by John Lydon
“There will be death tonight.”
But there never was. These cowboys seemed to take it for the joke it was meant to be. We weren’t there to destroy their way of life or anything like that. Quite the opposite. We sought to bring a little freshness into their boring, daily routines. The people we’d meet in America were mostly exceptional. Friendly and open. I’ve not met people like that since. Down south, for all its bad points, the people are genuine, they have less need for pretension, and they’re actually very individualistic, not a uniformed lump.
Sid landed in America in bad shape. There was a kind of cleaning-up process going on until we got to San Francisco. Honestly, the Sex Pistols tour bus was like a mobile hospital. It helped to just keep him occupied. He was very impressed with the bikers on board. Sid buying a pair of biker’s boots was better than his buying drugs.
BOB GRUEN: It was a funny situation. The bodyguards were obnoxious Vietnam vets with beards, knives, and boots. Also, the tour manager, Noel Monk, tore the band apart. He was really afraid of them. Monk was working for Warner Brothers and had to get this tour across the country in one piece. Malcolm was dying for confrontation. He wanted nothing more than to have journalists screaming at the band and writing some outrageous story, whereas Noel Monk and Warner Brothers had this traditional idea of bands being polite to the press.
Malcolm didn’t turn up at the first American gig in Atlanta. I didn’t see him for a long time, even though he booked us on this fiasco tour. This is why I let Sid’s anger run loose on Malcolm. I could have stopped it, but I thought it was justified. We never knew what the hell Malcolm was up to, where he was and what he was doing. He was usually off pontificating in his usual way and telling the world how great he was and all the things he’d done. Meanwhile the band had to take the front-line flak.
When we checked into our motel in Atlanta, the cops stopped Sid and me in the parking lot to keep us from going into town. Both the Warners people and the police didn’t want us to go out since they thought it would incite all kinds of trouble and there were people out there trying to lynch us. We found that not to be true. Things were weirder out on the streets of Atlanta than anything going on on stage at the gigs.
We were foiled briefly, but we still went out. There was this cheesy disco in Atlanta that had all these straight people in jeans and plaid shirts dancing to insipid disco. We only stayed there for three minutes at the most.
JOHN GRAY: When the Pistols started, we’d go into gay clubs in London like the Sombrero on High Street Kensington, hardly realizing they were gay. They were the best clubs, and we’d descend en masse.
We were looking for entertainment and to see how far entertainment would take us, so we went to a weird, funny club in a shopping mall on the outskirts of town. This club had a load of transvestites with their “Y’all come on down, now” southern accents. Tough cowboys dressed up as women. It was bizarre—literal John Wayne look-alikes in dresses. It was good fun. They had these cubicles in the back where they showed porno loops. The films were way severe, triple-X hard-core flicks. Little transvestites were back there offering you blow jobs for nothing. I was thrown out because I pissed in someone’s mouth. Others took it more seriously. It was so mad.
Those booths were hilarious, and the queues for them were astoundingly long. You had to keep pushing quarters into this little coin box to keep the movies going while there would be some transvestite sucking away.
Oh, come on, is there any such thing as a pretty transvestite? You look close and there’s whisker bristles sticking out of their faces. There’s no way I could be turned on by this. It was the sheer hell of it all. You couldn’t keep a hard-on.
Sid went off with a black transvestite and I went off with a cowgirl I found. She had a cowboy hat, and she had just got out of prison. She told me her sob story. I was fascinated. We never saw any place in the whole of America that could ever compare to that place. They had the worst laser show I had ever seen, but the music was insane! The deejays couldn’t give a shit and mixed everything up—country music followed by some deep black funk groove. The whole thing was a contradiction, and I loved it for that. It’s not what you’d think the South was all about. It’s funny how the city fathers could allow that stuff to go on, then condemn the Sex Pistols on stage.
The London clubs could never compare to this place. There’s something very weak in the English. They like the clothes and the imagery of it all, but when it comes to delivering the goods, they tend to back down.
One of the biker bodyguards on the American tour took us up to his place outside Atlanta. He was a giant of a man with a big ginger beard who owned a nightclub as well. His house was fantastic and strange. He lived in one of those frontier-style houses with a big wagon wheel out front. I loved it because it was so normal in an abnormal way, like visiting the set of “Bonanza.” We stayed up all night drinking, partying, and playing funny country and western songs. I’d also been speeding all fucking night. On the way back to the bus the next morning at about five or six A.M. he took us to a doughnut shop as a joke. It was supposed to be where all of the cops hung out. Lo and behold, they were there. American cops are the same all over. Doughnuts and coffee. Despite our paranoid state, it was great fun just to sit in among all that. It was the first I’d seen of it, especially after a night of being crazy in the hills listening to all this country and western noise. That’s what I wanted from America. I didn’t want to go to a rock ’n’ roll club and find the same-old, same-old shit. Sid and I were very intrigued by truck stops and doughnut shops. We had the greatest time on the bus because of all the truck stops. That’s when Sid wasn’t doing any bad gear or heroin, mainly because there was none about. The adventure of places like truck stops would keep him level. You’d go in and see these truckers with their Dolly Parton women and experience the whole down-south thing, the romance of it all.
I wanted to know everything about America. I’m not a social snob; I can move inside any group and feel comfortable, I don’t care if it’s old women talking about knitting quilts. It’s all about human beings. I can find that as fascinating as anything else. Sid, Paul, and Steve had a very hard time understanding that. “It’s not rock ’n’ roll.” Of course it is! Rock ’n’ roll is supposed to relate to everybody! If everybody isn’t involved, then it’s sectarianism. The people who condemn and slag you off do so because they have little knowledge of you. If you confront them and give them that knowledge, things will change. That’s the whole point of living! You can learn off each other and enjoy.
That might be an Irish way of thinking on my part. For instance, there’s no such thing as a generation gap in Irish social clubs. You’re listening to whatever is being played; kids are running around. The whole gamut of life as it should be is there. I could never understand why the Sex Pistols audience should be a bunch of clones wearing torn shirts and leather jackets. You should never have to look at your audience and say, “Ugh! Look at what they’re all wearing.” It was such a militaristic and foolish approach.
We bought tons of American souvenirs. Look at the photos at the time. Leather waistcoats, cowboy hats, and belts. Puff-sleeved shirts. Cowboy boots. We found out there was a whole hierarchy of hat wear down there. Sid would never wear a hat because it would spoil his hairdo. With Sid, above all else, looks were what mattered. Even during his most messed-up period, he still was thinking about the right look. He was always vainglorious about his image. It’s a shame that it later became a leather-jacketed cliché through no fault of his own. But on the American tour, we had the lot, it was a menagerie of clothing that we dumped after three wears. That’s when the joke wore thin. But I remember loving those loud cowboy shirts, dressing up in cowboy gear and going into those places.
“Yee-ha! We’re the Sex Pistols!”
(I still do a very bad impersonation of a southern accent with the cockney creeping through.)
The Sex Pistols did a few American in-store appearances. It was mad fun. Invariably,
Sid and I would run in and grab everything we could. It was Freebeeville. Sign a few autographs and walk out with hundreds of dollars’ worth of product, which we’d then throw out the window halfway down the road. It was our way of getting one over on someone; childish, but necessary for the fun of it all. The stores didn’t mind. It brought in loads of people. We’d sign autographs and talk. That’s where we met the most people. One in-store was in Atlanta. We got there and thought that no one was there. It was a huge store in the middle of nowhere. The car park was underground. When we got inside, it was mobbed with more people than at the gigs. It was the first time I’d ever seen a record store as big as an airplane hangar, and it left an absolutely vivid impression of America. In England all we had were small corner shops. Mile after mile of music—and Muzak—all of it, to record collectors like Sid and me, absolute heaven. We were after anything that looked interesting, especially bizarre country and western things. The whole country and western look was far more severe than anything the Sex Pistols could come up with. Particularly the women; they seemed overdone and freaky. Loved it.
That’s where I met Granny Rotten. She decided that she was going to adopt me because I was gorgeous. Really old, she brought a huge cake. To this day whenever I go down south she comes to the gigs with cakes and home-baked cookies. She brings her family, her sons.
We’d meet Hasidic Jews. Sid thought they were great because he loved their clothes. They were so stylish with their beaver hats, the locks, and their long black coats. There was a time when Sid actually wanted to start wearing that stuff. They wouldn’t sell him the clothes because they thought he was going to be disrespectful to their religion.
It seemed like everything in America—especially food—was too much and too big. I couldn’t finish anything. That’s America to this day. You greedy bastards, was the impression that left on me. You have to have too much. Such waste. Triple-decker hamburgers. God almighty! Feed an army.
I knew nothing about America. I also didn’t know what to expect. I knew there were problems in the band. I thought we could keep things together by the skin of our teeth. I never spoke to them the entire tour except for one night toward the end. Steve rang me up and I went to his room. We sat down and he had this shoebox full of marijuana. We smoked ourselves silly. We were supposed to discuss the problems at hand, but the gear was so good, it just didn’t matter. The next morning Paul rang Steve, wondering why we hadn’t sorted things out. All we’d sorted were the seeds and stems.
I hardly ever slept because, well, it was America. I kept my eyes open, glaring out the coach window all day, all night. I was fascinated by any flashing lights that went by. The sheer expanse of America never failed to impress. When you come from a tiny little place like Britain, you always feel the shore isn’t too far away.
BOB GRUEN: The trip was calm as we listened to Don Letts’s reggae tapes. Don was a black Rasta guy back in London who knew all the white punk rockers and was their reggae connection. He made the greatest tapes because he had access to all the latest dub sounds. It was music I had absolutely no knowledge of. I was surprised that these guys who were known for loud, crashing music were listening to such spiritual dub sounds. There we were, driving down the road to a sound track.
There was one concert in America where the Bible lot turned up. They had one of their banners up, quoting some verse about when the world turns to rottenness or whatever. That thrilled me. “Ahh, they care. They’ve noticed, at last.” I invited them to come into the gig, but nobody came in. It was one of those censorship scenes where the parents and the grandads of the town were out front. Anybody who wanted to see us had to go through this gauntlet of abuse, exactly what they do in front of the abortion clinics in America. Just like in Caerphilly in Wales, the religious fanatics threatened the audience in their locale. “I’ll tell your mum!” “Please do! I’ll buy two tickets just for that.” The emptiness of the American gigs could be startling. But others would be absolutely jam-packed, really overcrowded, and that frightened me, even with all the security, in the heart of country music with rednecks abound, the breeding place, the hornet’s nest. There was loads of horses tied up outside. In Texas, people rode in on horseback. “We have some good ol’ boys from England now…” There was a lot of Mexicans in the audience. They looked like wild Indians to me. This very large Mexican contingency decided that they liked us, so that shut the cowboys up and the bottles stopped being slung. It was two huge mobs of people facing each other off with the Pistols screaming blue murder in the middle. In the middle of all that were the English journalists. Noel Monk, our tour manager, told me that the first person who started throwing stuff was a British newspaper journalist. They had all their cameras ready, while this same person tried to incite something. Malcolm would be constantly arguing with Noel about publicity. Malcolm would have the British journalists there, and Noel would say no. They would just cause trouble and deliberately create chaos. I’ll accept all publicity, good or bad—but not false publicity. I can deal with it if it’s real. If it’s all just show bizzy, it makes you feel rather pointless. The British press loved to make things up. They were spotted starting incidents throughout the tour. That’s unforgivable. I’m the star. That’s my job, you bastard.
BOB GRUEN: I spent a few weeks riding across America with them, smoking, drinking beer, nobody getting too loaded, kicking back, watching the American horizon go by, listening to very spiritual reggae music. We’d pull up for the gig in Oklahoma, Dallas, or wherever, and when they opened the door, there would be three or four television cameras pointed at us. Someone would clear his throat and spit, and the newspeople would all freak out. That turned into a news break. I never understood why spitting was news.
Sid was a naughty boy on the road, half because he was well cut and half for the sheer hell of it. He finally had an audience of people who would behave with shock and horror. Hands in hair. It was too much good fun. Sid was easily led by the nose. The American record executives kept their distance from the band. They were told, right or wrong, that we would try to tear their heads off. That titillated them no end. “Oh, wow! We got a monster.”
BOB GRUEN: In Dallas, one of the girls in the audience who had been following the tour kept punching Sid in the face. In retaliation, he’d spit blood back at her. This went on, back and forth, through the first couple of songs. A few days before, Sid had carved “Give Me a Fix” on his chest. It was a desperate message. He wanted anybody to give him some dope. He hoped some fan would see it and come backstage before he was whisked away by Noel, who was keeping him removed. I honestly thought Sid had popped one of those stage blood capsules. It turned out he was really bleeding, and he had this big smile on his face. While he was spitting the blood at this girl, the bloody nose she gave him dried up, so he went over to his amp, shattered a bottle of whiskey, and began cutting his chest to get more blood. That’s when Noel grabbed him by the wrist, after which Sid looked down at the floor like a little kid who had been caught being stupid. Meanwhile the band was yelling at him. While he was messing with the bottle, he’d accidentally turned off his amp, which meant that while he was playing away for a song and a half, nobody heard him. I could see Johnny getting pissed off, especially as Sid got more and more attention.
Eventually I sewed up Sid’s cut myself. Two days had gone by and the wound was dirty and started to fester. That’s when I realized that nobody was going to take care of him. I was an ex–Boy Scout, so I washed and dressed the wound with butterfly stitches, I pulled the skin back together and taped him up. I did that mainly because I was tired of looking at it.
I got on all right with some of the Warners people. The late Bob Regehr was splendid, I really liked him. He was a bundle of fun. He got it right from the start. He knew there was a sense of fun in all of this. He absolutely hated Malcolm, as indeed most good people did. It was Bob Regehr’s idea to sign us to Warners in America. He had the perception and was the only one with the real rock ’n’ roll sense. He wa
s always laughing. You could tell that this man had an NFL physique in his younger days, with an enormous belly to go with it. You know instantly when people “get it.” It’s a terrible thing, but it’s also a good thing, when you’re caught out. When I was being moody, a typical Johnny Rotten stance—he’d just burst out laughing. Oh, I’ll have to change the rules of this game. Here was the only one who understood.
An all-black heavy-metal band opened up for us in Memphis. That struck me at the time as highly curious. They were very good, but because of color prejudices down south, they were doomed. The audience didn’t get it at all. I thought it was unfair. They were very good—better than us. American bands always seem older and tend to spend a lot more time learning their craft. Maybe that’s why American music is so confined.
I absolutely did not visit Elvis’s Graceland. I think Paul and Steve might have gone. I know I didn’t, even though we drove past it on the way to the gig. I deliberately turned my head away. I didn’t even want to see it. Some books have said that I loved Elvis! God! I’ve always hated Elvis Presley from an early age, and there’s a specific reason. A really boring Irish cousin of mine used to be in the Irish army military brass band. He was an Elvis fan, and he came over to my family’s house and brought all these awful, godforsaken Elvis records and sat down in my room because I had the record player. He played them for eight solid hours, over and over. I’ve never forgotten that nonstop crap. It left a solid hateful impression for that Elvis Presley. If anyone who plays in a brass band digs Elvis, then it’s clearly not for me!
Compared to Britain, playing in America was like starting all over again. There was a lot of animosity from the crowd, too. They were force fed all of the usual press garbage drivel. It was “You ain’t so hot!” before we even started. Those were very difficult audiences. In most places we won them over, but it’s hard to know what singing a song like “God Save the Queen” means to an American. They probably thought we’re talking about the fags in Atlanta.