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>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until June 15th.
On a warm afternoon in February 2006, John Lydon sat in a beach restaurant near his home in Los Angeles, and he broke out in happy song. Lydon, newly turned fifty, wore a plaid vinyl jacket, a boater hat, tartan sneakers, Union Jack socks and an exaggerated smile that seemed both easy and self-conscious. A ruddier version of the same face, two decades younger, scowled from a T-shirt stretched across his belly. "I'm staring at you," he said. His hat had a hole in it from a cigarette burn. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Sex Pistols' debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, but on this occasion Lydon was choking on another milestone, the band's imminent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (they didn't attend). He was talking about the humor in the Sex Pistols, which he said had been missed by all the people who came after. "We're music hall," he said, his cheer rising. "This is part of British culture. You're brought up, you sing along in the pubs, there's a piano in the corner, it's an ongoing process. You can sing songs from 200 years ago and everyone will know it, just like you can sing something brand-new, everyone will know it, because it fits into a thing. And basically, Sex Pistols songs lend themselves absolutely to" -- and by now he was positively beaming -- " 'Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the lamppost overnight?' "He was a grown man, consigned to explain and reanimate what he had done at nineteen, and he took to it with the forced whimsy of a vaudeville announcer, playing his own straight man when needed. Three decades after Never Mind the Bollocks immortalized forever Lydon's hypervigilant disdain, he said, no record company was interested in signing him, though at PTA meetings he was still Johnny Rotten. I asked what the Sex Pistols had set out to do back in 1975. "Attack. Attack. No recriminations, no defensive strategy. Attack: 'You're all wrong, you've got no fucking right to tell us who or what we are, or what is our place.'
"I think I brought a bit of barefaced honesty to music, which I don't think was there before. The closest that would describe what I was feeling, and what my culture was, would be John Lennon's 'Working Class Hero.' It was about complacency: 'No, I don't know my place, and nobody's going to tell me what it is, either, I'll work that out for myself, thank you -- not happy to be a slave worker, I've got a brain. Yes, I've got a shovel, but I've got a brain, too, and I like to use it.' Still shoveling shit, though, really." At the last bit of wordplay he seemed pleased.
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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.
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"Do you think it's lame if we go?" he asked, regarding the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. "I think it would be a good thing if we go and play. That would be the most punk thing to do. And just let the swindle continue. I think it's not the punk thing to do to slag it off. That's the obvious thing. That's like the mentality from twenty, thirty years ago. I'm all about making money. I'm not into that about selling out. Sold out? We sold out years ago when we signed with Warner Bros. That's a load of shit. I wanna make some dough. We've never made dough. Everybody else has made dough. Green Day has made millions of dollars off our coattails, and all these other fucks. Which is fine, but I want to make a little dough."
He smiled at the old recurring differences, never resolved. "I hate being in the Sex Pistols," he said, with humor more than malice, like half of a cantankerous older couple. "I just want to lead a nice, easy, normal life now. It's never like that. It's like a dysfunctional family. It's the same shit as any other band. Just that a lot of bands say they don't do that."
At fifty-one, Jones is keenly attuned to the motion of any female figure on either side of Santa Monica Boulevard and more than willing to share details of his experience with Viagra or the curative powers of amatory dress-up. What he had not shared, until recently, is that even during the Pistols days he secretly preferred colossal mainstream bands like Queen, Boston and Journey to the bands on the punk scene.
In the circus that was the Sex Pistols, Jones and Paul Cook, the drummer, never got the attention that went to John, Sid or Malcolm, and even within the band, they were often demeaned as "the sidemen." But to listen now to Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is to hear the power of their conventional virtues. Now that the songs aren't imperiling the empire, they flat rock.
For Jones, the son of a hairdresser and a professional boxer, who left home when he was fifteen, the Pistols grew out of old-fashioned rock & roll yearnings, born of limited options and the escape offered by crime. "I definitely didn't feel wanted as a child," he says in Julien Temple's 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury, one of several moments when the band's dramatized mayhem gives way to reveal the genuine damage to children behind it. "I actually got put back a year because I was so stupid."
So he excelled at crime, or at least persevered. He stole clothes from the stores where idols like Rod Stewart or Bryan Ferry shopped, then progressed to stealing from the stars directly: a fur coat from Ron Wood's house, clothes and a TV from Keith Richards', two guitars from Rod Stewart's, a PA system from a David Bowie gig and assorted drums, microphones and other gear. He didn't necessarily want to learn to play at first, just be part of the action. "All the equipment that I stole, that was the beginning of me being in music. I just wanted to be involved in music, that was it. That was the only way I knew how, to steal musical equipment. And clothes."
One of the stores he stole from was a clothing shop on Kings Road run by McLaren and his partner, Vivienne Westwood, which had a jukebox and a couch where people could hang out. Sex, as the store was soon called, was a destination for style-conscious rock stars and a gathering place for young misfits of mid-Seventies London. Westwood's designs, which included fetish gear and swastikas, foreshadowed some of the contradictions later explored in the Sex Pistols: They signaled liberation through the constriction of pleasure, not the free circulation, and they mocked consumerism and materialism while embracing the purest form of materialism, the fetish. When Jones and Cook took up the stolen instruments, they asked McLaren to manage them, though his limited experience as manager of the New York Dolls -- he put them in red leather and communist insignia -- was a disaster. "I certainly did not want to manage them," McLaren said later. "It was more preventing Steve Jones from thieving in the store."
McLaren, born in 1946, was a student of Fifties rock & roll and the working-class dandyism of British Teddy Boys, named for their revival of Edwardian fashions. To the fraying ends of the 1960s he brought a lightning-fast intellect that combined pop theory, prank politics and visions of hip capitalism. McLaren loved a catchy slogan and the promise of calamity. The idea of the Sex Pistols, he said, was an outgrowth of the store. "I was selling rubber masks and tying that to a jukebox playing tracks from Muddy Waters to Iggy Pop," he said, speaking from his office in Paris. "This really did have an idea before the Sex Pistols, it was already blowing up. And the Sex Pistols just gave it a platform for it to be seen outside the niche of the little shop. It spun it into the domain of the media. In this way, I forced and manipulated and created the Sex Pistols, and doing so, I suppose what I was hoping they would become was fatal attractions, dangerous people to know. I liked the thought that they would forever play as if they were on the verge of collapse into chaos and disaster. And I thought, once bitten by that disaster, you become twice as excited." McLaren speaks in long, discursive paragraphs, and though his account of the Sex Pistols is no more plausible than Rotten's bit about music hall, it has the virtue of capturing the feelings the band elicited. Unlike Lydon, McLaren is a mythmaker, not a debunker. "I didn't see the Sex Pistols as a group," he said. "It's funny to say. You just saw them as an idea. They were a constant, moving idea. Unlike a sculptor that uses clay or a painter uses paint, it was much more organic because they were real, but they were still an idea, and they were used as an idea."
Years before the Sex Pistols, he presaged them in a manifesto for an art-school film. "Be childish," McLaren wrote in the manifesto, which is quoted in the exhaustive history England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, by Jon Savage. "Be irresponsible. Be disrespectful. Be everything this society hates." Whatever else they were, from the moment they formed in McLaren's shop in the summer of 1975, the Sex Pistols were this manifesto come to life.
[Excerpt From Issue 1002 — June 15, 2006]