Lipstick Traces

by Greil Marcus

  So one heard when Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s; so one might have heard, anyway.

  IN 1975

  In 1975 a teenager who would be called Johnny Rotten turned himself into a living poster and paraded down London’s King’s Road to World’s End—the end of the street—with “I HATE” scrawled above the printed logo of a Pink Floyd t-shirt. He dyed what was left of his chopped-off hair green and made his way through the tourist crowds spitting at hippies, who tried to ignore him. One day he was pointed out to a businessman who was attempting to put together a band. The drummer remembered the teenager’s audition, which took place in front of a jukebox, the boy mouthing the words to Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen”: “We thought he’s got what we want. Bit of a lunatic, a front man. That’s what we was after: a front man who had definite ideas about what he wanted to do and he’d definitely got them. And we knew straight away. Even though he couldn’t sing. We wasn’t particularly interested in that because we were still learning to play at the time.”

  It may be that in the mind of their self-celebrated Svengali, King’s Road boutique owner Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were never meant to be more than a nine-month wonder, a cheap vehicle for fast money, a few laughs, a touch of the old épater la bourgeoisie. He had recruited them out of his store, found them a place to rehearse, given them a ridiculously offensive name, preached to them about the emptiness of pop music and the possibilities of ugliness and confrontation, told them they had as good a chance as anyone to make a noise, told them they had the right. If all else failed they could be a living poster for his shop, which always needed a new poster: before settling on Seditionaries in 1977, McLaren called his store Let It Rock in 1971, when it sold Teddy Boy clothes and old 45s; Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die in 1973, when it sold biker clothes and youth-gang accessories; Sex in 1974, when it sold bondage gear, nonmarital aids, and “God Save Myra Hindley” t-shirts commemorating the woman who along with Ian Brady had in 1963 and 1964 committed the Moors Murders—child murders, which Hindley and Brady recorded on tape as an art statement. It may also be that in the mind of their chief theorist and propagandist, 1960s art student and had-been, would-be anarchist provacateur Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were meant to set the country on its ear, to recapture the power McLaren had first glimpsed in Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” (“I’d never seen anything like it,” he said once, recalling a fellow pupil singing the song at a grammar-school talent show. “I thought his head was going to come off”), to finally unite music and politics, to change the world. Thrilled by the May 1968 revolt in France, McLaren had helped foment solidarity demonstrations in London and later sold t-shirts decorated with May ’68 slogans—even if, in his shop, “I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES,” the slogan of the Enragés, the tiny cabal of students that began the uprising, mainly helped closeted businessmen work up the nerve to buy McLaren’s rubber suits. McLaren would sell anything: in late 1978, after ex–Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious was arrested for the murder of Nancy Spungen, his girlfriend, McLaren rushed out “I’M ALIVE—SHE’S DEAD—I’M YOURS” Sid Vicious t-shirts (to help raise money for Vicious’ defense, McLaren said). But not long before, he’d been carrying around copies of Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, the first English-language anthology of situationist writings, which he and Jamie Reid had helped publish in 1974.

  American version of Malcolm McLaren’s shop

  He tried to get people to read it. “It’s just a little more than a 20th century interpretation of Marxist essays on alienated labor,” said Peter Urban, manager of the Dils, a Los Angeles punk band “into class war” (their first single was “I Hate the Rich,” the principal result of which was a tune by the rival Vom, “I Hate the Dils”). “It’s a little of that,” said McLaren, “but it is very, very strong. The good thing about it was all those slogans you can take up without being party to a movement. Being in a movement often stifles creative thinking and certainly, from the point of view of a young kid, the ability to announce yourself . . . That’s the greatest thing, that it allows you to do that. There is a certain aggression and arrogance in there that’s exciting . . .” Old hat, said Urban, ignoring the interesting conclusions McLaren was drawing, and ignoring too the sticker on the cover of the book, which carried a quote from a review by John Berger: “one of the most lucid and pure political formulations of the ’60s.” “Lost Prophets,” Berger’s review was titled; had the rest of it been somehow squeezed onto the sticker, it could have taken the conversation even farther afield, or closer to home.

  The conversation was appearing in the May 1978 issue of Slash, an L.A. punk magazine; the number, a note on the contents page read, was “dedicated to the handful of enragés (French for maniacs, fanatics, crazies) who, ten years ago, tried to change life.” The dedication was illustrated with “une jeunesse que l’avenir inquiète trop souvent” (a youth disturbed too often by the future), a once-famous poster by the May ’68 art-student collective Atelier populaire: it showed a young woman with her head covered in surgical gauze and a safety pin jamming her lips closed. After ten years, with May ’68 all but forgotten in the United States, this was true archaeology. It was an odd return to strange times, when apparently trivial disruptions on a university campus in the Paris suburbs had begun a chain reaction of refusal—when first students, then factory workers, then clerks, professors, nurses, doctors, athletes, bus drivers, and artists refused work, took to the streets, threw up barricades, and fought off the police, or turned back upon their workplaces, occupied them, fought off their unions, and transformed their workplaces into laboratories of debate and critique, when the walls of Paris bled with unusual slogans—when ten million people brought a signal version of modern society to a standstill. “In the confusion and tumult of the May revolt,” Bernard E. Brown wrote in Protest in Paris, his unique academic account of May ’68, “the slogans and shouts of the students were considered expressions of mass spontaneity and individual ingenuity. Only afterward was it evident that these slogans”—

  REVOLUTION CEASES TO BE THE MOMENT IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BE SACRIFICED FOR IT IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS DOWN WITH THE ABSTRACT, LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL AFTER GOD, ART IS DEAD DOWN WITH A WORLD WHERE THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WON’T DIE OF STARVATION HAS BEEN PURCHASED WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WILL DIE OF BOREDOM CLUB MED, A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE’S MISERY DON’T CHANGE EMPLOYERS, CHANGE THE EMPLOYMENT OF LIFE NEVER WORK CHANCE MUST BE SYSTEMATICALLY EXPLORED RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU BE CRUEL THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME, INDULGE UNTRAMMELED DESIRE PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHSUNDER THE PAVING STONES, THE BEACH!

  —“were fragments of a consistent and seductive ideology that had virtually all appeared in situationist tracts and publications . . . Mainly through their agency there welled up in the May Revolt an immense force of protest against the modern world and all its works, blending passion, mystery, and the primeval.” “This explosion,” said President Charles de Gaulle in the June speech with which he recaptured power, “was provoked by a few groups in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West—groups, moreover, which do not know what they would put in its place, but which delight in negation.” “The Beginning of an Epoch,” proclaimed the lead article in the twelfth and last number of the journal Internationale situationniste in 1969. “The death rattle of the historical irrelevants,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski.

  In 1978, when Brzezinski was national security adviser to the president of the United States and “The Beginning of an Epoch” was, in English, a badly translated, smudgy pamphlet long out of print, Slash readers were expected to recall the unscheduled holiday of Ma
y ’68 approximately as dimly as they might recall Gary “U.S.” Bonds’s small 1965 hit “Seven Day Weekend.” The reader was to look casually at the blind reference of the Atelier populaire poster, and then to superimpose the best-known Sex Pistols graphic, Jamie Reid’s photo-collage for “God Save the Queen,” which featured H.R.H. Elizabeth II with a safety pin through her lips; out of the ether of unmade history, connections were supposed to tumble like counters in a slot machine. “The revolutionary hopes of the 1960s, which culminated in 1968,” John Berger wrote in 1975,

  are now blocked or abandoned. One day they will break out again, transformed, and be lived again with different results. I mean only that; I am not prophesying the difference. When that happens, the Situationist programme (or anti-programme) will probably be recognized as one of the most lucid and pure political formulations of that earlier, historic decade, reflecting, in an extreme way, its desperate force and privileged weakness.

  As manager of the Dils, Peter Urban would not have been interested in such sentimental meanderings. There was a world to win, he told McLaren, tactics to be formulated, ideology to be fixed, and anyway . . . McLaren cut him off. “So, Peter, how come you’re managing a band with a name like a pickle? Or a dildo, what’s the controversy there?”

  The Sex Pistols had sparked the Dils; when I saw them play in 1979, they were a helpless imitation, nothing more. By the time Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death, the Sex Pistols had sparked new bands all over the world, and more of them than anyone could count were doing things no one in rock ’n’ roll had done before. But as an above-ground group—a commercial possibility, an international scandal—the Sex Pistols lasted little longer than nine months: they saw the release of their first record on 4 November 1976, and ceased to exist as much more than an asset in a lawsuit on 14 January 1978, when, immediately following the last show of their single American tour, Johnny Rotten quit the band, claiming that McLaren, in his lust for fame and money, had betrayed everything the Sex Pistols ever stood for. And what was that? For guitarist Steve Jones, an illiterate petty criminal, and drummer Paul Cook, a sometime electrician’s helper, it was girls and good times. For original bassist Glen Matlock, former art student and Sex shop clerk, it was pop music. For Sid Vicious, the junkie who replaced him, it was pop stardom. As for Johnny Rotten, he would say many different things (including, after the fall: “Steve can go off and become Peter Frampton”—he didn’t; “Sid can go off and kill himself”—he did; “Paul can go back to being an electrician”—he may still), and, one suspected, had yet to say what he meant.

  Atelier populaire poster, May 1968

  Sex Pistols flyer by Jamie Reid, 1977

  THE SEX PISTOLS

  The Sex Pistols called their final performance the worst of their career, but to the five thousand people packed into San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on 14 January 1978, that performance was as close to Judgment Day as a staged event can be—and not because many had seen the leaflets evangelists were distributing outside: “There’s a Johnny Rotten in each of us, and he doesn’t need to be liberated—he needs to be crucified!”

  That would have been old news to Johnny Rotten; one of his publicity photos showed him nailed to a cross. In London the subculture generated by the Sex Pistols and their first followers had already been pronounced dead by those whose business it is to make such pronouncements: a once-secret society diffused by headlines and tourism. Or was it that, in the beginning, punk was indeed a sort of secret society, dedicated not to the guarding of a secret but to its pursuit, a society based on a blind conviction that there was a secret to be found? Was it that once the secret was seemingly discovered, once punk became an ideology of protest and self-expression—once people knew what to expect, once they understood just what they would get when they paid their money, or what they would do to earn it—the story was ready for its footnotes?

  In the United States, primitive enclaves had formed across the country (nightclubs, fanzines, record stores, a half-dozen high school students here, a trio of artists there, a girl locked in her room staring at her new haircut in the mirror)—though perhaps less in response to the thrill of hearing $10 import copies of the banned “Anarchy” single than to newspaper and TV features about London teenagers mutilating their faces with common household objects. Real discoveries were taking place, out of nothing (“The original scene,” said a founder of the Los Angeles punk milieu, “was made of people who were taking chances and operating on obscure fragments of information”); for some, those discoveries, a new way of walking and a new way of talking, would dramatize the contradictions of everyday existence for years to come, would keep life more interesting than it would have otherwise been.

  “Now it’s time for audience participation,” Joe Strummer of the Clash said from the stage in late 1976. “I want you all to tell me what exactly you’re doing here.” As they waited for the Sex Pistols to take the stage at Winterland, probably a lot of people wondered what they were doing there—wondered why their expectations were so confused, and so fierce. In all the stories coded in that moment, at least one was simply musical; compared to everything the music secretly contained, that story was almost silent, but I will tell that story first.

  HAVE YOU

  “Have you seen the Sex Pistols?” Joe Strummer whispered to Graham Parker one night in early 1976—it was as if he were passing on a rumor so unlikely he was afraid to raise his voice. They were part of the London “pub rock” scene (Parker chasing echoes of Wilson Pickett and the Temptations, Strummer looking for Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent): one more abortive attempt to bring the bloated music of the 1970s back to basics. “No,” said Parker. “The Sex Pistols?” “Whole new thing, man,” said Strummer. “Whole new thing.”

  Straight away, Strummer quit his rock revival band to form the Clash: “Yesterday I thought I was a crud,” he would later say he said to friends who asked him why. “Then I saw the Sex Pistols, and I became a king.” It’s a good story, too good to be true, but it was true in the music, and never more so than in the music of the Slits. They were the first all-female punk band: four teenagers who hadn’t the slightest idea of how to do anything but climb onto a stage and shout. They said “Fuck you”; it meant “Why not.” It was the sound, Jon Savage wrote long after the fact, of people discovering their own power.

  ALL THE SLITS

  All the Slits really left behind is an object screaming with muteness: a nameless lp in a blank bootleg sleeve. I like to think the disc is called “Once upon a time in a living room,” but there’s no way to be sure; with phrases scrawled at random across the label in lieu of titles, you have to decide the names of the songs from the choices offered. “A Boring Life,” then: once the music starts I’ve never tried to understand a word.

  One Slit giggles; a second asks, “You ready?,” another answers “Ready?” as if she never could be, then the fourth returns the giggle like Alice diving down the rabbit hole: “Ah, ah, OH NOOOOO—” It’s the last sound you hear at the crest of a roller coaster, and in the dead pause that follows you have time to remember Elvis in Sam Phillips’ Sun studios in 1955, setting up “Milkcow Blues Boogie” with a little rehearsed dialogue (“Hold it, fellas! That don’t move me! Let’s get real, real gone for a change!”), except that the Slits’ dialogue is too trivial to have been rehearsed, let alone lead anywhere, and then the silence is collapsed by an unyielding noise. This compressed drama—embarrassment to anticipation, hesitation to panic, silence to sound—is what punk was all about.

  The Slits were Ari Up, lead singer; Palmolive, drums; Viv Albertine, guitar; Tessa, bass. The Rolling Stone Rock Almanac entry for 11 March 1977: “The Slits make their stage debut, opening for the Clash at the Roxy in London . . . [They] will have to bear the double curse of their sex and their style, which takes the concept of enlightened amateurism to an extreme . . . The Slits will respond to charges of incompetence by inviting members of the audience on stage to play while the four women take to the floor
to dance.” A line from an old Jamaican 45 comes to mind—from Prince Buster’s “Barrister Pardon,” the finale to his Judge Dread trilogy, the tale of an avenger come from Ethiopia to rid the Kingston slums of its rude-boy hooligans. Across three singles he sentences teenage murderers to hundreds of years in prison, jails their lawyers when they have the temerity to appeal, reduces everyone in the courtroom to tears, then sets everyone free and highsteps down from the bench to lead the crowd in a cakewalk: “I am the judge, but I know how to dance.” With “A Boring Life,” the Slits judged every other version of rock ’n’ roll: “Milkcow Blues Boogie,” “Barrister Pardon,” the crummy official records they themselves would make after their moment had passed.

  Nothing could keep up with it. Shouting and shrieking, out of guitar flailings the group finds a beat, makes a rhythm, begins to shape it; the rhythm gets away and they chase it down, overtake it, and keep going. Squeaks, squeals, snarls, and whines—unmediated female noises never before heard as pop music—course through the air as the Slits march hand in hand through a storm they themselves have created. It’s a performance of joy and revenge, an armed playground chant; every musical chance is taken, and for these women playing the simplest chord was taking a chance: their amateurism was not enlightened.

  “No more rock ’n’ roll for you / No more rock ’n’ roll for me,” goes a drunken moan elsewhere on the record, echoing the Sex Pistols’ chorus for no-future—some unidentified man was singing, maybe a guy running the tape recorder, but it was the Slits’ affirmation that whatever they were doing, they wouldn’t call it rock ’n’ roll. This was music that refused its own name, which meant it also refused its history—from this moment, no one knew what rock ’n’ roll was, and so almost anything became possible, or impossible, as rock ’n’ roll: random noise was rock ’n’ roll, and the Beatles were not. Save for the buried productions of a few cult prophets—such American avatars as Captain Beefheart, mid-1960s garage bands like Count Five or the Shadows of Knight, the Velvet Underground and the Stooges of the late 1960s, the New York Dolls and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers of the early 1970s, and the reggae voice of gnostic exile—punk immediately discredited the music that preceded it; punk denied the legitimacy of anyone who’d ever had a hit, or played as if he knew how to play. Destroying one tradition, punk revealed a new one.