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.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."
John Lydon is a moralist. And because that, after all, was another overlooked dimension of the Sex Pistols.
"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."
Continued tomorrow...
