Oh-my and a boo-hoo’ – positively dripping with sarcasm and self-loathing. Every bit as combative and confrontational as the cold, hard stares of the four lank-haired thugs glaring out from the cover artwork, The Stooges was also music to beat yourself up to, a recurring theme in punk rock to the present day.
Other music critics see the form as pre-dating The Stooges, with its roots in the primitive, animalistic poundings of The Sonics, The Seeds, The Wailers and a thousand more unsung hooligan-blues heroes of the early 1960s who never meant jack-shit outside the bare brick walls of their own suburban garages. These bands took the thrust-and-drag dynamics of The Kingsmen’s 1963 version of Richard Berry’s deathless rock ’n’ roll standard ‘Louie Louie’ and The Kinks’ 1964 hit ‘You Really Got Me’ and amplified them with brute force and ignorance, getting high on volume and fuzz and speaker-hiss and adrenaline. Drawn together on Rolling Stone writer Lenny Kaye’s seminal 1972 compilation album Nuggets, bands such as The Barbarians and The Mojo Men and The Amboy Dukes made a forceful case for being the true defenders of the spirit of rock ’n’ roll.
In the early seventies, though, rock critics seemed keen to label just about anyone punk. To New York Times writer Grace Lichtenstein, Alice Cooper was a punk. To England’s New Musical Express Gene Vincent was a punk, as was Eddie Cochran. To Zigzag magazine Bruce Springsteen was ‘a rock ’n’ roll punk’. To Greg Shaw of Rolling Stone magazine, fifties teen idol Dion was ‘the original punk’. As English rock writer Mick Houghton cannily observed in 1975, ‘the term “punk” is bandied about an awful lot these days. It seems to describe almost any rock performer who camps it up to any degree, on or off-stage, or who displays an arrogance and contempt for his audience.’
By consensus, however, New York and London are generally acclaimed as the parent cities of the modern punk sound. The New York punk scene revolved around the CBGB club on Bowery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a scuzzy, graffiti-covered fleapit which, from 1974, played host to nonconformist, experimental artists such as Ramones, The New York Dolls, The Heartbreakers, Suicide, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. London’s vibrant scene, centred around the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, X-Ray Spex, The Slits and The Adverts, kicked in two years later, in 1976. But it was the latter scene which first received mainstream press coverage in the US, when Rolling Stone writer Charles M. Young was dispatched to London in August 1977 to write a cover story on the Sex Pistols, then still unsigned in America.
The Sex Pistols were England’s most notorious rock band, even before their first single, the electrifying Anarchy in the UK, débuted in the UK charts. In their very first press interview guitarist Steve Jones commented, ‘We’re not into music. We’re into chaos,’ words that would prove astonishingly prescient. Following a fractious appearance on primetime television show Today on 1 December 1976 – where the Pistols responded to host Bill Grundy’s goading putdowns by calling him a ‘dirty fucker’ and a ‘fucking rotter’ – the band graduated from the covers of Britain’s four weekly music papers – New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror – to the nation’s sensationalist, scandal-thirsty tabloid newspapers, who gleefully set about portraying the young Londoners as dangerous revolutionaries hellbent on destroying the very fabric of British society. The band’s inflammatory decision to release their caustic second single, God Save the Queen, in the run-up to Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee only heightened their infamy.
Charles Young was not met with open arms in London. Initially, in fact, he was not met at all, for Malcolm McClaren, the Sex Pistols’ mischievous, maverick manager, simply ignored the writer’s phone calls during his first two days in the city. Though Rolling Stone took pride in its roots as a counter-cultural magazine, by the mid-seventies it was firmly part of the establishment, in thrall to Laurel Canyon songwriters and MOR superstars: cover stars in 1976 included Neil Diamond, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Peter Frampton, teen pinup Donny Osmond and Christian crooner Pat Boone. When McClaren finally deigned to receive Young at his central London flat, he regarded the journalist as one might regard a ball of phlegm hacked up in a porcelain sink.
‘This band hates you,’ he loftily informed Young. ‘It hates your culture. Why can’t you lethargic, complacent hippies understand that? You need to be smashed.’
When he finally met McClaren’s charges, Young was horrified and fascinated in equal measure by the ‘four proletarian kids’ who’d provoked such outrage and revulsion in the UK. In a beautifully written article, titled ‘Rock Is Sick and Living in London’, the writer sketched out pen portraits of the men behind the myths: in his eyes, guitarist Steve Jones was a brash, lairy Jack The Lad who revelled in his band’s ‘bad boy’ status, drummer Paul Cook was thoughtful and unassuming, while cartoon-like bassist Sid Vicious was a somewhat pitiful, childlike, self-abusing simpleton.
Young found the band’s witheringly sarcastic frontman Johnny Rotten a more complex character to categorise. Despite Rotten doing his level best to be as obnoxious as possible to the visiting scribe, Young was impressed by the singer’s passion and obvious intelligence, and found the 21-year-old a not entirely dislikeable character.
On 19 August Young travelled to Wolverhampton to see the Pistols in concert. When the band took to the stage of Club Lafayette at the stroke of midnight, the writer was transfixed by the chaotic, violent spectacle in front of him and by Rotten in particular, whom he later hailed as ‘perhaps the most captivating performer I’ve ever seen’. He was convinced that the Pistols could be just the wake-up call that the moribund US music scene was crying out for.
‘Kids destroyed schools to the tune of $600 million in the U.S. last year,’ he noted towards the end of his article. ‘That’s a lot of anger that the Southern-California-Cocaine-and-Unrequited-Love Axis isn’t capable of tapping.’
By the time the Sex Pistols finally hit America’s West Coast in January 1978, however, they were a very different band. Vicious was by now a full-blown heroin addict, Rotten was at loggerheads with McClaren over his manipulative managerial style and Jones and Cook were tiring of the self-destructive circus that had long since enveloped their band. With perverse, puckish logic, McClaren had shied away from booking the Pistols into America’s most Anglophile, punk-cognisant cities – New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit – opting instead to schedule dates in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Tulsa and San Francisco, gambling that America’s media would lap up the opportunity to see how the more conservative Bible Belt states would react to these delinquent scumbags pitching up in their towns. Hysterical television reports sensationalising the violence at the band’s English gigs duly followed: Atlanta’s Channel 2 news team upped the ante by claiming that the band routinely vomited and committed ‘sex acts’ upon one another as part of their stage show.
Those hoping to witness Caligulan frenzy on the Pistols’ début US tour would have been horribly disappointed: the shows were remarkable only for the sense of anti-climax which accompanied them. The biggest problem the Pistols faced lay in the yawning chasm between their terrifying reputation and the rather more prosaic reality: audiences expecting to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were confronted instead with little more than a workmanlike rock ’n’ roll band.
By the time the Pistols pitched up at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on 14 January it was all over bar the shouting. The Winterland show saw the quartet play to a crowd of over 5,000 people – more than they’d drawn in the previous six shows combined – but by now Rotten was sick to his cavities of the whole sorry pantomime. At the end of a perfunctory set the band returned for one encore, a ramshackle, seemingly interminable trawl through The Stooges’ ‘No Fun’. As the song limped to its climax, Rotten knelt at the lip of the stage, his arms folded across his chest, fixing his audience with a sullen glare.
‘Ah-ha-ha,’ he laughed joylessly. ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.’ His microphone clunked to the floor, and the Pistols’ great rock ’n’ roll swindle
