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Keen as mustard: Sid Vicious (main pic) plays up to the camera and enjoys a hot dog during
the US tour in 1978,and (left) flexing his sneer with the Sex Pistols and manager Malcolm
McLaren (far right) in March 1977.
When Sid Vicious joined the Sex Pistols in 1977 it was the end of the band and the beginning of his metamorphosis into mythic rock star, aided by smack, Nancy Spungen and a grim US tour. David Dalton and friends saw it all.
"It became a cartoon trip as opposed to a group," Glen Matlock famously observed when he was
booted out of the Sex Pistols in favour of Sid Vicious in March 1977. But what a brilliant
cartoon it was. Sid was perfect. He entered the group not as a replacement bass player, but
as messianic fan. With neither a stable name or personality, Sid was the nobody taken to
hallucinatory intensity, the nobody who believes that his inadequacies will be magically
transformed by exposure to the redeeming light of fame.
Danny Fields: "Johnny Rotten being so brilliant he must have realized the imagistic
possibilities of Sid - he was absolutely fabulous-looking person. The Sex Pistols were a
fashion statement as much as anything else, and Sid learnt early on to adopt the affect that
was required of him. So much of that band was style, and the style and the music came
together in a very fortunate way for the history of culture."
Leee Childers: "In the beginning the Sex Pistols thought they were going to make a difference, but by the time Sid joined the band they were beginning their downward spiral and had decided to just disintegrate. His dilemma was whether to be Sid or to be his real self. He didn't know who he was: whether he was gay or straight, had any talent or was a joke, whether anyone would ever find him attractive or what his future would be. He was just swimming underground - he didn't know where the circus was, he didn't know how to come up. He was grabbing at anything like a drowning man, and along came the Sex Pistols who had just made the decision to become as freaky as they could be - it might as well have been 20 clowns coming out of a Volkswagen. They were using Sid for his image but he didn't care. He was ecstatic, and it just sealed his fate."
Danny Fields: "Sid idolised Dee Dee [Ramone]. Dee Dee was his role model, a junkie bass player who was marginally more competent than Sid - The Ramones were all so proud of their musical ineptitude. The Stooges had re-invented what music can be. The punk catechism said: 'It's this, not that (Deep Purple). We may be terrible by your standards but we're fabulous by the new standards that we've invented.' And that's inarguable. For Dee Dee as for Sid it was all in the attack, what you put out front - what you brought onto the stage. As with Dee Dee, I never knew if Sid was acting or whether it was really him, but in either case it was really potent."
Lenny Kaye: "Glen was the one who provided the Pistols propulsion. Their drive and energy is coming off his bass. Paul Cook and Steve Jones were more traditional as musicians and Sid was just peddling eights. With Sid as part of their new image the Pistols moved into being a concept band because they'd painted themselves into a corner. There was an inbuilt timer in the Sex Pistols. Where do you go when you've positioned yourself against everything? What actually are you for? Given the construct they were working with, there didn't seem to be a lot of room to breathe except to become the very rock stars they vilified, and Sid was more intrigued with projecting the perfect rock sneer than he was in anchoring the music."
April 3, 1977, Enter fate in thigh-high boots in the baleful form of a suicide blonde, Dolls-besotted junkie sex-worker. Nancy Spungen was a far more ferocious species of fan than Sid, if only because she had jettisoned that final scrap of romantic ballast: idealism. Both are labouring under a gauzy enchantment. They subscribe to the dopey hell-on-wheels reverie of rock. Heroin hermetically seals them into a kind of punk daytime soap: solve all your problems through fantasy.
Page Two
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Page Three
Photo Caption
Sid and Nancy (left) at the Vicious White Kids gig. London's Electric Ballroom, August '78; (above) Max's Kansas City, with Mick Jones on guitar, September 7, '78; (below) with Dee Dee Ramone, New Year's Eve 1977.
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Cast List
Roberta Bayley: Chief photographer for legendary Punk magazine, began shooting punk's progenitors in 1975. Did album covers for The Ramones, Richard Hells Viodoids and Johnny Thunders' Heartbreaks.
Leee Childers: Writer, photographer, artist, raconteur, manager of various punk and rock groups, and a close friend of Sid's. A living leeegend.
Danny Fields: DJ on WFMU. Publicity director and "company freak" at Elektra Records who brought Nico, the MC5, and Iggy And the Stooges to the label. Managed The Ramones from 1975-80.
Richard Hell: Crucial originator of NY punk. Leader of the Voidoids. Classic album Blank Generation, hell-bent novel Go Now. Check out Hellish collection, Hot And Cold (Powerhouse Books 2001) for more on Sid and Nancy.
Lenny Kaye: Long-time guitarist of the Patti Smith Group, compiler of the seminal Nuggets collection, author of hallucinatory You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song Of The Croon (Villard Books 2004).
Lynne Leighting: bedeviled, inspired, self-taught musician, born and raised in New York City. Has played with every cool fool in rock and blues.
Article continued from Page One.
Leee Childers: "People don't realise how smart Sid was. He was well-read and articulate, and funny. He could quote Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde. He had so much heart and soul and talent - all those things going on in his brain. Then Nancy Spungen entered his life and a needle entered his arm, then the whole world changed and it didn't matter anymore. He no longer had to think."
The Pistols only played 15 dates in 1977. Sid's dream has come true. In a way. He's in his favourite band, but now they cant play. Promoters are paying them to go away. Locked up with Nancy, Sid is becoming restless. They destroy a few hotel rooms and make the front page of The Sun. Well, at least some good came of it.
New Year's Eve, 1977. Backstage with The Ramones, Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park, London. Danny Fields: "In The Ramones dressing room I saw a goofy, mopey guy. Gentle, like most junkies, sweet, sad - and slightly insane. Sid didn't talk, there was no conversation; he just mumbled to no one in particular, then went face down in the junkie slouch. Nancy took over fast and did all the talking. She'd been a cashier at CBGBs and was into his career in a funny, deluded way."
January 1978. In England the Sex Pistols were a revolutionary band; in the States they become rock stars. Wot a fuckin' outrage! As the chaos machine zaps the USA, the equilibrium of the group shifts. The more Rotten withdraws into snidey, sarky asides, the more it brings out the self-lacerating monk of punk in Sid. Little red flecks of blood splatter the faces of the faithful, eager for benediction. Self-laceration nightly; fucking axioms carved in his chest.
Roberta Bayley: "Sid was nothing like the tough guy caricature he felt obliged to act out. Despite his occasional lashing out - slicing his hand and letting his blood drip on some cowboy's steak dinner or getting beat up by Noel Monk's Nazi crew - he was no Johnny Thunders. Thunders was a tough guy from Queens, but Sid I remember as a timid galoot, confused, and apologetic. When I asked to take his picture he pulled down his pants and grabbed his balls. After I had taken the picture he sheepishly pulled up his trousers and tucked in his shriveled-up willy. He was just a little kid enacting his own name, pushed into being this tough guy - and he couldn't handle it."
El Sid, Exhibit A of Brit punk, is a fantasy-fuelled engine whose deranged authority presides over the last kamikaze phase as the Sex Pistols crash and burn. Sid is an aspect of Rotten that gets loose, secedes, and goes on to take over the script - a now drastically simplified plot in which the stand-in ends up stealing the show. And why not? Sid is the world's leading Sexpistologist. "I was just playing bass and jumping up and down, taking over as the new Johnny Rotten," says Sid hopefully.
After the Sex Pistols' last show on January 14, 1978 at Winterland, San Francisco, Sid ODs in a Haight-Ashbury shooting gallery. Next day, Cook and Jones quit the band; Lydon, too, walks off. Sid wakes up to find the dream is over. On the plane back to New York he ODs on 80 milligrams of methadone and seven valium.
Continue to A Star Is Born Part Two! --->>>
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