My British Invasion

by Harold Bronson

  Understandably shaken, McLaren is negotiating with other labels, but even with a sizeable cash settlement he’s feeling the effects of the turmoil. “The image I’ve got now is almost like a contagious disease. When I walk into record company offices people really scatter and lose themselves very fast.”

  I think it’s interesting that McLaren had contacted Peter Cook about writing the Sex Pistols’ movie. Sexploitation director Russ Meyer was hired to direct a script written by American film critic Roger Ebert. Meyer lasted only four days before he abandoned the film. An ex-military man who normally ran a tight ship, he couldn’t deal with the Pistols’ lack of discipline and commitment. A documentary of sorts was admirably cobbled together by director Julien Temple and released in 1980. John Lydon did not participate in the newly filmed segments.

  I was a fan of the group’s music, initially from the UK singles, which we sold in the Rhino store. I loved Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols when the album was released in October 1977. I thought it was an exceptional album, now as well as then. It’s remarkable how a group of street urchins could deliver such a confident collection of performances. The music was simple, but powerful—Steve Jones’ grinding guitar, Glen Matlock’s throbbing bass, and Paul Cook’s solid drumming—providing the perfect pocket for Lydon’s raging vocals. (Jones also played bass on a number of tracks.) One has to give a lot of credit for the result to producer Chris Thomas. He created the band’s dynamic sound by having Jones quadruple his rhythm guitar while ensuring that Lydon’s vocals could be heard, and provided subtleties like ghostly background vocals on “Bodies.” The album did not sell well in the United States. It got only to 106 on Billboard’s LP chart, dropping off after twelve weeks. But it sold steadily though the years, and by the late-eighties had totaled over a million.

  In the early days of Rhino, to enhance the appeal of one of our new bands compilations—1978’s Saturday Night Pogo—I produced a cover of the Sex Pistols’ “Belsen Was a Gas.” The group hadn’t released their version. I learned the song from a tape a friend had of the group’s Winterland concert from earlier in the year. I think on the strength of my approximating Lydon’s scabrous vocals, months following the death of Sid Vicious, Rory Johnston asked me if I would audition to be the group’s new bass player. I didn’t play bass, but neither had Sid. I thought about it only for a few seconds, and declined. The music was too angry, the scene too negative, and I couldn’t relate to the fashion.

  I loved Lydon’s book, though. His memory was intact and he had a cynical sense of humor and an entertaining way of telling his story. Lydon’s cowriters complemented his reminiscences with those of others on the scene, including his ex-bandmates.

  John was born into an Irish family and survived a tough childhood. His family had an odd bathing regimen: “I used to get scrubbed with Dettol, a toilet cleaner solvent we also used for the sinks to kill off the bugs.” When he was seven, he spent a year in the hospital battling spinal meningitis, frequently in a comatose state. When cured, he couldn’t recognize his parents when they came to take him home. He attended an Irish Catholic school “with wicked and violent nuns.” He described himself as a “shy, nervous kid.”

  His mother was often sick and he was responsible for getting his brothers dressed for school. This later led him to feel comfortable working with troubled kids. He described his mother as “a thinker,” and he was, too. He loved reading and treasured Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the writings of Oscar Wilde. His favorite musical acts were Alice Cooper, Hawkwind, and T. Rex. Seeing the gangster Kray Brothers on TV also made an impression: “They looked so viciously sharp, the world’s best dressers… That’s how I like my suits to be worn—with a sense of vicious purpose.”

  John was a denizen of the King’s Road. He was known as the kid with dyed-green hair who wore a homemade “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt and second-hand clothes bound with safety pins to keep them from disintegrating. He liked chaos. There was also a sensitive side to him.

  Malcolm McLaren was looking for something different to invigorate the rock band he managed. John hadn’t sung in a group before, hadn’t seriously thought about it, but he did make up lyrics, “ludicrous songs about people killing each other with broken light bulbs.” And John had ambition: “I always wanted to be brilliant, excellent, loved and adored right from the start.” He flailed about during his audition, which consisted of singing along to Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” as it blasted from the jukebox in McLaren’s shop.

  In August 1975 when John auditioned, Britain’s unemployment was the highest it had been in thirty years. John found London a depressing place, “completely run-down, with trash on the streets.” He was angry at Britain’s still-influential class system, which denied opportunities in education and employment to members of the working class. He also saw himself as “a person who respected the right of others, and always stood up for the disenfranchised.”

  Steve Jones renamed Lydon “Johnny Rotten” because of his poor dental hygiene. His teeth were green. Lydon loved Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of Richard III—“so utterly vile, it was great”–and revealed that he based his Johnny Rotten character on Olivier’s mannerisms in the 1955 film: “nasty, evil, conniving, selfish.” With the Sex Pistols’ aggressive music, their ripped-up clothes, overall surly manner, and Lydon singing that he’s the “Antichrist” in “Anarchy in the UK,” one would have expected the group to be violent thugs. But that wasn’t the case. As Lydon said in Rotten, “The only violence about the Sex Pistols was the anger. We were not violent people.”

  Although Glen Matlock was a good bass player and songwriter—he’s credited with coming up with the music for “Anarchy in the UK” and “Pretty Vacant”—his personality and fondness for The Beatles infuriated Lydon, so as of February 1977, he was out. As the newcomer, John felt that he needed somebody on his side, so the group agreed to his suggestion of Sid Vicious. Sid had an authentic punk image, but he had never played bass before. He had also been involved in incidences of violence. A misguided glass thrown at The Damned during a performance at the 100 Club, shattered, with fragments flying into a girl’s eye, had been attributed to him. Sid was incarcerated for that. At a Pistols’ performance also at the 100 Club, he assaulted music journalist Nick Kent with a bike chain.

  The group’s offensive “God Save the Queen,” released to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in June 1977, alienated the group further from British society. As there were few venues that would book them, Malcolm set up a six-date tour of the American South with a concluding concert at Winterland in San Francisco.

  With his newfound fame, Sid acquired a new girlfriend, American Nancy Spungen, who introduced him to heroin and initiated his downward spiral. John, concerned for Sid, elected to accompany him and the road crew on the tour bus to keep him away from the drug. As Malcolm, Steve, and Paul were flying to the tour locations, this served to alienate John further from the others. When they got to the final date in San Francisco, John and Sid were considered persona non gratae. John was abandoned in San Francisco without a plane ticket, and had to borrow money to fly back to London. Sid scored, overdosed, and then overdosed again on the plane to New York. (Sid died from an overdose on February 2, 1979.)

  Although the Sex Pistols elevated awareness of social problems and expressed the frustration of the working class, their primary impact was initiating England’s punk rock movement. Give them credit also for later inspiring the punk rock trend in the US, and even later, the grunge sound. Politically they accomplished little. The Conservative government was elected in 1979. A criticism of the American punk groups that followed—none of which was considered a commercial success—was that they were more motivated by the musical trend and the fashion rather than a need to express social discontent.

  Interestingly, the gang of punks John hung around with—aside from Sid Vicious whose real name was John Beverley—did well as respo
nsible adults: two teachers, an accountant, and a band leader. And John, who once professed an attraction to chaos and anarchy, expressed a philosophy of passive resistance in the wisdom of middle age, stating, “Gandhi is my life’s inspiration.” The Sex Pistols were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. In a typical anti-establishment gesture, none of the members attended the induction ceremony.

  A meeting was set up in the dining room at Shutters on the Beach hotel in Santa Monica: John Lydon, Eric Gardner, Stephen Nemeth, my brother-in-law and head of production for Rhino Films, and me. Lydon, shall we say, had filled out from his former undernourished youth. A waitress came over, telling us what a fan of the group she was, not sure who other than John might have been in the Sex Pistols as she looked us over.

  During that meeting, and a subsequent lunch, John came across as congenial, goofy. He smiled and gyrated throughout the meal and proved to be a good conversationalist. He cleared his throat of phlegm, and we both discovered that we were allergic to milk (which is different from lactose intolerance). He explained that’s how punk fans spitting on their favorite groups started. As he sang, phlegm emerged from his throat and he spat onto the stage. The fans, not understanding his discomfort, imitated the action and the trend developed.

  I felt that we needed an English writer, someone familiar with the punk rock scene, the social order, and the colloquialisms. We were contacted by Jeremy Drysdale, who read about our project in the industry trades. He left school at sixteen and got work in advertising, rising to cocreative director of the Visage Company. He worked hard on his writing samples and we told him to fly to Los Angeles—at his own expense—for a lunch meeting at Shutters On the Beach on April 2, 1999. It was the four of us, as before, with Jeremy, who made a favorable impression. He learned later that we were apprehensive that he might be an alcoholic (more on that soon) because he drank four bottles of beer. I was concerned, and it wasn’t just because I paid for lunch. The next day Jeremy came down with the flu. For the next three days Stephen left cartons of hot soup outside his hotel room door.

  Given our low budget, we considered him the perfect person for the job, even though he’d never written a screenplay before. We paid Jeremy $25,000 for the screenplay. Lydon’s option fee and other expenses amounted to an additional $15,000. Jeremy went back to England, read John’s book, made notes, and returned to Los Angeles, this time at our expense, for a story meeting with John. On January 20, 2000, Jeremy took a cab to John’s Venice Beach pad—which had once been owned by movie star Mae West—arriving at 11:00 a.m. He pounded on the door, but it took a long time before a grumpy and hung over Lydon answered, addressing Jeremy as “Are you the fucking writer?” Jeremy was asked to sit in the lounge—which was littered with empty bottles—while Lydon “woke up,” which included taking a shower.

  Upon his return, John was responsive to Jeremy’s questions. Jeremy: “I found him to be spiky, intelligent, well-read and quick-witted, and I quite liked him, although he seemed to have a massive chip on his shoulder about the way he had been treated.” The two drank beer throughout the session—no food was consumed—and Jeremy had to keep up or John would hurl abuse at him. They worked for eight hours, splitting thirty-six beers.

  The next day, Jeremy let it slip that he had a (small) per diem of which John wanted to take advantage by dining at a fancy Marina del Rey restaurant. Unfortunately John was in obnoxious Rotten mode and alienated the servers, none of whom seemed to know who he was. They worked for only four-and-a-half hours because John was “very hung over.”

  One of the problems with the book was that it lacked a narrative flow. John would spray his opinions like a garden hose on high. Interview passages from others on the scene would intrude on John’s first-person voice. Had Jeremy been experienced, he might have bridged the book’s shortcomings in his first draft.

  To John’s credit, he was a stickler for accuracy. Most of his comments reflected that concern. In order to make a book or other account workable in a feature film format, liberties have to be taken with the facts. Sometimes numerous characters have to be combined into fewer ones. The same with locations. Time can be an issue, the expanse of years, but in this case the Sex Pistols’ duration—a little over two years—was workable. As our projected movie was conceived to accommodate a lower budget— speculatively eight million dollars—the writer has to be aware of the number of locations and extras, among other considerations. As John was also new to scriptwriting, he was bothered when events deviated from how they were conveyed in his book. Sometimes Jeremy had difficulty capturing the voice of a character. John could have helped more here.

  Stephen, Eric and I had script notes. John’s were the most colorful of all, rendered in a histrionic, near-Ralph Steadman style. I doubt whether anybody else in the movie-making process had experienced comments such as the following: “Doh! Boring! Silly Fuck Off Talk. Middle Class Twat Talk. It reads silly, like a debutante’s hissy fit.” Sometimes his comments were more pointed: “Either be accurate or deliberately comedic.” Jeremy’s second draft rectified most of the concerns.

  I liked what Guy Ritchie did with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and thought he would be the perfect director for our film, but he turned it down. Eric suggested Penelope Spheeris because she had directed the Decline of Western Civilization series of documentaries, one of which profiled the Los Angeles punk community in 1980. She also showed her comedic sense with Wayne’s World and The Beverly Hillbillies. John met her and liked her. Stephen had Jeremy fly out to meet her and discuss the script. Spheeris, who had written only a fraction of the films she had directed, kept kvetching to Jeremy that she “wrote her own stuff and didn’t see why they needed an outside writer.”

  A number of weeks later, Stephen received a call from John wondering if his character could be played by “a woman, a black child, and an old guy?” It was a bad idea in 2000, and no less in 2007 when six different characters—including a black child—played Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. I guess John was ahead of his time.

  I was surprised that the project fell apart. I thought John didn’t renew the option because he thought he and Penelope could make the movie without us. Or maybe he had now fallen out with Eric Gardner. If he didn’t renew with us, he wouldn’t have to cut Eric in as a producer. Stephen merely thought that he changed his mind and didn’t want to make the film. As of this writing, no movie has been made from Lydon’s book.

  I had been looking forward to the production. The shortened title of “Rotten” intrigued me. There had never been a feature film with that title. If the movie turned out less than stellar, it would be too easy for dismissive reviewers to say that the movie lived up to its name. It seemed like a very John Lydon thing to do.

  My Yardley Girl

  She may not have been tall, fashionable, worn much makeup or dressed in mini-skirts, like the models in the cosmetic ads, but she was my Yardley girl, which is to say she looked English: pale skin, crystal blue eyes, and straight blond hair. She even had an English name, Susan Sherbourne. She was a junior, majoring in anthropology. I was a sophomore. I sidled up to her one day in our psychology lecture hall.

  She was the first girl I wanted to have a serious relationship with. It was April 1970, the beginning of the spring quarter at UCLA. I was shy, and didn’t date much. I had no mentors, no guidance from an older brother or sister, and no help from my middle-aged parents.

  Susan was from Sebastopol, a small town fifty miles north of San Francisco. She was smart and reserved. I asked if she knew its most famous resident, Charles Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip. She said she didn’t. I gave no thought to how a small town girl related to a large city like Los Angeles.

  Our first date wasn’t the best. When I picked her up at her apartment in a terraced building on Landfair Avenue, she made it clear that she had a boyfriend who was in the armed services. It didn’t deter me. After all, I reasoned, “He isn’t here,
is he?” Because I felt strongly aligned with the rock culture, being in the armed forces seemed passé, as did belonging to a sorority or fraternity. At the very least you went to college to get a student deferment, especially with the Vietnam War raging. Maybe he wasn’t that smart, or had elected not to go to college. Maybe joining the military was part of a small town’s culture.

  She also said that she had a roommate, who wasn’t there when I picked her up. That implied we couldn’t go back there to make out, and I wasn’t going to take her to the small home I shared with my parents, ten miles away. She also had a puppy, which I thought was odd. How do you care for a dog as a student in an apartment, with no backyard or grassy area?

  Our first stop was the Pizza Palace in Westwood Village for dinner. I thought a friend from high school was performing that evening with his jug band. Either I was mistaken, or they weren’t scheduled until much later. I ate pizza, but Susan wasn’t hungry, which threw me off. We then took in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned at the Granada Theater on Sunset Boulevard. Sitting through a two-and-a-half-hour movie about Nazism and decadence wasn’t the best choice to engender feelings of tenderness on a first date.

  It was Saturday, April 25. I’d just come from the Holiday Inn in Beverly Hills, where I’d interviewed the members of Argent, a new British quartet that evolved out of The Zombies, one of my favorite bands. I was in Powell Library, making notes for my article for the UCLA Daily Bruin. Nearby on campus the yearly Mardi Gras fundraiser was happening. I wondered where Susan was, and wished I were there with her.