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It's funny to notice what the guy in the beginning says About Rock and Roll, A Month Before the Release of VH I.
Great find ,bro.
Back in '78 , me and a buddy were trying to scrape together some cash to get to Rochester,N.Y. to see them. Our parents cought wind of this and put the kibash on it. We were 12 at the time but we did'nt give a fuck. We wanted to see the Pistols goddamnit ! :cool:
Saw them in 2002 at Crystal Palace sports stadium in London, my god they were good.
From the early gigs I've heard, I much prefered the '96 and '02 shows, they were much more polished, which you could say is against everything the Pistols stood for, but the band sounded incredible.
If I had been at the 100 club I might have a different opinion, but alas, wasn't born for another 12 years.
From the Dallas show.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsy2IPmHQD0
Sid Vicious, the finest air bassist ever!
F A T Bell's Palsy face Steve Jone$ claims he has Sid's original Fender bass but has never shown it to the public
https://allthatsinteresting.com/word...tour-stage.jpg
Huh!Quote:
Originally Posted by Kristy
Hadn't heard that claim before.
He said it on his lame radio show when interviewing Steve Earle of all people. Earle has asked him if Jone$ still had his original custom white Les Paul to which Jone$ replied "no" and sold it long ago for heroin but that he had Sid's bass with no back story on how he actually attained it
Who knows? I'd guess maybe after the Winterland gig all the equipment was sent back to England and ended up in whatever storage area the Sex Pistols kept their equipment, which probably wasn't much in terms of the amount of equipment they had: it wasn't as if the Pistols were this massive band in terms of playing large venues...most of their gigs were in small clubs/ballrooms, etc. If memory serves, I think Sid was filmed using the bass when the Pistols (minus Lydon, who quit the band after Winterland) were filming their 'auditions' for Rotten in the spring of 1978, the footage of which ended up in The Great Rock And Roll Swindle movie. I don't know if Sid ever had cause after that to even play bass, because he didn't do much live work after the Pistols broke up other than some NYC-area club gigs, and from what I've read those gigs featured Sid just singing. So, who knows if Sid even took the bass with him to New York when he and Spungen went there in the late summer/early fall of 1978: by that point Sid had already filmed his stuff for the Swindle movie, and it wasn't like he was doing any studio recording or anything like that when he was in NYC from what I remember reading. Jones may have just took the bass home with him after the Pistols went totally defunct.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kristy
Ironically enough, when Sid did a solo gig in London shortly before moving to NYC, his bass player was Glenn Matlock. It was the only time the two appeared on stage together
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBXVuaiBOV4
It can't be said enough that Sid was a sick talentless nasty fuck and the punk narrative gives him and his horrific girlfriend some sort of of artistic validity in some people's eyes that didn't actually exist.
Sid was more hype than substance, definitely. Basically he was a naive kid who was manipulated by a series of toxic people. Starting with his own mother, then McLaren, and finally Nancy. It's a cliche that some guys are attracted to women who remind them of their mother, but in Sid's case it seems to be true. His mom was a junkie herself. Ironically, she may have been the one who killed Sid. Intentionally or not? Who knows, but apparently she admits to shooting him up the night he died. Could be that the smack was of a higher purity than what she was used to? Might be that she thought he would be found guilty of killing Nancy, and a quick death via Heroin overdose beats a slow death in prison. Who the fuck knows.... nobody who knew Sid believed he actually committed the murder, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't have been convicted anyway, since he was too smacked up out of his mind that night to offer any other plausible suspects.
I know Rotten regrets bringing him into the band, since they basically grew up together. Maybe Sid might have had some chance at a long & boring life without the Pistols. It's definitely true that his musical abilities were considerably better during his rare moments of sobriety.... or at least semi-sobriety. Certainly never a threat to take a job from Geddy Lee or Billy Sheehan, but a competent bass player during those moments. Good enough for a punk band, easily.
There used to be a cool guitar shop on the ground floor of the Chelsea Hotel but that place was pretty seedy. NYC in the 80’s was quite the sludge dump.
It was all that media hype surrounding the Sex Pistols and it all definitely enveloped Sid and Nancy, particularly in America after Nancy's death where the stabbing of her was probably what most Americans first heard about regarding Sid Vicious. The whole punk period and the Pistols was something that was covered press-wise far more extensively in the United Kingdom during most of the years it was actually happening than it was in the United States. Outside of the New York underground scene and maybe some Los Angeles/New York-based music trade publications, America at large probably didn't hear much about punk until the Pistols came to America in early 1978. That did make some waves on some national news shows, mostly concerning the violent image of it all.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seshmeister
After the Pistols broke up and Sid and Nancy eventually ended up in New York City in the late summer of 1978, the period between their arrival and Nancy's death wasn't exactly causing a national media sensation here. By and large, nobody in the US gave two shits about punk music in 1978. Sid did a couple of club gigs in NYC, and an interview on an underground cable tv channel. The press coverage didn't happen until after Nancy died.
Whatever the media image of Vicious after Nancy's death and his own death became - that whole 'live fast, die young in a blaze of glory' bullshit - the reality strikes me as more than a bit pathetic. I remember after seeing the Sid And Nancy movie in the 1980s reading Nancy's mother's book that came out around the same time. Reading that book was an eye-opener and definite counterweight to the whole Sid and Nancy as Mythical Rock Star And His Super Groupie hype. By Nancy's mother's account, Nancy was deeply psychologically disturbed from an early age. It is certainly telling that by the time she died she had no close friends, her family didn't want anything to do with her and the acquaintances she had were solely people she encountered as Sid's 'manager'/groupie or people she was doing drugs with. In a nutshell, on a personal level people steered clear of Nancy because she had an off-putting personality. Sid seemingly bought into the whole image of it all and bought into the myths the media portrayed regarding him as the icon of punk or whatever. Throw heroin into that mix and it wasn't surprising in the least that the two ended up going down the tubes. Even if Nancy hadn't ended up being stabbed and Sid hadn't overdosed and died, their lives were obviously in a downward spiral.
I suppose the enduring image of the legend and myth of Sid and Nancy remains mildly lucrative for whoever has the rights to Sid's likeness and whatever recordings he managed to make (if the rights to those recordings were even retained by Sid's mother and passed on to whoever in the wake of her death). It'd be hard to imagine Sid's estate heaping in millions of dollars these days. I'd tend to imagine now Vicious is far more popular in the United Kingdom than he is in the US.
Who knows what really happened in the Chelsea Hotel? It's not exactly the Kennedy assassination in terms of a mystery with any consequence outside of whatever residual tabloid fodder mentioning it conjures up. Maybe Vicious and Nancy both passed out, then someone else came into the room to rip off their dope and money and Nancy woke up during the robbery and got stabbed for her troubles while Sid remained passed out. Maybe it was a drug deal gone sour. Maybe Sid stabbed her then passed out. Those two were hellbent on speeding toward oblivion one way or another, which isn't to say they deserved what they got, exactly. However, you strip away the tabloid notoriety factor and it was all a sad, pathetic end to a couple of very disturbed people who weren't even really revelling in a noteworthy degree of media notoriety when the stabbing happened. By and large, outside of the marginal NYC punk circle, Sid and Nancy had no celebrity currency in the couple few months they spent in NYC. Sid, when he was recognized, was already a has-been by that point.
It was hardly a Rock And Roll Heaven love story for the ages.
NYC even into the early 1990s was a shithole.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nitro Express
Had spent a couple of months there in late 1992/early 1993, and even Times Square was still pretty seedy.
Didn't go back there for ten years. Spent a week there in 2004 on the Lower East Side, and by then Times Square looked like something you'd see in Downtown Disneyland. The transformation was shocking.
Went back in 2008 and spent a week in Chelsea a couple of blocks from the Chelsea Hotel. The architecture of the place looked the same from the outside. The friends I was staying with remarked that the current management were pretty fervent on trying to clean up the image of the place in terms of the atmosphere and the clientele/tenants, that even though it was landmarked the vibe of the place was no longer a free-for-all in terms of looney, outrageous behavior happening at all hours all day every day.
Don't see any mystery in a junkie with a long long history of violence killing another junkie while out their face - happens all the time.
If you are the kind of person that strangles cats just for attention stabbing your nightmare girlfriend is a short step.
I must admit this sound check shows that there were tighter than you might think, away from the madness of live shows at least.
https://youtu.be/_GX-PZNig70?t=549
Oh man, Times Square in 1981 was one big seedy Sex mall. It was dangerous too. You had to watch your ass on 42nd Street and Hell’s Kitchen was actually Hell back then. But teens loved to ride the train into NYC for some naughty fun. You could score anything in that seedy dump and be underage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry
The Chelsea is a really old hotel. It dates back to the 1880’s I think. It’s amazing it was never torn down. But the Chelsea district was always famous for being the Bohemian part of NYC and NYC was popular with such people because nobody cared what you did. A mob wasn’t going to show up because you were a creative gay pervert with a drug problem.
Yeah the Sex Pistols did get a ton of media attention here. They were all over the television. They didn’t interest me one bit though. None of their songs grabbed me and I saw them as just a bunch of deviants who got some attention.
So many in the sludge hole would stab you just for the fun of it. Not too far fetched to say someone wondered in the room and jacked her. The place was a den of demented junkies.
But it had a cool guitar shop on the ground floor.
It still had that reputation in 2008 re: the 'Chelsea Boys' who came out at night to swish.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nitro Express
We went out drinking in bars around The Chelsea more than a few of the nights I was there in 2008 and there wasn't anything violently unsafe happening on the streets or in the bars. By the time 2008 rolled around, even the swishiest of swishers didn't even cause anybody to bat an eyelid and was a mild freak show at best because it was no longer shocking in the least. Who gives a shit about that stuff anymore anyway? One presumes anybody who does probably isn't hanging around the Chelsea, Manhatten District anyway.