Dec 14

Sex Pistols

Greatly Appreciated

SEX PISTOLS
 
 
The Sex Pistols  were an English punk rock band formed in London in 1975.  Although they lasted just two-and-a-half years and produced only four singles and one studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, they were one of the most influential acts in the history of popular music, initiated a punk movement in the United Kingdom, and inspired many later punk and alternative rock musicians.  Their 1977 single “God Save the Queen”, attacking social conformity and deference to the Crown, precipitated the “last and greatest outbreak of pop-based moral pandemonium”.  In January 1978, at the end of a turbulent tour of the United States, Rotten left the Sex Pistols and announced its break-up.  On 24 February 2006, the Sex Pistols — the four original, surviving members and Sid Vicious — were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but they refused to attend the ceremony, calling the museum “a piss stain”.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
As it turned out, three competing and complementary strains of music arose seemingly overnight by 1974:  In addition to power pop, they were what most of us know as “punk rock” – e.g., Ramones, Sex Pistols, Patti Smith Group (with Lenny Kaye on lead guitar), Dead Boys – and “new wave” – e.g., Elvis Costello, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Runaways – the latter band, the first successful all-female rock band, is now the subject of a major motion picture. 
 
(April 2010)
 
*       *       *
 
The Dead Boys broke up in 1979 when the whole punk rock scene seemed about to disintegrate; Sex Pistols had famously imploded in January 1978 during their first American tour.
 
(February 2011)
 
*       *       *
 
Ultra’s sound was clashing with the growing popularity of disco and punk rock; and in fact, their most high-profile moment came when they opened for Sex Pistols at Randy’s Rodeo on January 8, 1978.  Galen Niles stated recently:  “We most definitely had no business being on the same bill as the Sex Pistols, as we were not in any musical sense of the word a ‘punk’ outfit.”  
 
(September 2011)
 
*       *       *
 
Punk rockers often pick out wacko names; frontman Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys, drummer Rat Scabies of the Damned, and of course Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious of Sex Pistols are examples.  Usually it is just one or two bandmembers who do that, but all of the Ugly did:  Mike Nightmare (singer), Raymi Gutter (guitar), Sam Ugly (bass), and Tony Torcher (drums), plus soundman Johnny Garbagecan. 

 (November 2011)
 
*       *       *
 
 
Malcolm McLaren – the musical entrepreneur best known for managing Sex Pistols – assembled the musicians in the band Adam and the Ants (after Adam Ant became a solo artist and also escaped with the band name) with a teenaged Anglo-Burmese singer dubbed Annabella Lwin.  As Bow Wow Wow, they recorded the old Strangeloves song “I Want Candy”; coupled with an early MTV video, this song became a worldwide hit in 1982. 
 
(May 2012)
 
*       *       *
 
An even better punk rock band that I have written about several times comes from the Heartland (Cleveland to be precise):  the Dead Boys, led by front man Stiv Bators.  As Greg Shaw has said of (in part) the Dead Boys: 
 
“[A]fter a trip to London in which I’d seen one of the Sex Pistols’ first gigs . . . I knew the Pistols were revolutionary . . . but meanwhile discovered there was a band right here in America doing it a whole lot better.  For what it’s worth, the Dead Boys were far and away the best ‘punk’ band I ever saw — and I saw them all.” 
 
(July 2012)
 
*       *       *
 

It is not unprecedented for the front man of a rock band to adopt that name as his new surname.  When the British new wave band Adam and the Ants was formed in 1977 (originally called simply the Ants), the chief songwriter and lead singer was known to the world as “Adam” – he was born Stuart Leslie Goddard.  Although Goddard had apparently taken the name Adam Ant before forming the band, I don’t remember anyone calling him that until he started his solo career.  Of course that left Adam Ant’s former bandmates in the Ants in the lurch; however, Malcolm McLaren – best known as the manager of the Sex Pistols – recruited them to back a barely pubescent Anglo-Burmese singer that he later discovered named Annabella Lwin (that’s not her real name either as I recall, though I can’t seem to find the info online anymore).  The resulting band Bow Wow Wow is one of my favorites from the early 1980’s. 

 

(August 2013)

 

*       *       *

 

The Runaways never found the same success at home as they had overseas, so Joan Jett went to England to begin her solo career.  In 1979, Jett recorded three songs with Paul Cook and Steve Jones (both formerly in Sex Pistols), including an early version of “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” (“I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” had originally been recorded by a British band called Arrows). 

 

(November 2013)

 

*       *       *

 

Along with many other figures from the underground press, Mick Farren moved to the influential New Musical Express (NME) in 1974.  Quoting again from the Telegraph obituary:  “Allowed free rein to explore the outer reaches of popular culture by its editor, Nick Logan, Farren turned in a series of memorable pieces on people such as the motorbike stunt-rider Evel Knievel and the avant-garde film director Kenneth Anger. 

 

“In the summer of 1976, by which time the Sex Pistols were introducing Britain to punk, Farren’s NME piece headlined ‘The Titanic Sails At Dawn’ [again using a Bob Dylan lyric, this time from one of my all-time favorites, “Desolation Row”] was judged to have caught the mood among the generation of teenagers disaffected by giant stadium acts like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.” 

 

(March 2014/1)

 

*       *       *

 

Paul Fischer reports about their debut album:  “Ravales’ debut album Barrio Chino has just been released [2012] and is a fierce collection of 17 punked-up rocky gems.  At its best it really does sound like Steve Jones and Paul Cook [of Sex Pistols] playing a Ramones set, albeit mostly sung in Spanish!” 
 
(September 2016)
 
*       *       *
 
The Modern Lovers is probably best known for their song “Pablo Picasso”. (Another of their tracks is “Roadrunner”; “Roadrunner” was covered by Sex Pistols on their little-known, sort-of second album, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle). I actually first heard the song on the Phranc album, Positively Phranc (1991), where (with Jonathan Richman’s blessing) she had rewritten the song as “Gertrude Stein” in honor of the famed Paris avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein who was the life partner of Alice B. Toklas – her 1954 recipe for marijuana brownies was celebrated in the Peter Sellers film, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968). An excerpt of “Pablo Picasso” (as performed by Burning Sensations) appears in the 1985 cult classic film, Repo Man that has been in heavy rotation on my TiVo for most of the year.  
(December 2016)
* * *
The Avengers album that I have, The American in Me features four tracks that were produced by Steve Jones of Sex Pistols in late 1978.  The remainder of the CD is a June 1979 concert at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco, within days of the final break-up of the band.  Greg Ingraham had left the band when this music was made; he was replaced by Brad Kent (also known as Brad C--t, and formerly in Victorian Pork, D.O.A. and other important Canadian punk rock bands). 
 
(March 2017)
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021