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The Real Sid & Nancy,
by Richard Hell
___________________________________________________________________________
Spin magazine 1986
  
SWEET EXCESS
Pure energy. There's something evil about it. But irresistible. It doesn't care. It's self-sufficient. It dances. A burning building. A storm. The Sex Pistols were like subatomic particles, like electrons; you couldn't really know about them--if you knew their velocity you couldn't know where they were, and if you could determine their positions you couldn't know how fast they were moving.
They were demonic--in that it's demonic to be presented with real life, which is half death. I remember when I had a band, when we were at our best, a brilliant set, but playing for people who didn't know us, I felt the audience was like the crowd gathered at a car wreck, that to them I was some kind of fascinating, horrifying exhibit. The Pistols were like that. That's a lot of why they broke up--it's not a comfortable way to feel. But it’s also what made them spectacular--they made people question their whole lives.
The Sid and Nancy story is only one small slice of all the life of that time. I saw the movie the other day and it was depressing. It reminded me that I'm glad to have outgrown those days. But they sure were exciting. I can't think of a better way to have been that young.
Of course, every other person has o.d.'d or burned him/herself out, but that's rock 'n' roll. It's lousy with stories like Sid's. Brian Jones is probably the famous case that’s most similar: drugged out, dropped from the Stones, and dead. Both were performers who designated themselves--and were wildly encouraged by their fans to be--absolutely free, no restraints, in playing out their drives and destiny. Sid was unique in that that was his only distinction--his only talent was for self-indulgence and destruction.
But Sid did all right for himself. He grew up in council housing--the same kind of oppressive lower middle class hatchery as the Queens projects that produced the Ramones--and he had no father, no skill, no future. Rock 'n' roll has always been for people who don't have any choice. Malcolm McLaren and J. Lydon and the media gave Sid a license to destroy, which is about the best toy a kid who never had anything could want.
However, one does resent the people who die. It's as if right in the middle of telling you a good story, somebody says, "Never mind. It's too private." But the Sid and Nancy story really isn't a secret. We want people to push themselves to the limit for us, so we can identify with them and imagine we've lived. People who die rather than adjust to the demands of life form a secret society--in dark hours you wonder if maybe they were right. If they've left you behind, eating their dust.
I knew Nancy in New York in, guess it was, 1976. Right before she went to England. I went out with her for a few months. She was a fairly typical suburban girl who'd never fit in and who worshipped rock stars (I remember the Bad Company posters in her apartment). She had left school as soon as she could to come to the big city. She had an exceptionally large drive to be where the action was. She claimed this ridiculously high IQ score. It was her way of trying to distinguish herself from the crowd of other girls very much like her that hung out at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. It was how she made herself feel special to herself. (In a way, you'd have to be especially dumb to believe such a claim despite all the evidence to the contrary. ) Like many girls of the period, she made money go-go dancing naked in Times Square sex bars.
The New York scene that Nancy departed shortly thereafter was a little more battered and knowing than what she'd find in London. Malcolm had come through a year earlier and picked up a lot of ideas he was going to impart to the bands he would be nurturing in London. But the scene here was different from what would develop there. It was a little more eclectic and intellectual, but it was just as brand-new, brilliant, real, and honest. Most of us were in our early twenties rather than late teens. People did tend to be "cool." We had our share of headbangers, but there were just as many in the crowds at CBGB’s who came to be privately transported by the musings of groups like Television, Patti Smith, and the Voidoids. The Ramones and the Heartbreakers were the most aggressive (and they were to have the largest influence on Sid: his favorite rock stars were Dee Dee Ramone and Johnny Thunders). The crowds at CBGB’s and Max's were made up of junkies, prostitutes, young artists, homosexual career nightclubbers, and slumming socialites, just about everybody'd knocked around a little bit.
If you were in a band, there was always someone willing to buy you a drink and a hamburger, and there was always someone new to go home with if you wanted to. And we were at that age where we could do no wrong, because we were doing everything for the first time. Anything is worth doing once, and the harmful effects of even the most dangerous activities usually take a while to show up. CBGB's was ramshackle and nondescript. Before we arrived it had been a Hell's Angels bar and, being located on the Bowery, likely also to harbor a few halfdead old winos. The owner, Hilly, a slow, bearded, friendly old guy, drank there himself and was partial to country music (CBGB stood for Country, Blue Grass & Blues). The place smelled like shit because Hilly never walked the two dogs he kept on the premises. Over the next few years it would acquire some amenities--dressing rooms, a stage, a sound system--but when we first started playing there, it was an anonymous dive.
I really thought it was funny that the moment you played in a band you became handsome and desirable. Girls would fight over you, and the funny thing was, they liked you to be mean to them. I don't mean sadistic, but they thought band members were the coolest people in the world and they didn't respect you unless you proved it by using them for sex, money (these were girls who made up to $200-$300 a night--a lot more than us--"dancing" in Times Square), decoration, and target practice, and most of us were happy to oblige. Schoolgirls and socialites were a little different but not much. I wrote a song about it back then--Johnny Thunders wrote the music--called "Hurt Me":
Their eyes light up when you put them down
Heartbeat increases when you push them around
Spill a drink on her she's your friend for life
You can carve out a disciple if you have a knife...
Of course these girls weren't entirely passive. There had to be a fair exchange. There was a limit to the amount of abuse they'd take. There was a famous girl named Connie who cut (New York Doll) Killer Kane's thumb nearly off, and when she was going out with Dee Dee Ramone stabbed him in the butt. Most of us were out for kicks, and we expected a few bruises. It was all pretty humorous.
Nancy just wanted to he somebody (not necessarily herself). And you've got to hand it to her, she made it. She'd love that her name could be half a movie title and that we'd know right off who it was (though she'd know it wouldn't work without Sid's). But then she'd hate the lumpy face of the actress who plays her. She would do absolutely anything to get what she wanted, but her arsenal of persuasive means was limited. When I told her I didn't want to see her anymore, she started crying, and pleading, pulled off her panties, lifted her skirt, bent over, and swore she'd do anything I asked. It was not too attractive. There was really nothing between us.
The Sex Pistols were really something, though. I keep thinking how pure they were, an impenetrable phenomenon, like a mirror, or any given moment. Like life. They brought life back to rock 'n' roll. To write about them is to reveal yourself. They were pure chaos. Like watching a storm. Matter releasing its energy. To touch them was to burn (get burned), but they were so compelling, so tempting, so fascinating to watch. They weren't human, but it was a kind of inhumanity I understand, and a neglected teenager needs. They were the definition of white rock 'n' roll.
Mainly, a teenager wants to be heard, to make his presence felt. He sees how monstrous the world is behind its polite manners, and he resents being ignored and condescended to by such hypocrites. So he drops the manners and reflects the truth, which is to say he makes a monster of himself. Utterly exhilarating. The problem is that when it happens to you, like it did to Sid, when it's done naively, you're still allowing yourself to he defined and controlled by the society you're "defying," and unless you can grow up before you die, your destiny will be to self-destruct in some sort of misbegotten, half-conscious protest against it.
It reminds me of the night James Chance--another crazy inspired musician of the period--was furious because the mob proprietors of some New York disco refused to pay him after a gig. Chance stalked around the huge, darkened dance floor in a fury, cursing. The room was empty except for a muscle-bound bouncer and James and me. When James started kicking beer bottles, the bouncer began to approach him. James picked up a bottle by the neck, smashed it against a pillar, and screamed at the guy, "You can't hurt me!" Then he jammed the broken bottle into his own chest.
It's a weird syndrome of the powerless saying to the powerful "You can't hurt me because I'm willing to hurt myself."
Of course, Lydon and Malcolm were not such lost souls. Neither of them is done justice by the movie. To be fair, the movie isn’t their story, though it is virtually a docudrama. But Malcolm wasn't the sort of cynical character it makes him out to be. Malcolm was having fun. He was shaking things up and making art. The mass media was his art form and he was a master of its properties. He was also quite honest, I think, and very politically sophisticated, which is to say thoughtful and consistent in dealing with people. He was something of a megalomaniac where his work was concerned, but an artist has to be. He was a lot like Warhol (Or Picasso for that matter) in that he took ideas wherever he could find them. But ideas aren’t property, nobody owns them. They belong to whomever makes the best use of them. His collaborators in the Sex Pistols were eager volunteers, not captive victims.
I remember once talking to Johnny Thunders (probably the most unacknowledged legislator of rock'n'roll) about how sleazy rock life is, and he came up with the best characterization of it I ever heard. He compared it to professional boxing, with its sleazy, incompetent managers, gangster promoters, and other duplicitous parasites who live off the blood of the performers, performers who are likely to end up punch-drunk burnouts, while the owners get rich, but whose only other choices in life are jail or a cubicle in social hell. Malcolm was as far as could be from such sinister managerial types. He was an extension of the band. Without his energy, commitment, and brilliant strategy, they never could have approached the position they reached. He understood rock 'n' roll too--that its essence is that it's made by and for kids. It's not about virtuosity--it's about energy, passion, frustration, lust, and fun. Not to mention drugs (though Malcolm seriously disapproved of drugs). Teenage life. Life and life only. The Sex Pistols were, first, true to life. That's how they burned through the newspapers and the TV tubes to the kids, because the kids, whether they knew it beforehand or not, were sick of the self-important, posing, old, and isolated rock-emperors of the time.
The Sex Pistols had no pretensions. They'd only just learned how to operate their instruments. But they operated as one, with a common intention that was shared by half the youth of London. That intention was just to have some fun, for once, just to make something happen. Despite grownups. They created an atmosphere where kids could be themselves, despite everything. Things were (and still are) bad for kids in England. Every year, literally hundreds of thousands of them went directly from school onto the dole. There were no jobs. The welfare state was a listless, pathetic failure. The streets were ugly with bored and hungry kids.
So London was ripe to the point of rotten. Enter Johnny, who, like Malcolm, is not well served by Sid & Nancy. Rotten was heroic for his absolutely scrupulous refusal to ever promote anything but general chaos. It was just his nature. He was like some mythological imp, the imp of the perverse, who just liked to rub you the wrong way. At the first date my band, the Voidoids, played in London, 1977, Rotten came on stage after the set and harangued the audience into forcing us, with ten minutes of applause, to return for an encore (when we'd already played every song we knew). I'd never met him. Then when he came backstage later, the first thing he said to me was, "God, you've got a big nose." He was definitely into one-upmanship, but you had to admire him. All the kids in London did, because he didn't give a fuck, even about that. He just hated anything conventional and he was funny and street-smart. He was one of them, and he was a concentrated package of the part of each of them they'd been least able to express. He gave it release, and they really loved him for it. All those bands, from the Clash to Generation X (Billy Idol) to even Duran Duran, freely, publicly, admit that he--or the Sex Pistols--was directly responsible for inspiring them. This kind of acknowledgment is very unusual among members of essentially the same generation in such a competitive and egotistical business as rock music.
That's something that's missing from the movie--a sense of the emotional commitment and loyalty the kids had to each other. (It was true in New York, too.) Things were shared and people helped each other. It wasn't sentimental. They were a hard lot, for all their youth, but they believed in each other and their common worth in the face of the contempt and indifference of adults. (Everyone was much younger than they're portrayed in the movie.)
The scene that erupted in London was single-minded, or singularly mindless. The New York scene that Malcolm had studied (when he was here managing the Dolls in their declining days) was more diffuse and varied, with all the innovations present (from torn, scribbled-on, and safety-pinned clothes to spiky short hair to short, hard, loud, obnoxious songs) but not exclusively in any one group. In London it all gushed outward from Malcolm and the Pistols, and the audience was 90 percent crazed kids with nothing to do. The kids weren't cool, they were boiling hot. They spat and hit and cursed. Perfect turf for Nancy.
The movie does succeed on its own terms in accurately capturing the style and attitudes of its two principles. I've never seen a film that comes near it for conveying the growing desperation and shrinking prospects of the heroin addict. Director Alex Cox knows his stuff. You could fault Chloe Webb as Nancy for overdoing the facial contortions and tongue lolling, but apart from that, the impersonations she and Gary Oldman (Sid) achieve are remarkably on the mark, as is the content of the individual scenes. Every one obviously did their research. One could wish that the social structure and its values (rather than Malcolm or John) could have been implicated some for the depressing fate suffered by Sid and his girl. Because it was fate. Sid's whole identity was self-destruction. He was famous for dying. It's all he knew how to do. He didn't have a clue. (But then, who does?)
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©Richard Hell
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