Lipstick Traces (6 page)

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 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 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.

Looking back, it remains possible to take this version of the rock ’n’ roll story for the truth, as the whole story—not because the music punk discredited was worthless, but because what little remains of the Slits’ music allows you to imagine that the sound they made communicated more completely and more mysteriously than the most carefully crafted work of anyone who came before or after. “A Boring Life,” heard as it was made in 1977 or heard a decade later, rewrites the history of rock ’n’ roll.

It’s said that in the 1950s fifteen thousand black vocal groups made records. I don’t know if this is true; when I first came across the figure, my eyes bugged out. Punk made it credible.

Only the smallest fraction of those groups would have been heard by the public, though all would have been bent on the public—on fame and money, and on the sensation that if only in the fantasy utopia of a three-minute record, this was the momentary empowerment of people who never before had reason to think anyone might be interested in what they sounded like, or what they had to say. It was a surge of new voices unprecedented in the history of popular culture, and along with other forms of early rock ’n’ roll—the sophisticated rhythm and blues of Ray Charles and Clyde McPhatter’s Drifters, the rockabilly of Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, the mad irruptions of Little Richard, the savvy teen anthems of
Chuck Berry, the surprises of noisemakers like the Monotones—this event marked the transformation of popular music all over the world. “I must speak to a boy named Elvis Presley,” said the headmistress of a London comprehensive academy in 1956, “because he has carved his name on every desk in the school.”

The next major event in rock ’n’ roll—the emergence of the Beatles in Liverpool and London between 1962 and 1963, powered by the black rock of James Brown, Motown in Detroit, and Stax in Memphis—produced no such cacophony. Countless new bands recorded, but once revitalized the music was soon dominant and entrenched across the West; linked to the social revolt of American blacks, then to the international rebellion of white youth, rock ’n’ roll grew self-important. Hailed as art, it grew self-conscious. The spirit that brought the sound to the attention of the world in the first place—the eagerness to do absolutely anything to get heard that still leaps out of so many 1950s 45s, or for that matter out of so many third-rate 1964 Beatle imitations—was replaced by a cult of wisdom, responsibility, and virtuosity.

Bypassed the first time around by hundreds of tiny independent labels, from the mid-1960s the major record companies covered the major artists and built a center; idiosyncratic music, a concept that would have made no sense at all in 1956, soon sounded merely cranky. By 1967, a pop year organized around the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
rock ’n’ roll was governed by an ideology of affirmation, creativity, and novelty. Almost everything sounded hopeful, significant, and new, but in fact the music was imploding. Almost everything was aimed at the center, and the spinning center threw off whatever was not. End-of-the-decade warnings—the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” the Rolling Stones’
Let It Bleed,
Bob Dylan’s
John Wesley Harding,
the Velvet Underground’s
White Light/White Heat,
John Lennon’s
Plastic Ono Band,
Sly and the Family Stone’s
There’s a riot
goin’ on,
the
post-Riot
wave of disillusioned, politicized black pop—were ignored even by those who made them. The music business moved toward rationalization; the process was almost complete by 1975, when leisure-service conglomerates had concentrated record sales in the hands of corporations hardly more numerous than American auto manufacturers. “Entertainment isn’t a suspension of belief,” Michael Ventura wrote in 1985, “but a suspension of values. It may even be said that this is the
meaning
of ‘entertainment’ as it is practiced among us: the relief of suspending values with which we are tired of living and frightened of living without . . . To go from a job you don’t like to watching a screen on which others live more intensely than you . . . this is American life, by and large”; Ventura could as easily have said modern life. In 1977, in its annual report, Warner Communications, then the leading leisure-service corporation, had already faced the problem:

Entertainment has become a necessity. The statement seems unsupportable: can entertainment be necessary in the sense that food, clothing and shelter are necessary? . . . the problem in the above statement is not with the word “necessary,” but with the word “entertainment.” As recently as twenty years ago, “entertainment”—diversion, amusement—would have served adequately to describe the vast majority of movies, television, radio, popular print and recorded sound. But today the word seems inadequate, outdistanced by events. The role of these media is now far more various and crucial than the pleasurable passing of time. In their mechanical operations . . . the media [have remained] essentially the same. Yet in their personal and social usefulness, they are utterly changed . . . The pace of world industrialization that has steadily accelerated since the 19th century is widely believed to have effected a severe challenge to individual identity: an increasingly efficient and standardized world jeopardizes personal freedom, importance and opportunity, with a consequent sensation of disenfranchisement of self.