Good Riddance To Bad Trash

Malcom McLaren

Sometime in the gutter of 1977, or was it 1976?, in a suburban basement, my friends and I watched Weekend, the NBC once-monthly news show, hosted by Lloyd Dobyns, which aired in the Saturday Night Live timeslot. We were extremely excited because the subject of that night’s show was The Sex Pistols. We (I say we because there were a bunch of us) had bought the singles Anarchy in the UK and God Save the Queen in the same White Plains music store where we bought The Modern Lovers and Roxy Music records, the latter because of the covers, and the former because it was produced by John Cale. The Sex Pistols were the coolest, most outrageous manifestation of punk, and we were eager to see them hit television for the first time. They were breaking out of the crust of the underground. The report was censorious. They vomited in airports, they created scandal, they milked record companies for money. The Sex Pistols had gotten rich without ever releasing an album. Their singles were number one hits even though they were banned from airplay. Their manager, Malcom McLaren, had managed to do for rock music what Andy Warhol had done for his own art but failed to do for The Velvet Underground: he had made rebellion profitable. Ripping off the system, spitting in its face, making money, was the ultimate subversion. We can fuck you and still you will pay.

For most people The Sex Pistols and The Clash are the faces of early punk. The movement started in London and moved to New York. This is not how it happened. Punk didn’t start anywhere. It was a continuation of, and significant mutation of, the counterculture of the 1950’s and ‘60’s. The search for the roots of punk will take you far and wide. The best book I know about the subject is Legs McNeil’s brilliant oral history, Please Kill Me. The primordial soup aside, it was the New York scene centered on Max’s Kansas City that gave birth to punk, and McLaren was there, as manager of The New York Dolls. For McLaren, rock music was always a package of fashion, music and outrageous theatre, the purpose of which was both to earn infamy (and thus dollars) and upset ‘the system’. McLaren’s roots were in the sixties, the anarchism of Paris 1968, of Situationalist art and conceptual art. We knew about those things in 1977, but the theory wasn’t nearly as important as the practise, fused as they were supposed to be.

There were differences between the two cities, London and New York. Punk in New York was militantly apolitical, a reaction the political rectitude of the counter culture of the 70’s. We think of the culture wars as being a phenomenon of the 80’s and 90’s, but that is only because those decades saw the institutionalization of the 60’s counter culture. In the 70’s it was still on the street, in guerilla theatres, in groups of friends. There were no feminazis, just women you knew or who knew someone you knew telling you that all heterosexual intercourse was rape, and that Roxy Music and The Rolling Stones were evil, because their album covers and lyrics were racist and/or misogynistic. In England, where the economy was even worse than in New York, the political stakes were higher. Punk music in England would be, could be, communist or fascist or anarchist in a way it never was in NY, and violence there was palpable. New York punk was about clothes and verbal assaults on authority. It was also about self-destructive drug binges. We didn’t vomit after a night on the piss (well, actually, we did) so much as shoot heroin, snort speed and cocaine, and come down on Quaaludes. Sid Vicious came to NY to die.

There would have been The Sex Pistols and punk rock without Malcom McLaren. John Lydon would have found his way to a mike one way or another. But the impresario is the midwife of such things. Dylan may have been largely sui generis, but his road is littered with fellow musicians who were fellow travelers, he had Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and Chicago blues, and he had John Hammond and Tom Wilson.

When Sid Vicious died Roger Gimsby, the Eyewitness News anchor, famously remarked to Bill Beutel, “Good riddance to bad trash.” What he didn’t understand was that The Sex Pistols and Malcom McLaren had done what no one before had managed to do, turn the trash aesthetic into big business, with a music, ideology, aesthetic and clothing line that could be marketed at boutiques and, eventually, Walmart. Well, maybe not Walmart, but Bloomingdales, certainly. Today every middle class woman in her thirties has a tattoo, and body piercing is as common Big Macs. According to McLaren’s Wikipedia article his grandmother told him, “To be bad is good… to be good is simply boring”. My instinct tells me that McLaren said that, not his granny, which makes him the Oscar Wilde of our time. Good riddance to bad trash then is a high compliment indeed.