Night Beat (25 page)

It’s my guess that if it ever came to blows between Keith Jarrett and a Sun Bear, that little bear might have to reexamine a few conceptions of its own.

life & death in the u.k.: the sex pistols, public image ltd., joy division, new order, and the jesus and mary chain

J
ohnny Rotten was one of the few terrific anti-heroes rock & roll has ever produced: a violent-voiced bantam of a boy who tried to make sense of popular culture by making that culture suffer the world outside—its moral horror, its self-impelled violation, its social homicide. His brief, rampaging tenure with the Sex Pistols—the definitional punk band of the late 1970s—had the effect of disrupting rock & roll’s sound, style, and meaning, unlike any pop force before or since. Even seeing the band only once, as I did at San Francisco’s Winterland in January 1978, brought home their consequence with an indelible jolt. That night, Rotten 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 and sweat, the scene resembled nothing so much as a rehearsal for Armageddon, and Rotten 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 have ever witnessed.

The morning after the show, the other Sex Pistols and their manager, Malcolm McLaren, fired Rotten. 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 Rotten and the rest of the band, and that Rotten himself—who had influenced punk ethos more than any other single figure—had turned into a glory-basking rock star. “What really happened,” Rotten will tell me more than two years after the band’s end, “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 roadies. You come here to see the fuckin’ country, not fly over it.” It is nearly 1 A.M., and as we talk we are seated in the bar at a Los Angeles Sunset Strip hotel, drinking rum and Cokes.

“If you really want to know, I think the Sex Pistols failed
. . . miserably,
Rotten says, spouting the last word with a thespian flourish. “Actually, it was a bit embarrassing. The other people in the band never understood what I was singing about.”

IN CONTRAST TO Johnny Rotten, John Lydon—who rose from the ashes of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols to form the experimentalist postpunk band Public Image Ltd.—impresses some erstwhile followers as just a plain antagonist: a tedious, ill-affected
artiste
who deserted his own dread visions for fear they might destroy him. In a way, that may be true. By dealing exclusively in abstract images and accidental sounds, Lydon no longer has to run the risk of caring—which means he no longer needs to run the risk of meaning. (Director Julien Temple—who made the Sex Pistols feature
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle,
and would later film
Absolute Beginners—
once told me: “What John understands is that if people love you, they have control over you, because they can always say they
don’t
love you and destroy you. But if they hate you, and you hate them in return, then you’re freer.”)

It’s also true that Lydon rankles critics and punk diehards alike because he’s repudiated his past. By his own admission, the music he has made with PiL aims to devastate classicist rock & roll—including punk rock—by blackening its themes and confounding its forms. It’s as if, after distancing himself from the merciless primitivism of the Sex Pistols, Lydon found a fatal flaw in rock & roll itself—namely, that it imparted the illusion of order and transcendence—and decided to remake the genre. In creating PiL, Lydon announced that he wanted to form a group that was “anti-music of any kind. I’m tired of melody.” To help him realize this end, Lydon 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. Lydon also saw all this new musical change as a chance 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 generally refers to himself as Johnny Rotten.) “Malcolm and the press had a lot to do with fostering that
Rotten
image,” Lydon 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 Spungen, and his subsequent 1979 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 named his new group Public Image Ltd. (“The name,” he says, “means just that: Our image
is
limited”), and that their debut single, “Public Image,” was an indictment of the Pistols and McLaren. 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, Brian Eno, avant-garde composer La Monte Young and the German group Can, while the actual sound mix resembled the prominent bass and deep-echo characteristic of reggae dub production. In actual effect, Lydon and PiL simply rerouted the Pistols’ much vaunted anarchism, applying it to song structure, and in the process, authored the first major attempt to transmogrify rock parlance since Captain Beefheart’s
Trout Mask Replica.

The rock press, though, lambasted
Public Image. Rolling Stone
termed it “postnasal 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.) 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 in 1980, critical perspectives on PiL start to shift. In part, that’s because the group has come to be seen as progenitors of the English postpunk movement, which at the time includes electronic, theorizing, doleful bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division, and many others. It’s also because PiL’s own music matured measurably. With
Second Edition
(originally released in November 1979 in Britain by Virgin Records, in limited edition as
Metal Box—
a set of three 12-inch forty-fives packaged in a film canister), Levene fashioned a mesmerizing, orchestral guitar and synthesizer mesh that embroiders and enwraps the dance beat-oriented rhythm section, while Lydon wrote some of his most forceful lyrics (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 death).

“Now all the critics
love
us,” Lydon says with a scornful smile. At 2 A.M. the waitress calls for last rounds. Lydon orders a double (I can’t help but copy him), then he 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 that 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.”

BUT, OF COURSE, PiL
was
John Lydon’s band—which would become inarguably plain with the band’s next (and probably best) album,
Paris au Printemps.

Paris au Printemps
(recorded live in France in January 1980 though never released in the United States) is the album on which PiL’s formlessness finally became formulated—which is to say that if they could reproduce their apparently inchoate, unpremeditated music letter-perfect live (and they could), then it wasn’t really orderless or even all that experimental. Yet it was visceral. Guitarist Keith Levene, bassist Jah Wobble, and drummer Martin Atkins play momentously throughout, interweaving deliberate rhythms and backhanded melodies into a taut webwork of crosscurrent designs and motions. Lydon offers a stunning, protean vocal performance: by turns gleeful, derisive, virulent and, during “Chant” and “Careering,” so terrifying—invoking images of mob rule one minute, murder the next—as to be almost unendurable.

But what we hear on
Paris au Printemps
is more than animated, frictional music: We hear the way that music can rub up against, even threaten, people who aren’t ready for it. By the LP’s second side, the crowd—a horde of recherché, loud-mouthed, self-conscious gothics—have had about all the cacophony they can handle. They want pogo beats, block chords, primal thrums—in short, the familiar punk mannerisms they know how to react to. Not getting these, they start to taunt Lydon, spitting jeers, demands, and audible gobs of phlegm at him. John Lydon returns the contempt, leaning lethally into his vocals, narrowing the distance between himself and the implied violence, turning the insensibility of the moment back into the faces of an audience he helped conceive but can no longer abide. “Shut up!” he barks at one point, his scorn echoing through the hall. “I’ll walk off this fucking stage if you keep spitting
. . . Dog
!” Minutes later, at the close of “Poptones,” that’s exactly what he does, dropping his microphone on the saliva-soaked floor and stomping into the wings. In that moment, you can hear Lydon further remove himself from any conceivable culture or subculture that might contain him. He kisses off the whole oppressive orthodoxy of punk mindlessness, just as he once decried the manifest hopelessness of British society.

Little wonder that
Paris au Printemps
also depicts an end of sorts for PiL. Following the group’s 1980 American tour, Martin Atkins (the finest drummer PiL’s ever had; he made the music pounce where others made it loiter) left to form a puerile and comedic postpunk band, Brian Brain. Then, a few weeks later, Lydon, Levene, and hidden member Jeanette Lee (who handles much of PiL’s business) parted company with Jah Wobble after he released two solo albums in quick succession, charging that the bassist had used PiL backing tracks without permission.