| John Lydon could probably go all night without
mentioning the subject, but when it’s finally broached, he greets
it with a grim, world-weary look. "If you really want to know,
I think we failed ... miserably," he says with a thespian
flourish. Lydon is speaking about the Sex Pistols, the definitional
punk group that branded him Johnny Rotten—rock & roll’s
most formidable nihilist. "Actually, it was a bit embarrassing.
The other people in the band never understood what I was singing about."
It is nearly one a.m. and we’re seated at the bar at Lydon’s
Sunset Strip hotel, talking over rum and Cokes. Lydon has come to town,
along with guitarist Keith Levene, to make arrangements for the impending
first American tour of Public Image Ltd.—the iconoclastic, impressionistic
New Wave band Lydon formed after his exit from the Sex Pistols. Lydon
is also doing a handful of interviews to promote the group’s newly
released Warner Bros. / Island album, Second Edition. (The LP
was originally released last November in Britain by Virgin Records,
in a limited edition of 50,000 copies, as Metal Box, a set of
three twelve-inch 45s packaged in a film canister.) But an irksome irony
is besetting Lydon’s attempts at interviews: the questioners inevitably
ask more about the Sex Pistols than about Public Image Ltd. (official
abbreviation: PiL).
"It’s really awful to come back here and go through this
all again," he says in a rueful voice. As he speaks, Lydon plays
distractedly with his thorny, red-hued hair and fixes me with his stabbing
eyes. "All I can say is that Public Image is everything the Sex
Pistols were meant to be—a valid threat to rock & roll. In
the end, the Pistols weren’t any more threatening than retreaded
Chuck Berry."
Lydon’s distaste is understandable but also a bit misleading.
In reality, the Sex Pistols were one of the most cataclysmic forces
in Seventies rock & roll: they served noticed that its form had
become complacent, its content insignificant. Even seeing them only
once, as I did at San Francisco’s Winterland in January 1978, brought
home the message with an indelible force. That night, Lydon danced—waded,
actually—through a mounting pile of debris, everything from shoes,
coins, books, and umbrellas, all heaved his way by a tense, adulatory
crowd. Draped in a veil of smoke, sweat, and spit, the scene resembled
a rehearsal for Armageddon, and Lydon rummaged through it all like some
misplaced jester. But when he sang—railing at the crowd, jeering
the line, "There’s no future, no future, no future for you!"—he
was predatory and awesome. It was the most impressive moment in rock
& roll I’ve ever witnessed.
The morning after that show, the other Sex Pistols and their manager,
Malcolm McLaren, fired Lydon. McLaren, who conceived the group and purportedly
engineered its rise and fall, charged that Warner Bros. (the Pistols’
American label) had purposefully driven a wedge between Lydon and the
rest of the band, and that Lydon himself—who had influenced punk
ethos more than any other single figure—had turned into punk’s
antithesis: a glory-basking rock star.
(In reply to McLaren’s charges, Warner Bros. Vice President Bob
Regehr, who was instrumental in signing the Sex Pistols in America,
says: "We had nothing to do with enticing John from the band. In
fact, we wanted them to stay together, and until the breakup, we’d
done most of our dealing with Malcolm. But whether Malcolm wanted John
to be a rock star or not is irrelevant. John is charismatic,
and there’s nothing anyone could do to deny that. What did Malcolm
want—for him to stick a bag over his head and stand in the corner?")
"What really happened," says Lydon, is that the other Pistols
[guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook] wouldn’t speak to
me anymore. Malcolm flew them around in airplanes, while Sid [Vicious]
and I traveled across America with the roadies. You come here to see
the fucking country, not fly over it."
A few days after the group’s disintegration, Lydon announced that
he wanted to form a group that was "antimusic of any kind. I’m
tired of melody." He returned to England, reputedly broke and still
bound to Virgin and Warner Bros. Back home he recruited two friends—classically
trained guitarist and pianist Keith Levene, who’d been a founding
member of the Clash, and Jah Wobble, a novice bassist and reggae enthusiast—along
with drummer Jim Walker (since replaced by Martin Atkins) to form a
band Lydon claimed wouldn’t be a band at all. Rather, it would
be a cooperative—a self-contained company whose members had equal
responsibility for the group’s management, production, and promotion.
Lydon also saw that change as an opportunity to debunk the myth of
Johnny Rotten. (Actually, he delights in interchanging the surnames:
on PiL’s album jackets he lists himself as John Lydon, though in
conversation he frequently refers to himself as John Rotten.) "Malcolm
and the press had a lot to do with fostering that image," he says.
"I chose to walk away from it because otherwise you have all these
people out there waiting for you to kill yourself on their behalf.
"I mean, look what happened to Sid," he adds, referring to
bassist Sid Vicious’ arrest for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy
Spungeon, and his subsequent death by heroin overdose. A plaintive look
crosses Lydon’s face, and he stares into his drink for a long moment.
"Poor Sid. The only way he could live up to what he wanted everyone
to believe about him was to die. That was tragic, but more for Sid than
anyone else. He really bought his public image."
It is fitting, then, that Lydon’s new group is called Public Image,
Ltd. ("The name," he says, "means just that: our public
image is limited.), and their debut single, "Public Image,"
was an indictment of the Pistols and McLaren: "You never listened
to a word that I said / You only seen me by the clothes I wear / Or
did the interest go so much deeper / It must have been the color of
my hair.... / What you wanted was never made clear / Behind the image
was ignorance and fear."
But the real focal point of the song, as well as the subsequent album,
Public Image, was the musical content: amorphous structures and
unbroken rhythms, paired with minimal melodies and Lydon’s hoodoo
vocals. The concept had its roots in the drone and modal experimentalism
of the Velvet Underground, Brain Eno, avant-garde composer LaMonte Young
and the German group Can, while the actual sound mix resembled the prominent
bass and deep echo characteristic of reggae dub productions.
The rock press, though, lambasted the album. Rolling Stone termed
it "post-nasal drip monotony," while England’s New
Musical Express dismissed it as "a Zen lesson in idolatry."
(Warner Bros. declined to release the album in America, even though
PiL rerecorded and remixed parts of it. "It will come out eventually,"
says Regehr.) Basically, PiL agreed with the critics: "They all
slagged it," says Keith Levene, "because it was self-indulgent,
nonsimplistic, and non-rock & roll. Those are all good points. But
that’s the kind of music we intend to make. We don’t want
to be another Clash, making old-fashioned, twelve-bar rock & roll."
But critical perspectives on PiL seem to be shifting. In part, that’s
because they’re now seen as progenitors of an English "Brave
New Wave" movement that includes electronic, theorizing bands like
Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle and This Heat. It’s
also because PiL’s own music has matured measurably. With Second
Edition, Levene has fashioned a mesmerizing orchestral guitar and
synthesizer web that embroiders and enwraps the dance-beat-oriented
rhythm section, while Lydon has written some of his most forceful lyrics
to date (particularly those to "Poptones," a deathly account
of rape told from the victim’s point of view, and "Swan Lake,"
a song about his mother’s recent death).
"Now all the critics love us," Lydon says with a scornful
smile. At two a.m. the waitress calls for last rounds. Lydon orders
a double, then continues. "I don’t trust all these people
who praise us now. They’re the same ones who waited until the Pistols
were over before they accepted them. And I’m not sure the press
appreciates at all the Public Image is more than just a band I’m
in."
But, I note, when people open Rolling Stone and see a picture
of Lydon only—since Keith Levene wouldn’t be photographed—doesn’t
that help reinforce the notion that PiL is, indeed, Lydon’s band?
His eyes flicker. "They can think what they fuckin’ want."
he snaps. "I gave up a long time ago bothering about people’s
opinions and impressions. If Keith don’t want his picture taken,
that’s fine. It’s a band decision, is it not? Just appreciate
it for that."
The real question, though, is whether people—New Wave devotees
included—will appreciate PiL. The group makes music that, by virtue
of it’s dissonance, idiosyncrasy and anti-rock & roll stance,
is almost certain to reach a smaller audience in America than the Sex
Pistols did. But in the same way the Sex Pistol’s radicalism has
now become a part of the rock vernacular, making it possible for groups
like the Clash to reach a wider audience, it’s likely that PiL
is preparing us for an even more modern dance, somewhere further down
the road.
Lydon, though, doesn’t agree. "I think our cause will be
lost, but that won’t be so bad, will it? Until then," he says,
pulling his jeering lips into a smile, "we can do nothing but benefit
your dreary little lives." |