McLaren sold his naughty-sloganed, studded T-shirts, rubberwear, leather knickers, and brightly colored zoot suits to the likes of Jimmy Page and the Kinks but, always on the lookout for something to snazz up his world and make some cash, the frizzy redhead started managing a fledgling band, led by a thieving young street kid, Steve Jones. Almost all of the band’s equipment had been stolen: most of the PA from a parked van, the drum kit from BBC studios, a strobe tuner from a Roxy Music concert, two guitars from Rod Stewart’s mansion, and—the biggest coup—almost all of David Bowie’s equipment from a Hammersmith Odeon gig.
Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen on the set of the documentary DOA, nodding out and barely coherent. (COURTESY OF LECH KOWALSKI)
Contrary to the myth that McLaren was the band’s Svengali creator, it was in fact Steve Jones who approached Malcolm when he and drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock needed a place for their band to audition and rehearse. When Jones realized he needed a front man, Malcolm invited Johnny Lydon down to try out. Decked out in full punk safety-pin fashion, Lydon, hiding his fears with snarling attitude, caterwauled and croaked his way through Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen.” “We knew he couldn’t sing,” McLaren said, “but he had this charm of a boy in pain, trying to pretend he’s cool.” He was hired. The rest of the band were suspicious of Lydon, but Malcolm believed that the antagonism would create just the right combustion. “They’re like young assassins,” he stated with pride. The newest member had a disgusting habit of picking at and inspecting his rotting teeth. Steve found this nauseating and used to say to Johnny, “Your teeth are rotten, you look rotten,” and the name was obnoxious enough to stick.
England was in a recession, with unemployment at its worst since World War II. Sullen and brooding, coming from the working class, the teenagers in Britain weren’t able to get jobs, many of them squatting in central London on the dole. And music was nowhere. Glam had faded fast—Marc Bolan had his own chat show. Synthesized and heavily marketed, rock had turned into streamlined, promotable pop or insipid nostalgic rehash. It was the end of 1975, and Steve Jones’s band had decided to call themselves the Sex Pistols.
The Pistols started playing out to immediately charged crowds. It became clear right away that the band was acting out the angst for their pent-up audience. When they opened for a band called the Hot-Rods, the headliners weren’t even mentioned in the New Musical Express review, which warned, “Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming.” “Actually, we’re not into music,” Steve Jones had growled at the reporter. “We’re into chaos.”
Since their rejection of values was mutual, these dangerous urchins weren’t out to make their audience like them. Quite the reverse. There was spitting, “gobbing” (the reaction to Rotten’s constant stream of snotty phlegm), “slamming” (butting heads, inflicting pain on each other), and “pogoing” (a stiff upward pogo-stick leap, to get a better view of the band). Punks in the know say that this action was started by the Pistols’ number-one fan, John Simon Ritchie—newly named “Sid Vicious” by Johnny Rotten (some say the moniker was taken from Lou Reed’s “You’re So Vicious,” but Sid was actually christened after Johnny’s evil pet hamster)—for his chain-wielding attacks on unsuspecting audience members.
Malcolm McLaren was in his element, grabbing hold of the novelty-geared British press, determined to stir up a sensation where one was direly needed—and make a few pounds in the process. He took his band into the studio, where they recorded seven explosive original songs, one of which, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” broke two taboos at once: “I am an antiChrist /I am an anarchist.” With these tapes Malcolm attacked the record industry, finally convincing EMI to take a chance on his menacing brute boys. Nobody bothered to read the contract. “At that age you’re naive, you don’t think of these things,” said Lydon years later. “You just see: contract, the big time. You think of the hundred pounds you’re going to get out of it, not how it’ll be an albatross for the rest of your life.” There would be years of lawsuits with Malcolm before the Pistols finally got their fair share.
The Sex Pistols—anarchists, anti-Christs, “foul-mouthed yobs.” (ROBERTA BAYLEY)
“Anarchy” came out to very mixed reviews, but after appearing live on Bill Grundy’s TV chat show, on which Steve Jones called the host “a dirty bastard” and a “fucking rotter,” the Pistols’ publicity storm turned into a tornado. Headlines blazed FURY AT FILTHY TV CHAT, THE BIZARRE FACE OF PUNK ROCK, THE FOUL-MOUTHED YOBS. Chaos ensued, but that’s what the Pistols had asked for. Gigs were canceled. The entire country was aghast and afraid. “Anarchy” reached number twenty-seven on the charts before plummeting. But hopping-mad punk bands were springing up everywhere.
Twenty-year-old Sid Vicious had been singing in a band called Flowers of Romance, and when bassist Glen Matlock received his Pistols walking papers, Johnny Rotten insisted that the Pistols’ number-one fan take his place. At almost exactly the same time, Sid met Nancy. Already into pill popping, Sid joined nineteen-year-old Nancy Spungen in her heroin haze, where he remained ensnared for the rest of his life.
A highly hyperactive child, Nancy had all but toppled her suburban family back in Philadelphia, entering the first of several psychiatric institutions at the age of eleven. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, she was into drugs very early, turning both of her siblings on to the joys of pot smoking when they were barely twelve. Two suicide attempts later, Nancy was shooting smack at fifteen, constantly claiming that she would go out in a headlining blaze of glory before she hit twenty-one. All she wanted was to grab hold of a famous guy in a band and fly along for the ride. She claimed to have had sex with every member of Aerosmith, every member of Bad Company, some of the Who, a few of the Allman Brothers. Once her mother found all of the Pretty Things in Nancy’s childhood bedroom. When she met the New York Dolls in Manhattan, Nancy followed them to London, where she met her prize, the infamous Sex Pistol, Sid Vicious, glomming on to him hard and fast (though she was originally looking to score top gun Johnny Rotten). From then on, Nancy called him “my Sid.” The rest of the band vilified Nancy as a strung-out tramp and a scumbag, calling her “Nauseating Nancy,” which made Sid want her all the more.
Sid and his beloved Nancy. He promised to join her if she happened to die first. He killed her by accident and kept his promise. (LONDON FEATURES INTERNATIONAL)
Sid drops his leather trousers … (ROBERTA BAYLEY)
The Pistols signed their second record deal with A&M in front of Buckingham Palace, wreaking havoc, before disappearing to the offices for a meeting about the single “God Save the Queen.” In the limo Sid and Paul had a fistfight about who was more “Sex Pistol,” and by the time they arrived at A&M, Paul was cut up and Sid, scuffed and shoeless, passed out comatose on the couch. Somebody threw wine in his face, and when Sid discovered his feet were bleeding, he proceeded to the bathroom, where he smashed the toilet and crashed through the window, finally bathing his battered feet in the shattered toilet bowl. Sid was already trying to prove he was more “Sex Pistol.”
… then sheepishly pulls them back up. (ROBERT BAYLEY)
They were supposed to be bad boys, but after a row at a nightclub in which an insulted Sid charged somebody with a broken bottle, and a friend of Rotten’s made death threats, A&M dropped the Pistols, destroying all the newly pressed “God Save the Queen” singles. At that point the group was given nothing more than a fifteen-pound weekly wage raise, and while the obstinate Malcolm tried to round up another record deal, Sid was on the loose, scoring bags of heroin with Nancy. When he wound up in the hospital for a month, sick with hepatitis, nobody came to visit except for “his Nancy.” The loving couple were creating their own insulated, private junkie world where everybody else was a trespasser. Sid signed the Virgin recording contract from his hospital bed, and “God Save the Queen” sold an amazing 150,000 copies in five days. “There is no future!” Rotten squalled murderously. “No future for you, no future for me, no future for you!”
PUNISH THE PUNKS! raged the headline in the Sunday Mirror. Shocking, disturbing, and subversive—accused of everything from conspiracy to communism—the Pistol boys were treated as though they weren’t even human beings. Both Johnny and Paul had been accosted on the street and beaten up badly, but despite the national vitriolic dissension, newly bred punks thronged the King’s Road wearing their leather jackets, bondage trousers, and shredded, graffiti’d T-shirts, leaking amphetamine violence with every step of their heavy black boots and agreeing with the Pistols that everything was indeed “pretty vacant” and “no fun.” The album Never Mind the Bollocks (Here’s the Sex Pistols), which came out in October of 1977, went straight to number one in the U.K. despite being banned by Boots, Woolworth’s, and W H. Smith. Raging success aside, the Sex Pistols would never record together again.
Discomania was sweeping the States. John Travolta’s white suit was copied in polyester and sold at shopping malls from coast to coast. The Bee Gees topped the U.S. charts with the croony ballad “How Deep Is Your Love.” Still, Malcolm was determined to overthrow America with his band of terrifying punks and, after signing the Pistols to Warner Bros. Records in the United States, booked a tour excluding Los Angeles and New York, cities he loathed, choosing Atlanta, Georgia, for the Pistols’ first show. Nancy wasn’t allowed on the trip, and Sid wasn’t amused, disappearing into the deep South underworld after the opening gig, searching for a fix. He missed the plane to Memphis, but was rounded up by a roadie the next afternoon, only to get promptly lost in the city where Elvis sleeps. When he finally turned up, just in time to make the show (on what would have been Elvis’s forty-third birthday), his bloody chest newly carved with the words “I Wanna Fix,” Sid was greeted with open hostility by his three band mates. By the third U.S. date, nobody was speaking to the naughty bass player, who was half-kicking his habit, nodding on Valiums. In the bus en route to Austin, he cut a seven-inch gash into his left arm, saying, “Do you want to see what I do when I’m happy?” The wound got infected, he wouldn’t bathe, and the bus was crawling with Sid’s crabs.
At the next show in San Antonio, after a hunchbacked Johnny berated his audience (“All you cowboys are fuckin’ faggots”), Sid smashed his bass over a photographer’s head, bled all over the stage, and made a halfhearted attempt to dodge the barrage of hurtling cans and bottles. In Baton Rouge he had sex on top of the bar with a fleshy, Spandex-clad babe while flashbulbs popped. In Dallas Sid punched holes in the hotel wall with a set of brass knuckles. In the middle of the night somewhere in Middle America, as Sid sat in a coffee shop having his usual rare steak and runny eggs, a big ol’ trucker taunted him, “If you’re so vicious, can you do this?,” putting a cigarette out on his hand. Barely glancing at the man, Sid said, “Yeah,” and cut his own hand so badly that blood poured into his plate of food as he ate it. In another version of the story, Malcolm says that Sid bled on the trucker’s steak and was hurled twenty-five yards into the side of the tour bus. In Tulsa roadies had to rescue a girl from Sid’s room after he vomited on her and had a diarrhea attack during a romantic blow job. Things were very grave. In San Francisco Rotten sang, “I’m an abortion,” then, slipping into his speaking voice, said, “What does that make you!” He announced he was quitting the Sex Pistols that same night.
Sid turned blue and collapsed on the corner of Haight and Ashbury after mainlining on a scummy mattress on somebody’s floor. He slipped into a drug-induced coma on a plane headed for New York and spent a few days in Jamaica Hospital, where photographer Roberta Bayley called him. He told her it was his basic nature to fuck up badly. She told him that his basic nature would get him in a lot of trouble, to which he responded, “My basic nature is going to kill me in six months.” He wasn’t far off.
In less than two years the Sex Pistols, the most influential band in over a decade, were over. Even though Malcolm was busy finishing a film about the group, John Lydon became a recluse, only appearing briefly in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle before starting another band, PiL—Public Image, Ltd.—where he continued to vent his unique brand of wretchedness. Steve and Paul worked on Swindle in Rio de Janeiro, eventually forming their own band, the Professionals. Malcolm flew Sid to Paris, where he did his bits for the film, including his pathetic and ferocious thrash bleating of “My Way,” soon to become a punk classic. (He refused to record the song unless some of his own lyrics could be used: “I ducked the blows/I shot it up / and killed a cat.”
Holed up in London’s heroin hell, Sid and Nancy bickered constantly, becoming sicker and more dependent on each other daily. It was during this time that Lech Kowalski filmed the couple for his appropriately titled documentary, DOA. Lying in bed, entirely stoned, the two are attempting an interview, but Sid keeps nodding off in mid-word. Nancy tries to arouse him repeatedly, whining and yowling, but he’s nodding hard. He continually fondles a hunting knife, and actually burns her with a cigarette at one point. Nancy seems oddly proud of who they are. “Sid and Nancy,” she moons as if they were already dead. “We were partners in crime, we helped each other out.” The partners went on short-term methadone cures but were mostly adrift and pitiful. Determined to live up to his name at the Speakeasy club one frantic night, Sid got into another fight, this time with a marine who severed a nerve in Sid’s right eye so severely that he could no longer open it fully. The droopy eye went well with his sneering pirate’s leer.
After burning bridge after bridge in London, the pair moved to New York, checking into the infamous Chelsea Hotel, where they planned on getting clean and maybe even getting married, but the couple’s fatal reputation preceded them. Nancy, always bruised and battered because she provoked Sid into beating on her, egged him into confrontations. Sid got into constant fights, even at the Spring Street methadone clinic. But he still wanted to be a star. With Nancy as his “manager,” Sid played a few gigs with some of the New York Dolls and even had meager hopes of a solo record deal. But the American music industry wasn’t interested in a broken-down Pistol with a habit. It was a bad time. That September Sid said, “The world has put us under house arrest.”
To recuperate one more time, Sid and Nancy went to spend a week with Nancy’s parents in Philadelphia. In Deborah Spungen’s harrowing account about her daughter’s sad, short life, And I Don’t Want to Live This Life, she describes the couple’s arrival at the train station: “She looked like a Holocaust victim … . Her skin was a translucent bluish-white. Her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets and had black circles under them. Her hair was bleached white and along the hairline there were yellowish bruises and sores and scabs … . Behind her lurked Sid … his spiky hair stood straight up on his head. He, too, was bluish-white and painfully thin … . There was a total absence of life to them. It was as if the rest of the world were in color and they were in black and white.” Oblivious to the gaping stares, Nancy ran to embrace her mother, proudly introducing her to Sid. “He stuck out his hand,” Deborah reported. “I shook it. It was wet and limp, a boy’s hand. He was a boy, shy and more than a little confused by the strange surroundings. ‘Allo, Mum,’ he said quietly.” Thus began a traumatic week in suburbia. The lovebirds constantly swigged out of their methadone bottle, popped heavy downers like Tuinals and Dilaudids (Elvis’s drug of choice), and watched cartoons, groping each other and dropping lit cigarettes on the family sofa. Deborah plucked stitches out of her daughter’s ear to avoid a scene at the local hospital. In one of their fights, Sid had actually torn off Nancy’s ear, but she kept that information from her tragically concerned mother. He had also dangled Nancy out a seventh-story window by her ankles, but she didn’t tell her mother about that episode, either. When a forlorn Sid asked Deborah if she could help him find a plastic surgeon for his eye, she said she would try. “Thank you,” he said, “that’d be very nice of you. I don’t like my eye, you know. I got it in a fight. People always want to fight with me. Teachers. Policemen. Teddys. Everybody. I don’t want to, but they do.” Before she left for Ne
w York, Nancy once again told her mother that she was going to die very soon, before her twenty-first birthday, “in a blaze of glory.”
Back in the Chelsea, Sid and Nancy set their bed on fire and were moved to Room 100.
On October 11, 1979, Sid got some Pistols money and Nancy wanted Dilaudid, ordering forty of the pills from dealer Rockets Redglare at about 1:30 A.M., which he was unable to get. He brought the couple a small amount of the drug, and Nancy gave him a few hundred dollars to find more. The pair then went to see a guitarist down the hall, Neon Leon, looking for pot. According to Leon, Sid showed him a five-inch knife that Nancy had bought him that day for protection. Then another dealer, Steve Cincotti, arrived at Room 100 between four and five A.M. with Tuinal.
The next morning Sid woke up to find his bloody valentine under the sink.
But what had actually happened? Had Sid killed Nancy in another one of their violent stoned-out fights? Could it have been an angry young dealer? Drugged-out thieves? Rockets Redglare told police that after Nancy gave him the money for Dilaudid, she still had several hundred left. Where was the money? Perhaps it was a screwed-up suicide pact gone awry? Said a friend at the Chelsea, “They were both really depressed and talked about dying the last few weeks.” Another friend said the couple had a longstanding agreement that if one died, the other would follow.
Somehow Malcolm McLaren raised Sid’s fifty thousand dollars’ bail, and after a grim, nightmarish few days, kicking cold turkey on Rikers Island, Sid was cut loose and hidden from the press at a welfare hotel, the Saville. To raise funds for Sid’s defense (and stir up some more controversy), McLaren sold T-shirts with Sid wearing G.I. Joe clothes, shouting the words “I’m Alive, She’s Dead, I’m Yours.” Sid’s mother, Anne Beverley, arrived in New York to provide some comfort for her little boy, reportedly selling her story to the New York Post for ten thousand dollars.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 39