I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp
Page 24
* Like refraining from using the Sex Pistols’ priceless appearance on their packaging, but instead using Jamie Reid’s graphical equivalent of it, such as Queen Elizabeth with a safety pin through her nose, or the album that had nothing on its cover but the Day-Glo ransom-note paste-up “NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS HERE’S THE Sex PisTOLs.” These were brilliant ways of keeping faith with the band’s insistence that they wanted to destroy rock-god worship, that what they did was what anybody could do, and was done by everybody for everybody. Or how he had them play an earsplitting set on a houseboat floating down the middle of the Thames on the queen’s jubilee. Or how on their American tour, they skipped the Northeast and L.A. to play most of their shows in the backwater working-class South.
* For example, the way he had numbered with “#0001” a large batch of the limited number-stamped five-thousand-copy 1976 “Blank Generation” single on his Stiff Records, as well as a set of copies that were numbered above five thousand.
** Malcolm was like this with musicians too, and so was Hilly, for that matter. These three were the successful music-business people I dealt with who were actually sympathetic with the bands and generous and loyal towards them, not just exploitive. It wasn’t like the relationships I had with other music-business people, like Seymour or Gottehrer or Thau, who saw me only as something from which they might be able to profit a little.
* I didn’t really say that. I said, “I understand Socrates came from outer space.”