything." And the manager, Malcolm McLaren, was bored with the group's increasingly calcified routine. He'd imagined them destroying show business, but show business was all they had. "As you design these things, you think you're the master of your own destiny," he said later. "But at the end of the day you're creating Frankenstein, and it will ultimately go out of control."

Unable to hear himself onstage, Lydon glared at the crowd, half camp, half Antichrist. Though he didn't know it at the time, it was his last day as Rotten for years to come, because McLaren claimed ownership of the name for the next few years. He had twenty dollars in his pocket, no credit card, no airline ticket, no plan -- no future.

In other words, the Sex Pistols were being the Sex Pistols, and it was crashing down on them, with the clarity of Rotten's famous last words.

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

In their twenty-six-month public existence, the Sex Pistols managed one album, a handful of singles, a few dozen club gigs, one mildly profane TV appearance, several arrests, two sackings from record companies, some hasty local bans and one dance fad (the pogo, invented by Sid). When they were scaring the English public, three members lived with their mothers and one lived in a rehearsal space with no hot water because they couldn't afford proper homes; Rotten wrote "God Save the Queen," the band's most notorious song, at his parents' breakfast table, awaiting his baked beans. Their best-played shows drew a couple hundred people or fewer, and even for their last gig, at the cavernous Winterland, they split sixty-seven dollars. They were gone before any of them turned twenty-three.

No one managed to destroy more with less.

Of their contemporaries, the Buzzcocks wrote better songs, the Ramones were more conceptually perfect and the Clash were less internally conflicted. Siouxsie and the Banshees dressed better. But it is the Pistols who breathed the viral promise that punk's elements, including their own inadequacies, represented something more: a rejection not just of work and rules but of the rebellions of the previous generation, which were then being fed back as a new pleasure industry. "I hate shit," Rotten said in the band's first interview, just four months after their first gig. "I hate hippies and what they stand for. I hate long hair. I hate pub bands. . . . I want people to go out and start something, to see us and start something, or else I'm just wasting my time." He could not have known how far his provocation would carry. When a square British television announcer warned viewers, "Punk rock . . . to many people, it is a bigger threat to our way of life than Russian communism or hyperinflation," even the kitsch proved prophetic: In 1991, thirteen years after the Pistols' breakup, visitors to post-communist Budapest would have seen the graffiti "Sid Vicious!" in Vörösmarty Square, a new youth culture claiming its identity in the freshest language it knew.

At a cafe in West Hollywood, Steve Jones had his own take on the meaning of the Sex Pistols. It was midafternoon, and he had just finished his daily radio show, Jonesy's Jukebox, with a guest appearance by Slash from Guns n' Roses. Jones wore a black anarchy T-shirt, tired eyes and mild regret that he was lapsing on his resolution to cut down on coffee. "How'd it go with John?" he asked. "Had he been hitting it?" (Lydon for his part had said, affectionately, "Steve thinks thinking's a problem.") Jones has lived in Los Angeles for the last twenty-six years, sober for the last sixteen, but he has little contact with Lydon.