I’ve long wanted to do a piece on Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010) that posited him in the impresario tradition of Colonel Tom Parker, Brian Epstein, Andrew Loog Oldham, and others. This year marks a half century since he began assembling the ingredients that would result in The Sex Pistols. I like the fact that his birthday is the same as that of Sergei Eisenstein, Jim Jarmusch, and Daniel Johnston. (Marxist and punk aesthetics being the common denominator, for those too dense to put it together).
The “swindle” of McLaren’s famous “swindle” is that, like all swindlers, he was a capitalist, not a communist. There’s nothing new or unique or even bad about this. It’s show business. There IS a hoax element, but even this is something he wears on his sleeve. The subterfuge is that his project is somehow looking to unseat the powerful and address systemic inequities. He claimed to have been inspired by Situationist Art, which fed the Paris Riots of ’68, and he may well have been, but his own projects were at most only a superficial echo of all that. His real business was selling rebellion to adolescents, in the form of outlandish record albums and clothing.
With respect to which it is useful, I think, to see McLaren as part of a continuum, rather than describing punk in terms of a musical style or phase discrete from ones that had come before and would come after. With the passage of time, that aspect has come to seem silly and exaggerated, like pointing out the differences between homo habilis and homo erectus. In the end, they’re just a couple of cavemen.
The significant break with the past happened in the 1950s when the business world noticed a brand new market of consumers, somewhere in between children and adults (the latter defined loosely as mature people with jobs, homes, and families, more or less). Generally the middle demographic is couched in terms of teenagers and adolescents, but you can also include young adults (college age) into a second leg of the same group. Prior to the Post-War era, this demographic scarcely existed from a marketing perspective. By the ’50s, a variety of factors combined to make the demographic newly formidable. Child Labor Laws and the decline of agriculture as a sector of the workforce meant expanded free time for young people. Compulsory education meant increased socialization. Families were now smaller, resulting in greater attention to each child. A booming economy meant independence (as enabled by motor vehicles) and disposable income.
So now kids could buy things. And what might you sell to teenagers? Given that they are at the age where they now question authority, are looking to define themselves, and are bursting at the seams with hormones? How about music that would make them feel alive while simultaneously appalling their parents? Tin Pan Alley and showtunes were marginalized, and sexy, hot rhythm and blues came to the fore. So honestly the roots of punk are really in the rockabilly era, the time of Elvis, and Little Richard and company. Every refinement after that is just cosmetic.
And then it was exported to Britain. There, the population was whiter, thus so was the music, and also the audience. The education system was different as well, resulting in a frankly more literate brand of lyricist. In America, college students had been drawn to folk music in the late ’50s and early ’60s. But from across the Atlantic British college kids could perceive that the blues, rock and roll and country music WERE folk music, and thus were drawn to those forms as well. From the beginning many British rock and rollers were art students, and that colors what happened in the U.K. as well.
Both of Britain’s major youth subcultures, the Rockers and the Mods, fed directly into Punk. Honestly, from 10,000 feet, it’s honestly hard to differentiate them. The Rockers and the Teddy Boys were just what they sound like. They were greasers who rode motorcycles, wore leather jackets, and affected a streetwise attitude. The Mods (short for Modernists) tended to be better educated, listened to modern jazz or be bop, rode scooters, and above all sported the latest natty threads. They were stylish, Beau Brummels. The two groups were often in conflict and had highly publicized brawls. Inevitably, they spawned their own natively hatched music groups. The Beatles had aspects of both in terms of their tastes (“We’re Mockers!” quipped Ringo). Originally they looked more like the Rockers; under Epstein’s management they dressed like Mods. With The Kinks and The Who (both purely Mod) you see the line that leads straight to Punk, with their distortion and power chords. The Kinks even have a name that evokes sadomasochism, and The Who smashed all of their instruments! (Talk about planned obsolescence in a capitalist eco-system! The Who literally needed to buy entirely new instruments after every gig!)
McLaren attended a variety of art colleges throughout those very same years, just a little behind the British Invasion guys in the time scale. He met his girlfriend, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood while in school. His stepfather was in the garment trade; his grandfather had been a diamond merchant. In 1971, McLaren opened his clothing boutique, the name of which changed over the years from “Let it Rock”, to “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die”, to “Sex”, to “Seditionaries” to “World’s End”. Westwood’s original couture became the main attraction of the shop. Some of their early projects included costumes for the original London production of The Rocky Horror Show (1973) and the movies That’ll Be the Day (1973) with Ringo Starr, and Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974). Other projects from around this time that pre-sage the birth of punk include A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Who’s Quadrophenia (1973) which would later be a film.
The next logical step would be for McLaren to branch out into music himself. For a boutique owner/designer to branch out into this direction is not as as out of character as it sounds. Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager had owned a chain of record stores. Former commercial artist turned pop art phenomenon Andy Warhol had launched The Velvet Underground as an entrepreneurial side project. McLaren’s project would sort of merge aspects of both of those. For musicians he needed look no further than his shop. The four musicians who would make up the original line-up of the Sex Pistols, John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock all hung out there.
After dabbling in managing The New York Dolls (and basically breaking them up), he formally assumed the management of The Sex Pistols (which would also quickly break up under his management, as Adam and the Ants would also later do). The gimmick behind the band was to be as appalling as possible beginning with their name. McLaren didn’t invent punk or the aesthetic, it was already circulating, and at the same time this band was formed or soon thereafter, hundreds of others followed.
After building an intense local following of local punks, they signed with a major label EMI, and released their first single “Anarchy in the U.K.” in Fall 1976. An appearance on a talk show a couple of months later in which the lubricated musicians freely used profanity garnered a storm of tabloid publicity, making them a major sensation. Their first LP Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1976) went to #1. Their second single “God Save the Queen” designed to shock and appall on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee went to #2 on the singles chart — despite being banned on BBC radio. In early 1977 Matlock was fired from the band for copping to an affection for the Beatles, and was replaced by Johnny Rotten’s friend Sid Vicious (Simon Ritchie).
Astounding to contemplate, Sid was to become more notorious than the already notorious members of the band. A heroin addict who couldn’t play his instrument (the bass), he picked fights wherever he went, carved “Gimme a Fix” into his chest with a razor blade, and seemed to get arrested wherever he went. Their infamous U.S. tour in 1978 was a disaster and Rotten — the front man, lead singer, and ostensible star, quit before it was over. Nothing daunted, the remaining members and McLaren made the movie The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, directed by Julian Temple. The soundtrack (which is nearly as good as their excellent first LP) includes lots of tracks featuring Rotten, as well as Vicious taking lead vocals on a couple of Eddie Cochran tunes, and a hilariously disrespectful version of “My Way’, previously associated with both Sinatra and Elvis (who had recently died). The movie was released in 1980. By that time Vicious had died of a heroin overdose in the aftermath of having murdered his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in their room at the Chelsea Hotel. Roll credits!
This is a story with a lot of drama, though most Americans knew nothing about it while it was happening. Though they were top of the charts in the UK, the Sex Pistols scarcely moved the needle in the US when they were still a going concern. I seem to remember some fear-mongering segment about punk rock featuring the Pistols on 60 Minutes or some other news show in the late ’70s, and that’s where I first heard their name. Around 1982 my friend Colin came back from Detroit was a mohawk and a stack of punk records, and this is when I first heard the two Sex Pistols LPs all the way through. And of course, a portion of their story was immortalized in Alex Cox’s brilliant movie Sid and Nancy (1986). At around the same time, I first heard McLaren’s own single “Buffalo Gals” which had been a hit single for him in the UK four years earlier. We had a serious international time delay happening back then.
In the late ’70s while American teenagers were still listening to “Disco Duck”, Britain had spawned a thousand angry punk bands. Talk about a cultural divide! Many of them had an explicitly Marxist agenda going on. And punk culture did spawn some independent record labels, ‘zines, and clubs that kept their distance from the big corporate cannibals. But in the end, the most popular acts all signed with big labels and became part of the machine. Plenty of them continued to snarl their social criticisms. But nothing like a revolution ever happened. Instead, Britain got Thatcherism, and John Lydon became a conservative. (Plenty of skinheads had been Fascists anyway). Ultimately, it’s all so much show business, and The Sex Pistols were an act, just like The Monkees, but with fangs.. After they broke up, McLaren unspooled about a hundred other schemes and entrepreneurial projects, which had always been what he was about. Ya know? The band was born in a STORE, for God’s sake. And 50 years down the line, corporations have monetizing outrageousness (and outrage) down to a science.