It's not coincidental that Johnny Rotten sings these tracks. Rotten was the guiding genius of the band, Vicious the epitome of its ethos, a relationship similar to the Jagger-Richards symbiosis. Upon Rotten's departure, the remaining Sex Pistols ran into the problem of taste: Is this any good? How far do we go? It was a problem they were unequipped to handle. A song like "Friggin" in the Riggin'," a nautical round of masturbation and sodomy on a British man o'war which is sure to replace "Barnacle Bill the Sailor" on top of the fifth grade charts, has no business on this record. Part of the problem is the manifest influence of Malcolm MacLaren, the Sex Pistols' manager, who apparently drove Rotten from the band and tried to fill the vacuum. MacLaren is the same imbecile who tried to dress up the New York Dolls in Communist regalia and helped to ensure their demise. He actually sings a track on this album. "You Need Hands," but I have found that a carefully etched groove will cause your needle to skip over it entirely.
Two tracks deserve special consideration, as they are sure to be singled out for particular opprobrium. "Belsen Was a Gas," a live recording about the infamous German concentration camp which also found its way into "Holiday in the Sun," contains the chilling refrain "Be a man, kill a man" and Rotten's patented looney-bin hysterics. Roland Biggs, the fat old geezer who took over fronting the band after Rotten left, performs his own version of the song, complete with bogus German accent. He also marches on Martin Bormann in his "No One's Innocent".
God save Marty Bormann.
And Nazis on the run.
They wasn't being wicked, Lord
It was their idea of fun.
Facile condemnations of this sort of thing clearly won't do. It's hard to get a handle on the punk fascination with Nazism: Elvis Costello talks about emotional fascism, Johnny Rotten sings about Belsen, and the swastika is the dominant icon in punk life, but what does it all add up to? With Rotten, it may just be the shock value, as when he used to tell people he cut out his hemmorhoids with a razor. And just how is one supposed to react to something like Belsen, anyway?
The album closes with Sid Vicious's "My Way," already a punk classic. Sid hams it up in a thickened, quavering voice until Steve Jones's guitar breaks the song into the desperately vital punk mode. The poignancy of the lyrics, in light of Vicious's early death, need not be belabored here. Just let "My Way" stand as a testament to his visceral understanding of the punk aesthetic.
WHICH BRINGS ME to a long overdue obituary for Sid Vicious. Sid Vicious had the extraordinary good fortune of the very, very few who are born into an artistic movement that mirrors their inner sensibility, whose untrammeled self-expression jibes exactly, as if predestined, with the zeitgeist. He was the quintessential punk, with his chalk-white, emaciated body, his spiked hair and suicide-scars and drunken, fun-loving leer. When he danced the pogo, it became the rage; when he pieced together his clothes with safety pins, that device became the emblem of an entire subculture. He realized that old age would be a breach of decorum--that, like Keith Moon, he could never grow old. Sid Vicious was to rock and roll what Winston Churchill was to Western democracy, and to many of us there was not a hell of a difference in scale. John Kifner, in his often cruel and amazingly obtuse obituary in the New York Times, wrote. "Sid Vicious played electric bass and vomited," as if that epigraph could contain his short life. It was more, Mr. Kifner, much more than that.