“The king is gone but he’s not forgotten
This is the story of a Johnny Rotten
It’s better to burn out than it is to rust
The king is gone but he’s not forgotten.”
–Neil Young, “My My,
Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”
It is a sad summer for punk purists. Johnny Rotten–the yammering, demon-eyed center of one of rock’s most mythically short-lived bands–didn’t burn out, after all. Instead, as he announced a few weeks ago at the Sex Pistols’ first concert in England in more than 18 years, he’s “fat, 40 and baaaaack!”
And cashing in. Rotten and the rest of the original Sex Pistols–guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock–have made no pretense about what clinched their reunion. “We’ve found a common cause, and it’s your money,” Rotten cackled at a news conference announcing the reunion a few months ago.
The appropriately dubbed “Filthy Lucre” tour brings the reformed Pistols to Chicago and the sold-out Aragon on Saturday, following the quick-bucks release of a live CD from the band’s first U.K. reunion show, “Filthy Lucre Live” (Virgin). That performance was attended by 30,000 people–nearly as many as had seen the approximately 60 concerts the Sex Pistols gave in their entire previous life–and the re-formed Pistols are selling out shows across North America.
From one perspective, it’s quite a scam: Here are a bunch of middle-aged ex-punks who for the last 10 years have produced little or no music of enduring worth, and who couldn’t be bothered to write any new songs, cleaning up with what is essentially the antithesis of punk rock: a nostalgia show. Or, as the purists might view it, a betrayal masquerading as a swindle.
Deja vu, anyone?
As Rotten exited the stage for presumably the last time as a Sex Pistol, on Jan. 14, 1978, in San Francisco, he snarled what would become the band’s epitaph: “Ever have the feeling you’ve been cheated?” In so doing, he slammed the door on one of the all-time rock ‘n’ roll myths: The band of poor working-class kids that forms at a time of artistic blandness and economic hopelessness in their native Britain (1 million unemployed), arouses disenfranchised youth and offends most everybody else with their confrontational clothes, attitude and music, and then — with the initial shock waves still reverberating — implodes and vanishes.
It was a myth that inspired rock’s old guard to stand up and take notice — Neil Young and Pete Townshend wrote songs about the “rough boys” who kicked rock ‘n’ roll’s corpulent, self-satisfied image in the behind — and countless punk bands rose up in the Pistols’ wake, determined to carry on in the same do-it-yourself, us-against-the-world spirit.
The myth only mushroomed in subsequent years. The Pistols’ sole studio album, “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols,” was named the top rock album of all time by Rolling Stone magazine and eventually sold more than a million copies. And by the ’90s, punk bands such as Green Day, Rancid and the Offspring, many with members still in diapers when the Sex Pistols broke up, were selling millions of records playing cartoonish variations on the Pistols’ nasty three-chord screeds.
So perhaps it was inevitable that the one band least likely to reunite finally did. For years Rotten — who changed his name back to John Lydon — didn’t even want to talk about his former band, while leading a sometimes inspired new group, Public Image Ltd.
When the Pistols toured America in 1978, the safety pins that held together the volatile band were coming unhinged, and Rotten was in the midst of a bitter feud with manager Malcolm McClaren that would eventually lead to years of litigation over band revenue. Matlock, who had co-written many of the band’s original singles, had been fired months before and been replaced by Sid Vicious, who embodied the Pistols’ nihilistic image but who could neither write music nor play his bass guitar and was an incorrigible heroin addict.
But the art that was the foundation of the Pistols’ rebellion was not the focus when the snaggle-toothed quartet barged through an outraged Britain. They were more notorious for cursing on British television, verbally abusing the royal family and acting like, well, punks, than for the lacerating formal brilliance of their songs.
Now that songs such as “Anarchy” have been covered by bands ranging from Megadeth to Living Colour, the Pistols’ musical vocabulary has become an integral part of rock, perhaps the common language of the last 15 years — a language that other bands were turning into money and houses and cars.
“I look around at these bands and punk is like a costume for them, all image and no substance,” Jones says. “To them, it’s just pop songs, because they’re not writing about anything in particular.”
If it all sounds like the crankiness of a middle-aged has-been, Martin Atkins, a drummer who worked with Rotten/Lydon for five years in Public Image soon after the Pistols break-up, empathizes with it.
“If you were Steve Jones or Paul Cook in your crappy apartment, and looking at Green Day and the rest, the repercussions of what you’ve done, it just seems there is a justice in these guys ultimately making off with a wheelbarrow full of cash,” Atkins says. “It’s very easy to say that their coming back ruins it all, but when it comes down to it, it’s just people working. And why not turn that hard work into a house? No one is being ripped off.”
The British press has been typically jaded about the reunion: a Melody Maker critic likened a recent Pistols performance to a cabaret show and Rotten to a “pink and green-haired Liza Minnelli”; the New Musical Express described the Pistols’ string of oldies as “bloated, dilapidated dinosaurs.”
Even Jones was slightly embarrassed that the band hadn’t been able to write new material for the tour. “One new song would’ve been good,” he says. “I’d like to do another record.”
But that seems highly unlikely. The personal tensions that made the band great also pulled it apart, and Jones acknowledges, “We’re the same personalities, and we know how to punch certain buttons with each other. That will never go away.”
It is Rotten who will determine how long the band will go on once the current tour is finished. “If it comes down to it and we really can’t get on, then that’s it, bye-bye,” he told the English monthly Q.
For Jon Langford, who formed the Mekons in Leeds, England, soon after the Pistols’ break-out, the return of Rotten is perhaps the final subversive act in a career built on subversion.
“The Sex Pistols were never about being pure and noble,” he says. “It’s the one way they have left to still annoy people. What’s the most annoying thing they could do to people who believe in the myth? Get back together again.”
Jones, for one, never bought the myth either. “We want to show people we’re a great rock ‘n’ roll band, not a bunch of idiots who relied on bad press.”
