Next month, the Sex Pistols will release the first of three live albums recorded on their first -and last - US tour. And while guitarist Steve Jones admits, with commendable honesty, that he'll “probably never listen to ‘em”, his own memories of the January '78 tour remain vivid.
The Pistols were originally scheduled to play eight shows in America at the close of 1977/beginning of 1978. But from the off, things went wrong.
Due to members of the group having criminal records, ranging from drug arrests to assaults on a police officer. the band were initially denied visas to enter the United States, and only managed to secure visas at the 11th hour when their label stumped up $1 million as a guarantee of their good behaviour. A Warners lawyer told The New York Times, "This is a group of youngsters who came up from slum areas and it sounds to me like a lot of small things involved with street kids growing up. Now that they're on the threshold of being somebody, we shouldn't deny them the right to really make it."
"Betting on the Sex Pistols to keep the peace at that time was like betting on a three-legged chihuahua to win the Grand National - not the best investment they would ever make," Jones wrote in one of the more amusing lines included in his autobiography Lonely Boy.
The delay in securing the visas meant that the first scheduled show on the tour, booked at the Leona Theatre in Pittsburgh on December 28, 1977, had to be cancelled, as did a proposed appearance on Saturday Night Live. And when the band rolled into Atlanta, Georgia for their opening gig at the Great South East Music Hall, their case was hardly helped by a local TV station gravely informing viewers that the English group would vomit and commit 'sex acts' with one another as part of their show. Perhaps understandably, the group would face hostile, and in some cases properly violent, audiences in every city they visited, on a tour Steve Jones recalls as "a fucking circus", and "no fun". Bassist Sid Vicious in particular was subjected to more than one assault during the run, not helped by his baiting the audience every night, and begging for heroin onstage.
"Most people came out of curiosity ‘cause of all the bad and good publicity that we were getting in the States," the guitarist recalls in a new interview with NME. "It was all the old ‘We bite the heads off of chickens!’ routine. So a lot of people come with their backs up and was fucking throwing so much crap at us, it was kind of scary. It was such a mess. By the end of that, I’m like: I’ve had enough of this."
The group's final US show took place at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on January 14. It ended, famously, with Johnny Rotten telling the audience "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
"We were awful," Jones wrote in Lonely Boy. "My guitars were all out of tune as I'd bought this fucking Firebird that was shit, and Sid was being a complete clown. Looking at it from the audience's point of view, maybe they thought, 'Wow, this is wild, this is crazy', but from my point of view we were just utterly fucked."
"After the Winterland, that’s when me and Cookie went to Brazil and did The Great Rock’n’roll Swindle, which I wanted to do to get away from John and Sid and all that," Jones admits to NME. "It was just too chaotic. In hindsight, we were young. I didn’t know what I was doing. I basically just wanted to run and get away from it."
Jones also tells NME that the band will return to the US this year.
"I’m excited," he says. "I know the dates, so I know it’s gonna be good…"
