Grumpy Old Men

Despite the fact that their mythic status rests on the foundation of merely one album, plus various other outtakes/demos/live cuts/and general fuck-offs, The Sex Pistols unquestionably deserve said status. There’s been a bit of revisionist history about the band in the last ten years or so, especially in light of their controversial (and utterly pathetic) reunion tour in 1996 and various one-off shows since then. An acquaintance of mine once shook her head at the Pistols always being the most prominently-mentioned band in any magazine article celebrating the halcyon days of 1977, saying, “What’s the big deal?” But no, even with all that crap, the Pistols really are one of the great bands.

It’s easy writing off Never Mind the Bollocks… because it was the one and only LP the band managed committing to vinyl before grinding to a halt in January of 1978. By the time of its release it was, as many cynics complain, more like a greatest hits album than a proper debut; all four of the band’s singles up until that point were included, along with a re-recording of No Feelings, already familiar to fans as the B-side of God Save the Queen. Really, the only songs on the album that could actually be considered new were Bodies and Holidays in the Sun, the latter lifting its main riff from The Jam’s In the City (which itself was derivative of The Kinks’ One of the Survivors).

I’ll give that much to the cynics. In the final analysis, however, there’s simply no denying the songs themselves, and the effect the songs and the band had on the late 70s. The “big deal” my acquaintance wondered about was the band’s capacity, sometimes accidental, sometimes not, to blaze the trail so many bands scrambled to travel in the following months and years. They had memorable made-up names, they died their hair and flaunted shabby, often offensive clothing, they swore on live television, their music was loud and raw, and their lyrics savaged the status-quo, from the government’s figure-head, to the government itself. And the songs themselves were incendiary. God Save the Queen still pulverizes, Liar’s minimalist guitar solo is beautifully and searingly serendipitous, and Holidays in the Sun/Bodies may be the most dramatic one-two punch in rock history. Jaded American consumers, in this day and age of EVERYTHING being co-opted by the world’s major corporations, forget what Bollocks sounded like for many years after its release. I was 14 years-old in May of 1984 when I pedaled my bicycle through gawdawful Santa Fe spring winds to Hastings at DeVargas Mall and threw down eight bucks for Bollocks on vinyl. The bag with the album whipped and snapped in the wind all the way home, where I locked myself in my room and lowered the needle on side one. For a kid who’d been listening to top-40 radio, Queen, and AC/DC up until then, the sounds blasting from my speakers for the next few minutes were almost incomprehensible. I made it through Holidays and got to the ultra-profane part of Bodies (“Fuck this and fuck that…”), whereupon I lifted the needle off the vinyl, placed the arm in its cradle, and called my best friend. I told him I had bought Bollocks. "How is it?" he asked. “You should probably come over here and hear this…” I didn’t know what else to say.

So, having been in that kind of band, the kind that almost single-handedly changed everything, it is, I suppose, somewhat understandable that John Lydon continues being one of the most obdurately and cantankerously opinionated blokes in the music industry. Which is a diplomatic way of saying the guy is a total dumb-ass. I just re-read Lydon’s interview with The Orange County Register’s Ben Wener from last year, and was struck by how whiny and judgmental Lydon has grown now that he’s had 30 years to reflect on the Pistols’ legacy and let it swell his head up. Yeah, I know – he was always whiny and judgemental, right? But at least Rotten's rancor, ca. 1977, was aimed squarely at the status quo. Nowadays his tirades are the pathetic ravings of a chubby 51 year-old reduced to singing Anarchy in the U.K. – as irrelevant a lyric as there could be to a man living a comfortable middle class existence, courtesy the money still rolling in from Sex Pistols paraphernalia – on the Jay Leno show, of all things.

Among the idiotic things flowing from his mouth in the Wener interview:

1) “…I’m rather fond of the royal family… There’s an invigorating pulse to a British heartbeat to have something so ancestral as a royal family. It means your roots go back way into the centuries, and that’s an important thing.” Uh… doesn’t the fact that ANY of us are here, whether we’re British, American, Chinese, black, white, yellow, red, mean that our roots go back “way into the centuries”?

2) (On identifying with his working-class roots): “We’re working class and that means something in England. It means you have no hope, no future. Every line in every (Pistols) song is about that… (Editor’s note: The following Sex Pistols songs have nothing to do with being working-class: Submission, New York, EMI, Belsen Was a Gas.) …You can never take it out of you… I don’t need the lying nonsense of the wealthy, the powers-that-be… they cheated me out of my childhood and out of my life.” Jesus, I had no idea that the “powers-that-be” cheated poor John Lydon out of his entire life. Poor dude. Seriously, tho – how is it that a guy who has fronted not one, but two iconic bands, toured the entire globe, recorded dozens and dozens of songs, written a book, and made a million dollars feels he has been cheated out of his life? Goddamn, I’m sick of losers like John Lydon deploying their rough childhoods as this untouchable virtue that makes only their art valid. Gimme a fuckin’ break. Art is art, whether you’re poor or wealthy. Gram Parsons was a trust fund baby alright, but he wrote some great songs, and that he didn’t have to worry about paying the bills doesn’t make The Gilded Palace of Sin any less artistically valid than PiL’s Flowers of Romance. Trotting out your hard-fought roots as an irrefutable proof of your artistic purity, even after shamelessly pocketing tons of dough on the aptly-named “Filthy Lucre” tour, is ignorant, self-pitying, and fucking pathetic.

3) “Everybody’s trying to claim the credit for inventing punk… And that Ramones nonsense going on and on – how on Earth are the Ramones anything at all like the Sex Pistols? We came from a culture facing some serious challenges when we were young. We were the complete bottom line – the poorest of the poor. We come from squalor and fought our way up tooth and claw. Mommy and Daddy didn’t buy us no guitars… I have no begrudging of what the Ramones do or any of them bands. But they did not come from harsh realities – and therefore (are) incomparable.” This is more or less like the last quote: asinine, self-pitying bullshit from a feeble old man who hasn’t written a decent song for 30 years. I get the sense that it’s this self-judgmental desperation that drives Lydon to say such mind-bogglingly stupid crap. Nevermind the fact that the Ramones were, indisputably, a huge influence on the Pistols and England’s burgeoning punk scene in 1976; here’s a guy who between 1976 and 1980 recorded songs and albums that are the bedrock of punk and everything it spawned, yet when the amps are turned on in 2007 and Jay Leno introduces him, it’s still as a band that broke up 29 years ago, and he’s still singing (badly, I might add) songs that were written 30, 31 years ago. No one remembers or cares about anything Lydon has written since 1979’s Metal Box. He hasn’t written anything good since then.

At least the Ramones recorded three phenomenal albums, two great albums, and two more decent albums, which is a shitload more than John Lydon can take credit for. I don’t care if you’re main source of income derives from something you did three decades ago. And I have no problem with anyone being proud of their roots; I’m proud of being from a ranching family in Roswell, NM that never had any money. But watching Lydon’s once energizing young-man energy devolve over the years into two-dimensional maudlin annoyance is sad indeed. Buck up, dude. You’re doing just fine.