Sex Pistols
Live In The U.S.A. 1978
★★★
Universal
Long before he shot dead Lee Oswald, President Kennedy’s supposed assassin, nightclub owner Jack Ruby ran a cowboy joint in Dallas called the Longhorn Ballroom. His taste in music was impeccable: as well as Western Swing and country acts, he also booked Nat King Cole, Count Basie and Ruth Brown (this in ’50s Texas). Probably best for all parties, then, that he’d long expired before the Sex Pistols performed at the club on January 10, 1978, their junkie bassist Sid Vicious sporting the legend “Gimme A Fix” in magic-marker on his bare chest and goading audience members to fight him.
The Longhorn Ballroom gig, the fifth date of the Pistols’ messy – and, as it would transpire, terminal – two-week tour of America, is one of three concerts gathered in a new box set, Live In The U.S.A 1978. Many fans will already know the material from the numerous bootlegs that have circulated down the years; but while some of those featured edited or incomplete recordings, here we’re treated to pretty much the entire shows. Which, with the inclusion of, say, Steve Jones trying to tune up his guitar for a full minute, or Sid’s witless between-song showboating, makes these albums priceless verité documents of a band spiralling to their doom.
The Pistols’ US tour has passed into myth as violent, ugly, badly managed and perhaps even unnecessary in the first place. The dates, hastily arranged to begin in late December 1977, were demanded by Warners Bros, keen to get a return on their £250,000 (£2m today) advance for Never Mind The Bollocks and a stake in the group’s proposed feature film, then called Who Killed Bambi?. But the UK’s most notorious punk band proved just that: due to their criminal convictions, entry visas were issued – after much legal wrangling – only on the condition that Warners post a $1m surety against any felonious misdeeds. What could possibly go wrong?
By this time, just six fixtures were left on the original itinerary, in Southern “cowboy” towns like San Antonio, Dallas and Tulsa, chosen by the Pistols’ publicity-hungry manager Malcolm McLaren for maximum explosive effect. A final show would take place at San Francisco’s cavernous Winterland, a sop to Warner’s insistence on an industry-friendly location to conclude the tour.
The Pistols’ debut on American soil, at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta, is captured on the first disc of the box set. The previous evening, one of the heavy-set bikers employed to chaperone the group, the formidable D.W., had repeatedly smashed Vicious’s head against a restroom sink to demonstrate who was in charge. This at least deterred the bassist from scoring heroin and, perhaps consequently, Sid’s playing in Atlanta is surprisingly tight and even a little funky (dig those Eddie Cochran-style hammer-ons in God Save The Queen), belying the received wisdom he was hopeless as a musician.
If anything, it’s Jones who lets the side down, on New York and Bodies in particular, playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order. Perhaps equipment worries were to blame: his amp blows midway through Seventeen and there are serious tuning issues throughout. Rotten, meanwhile, is magnificently sardonic in the face of redneck hostiles in the crowd: “Oh, I’m so frightened,” he sneers and, later, “Aren’t we the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”
As the tour rolled on, McLaren’s vision of apocalyptic, headline-grabbing scenes soon came to pass, with the date at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio seeing a drunk Sid club an audience member with his bass and the band pelted with half-eaten hotdogs, bottles and offal. By the time Live In The U.S.A catches up with them again, at the Longhorn Ballroom, they play decently enough (the early Matlock-era numbers like No Feelings, Problems, Liar, et al generally fare best), and Belsen Was A Gas, the group’s only post-Bollocks composition, also gets an airing.
What’s worrying evident, however, is Vicious by now trying to upstage everyone else – to much eyeball-rolling from Rotten. Lech Kowalski’s footage of the Dallas show in 1980 punk doc D.O.A. fills in the detail; having had his lips burst by an airborne beer can, Sid thrusts his bloodied face towards a female fan, prompting Rotten to bitterly complain, “Look at that – a living circus.” It’s a moment where control and camaraderie is lost: Pistol publicly turning on Pistol.
The next gig, in Tulsa, was, according to road manager John Tiberi, “the only place I thought we’d get killed”; then, it was on to San Francisco and promoter Bill Graham’s flagship Winterland, where just 14 months earlier The Band had played their Last Waltz. In the run-up to the show, Rotten fell out with McLaren, Cook and Jones over plans to record in Rio with notorious train robber Ronnie Biggs. Sid, meanwhile, had escaped the clutches of D.W. and managed to jack up on smack. The gig itself – filmed by Warners and broadcast on KSAN radio (it was briefly available officially on CD and VHS in the mid-’90s) – was joyless, disjointed and flat. True, Jones and Cook were by now tight and locked in, but Sid’s stoned playing was appalling, and after a few songs the sound engineer appears to lower his bass to a subsonic rumble.
Alienated from his own band, Rotten seems suddenly to acquire greater perspicuity on the Pistols’ deteriorating situation. “Another song, another tuneless racket,” he grimaces after one number. The show ends with their customary encore of The Stooges’ No Fun, here dark, relentless, and by now almost comically self-descriptive. At its coda, Cook and Jones repeatedly refuse to curtail the song, clinging on desperately to its hypnotic riff as if possessed with foreknowledge that all would soon be lost. When it finally ends, Rotten utters his infamous last address as a Pistol until their dramatic reunion two decades later: “Ever had the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
And so ends Live In The U.S.A. 1978 and the original Pistols line-up, leaving an interesting question: with the balance of power in the group today resting with Cook and Jones thanks to their victory over Rotten in a 2021 High Court case, would this sonically poor set otherwise have been vetoed? Ultimately, it matters not: Live In The U.S.A. is what it is – a fascinating official bootleg of one of rock’s most extraordinary chapters, warts and even more warts.
Sex Pistols Live In The USA 1978 three disc boxset is out on Universal in April. Each of the three featured shows will be available on coloured vinyl on February 28 (Atlanta), March 28 (Dallas) and April 25 (San Fransisco) respectively.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
Disc 1: Atlanta, South East Music Hall, January 5th, 1978
God Save The Queen
I Wanna Be Me
Seventeen
New York
Bodies
Submission
Holidays In The Sun
EMI
No Feelings
Problems
Pretty Vacant
Anarchy In The UK
Disc 2: Dallas, Longhorns Ballroom, January 10th, 1978
Intro/Radio Ad
God Save The Queen
I Wanna Be Me
Seventeen
New York
EMI
Bodies
Belsen Was A Gas
Holidays In The Sun
No Feelings
Problems
Pretty Vacant
Anarchy In The UK
No Fun
Disc 3: San Francisco, Winterland Ballroom, January 14th, 1978
God Save The Queen
I Wanna Be Me
Seventeen
New York
EMI
Belsen Was A Gas
Bodies
Holidays In The Sun
Liar
No Feelings
Problems
Pretty Vacant
Anarchy in the UK
No Fun
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Main shot: Sex Pistols at Cain's Ballroom, Tulsa January 12, 1978. Credit: Bob Gruen.