rock and roll musings by Tim Byrnes

Belsen Was an Atrocity: How the Sex Pistols Blew It

Consider the Sex Pistols, on one hand they are undeniably one of the greatest rock and roll bands to ever strap on guitars and drums and spit into microphones, perhaps the greatest. Yet for a band that set out, loudly, to destroy all that was bloated and useless in rock and roll and, by extension, society itself, they looked pretty comfortable preening for the cameras on the god awful Jimmy Kimmel Show last week, being treated like the second coming of the Beatles by kids who didn’t know any better. These were, after all, the Sex Pistols, and didn’t they, like, do something great a long time ago? All the material says they’re legendary and wow, it’s the Sex Pistols!! Which one’s Sid Vicious? Hi, mom, I’m on TV......... with the friggin’ Sex Pistols!

Yeah, yeah, yeah..who am I to begrudge Johnny and the boys from finally getting paid in cash and notoriety? I’ll tell ya. I’m (one of the) guy(s) who fell victim to the Great Rock and Roll Swindle, I believed, and truth be told-still believe- in the promise of punk rock. That promise, to me, was one of staying true to the classic rule of the spiritual anarchist, the one that states there are no rules. I always thought that, once the initial rage and anger of punk, which was necessary if only to get us to move, passed that there would be a punk-invented new framework, an art-driven societal model of repair and reparations of and to the disenchanted. A New World Order (and don’t get me started on New Order, I mean Ian Curtis died for this?) free from hype and hermetically sealed personalities, strutting their thievery and mocking us with their riches and unavailability. And, who am I to dog the kids in the audience ‘cause I think they’re spoiled, clueless, lethargic little Woodstock burning down m***********s?

I’m an old guy, that’s my job.

As stated before, the roots of punk go way back, maybe to the caveman who knows? Conventional, that is East Coast, wisdom claims the 74/75 CBGB explosion to be punk’s true roots and maybe so ( My take on this: the Ramones go to England with the Heartbreakers, Johnny steals Richard Hell’s fashion sense, Sid steals Johnny Thunders’ drug habits, Steve and Paul swipe that drivin’ beat from the Ramones while Malcolm confers his New York Dolls marketing plan onto these kids in his clothing store and the next thing you know, they’re cursing on tv and vomiting in airports and so are every other band to come out of the woods for the next 15 years until Cobain swiped the Replacements rock and the Pixies’ psychosis and succeeded himself all the way to the Shotgun Shoppe), but there was nothing but a common stage that linked those early CBGB bands. There was no code, no uniform no requirements then, only fierce fire burning in a thousand hearts. Punk was a movement of self with communication at it’s core, the point was to do it yourself, find that space where truth spoke louder than fact and rock with it. Or scream at it. Or chant. Or tell stories over drop beats. Cover your face in swaddling clothes, be so strange you’re normal, be so normal you’re creepy, it didn’t (doesn’t? shouldn’t?) matter. The watchword was originality. The promise was possibilities. What happened?

Much like the crash of the Aquarian Dream, where my generation got too stoned on it’s own (idea of) beauty to actually create the land of peace and love we envisioned, Punk was hoisted on the petard of it’s own anger. This anger, while righteous and good at first, slowly turned to the dread ‘nihilism’, which means that the intellectuals got a hold of it and dressed it up to the point of posture, an end to itself. This is where the rot sets in, people. Once it becomes cool to be angry about the state of things, all the cool people will do is stay angry. Yes, things are f****d up, always have been, and as long as we as the people continue to respond to these feelings by dressing in black and perforating ourselves with safety pins, and such like nonsense, then things will always be f****d up! The refrain of ‘No Future", taken on face value and celebrated as a way of life leads to just that: No Future. But when critical thought is brought to bear on the concept the first question to come to mind must be "What can we do to avoid this No Future? We get it, life sucks, everything sucks, what are we going to do about it?"

I’ve gotten no answers from Johnny Rotten and Sid’s too dead to speak. In a sense, Sid was the ultimate punk rocker in that he paid the inevitable price for following the scene’s scent, for believing and trying to live up to his publicity. Sid was stupid and vulgar and on drugs, perhaps he even murdered Nancy Spungen though I don’t think so, I mean that act would require a level of commitment that Sid was probably not capable of. I saw him at Max’s Kansas City weeks before Nancy’s death. He was stranded in New York, suddenly an Ex-Pistol and trapped by fame into performing with a pickup band consisting of Jerry Nolan and Arthur Kane of the Dolls and a guitarist who’s name escapes me now, but it was NOT Steve Jones, as intimated, hell, claimed at the Pistols own site. I was, as I was usually in those days, drunk to the point of seeing double, but even in my condition I could tell that Sid (both of them) was in worse shape. Thin, pale and shaking with dead eyes too tired to even cross as he weaved back and forth in the vicinity of the microphone, mumbling old rockabilly tunes as Nancy screamed drink orders in a harridan voice all the while. This man could no more commit murder than loud music could change the world. But, the saddest thing about Sid’s story is that it didn’t have to be that way. Sid Vicious was a human being, a kid named John Simon Ritchie who fell into the rock and roll circus with all it’s gifts and temptations only to be used up and left to die by Malcolm McClaren, John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, EMI, WB, Virgin, the underground media, the overground media and, finally by you and me, ‘cause we watched this poor kid’s demise like it was entertainment. Which it was presented to us as, but Christ, why couldn’t we see through it?

So the Pistols begat the Clash, who begat the Damned, who begat the Dead Boys and so on and so forth until we got Joe Strummer’s ghost in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the whole ‘stone-temple-of-the-alice-in-the-pearl-bush’ department of Doors impersonators passing as the new New Wave. And wither the Sex Pistols? Well, the once ‘last, best hope for rock and roll’ have turned into the very machine they were born to hate; the massively bloated rock machine that elevates itself from us - where all the power truly comes from - and plows through old songs for old people, no matter their age.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 23:08 | link | comments

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