Post by Fuggle on Oct 4, 2006 22:56:17 GMT -5
25 Up: Punk's Silver Jubilee
So Tough: The Boy Behind the Sid Vicious Myth
by Charlotte Robinson
PopMatters Music Critic
Sid Vicious
Photo credit: Bob Gruen
One evening as a friend and I were ordering coffee, the young barista behind the counter noticed my Sex Pistols T-shirt. "Oh, I'm in love with Sid Vicious", she confided. "Have you ever read the book 12 Days on the Road? I fell in love with him after reading that book". As soon as I was away from the counter, I explained to my companion just how disturbing the young woman's admission was. Among the many unflattering anecdotes about the Sex Pistols bassist that appear in the book is one in which, while going through heroin withdrawal, he simultaneously vomited and defecated on a groupie as she was performing oral sex on him.
While stories like these are in no short supply, neither are fans like the barista, who continue to idolize Vicious -- a junkie, accused murderer of his girlfriend, and by all accounts unable to play his instrument -- nearly twenty-three years after he died of an overdose. The punk rock version of James Dean, Vicious solidified his fame by dying young (at age twenty-one), leaving behind memories of his notorious behavior and the mystery of girlfriend Nancy Spungen's murder. Although he contributed little to punk music, Vicious remains its most famous name, and his cult has only grown thanks to T-shirts and posters bearing his likeness and slogans like "Don't let them take you alive" and "Drugs Kill", and especially the iconographic 1986 film Sid and Nancy. Besides being a wildly inaccurate depiction of the punk scene, the Alex Cox cult hit upset Vicious' bandmate and friend Johnny Rotten, who said, "The chap who played Sid, Gary Oldman, I thought was quite good. But even he only played the stage persona as opposed to the real person" (Lydon, 150). But just who was "the real person" anyway? Reminiscences of friends and acquaintances offer endless contradictions, alternately portraying him as slow, intelligent but inarticulate, sensitive, destructive, kind, angry, passive, and violent. About the only adjective that can be irrefutably applied to Sid Vicious is "troubled".
Given the turbulent nature of his childhood, it's little surprise that Vicious was unable to cope in the adult world. Born John Simon Ritchie on May 10, 1957, Vicious was the son of Anne Beverley, described by Johnny Rotten as "an oddball hippie". Left to raise the boy alone after splitting with his dad, Beverley moved frequently and drifted from job to job. At one point, she and young Simon lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where it is said she made a living by selling marijuana. Upon returning to England with the financial assistance of the British High Commission, Beverley became involved with hard drugs. After a brief marriage to Oxford student Chris Beverley, Simon's mother worked a succession of jobs in several different towns. Finally, the two settled in Hackney, London, where, at a state art school, Simon first met Johnny Rotten, then known as John Lydon.
By that time, Simon had developed a love for glam rockers like David Bowie, Roxy Music, and T. Rex, and adopted their outrageous, effeminate style of dress. According to Rotten, Simon was a follower, not a leader, when it came to fashion, and he was dead serious about his looks. "It would be midwinter and bitter cold outside. He wouldn't wear a jacket because he would buy this new shirt or something. He had to be seen in this shirt" (Lydon, 60). Ironically, it was Simon's wimpiness that got him his aggressive-sounding stage name; Rotten dubbed him "Sid Vicious" after a pet hamster that had bitten his father. Once punk came along and gave him somewhere to channel his anger and frustration, however, Vicious' name took on a much more literal flavor.
The seeds of the British punk movement were sown in 1975, when Rotten (vocals), Glen Matlock (bass), Steve Jones (guitar), and Paul Cook (drums) formed the Sex Pistols at the prodding of boutique owner Malcolm McLaren, who acted as the band's manager. Sid, although not yet part of the band, made an impression at their gigs by "inventing" the pogo dance; in an attempt to get a better view of the stage, he would jump straight up and down. Sid also made a few attempts to play music himself. He acted as drummer for Siouxsie and the Banshees at their debut gig at the 100 Club Punk Rock Festival in 1976. He also had his own group, the Flowers of Romance, with Keith Levene (later of PiL), future Slits members Viv Albertine and Palmolive, and Adam Ant guitarist Marco Pirroni, among others. According to Pirroni, however, "They never got together on any one occasion, ever. There were originally fifteen people in this band, and I never actually met the others until years later" (Lydon, 224).
If Sid's onstage contributions to the burgeoning London music scene were minimal, however, his offstage antics made plenty of waves. His friend Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders recalled, "I'd seen Sid pull a long link of chain out of his jacket and spin it around to clear an entire dance floor. If anyone got caught in the chain, it was tough shit" (Lydon, 131). At the 100 Club Punk Rock Festival, Vicious allegedly threw a glass at the Damned while they were performing. When it shattered against a pillar, sending glass shards into the face of the lead singer's girlfriend, Vicious was arrested. Most famously, he beat music journalist Nick Kent with a bicycle chain at a 100 Club Sex Pistols gig for criticizing the band in print. What is most telling about the incident is that none of the accounts of it include any mention of what Kent actually wrote; it is Sid who gets the attention, just as he would have wanted it.
As aggressive as he was towards others, Vicious was equally abusive to himself. Rotten's friend John Gray recalled that when he would visit one of the squats Rotten and Vicious shared, "Sid would strangle cats and slash himself with an old Heinz baked beans tin lid" (Lydon, 65). During that period, Rotten and Vicious also burned themselves with cigarettes. Rotten's father also witnessed such incidents, and attributed them to Sid's desperate need for attention: "If he was sitting here and no one was taking any notice of him, he'd cut his hand or something to attract attention. You'd have to take your mind off everything else and look at him" (Lydon, 49).
Sid's self-destructive habits also extended to drugs; he had been mainlining speed from the time he was still living at home. Gray recalled seeing him shooting up and asking where he'd gotten the stuff, only to be told it was "me mum's". New York punk musician Dee Dee Ramone concurred that Vicious was taking drugs intravenously even before he joined the Sex Pistols. During the Ramones' first visit to England, Dee Dee, no stranger to depravity himself, seemed taken aback by what he witnessed: "Sid pulled out a set of works and put a whole bunch of speed in the syringe and then stuck the needle in the toilet with all the puke and piss in there and loaded it. He didn't cook it up. He just shook it, stuck it in his arm, and got off" (McNeil, 232).
Still, many others remember the Sid of that period fondly, including Steve Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees, who said, "Actually, before he got deeply into drugs, he was one of the funniest guys. He had a brilliant sense of humor, goofy, sweet, and very cute" (Lydon, 185).
Photographer and former David Bowie associate Leee Black Childers, who briefly attempted to manage the Flowers of Romance, got a first impression of Sid as being very vulnerable. The pair met at a Christmas dinner at journalist Caroline Coon's house. A homesick American, Childers started crying when he heard a Jim Reeves song playing on the stereo, and walked upstairs to discover Sid in a similar state -- "this little guy, just sitting there crying" (McNeil, 262).
That would all change in the spring of 1977, when Vicious was invited to replace Glen Matlock, whose more conventional musicianship had clashed with Rotten's confrontational politics from the start of the Sex Pistols' career. While Rotten seemed to believe the bass player job would provide Sid with some direction (as well as giving him an ally in the band, since Cook and Jones were close friends), his own mother saw the inherent danger in inviting such an unstable, volatile personality into the band. Rotten recalled, "When I got Sid into the Pistols, my mum sighed. 'What kind of wicked reasons have you got behind that?' I didn't have any wicked reasons at the time, but I think my parents spotted it as a bad move" (Lydon, 197).
Certainly, Sid's addition was not a brilliant move from a musical point of view, since he didn't even know how to play bass. As Marco Pirroni saw it, "After that, it was nothing to do with music anymore. It would just be for the sensationalism and scandal of it all. Then it became the Malcolm McLaren story..." (Lydon, 229).
Indeed, McLaren was initially thrilled about adding Sid's fiery personality to the Sex Pistols, saying, "When Sid joined he couldn't play guitar but his craziness fit into the structure of the band. He was the knight in shining armor with a giant fist" (Bromberg, 134).
While Sid had shown a predilection for violence and drugs before joining the Sex Pistols, being in a successful band gave him carte blanche to go out of control. "Up to that time, Sid was absolutely childlike. Everything was fun and giggly. Suddenly he was a big pop star", Rotten remembered. "Pop star status meant press, a good chance to be spotted in all the right places, adoration. That's what it all meant to Sid. I never dreamed he would perceive it that way. I thought he was far smarter" (Lydon, 144). Adoration -- and significantly more trouble -- came in the form of Nancy Spungen, an American music fan who had traveled to London from New York to be where the "action" was. A heroin addict with a history of severe emotional problems, Spungen's main ambition at the time was to become the girlfriend of a rock star. With Vicious, she not only fulfilled her goal, but also found someone whose dependence on her gave her a purpose.
Before Spungen, Vicious had limited experience in matters of romance. Like his self-esteem, Sid's sexuality was fluid and unformed. Leee Black Childers recalled having conversations with Vicious about his sexual orientation: "I thought that he would have sex with me, but the next morning he'd freak out: 'What have I done, am I a queer?'" (McNeil, 264). As in his relationship with Spungen, however, Vicious seemed drawn to Childers more out of a need to be protected than anything blatantly sexual, sleeping in his arms "like a little baby", but never consummating the relationship.
Sid's ideas about the opposite sex seemed contradictory and confused. Former bandmate Viv Albertine called Vicious one of the least sexist people she knew, but an anecdote from Chrissie Hynde tells a different story. Trying to obtain the British equivalent of a green card, Hynde was trying to talk Johnny Rotten into marrying her so she could remain in the country. Overhearing the pair discussing the subject one day, Sid gave his unsolicited opinion: "Sid stood up and said, 'I know! You want to marry John because he's going to be a famous rock star! And then you'll get pregnant, and then you'll.…'" According to Hynde, "He went on and on, describing this absurd scenario -- something like a seventies groupie girl might think. Everyone was horrified that Sid would have such a straitlaced idea" (Lydon, 138).
With Nancy, Sid alternated between playing the gentleman and the brute. Once, when Spungen was ill, he acted as her nursemaid, feeding her and calling her mother with daily updates on her health. Nancy's mother, Deborah Spungen, recalled Sid being very polite and shy during their phone conversations, and when the pair visited the Spungens at their Philadelphia home, Sid was subdued and childlike, even letting Nancy cut his meat for him. At other times, however, Sid would physically abuse Nancy, a fact confirmed by Johnny Rotten's wife, Nora. Vicious was once arrested after beating Nancy in a London hotel room (which prompted McLaren to briefly throw him out of the band), and during her final phone conversation with Deborah Spungen, Nancy admitted that a number of beatings she'd claimed to have received from street thugs had actually occurred at the hands of Sid. Vicious didn't mind participating in Spungen's self-degradation either. He once told Rotten that he watched her perform oral sex on a stranger in the alley behind their house, a service for which she earned fifteen pounds.
Many of Vicious' friends, however, gloss over his physical abuse because Spungen was so verbally abusive herself, and because they hold her responsible for introducing Vicious to heroin. Judging from his mother's history of drug abuse and his own practice of injecting speed, however, it seems that Vicious might have found his way to hard drugs even without Spungen's influence. There's no denying, however, that Sid and Nancy's co-dependent relationship kept them both hooked. Rotten hoped that the Sex Pistols' American tour, which would separate Sid from Nancy, would give his friend the opportunity to get straight. Instead, it turned out to be one of the vilest displays of rock 'n' roll excess imaginable, not only sending Sid straight down the tubes, but effectively putting an end to the promise that punk held.
The January 1978 tour, consisting mainly of stops in America's Deep South, did get Sid some much-needed supervision. Warner Brothers employee Noel Monk, who headed the road crew, was determined to keep Sid straight, if only so he'd fulfill his contractual obligations. Unfortunately, Sid also encountered a number of disturbed American fans and groupies who encouraged his self-destructive behavior, which soon became part of the live show. After being head-butted by one such fan at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Vicious, never one to be upstaged, put on his own spectacle. "With blood trickling down his cheek and down his bare sunken chest toward his black jeans, he rips a pus-soaked bandage off [his] arm, revealing a deeper laceration. He throws the bandage into the crowd, and smiles wider while the devoted rip it to shreds, hungry for a special souvenir" (Monk, 15).
So Tough: The Boy Behind the Sid Vicious Myth
by Charlotte Robinson
PopMatters Music Critic
Sid Vicious
Photo credit: Bob Gruen
One evening as a friend and I were ordering coffee, the young barista behind the counter noticed my Sex Pistols T-shirt. "Oh, I'm in love with Sid Vicious", she confided. "Have you ever read the book 12 Days on the Road? I fell in love with him after reading that book". As soon as I was away from the counter, I explained to my companion just how disturbing the young woman's admission was. Among the many unflattering anecdotes about the Sex Pistols bassist that appear in the book is one in which, while going through heroin withdrawal, he simultaneously vomited and defecated on a groupie as she was performing oral sex on him.
While stories like these are in no short supply, neither are fans like the barista, who continue to idolize Vicious -- a junkie, accused murderer of his girlfriend, and by all accounts unable to play his instrument -- nearly twenty-three years after he died of an overdose. The punk rock version of James Dean, Vicious solidified his fame by dying young (at age twenty-one), leaving behind memories of his notorious behavior and the mystery of girlfriend Nancy Spungen's murder. Although he contributed little to punk music, Vicious remains its most famous name, and his cult has only grown thanks to T-shirts and posters bearing his likeness and slogans like "Don't let them take you alive" and "Drugs Kill", and especially the iconographic 1986 film Sid and Nancy. Besides being a wildly inaccurate depiction of the punk scene, the Alex Cox cult hit upset Vicious' bandmate and friend Johnny Rotten, who said, "The chap who played Sid, Gary Oldman, I thought was quite good. But even he only played the stage persona as opposed to the real person" (Lydon, 150). But just who was "the real person" anyway? Reminiscences of friends and acquaintances offer endless contradictions, alternately portraying him as slow, intelligent but inarticulate, sensitive, destructive, kind, angry, passive, and violent. About the only adjective that can be irrefutably applied to Sid Vicious is "troubled".
Given the turbulent nature of his childhood, it's little surprise that Vicious was unable to cope in the adult world. Born John Simon Ritchie on May 10, 1957, Vicious was the son of Anne Beverley, described by Johnny Rotten as "an oddball hippie". Left to raise the boy alone after splitting with his dad, Beverley moved frequently and drifted from job to job. At one point, she and young Simon lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where it is said she made a living by selling marijuana. Upon returning to England with the financial assistance of the British High Commission, Beverley became involved with hard drugs. After a brief marriage to Oxford student Chris Beverley, Simon's mother worked a succession of jobs in several different towns. Finally, the two settled in Hackney, London, where, at a state art school, Simon first met Johnny Rotten, then known as John Lydon.
By that time, Simon had developed a love for glam rockers like David Bowie, Roxy Music, and T. Rex, and adopted their outrageous, effeminate style of dress. According to Rotten, Simon was a follower, not a leader, when it came to fashion, and he was dead serious about his looks. "It would be midwinter and bitter cold outside. He wouldn't wear a jacket because he would buy this new shirt or something. He had to be seen in this shirt" (Lydon, 60). Ironically, it was Simon's wimpiness that got him his aggressive-sounding stage name; Rotten dubbed him "Sid Vicious" after a pet hamster that had bitten his father. Once punk came along and gave him somewhere to channel his anger and frustration, however, Vicious' name took on a much more literal flavor.
The seeds of the British punk movement were sown in 1975, when Rotten (vocals), Glen Matlock (bass), Steve Jones (guitar), and Paul Cook (drums) formed the Sex Pistols at the prodding of boutique owner Malcolm McLaren, who acted as the band's manager. Sid, although not yet part of the band, made an impression at their gigs by "inventing" the pogo dance; in an attempt to get a better view of the stage, he would jump straight up and down. Sid also made a few attempts to play music himself. He acted as drummer for Siouxsie and the Banshees at their debut gig at the 100 Club Punk Rock Festival in 1976. He also had his own group, the Flowers of Romance, with Keith Levene (later of PiL), future Slits members Viv Albertine and Palmolive, and Adam Ant guitarist Marco Pirroni, among others. According to Pirroni, however, "They never got together on any one occasion, ever. There were originally fifteen people in this band, and I never actually met the others until years later" (Lydon, 224).
If Sid's onstage contributions to the burgeoning London music scene were minimal, however, his offstage antics made plenty of waves. His friend Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders recalled, "I'd seen Sid pull a long link of chain out of his jacket and spin it around to clear an entire dance floor. If anyone got caught in the chain, it was tough shit" (Lydon, 131). At the 100 Club Punk Rock Festival, Vicious allegedly threw a glass at the Damned while they were performing. When it shattered against a pillar, sending glass shards into the face of the lead singer's girlfriend, Vicious was arrested. Most famously, he beat music journalist Nick Kent with a bicycle chain at a 100 Club Sex Pistols gig for criticizing the band in print. What is most telling about the incident is that none of the accounts of it include any mention of what Kent actually wrote; it is Sid who gets the attention, just as he would have wanted it.
As aggressive as he was towards others, Vicious was equally abusive to himself. Rotten's friend John Gray recalled that when he would visit one of the squats Rotten and Vicious shared, "Sid would strangle cats and slash himself with an old Heinz baked beans tin lid" (Lydon, 65). During that period, Rotten and Vicious also burned themselves with cigarettes. Rotten's father also witnessed such incidents, and attributed them to Sid's desperate need for attention: "If he was sitting here and no one was taking any notice of him, he'd cut his hand or something to attract attention. You'd have to take your mind off everything else and look at him" (Lydon, 49).
Sid's self-destructive habits also extended to drugs; he had been mainlining speed from the time he was still living at home. Gray recalled seeing him shooting up and asking where he'd gotten the stuff, only to be told it was "me mum's". New York punk musician Dee Dee Ramone concurred that Vicious was taking drugs intravenously even before he joined the Sex Pistols. During the Ramones' first visit to England, Dee Dee, no stranger to depravity himself, seemed taken aback by what he witnessed: "Sid pulled out a set of works and put a whole bunch of speed in the syringe and then stuck the needle in the toilet with all the puke and piss in there and loaded it. He didn't cook it up. He just shook it, stuck it in his arm, and got off" (McNeil, 232).
Still, many others remember the Sid of that period fondly, including Steve Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees, who said, "Actually, before he got deeply into drugs, he was one of the funniest guys. He had a brilliant sense of humor, goofy, sweet, and very cute" (Lydon, 185).
Photographer and former David Bowie associate Leee Black Childers, who briefly attempted to manage the Flowers of Romance, got a first impression of Sid as being very vulnerable. The pair met at a Christmas dinner at journalist Caroline Coon's house. A homesick American, Childers started crying when he heard a Jim Reeves song playing on the stereo, and walked upstairs to discover Sid in a similar state -- "this little guy, just sitting there crying" (McNeil, 262).
That would all change in the spring of 1977, when Vicious was invited to replace Glen Matlock, whose more conventional musicianship had clashed with Rotten's confrontational politics from the start of the Sex Pistols' career. While Rotten seemed to believe the bass player job would provide Sid with some direction (as well as giving him an ally in the band, since Cook and Jones were close friends), his own mother saw the inherent danger in inviting such an unstable, volatile personality into the band. Rotten recalled, "When I got Sid into the Pistols, my mum sighed. 'What kind of wicked reasons have you got behind that?' I didn't have any wicked reasons at the time, but I think my parents spotted it as a bad move" (Lydon, 197).
Certainly, Sid's addition was not a brilliant move from a musical point of view, since he didn't even know how to play bass. As Marco Pirroni saw it, "After that, it was nothing to do with music anymore. It would just be for the sensationalism and scandal of it all. Then it became the Malcolm McLaren story..." (Lydon, 229).
Indeed, McLaren was initially thrilled about adding Sid's fiery personality to the Sex Pistols, saying, "When Sid joined he couldn't play guitar but his craziness fit into the structure of the band. He was the knight in shining armor with a giant fist" (Bromberg, 134).
While Sid had shown a predilection for violence and drugs before joining the Sex Pistols, being in a successful band gave him carte blanche to go out of control. "Up to that time, Sid was absolutely childlike. Everything was fun and giggly. Suddenly he was a big pop star", Rotten remembered. "Pop star status meant press, a good chance to be spotted in all the right places, adoration. That's what it all meant to Sid. I never dreamed he would perceive it that way. I thought he was far smarter" (Lydon, 144). Adoration -- and significantly more trouble -- came in the form of Nancy Spungen, an American music fan who had traveled to London from New York to be where the "action" was. A heroin addict with a history of severe emotional problems, Spungen's main ambition at the time was to become the girlfriend of a rock star. With Vicious, she not only fulfilled her goal, but also found someone whose dependence on her gave her a purpose.
Before Spungen, Vicious had limited experience in matters of romance. Like his self-esteem, Sid's sexuality was fluid and unformed. Leee Black Childers recalled having conversations with Vicious about his sexual orientation: "I thought that he would have sex with me, but the next morning he'd freak out: 'What have I done, am I a queer?'" (McNeil, 264). As in his relationship with Spungen, however, Vicious seemed drawn to Childers more out of a need to be protected than anything blatantly sexual, sleeping in his arms "like a little baby", but never consummating the relationship.
Sid's ideas about the opposite sex seemed contradictory and confused. Former bandmate Viv Albertine called Vicious one of the least sexist people she knew, but an anecdote from Chrissie Hynde tells a different story. Trying to obtain the British equivalent of a green card, Hynde was trying to talk Johnny Rotten into marrying her so she could remain in the country. Overhearing the pair discussing the subject one day, Sid gave his unsolicited opinion: "Sid stood up and said, 'I know! You want to marry John because he's going to be a famous rock star! And then you'll get pregnant, and then you'll.…'" According to Hynde, "He went on and on, describing this absurd scenario -- something like a seventies groupie girl might think. Everyone was horrified that Sid would have such a straitlaced idea" (Lydon, 138).
With Nancy, Sid alternated between playing the gentleman and the brute. Once, when Spungen was ill, he acted as her nursemaid, feeding her and calling her mother with daily updates on her health. Nancy's mother, Deborah Spungen, recalled Sid being very polite and shy during their phone conversations, and when the pair visited the Spungens at their Philadelphia home, Sid was subdued and childlike, even letting Nancy cut his meat for him. At other times, however, Sid would physically abuse Nancy, a fact confirmed by Johnny Rotten's wife, Nora. Vicious was once arrested after beating Nancy in a London hotel room (which prompted McLaren to briefly throw him out of the band), and during her final phone conversation with Deborah Spungen, Nancy admitted that a number of beatings she'd claimed to have received from street thugs had actually occurred at the hands of Sid. Vicious didn't mind participating in Spungen's self-degradation either. He once told Rotten that he watched her perform oral sex on a stranger in the alley behind their house, a service for which she earned fifteen pounds.
Many of Vicious' friends, however, gloss over his physical abuse because Spungen was so verbally abusive herself, and because they hold her responsible for introducing Vicious to heroin. Judging from his mother's history of drug abuse and his own practice of injecting speed, however, it seems that Vicious might have found his way to hard drugs even without Spungen's influence. There's no denying, however, that Sid and Nancy's co-dependent relationship kept them both hooked. Rotten hoped that the Sex Pistols' American tour, which would separate Sid from Nancy, would give his friend the opportunity to get straight. Instead, it turned out to be one of the vilest displays of rock 'n' roll excess imaginable, not only sending Sid straight down the tubes, but effectively putting an end to the promise that punk held.
The January 1978 tour, consisting mainly of stops in America's Deep South, did get Sid some much-needed supervision. Warner Brothers employee Noel Monk, who headed the road crew, was determined to keep Sid straight, if only so he'd fulfill his contractual obligations. Unfortunately, Sid also encountered a number of disturbed American fans and groupies who encouraged his self-destructive behavior, which soon became part of the live show. After being head-butted by one such fan at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Vicious, never one to be upstaged, put on his own spectacle. "With blood trickling down his cheek and down his bare sunken chest toward his black jeans, he rips a pus-soaked bandage off [his] arm, revealing a deeper laceration. He throws the bandage into the crowd, and smiles wider while the devoted rip it to shreds, hungry for a special souvenir" (Monk, 15).
