Lipstick Traces (5 page)

So one heard when Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s; so one might have heard, anyway.

In 1975 a teenager who would be called Johnny Rotten turned himself into a living poster and paraded down London’s King’s Road to World’s End—the end of the street—with “I HATE” scrawled above the printed logo of a Pink Floyd t-shirt. He dyed what was left of his chopped-off hair green and made his way through the tourist crowds spitting at hippies, who tried to ignore him. One day he was pointed out to a businessman who was attempting to put together a band. The drummer remembered the teenager’s audition, which took place in front of a jukebox, the boy mouthing the words to Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen”: “We thought he’s got what we want.
Bit of a lunatic, a front man. That’s what we was after: a front man who had definite ideas about what he wanted to do and he’d definitely got them. And we knew straight away. Even though he couldn’t sing. We wasn’t particularly interested in that because we were still learning to play at the time.”

It may be that in the mind of their self-celebrated Svengali, King’s Road boutique owner Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were never meant to be more than a nine-month wonder, a cheap vehicle for fast money, a few laughs, a touch of the old épater la bourgeoisie. He had recruited them out of his store, found them a place to rehearse, given them a ridiculously offensive name, preached to them about the emptiness of pop music and the possibilities of ugliness and confrontation, told them they had as good a chance as anyone to make a noise, told them they had the right. If all else failed they could be a living poster for his shop, which always needed a new poster: before settling on Seditionaries in 1977, McLaren called his store Let It Rock in 1971, when it sold Teddy Boy clothes and old 45s; Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die in 1973, when it sold biker clothes and youth-gang accessories; Sex in 1974, when it sold bondage gear, nonmarital aids, and “God Save Myra Hindley” t-shirts commemorating the woman who along with Ian Brady had in 1963 and 1964 committed the Moors Murders—child murders, which Hindley and Brady recorded on tape as an art statement. It may also be that in the mind of their chief theorist and propagandist, 1960s art student and had-been, would-be anarchist provacateur Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were meant to set the country on its ear, to recapture the power McLaren had first glimpsed in Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” (“I’d never seen anything like it,” he said once, recalling a fellow pupil singing the song at a grammar-school talent show. “I thought his head was going to come off”), to finally unite music and politics, to change the world. Thrilled by the May 1968 revolt in France, McLaren had helped foment solidarity demonstrations in London and later sold t-shirts decorated with May ’68 slogans—even if, in his shop, “
I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES
,” the slogan of the Enragés, the tiny cabal of students that began the uprising, mainly helped closeted businessmen work up the nerve to buy McLaren’s rubber suits. McLaren would sell anything: in late 1978, after
ex–Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious was arrested for the murder of Nancy Spungen, his girlfriend, McLaren rushed out “
I
’
M ALIVE—SHE
’
S DEAD—I
’
M YOURS”
Sid Vicious t-shirts (to help raise money for Vicious’ defense, McLaren said). But not long before, he’d been carrying around copies of Christopher Gray’s
Leaving the 20th Century,
the first English-language anthology of situationist writings, which he and Jamie Reid had helped publish in 1974.

He tried to get people to read it. “It’s just a little more than a 20th century interpretation of Marxist essays on alienated labor,” said Peter Urban, manager of the Dils, a Los Angeles punk band “into class war” (their first single was “I Hate the Rich,” the principal result of which was a tune by the rival Vom, “I Hate the Dils”). “It’s a little of that,” said McLaren, “but it is very, very strong. The good thing about it was all those slogans you can take up without being party to a movement. Being in a movement often stifles creative thinking and certainly, from the point of view of a young kid, the ability to announce yourself . . . That’s the greatest thing, that it allows you to do that. There is a certain aggression and arrogance in there that’s exciting . . .” Old hat, said Urban, ignoring the interesting conclusions McLaren was drawing, and ignoring too the sticker on the cover of the book, which carried a quote from a review by John Berger: “one of the most lucid and pure political formulations of the ’60s.” “Lost Prophets,” Berger’s review was titled; had the rest of it been somehow squeezed onto the sticker, it could have taken the conversation even farther afield, or closer to home.

The conversation was appearing in the May 1978 issue of
Slash,
an L.A. punk magazine; the number, a note on the contents page read, was “dedicated to the handful of
enragés
(French for maniacs, fanatics, crazies) who, ten years ago, tried to change life.” The dedication was illustrated with “une jeunesse que l’avenir inquiète trop souvent” (a youth disturbed too often by the future), a once-famous poster by the May ’68 art-student collective Atelier populaire: it showed a young woman with her head covered in surgical gauze and a safety pin jamming her lips closed. After ten years, with May ’68 all but forgotten in the United States, this was true archaeology. It was an odd return to strange times, when apparently trivial disruptions on a university campus in the Paris suburbs had begun a chain reaction of refusal—when first students, then factory workers, then clerks, professors, nurses, doctors, athletes, bus drivers, and artists refused work, took to the streets, threw up barricades, and fought off the police, or turned back upon their workplaces, occupied them, fought off their unions, and transformed their workplaces into laboratories of debate and critique, when the walls of Paris bled with unusual slogans—when ten million people
brought a signal version of modern society to a standstill. “In the confusion and tumult of the May revolt,” Bernard E. Brown wrote in
Protest in Paris,
his unique academic account of May ’68, “the slogans and shouts of the students were considered expressions of mass spontaneity and individual ingenuity. Only afterward was it evident that these slogans”—

REVOLUTION CEASES TO BE THE MOMENT IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BE SACRIFICED FOR IT IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS DOWN WITH THE ABSTRACT, LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL AFTER GOD, ART IS DEAD DOWN WITH A WORLD WHERE THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WON’T DIE OF STARVATION HAS BEEN PURCHASED WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WILL DIE OF BOREDOM CLUB MED, A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE’S MISERY DON’T CHANGE EMPLOYERS, CHANGE THE EMPLOYMENT OF LIFE NEVER WORK CHANCE MUST BE SYSTEMATICALLY EXPLORED RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU BE CRUEL THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME, INDULGE UNTRAMMELED DESIRE PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHSUNDER THE PAVING STONES, THE BEACH!

—“were fragments of a consistent and seductive ideology that had virtually all appeared in situationist tracts and publications . . . Mainly through their agency there welled up in the May Revolt an immense force of protest against the modern world and all its works, blending passion, mystery, and the primeval.” “This explosion,” said President Charles de Gaulle in the June speech with which he recaptured power, “was provoked by a few groups in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West—groups, moreover, which do not know what they would put in its place, but which delight in negation.” “The Beginning of an Epoch,” proclaimed the lead article in the twelfth and last number of the journal
Internationale situationniste
in 1969. “The death rattle of the historical irrelevants,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In 1978, when Brzezinski was national security adviser to the president of the United States and “The Beginning of an Epoch” was, in English, a
badly translated, smudgy pamphlet long out of print,
Slash
readers were expected to recall the unscheduled holiday of May ’68 approximately as dimly as they might recall Gary “U.S.” Bonds’s small 1965 hit “Seven Day Weekend.” The reader was to look casually at the blind reference of the Atelier populaire poster, and then to superimpose the best-known Sex Pistols graphic, Jamie Reid’s photo-collage for “God Save the Queen,” which featured H.R.H. Elizabeth II with a safety pin through her lips; out of the ether of unmade history, connections were supposed to tumble like counters in a slot machine. “The revolutionary hopes of the 1960s, which culminated in 1968,” John Berger wrote in 1975,

are now blocked or abandoned. One day they will break out again, transformed, and be lived again with different results. I mean only that; I am not prophesying the difference. When that happens, the Situationist programme (or anti-programme) will probably be recognized as one of the most lucid and pure political formulations of that earlier, historic decade, reflecting, in an extreme way, its desperate force and privileged weakness.

As manager of the Dils, Peter Urban would not have been interested in such sentimental meanderings. There was a world to win, he told McLaren, tactics to be formulated, ideology to be fixed, and anyway . . . McLaren cut him off. “So, Peter, how come you’re managing a band with a name like a pickle? Or a dildo, what’s the controversy there?”

The Sex Pistols had sparked the Dils; when I saw them play in 1979, they were a helpless imitation, nothing more. By the time Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death, the Sex Pistols had sparked new bands all over the world, and more of them than anyone could count were doing things no one in rock ’n’ roll had done before. But as an above-ground group—a commercial possibility, an international scandal—the Sex Pistols lasted little longer than nine months: they saw the release of their first record on 4 November 1976, and ceased to exist as much more than an asset in a lawsuit on 14 January 1978, when, immediately following the last show of their single American tour, Johnny Rotten quit the band, claiming that McLaren, in his lust for fame and money, had betrayed everything the Sex Pistols ever stood for. And what was that? For guitarist Steve Jones, an illiterate petty criminal, and drummer Paul Cook, a sometime electrician’s helper, it was girls and good times. For original bassist Glen Matlock, former art student and
Sex shop clerk, it was pop music. For Sid Vicious, the junkie who replaced him, it was pop stardom. As for Johnny Rotten, he would say many different things (including, after the fall: “Steve can go off and become Peter Frampton”—he didn’t; “Sid can go off and kill himself”—he did; “Paul can go back to being an electrician”—he may still), and, one suspected, had yet to say what he meant.