Founding Fathers: The Sex Pistols

Too many fathers of rock have been lost to the mists of time, so join J.A. Bartlett of the Hits Just Keep On Comin' every Saturday as he reminds us who helped to set the groundwork for the music we love...

The Sex Pistols were not the founders of punk rock, although they inspired some of the most famous British punk bands, and they became the public face of punk. They did, however, set a standard for rock 'n' roll outrageousness and promotional cojones that stands mostly untouched over 30 years later.

Managed by mogul Malcolm McLaren, who took over and remolded them in 1975 after observing the punk scene in New York, the Pistols wouldn't get into a recording studio for nearly a year. In October 1976, they recorded their first single, Anarchy in the UK, which began with Johnny Rotten snarling a couplet guaranteed to make them notorious: "I am the anti-Christ/I am an anarchist." Days after the record was released, the band upped the outrageousness quotient by using obscene language on a live TV show. In their defense, they were provoked by the host, who had apparently been hitting on one of the female musicians accompanying them, but the resulting furor gave punk a boost into the British mainstream. Weeks later, their record label, EMI, dropped them, thanks to the TV show uproar and an incident at London's Heathrow Airport in which the Pistols verbally abused airport staff and engaged in unspeakable acts. (Since the acts were always described as "unspeakable," nobody ever said for sure what the Pistols had done.)

And Sid Vicious hadn't even joined yet. He came aboard in February 1977, and although he looked like the quintessential punk rocker, he was so inept on bass that his amplifier was usually turned down during live performances. He began abusing heroin almost immediately, through the influence of his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.

In March 1977, the Pistols recorded their second single and their most notorious, God Save the Queen, which opened with the lines "God save the queen/the fascist regime" and ended by claiming that England had no future. In the year of Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee, this wasn't a universally popular sentiment. The BBC banned the record, but it became a hit that summer anyhow, reaching Number One according to the magazine New Musical Express, and Number Two on the official British charts. During the same summer, the Pistols recorded Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, an album that is today considered one of the greatest in rock history.

After Never Mind the Bollocks was released, it was time for the Pistols to conquer America. But instead of booking them in New York, where they would have gotten an enthusiastic welcome, MacLaren scheduled them to play in Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, and Tulsa during early January 1978. Audiences in those cities reacted with predictable horror. If McLaren wanted to gain maximum publicity for the Pistols and their outrageousness, his decision to tour the Bible Belt was brilliant. A final show in San Francisco on January 14 ended with Johnny Rotten delivering the band's epitaph, asking the audience, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" The band splintered after that. By the end of 1978, Nancy Spungen would be dead and Sid Vicious would be charged with her murder. After spending 55 days at Rikers Island Prison in New York City, he was finally released on bail. At a party celebrating his release, he overdosed on heroin. He was not yet 22 years old.

The surviving Pistols have reunited several times since the mid '90s, most recently this past summer, when they toured the UK and Europe and played a single show in Las Vegas. When they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, they refused to appear at the ceremony -- punks to the end.

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