Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [179]
Meanwhile the staff in there treated them with a mixture of contempt, condescension, and bored patience. There were all kinds of little Catch-22s: I took the person I’d gone there to see a bunch of jazz records, really nice stuff that wouldn’t freak anybody out, albums by Bill Evans and Duke Ellington and like that, but she wasn’t allowed to play them at an audible volume in the day room because they supposedly would disturb the other patients, and she wasn’t allowed to have headphones because that was deemed “antisocial.” There were all kinds of pointless little rules, and if you rebelled against them at all that was a strike against you and guarantee of more time inside, and if you obeyed straight down the line they’d tell you your attitude was “too positive,” that you must be faking.
One guy in there used to play with Hank Williams. He was a poor old broken down alcoholic hillbilly with eight kids he could barely manage to feed and clothe and a 300-pound wife, and he’d had terrible luck with jobs to the point that all of them were going hungry half the time, so one day he just sat down and tried to kill himself. Possibly a perfectly logical and defensible reaction, under the circumstances. Cowardly, one supposes, but who is to say that there is not a point beyond which life becomes so awful it's just not worth the trouble anymore? No one. No one but the people who locked him in this place. Well, I looked at the guy and thought, “You know, people like Rockefeller just come right out of his hide.” And countless others like him.
Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren's slimy movie which we’re all gonna go see anyway and the careers of Steve Jones and Paul Cook though they probably weren’t aware of it and all the photographers who were only too happy to cop hot pix of Sid showing off his latest wound and winking and all the hype in rockmags down to articles like the one I wrote on the Pistols in NME and perhaps even what you are reading right now came out of Sid Vicious’ hide. I guess it could be said that under the circumstances he made the same existential choice as that old hillbilly. I’m sure he was as suckered all down the line. But there are plenty of people in the world who have been beaten and whipped and raped and tortured and defiled and given zero chance to make it out of the pit, who have had a dose of all that every bit as heavy as Sid's if not worse, and some of them, a lot of them, are trying to do something about it besides crumple. It's like that scene in Fat City, where Stacy Keach goes to see his ex-girlfriend who's now living with a working-class black guy in some shitty tenement room. She's in there drinking and crying and the black guy says to Keach, “Look man, don’t come ‘roun no more, she's a juicehead and it wigs her out.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “You know, she's had a bad life and all that shit.”
Which is what I think about Sid Vicious and the whole Sex Pistols media-scam when you get right down to it: alienation, societal disintegration, anomie, and all that shit. You’ve heard it all before and you’re gonna hear it all again from some other bunch of assholes, but if you stand there and keep listening after the first few familiar refrains you’re not gonna find me standing next to you. Because I’ve had it. I’m not saying I’m any better. Directly the opposite, in fact—inasmuch as I had even as minuscule a part in helping shape the Sex Pistols saga as I did. I must accept some portion of the complicity in Sid's death and possibly Nancy's as well. And under such circumstances I feel the least I can do is try to stay aware enough to see something coming like