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The Sex Pistols enjoy some refreshing bevvys on the road in Sweden. (pic: Bob Gruen)

October 28, 1977. According to the New York Times, on this day President Jimmy Carter announced he was backing the U.N.’s arms ban against South Africa;three West German terrorist leaders who died in their prison cells the previous week were buried, as mourners vowed vengeance; Federal authorities swept up four men in a sex-for-sale cleanup of Times Square; General Electric’s Vallecitos nuclear reactor near Pleasanton, CA, was shut down when it was discovered it sat dangerously close to fault lines; and Vito Antuofermo defeated Mike Nixon in a 10-round middleweight boxing bout at Madison Square Garden. Debby Boone, daughter of whitewashed ‘50s “rocker” Pat Boone, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the third week in a row with the treacly “You Light Up My Life,” while TV actor David Soul topped the UK charts with something called “Silver Lady.” Looking For Mr. Goodbar was the top movie in America. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion topped the New York Times Fiction Bestsellers list. 

And the Sex Pistols released the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album ever recorded, Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols.

Think about it. What else got released in 1977? No, don’t bring up the plethora of other great punk albums out that year, The Clashor Rocket To Russia or Pink Flag or Blank Generation. 1977 was the year of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. Of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The Stranger by Billy Joel. ELO’s Out Of The Blue. JT by James Taylor. Seriously – do any of these make you wanna jump up and down, knock over bookshelves and smash your face into sheetrock the way great rock ‘n’ roll does? No, they don’t. But that Pistols album sure does stir those urges, doesn’t it?

Maybe your tastes lean towards other 1977 full lengths, such as Rush’s A Farewell To Kings or Queen’s News Of The World, which was recorded down the hall from the Bollocks sessions at Wessex Studios. Well, put those albums on after Bollocks. Do they sound like rock ‘n’ roll in comparison? Well no, because they aren’t. Rock music, yes. But there’s no roll in ‘em, except maybe for parts of that Queen album. They don’t have that primal whatsis you recognize from Chuck Berry or the Stones or MC5, do they? No, they do not. You know the Pistols album does, even if you don’t wanna admit it. And plenty don’t. I don’t wanna know any such persons. 

Some people prefer the rawer demo recordings of these songs presented on the Spunk bootleg. They think Bollocks is overproduced. You are entitled to your opinion. There is some merit to this idea. The truth is, Bollocks is actually perfectly produced. It’s loud, the drums slam, the bass is fat and the guitars sound enormous. Greil Marcus once wrote that Steve Jones made a sound more akin to “a man playing a guitar factory than a man playing a guitar.” Isn’t that how a rock ‘n’ roll record should sound? Even Cheap Trick’s great In Color comes off slick and overproduced next to the Pistols album. Rick Nielsen and crew should have hired Chris Thomas and Bill Price to produce In Color, rather than Tom Werman.

Yeah, the musicians could play. They were advanced beyond their brief apprenticeships, Sid Vicious notwithstanding. (And he doesn’t even play on the album! That’s all Steve Jones, save for “Anarchy In The UK,” which features OG Pistols bassist Glen Matlock.) They knew to stick to the meat-and-potatoes, eschew flash, and play with conviction. As songwriters, they were preternaturally gifted, even as novices. This is essential to the great democratization the Sex Pistols inflicted upon rock ‘n’ roll – if they could do this, anyone could. All it took was talent and belief. 

And Johnny “Rotten” Lydon? He’s the X factor. He’s no Elvis as a singer, but he’s perfect for this band. It has to do with his attitude. He said the unsayable, and ground your face in it. And he gave not one single fuck. Without him, the Sex Pistols would’ve simply been been a good rock ‘n’ roll band, a younger and nastier Slade, or competition for AC/DC, also coming up at this time. With Rotten, they were a phenomenon.

Spare me all the conspiracy theories (mis-)manager Malcolm McLaren put out there about this being a proto-boy band he assembled for a quick buck. How gullible are you? Apparently very, considering how that bullshit’s persisted since The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle’s release. But y’know, there are always gonna be haters and naysayers out there who have to tear something down because it’s too universally celebrated. The Beatles were a hype, Little Richard was greater than Elvis, and Dean Martin was better than Sinatra. I don’t have time for sour grapes fantasies, and you shouldn’t either. If you put on Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols, crank the volume up all the way and break the knob off and don’t get the same electrical jolt and thrill you did the first time you heard it? Then you’re emotionally dead inside. Pure and simple. 

Here comes the chorus of diehards who’ll insist The Ramones’ third (and best) album is “better” and “more punk” than Bollocks. *rolls eyes*

Danny Fields’ photo for the Rocket To Russia cover. (Courtesy Rick Johnson)

Interesting to see that the Ramones’ best album, Rocket To Russia, followed hot on the heels of Never Mind The Bollocks one week later, Nov. 4, 1977. No two albums better define punk rock or what was great about the year 1977 than the Ramones’ third LP or the Sex Pistols’ first. They also define the two bands and their individual approaches to rock ‘n’ roll.

Summer of 1977, the major labels began snapping up every punk band either on the Lower East Side or walking down the King’s Road. The Ramones’ Beach-Boys-with-Marshall-amps single “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker” hit #81 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles list when it was released in July. Sire Records gave Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy between $25,000 to $30,000 to record their follow-up to Leave Home, released earlier in the year. They got cheap studio time ($150/hour) at Media Sound, opting to spend the lion’s share of the budget on the production itself. For the most part, they adhered to first takes; as Johnny Ramone explained to UK rock journalist Everett True, "It's best to do it quickly ... You do not wanna sit there and bullshit. It's your money they're spending."

But the guitarist had a goal in mind when they entered Media Sound with 12 of their best originals and two of their best cover tunes: Bury the Sex Pistols.

On the first day of recording, Johnny plopped a copy of the “God Save The Queen” on the recording console, remarking that the Pistols’ music “robbed” them. He demanded that engineer Ed Stasium give the Ramones better production than their rivals.

“These guys ripped us off,” he asserted, “and I want to sound better than this.” To which Stasium replied, “No problem.” 

Truthfully, the Pistols’ approach was only Ramones-derivative in its stripping of rock ‘n’ roll down to raw basics. The Pistols preferred to bury any melody in Johnny Rotten’s diamond-cutting sneer, and never got faster than a midtempo chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk. The Ramones were great lovers of 1960s AM radio pop, therefore always kept melody prominent, and played everything at a blistering ramalama pace. Johnny’s chainsaw guitar technique completely eschewed any lead guitar, emphasizing relentlessly downstroked eighth notes extracted from two barre chord positions played up and down his Mosrite Ventures II neck. As detailed in my appreciation last month, this and his dimed Marshall stacks created that barrage of harmonics that fooled ears into hearing organs and all manner of other instruments. Steve Jones favored three-note power chords, and graduated with honors from The Johnny Thunders School Of Trash Can Guitar. 

The two bands could not have differed more if they’d been Metallica and the Norman Luboff Chorale. 

Then there’s the Ramones’ songwriting, with its elemental mix of Sixties bubblegum, surf, girl groups and the British Invasion’s poppier side, wed to the aggression of The Stooges. Rocket To Russia’s 14 tracks highlighted 12 of their strongest songs, supplemented by fantastic covers of Bobby Freeman’s Calypso rocker “Do You Wanna Dance” and The Trashmen’s hysterical “Surfin’ Bird.”  One intriguing tale, courtesy of Ramones expert Rick Johnson, concerns an unfinished title track the band never used. The chorus – “I’m gonna send a Rocket to Russia, I’m gonna flatten Vietnam” – is reportedly as far as they got. 

The rest – “Cretin Hop,” “Rockaway Beach,” “Teenage Lobotomy,” etc. – are the state of the Ramones’ art, full of their casual musical brutality, sugary hooks and melodies, and a Mad magazine sense of humor equating pogoing to the hopping of mental patients and celebrating frontal lobe surgery. (“Now I guess I’ll hafta tell ‘em/That I got no cerebellum!”) 

Then there’s the proto-power ballad “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.” Over ringing, jangling guitars and a headbanging pop beat, Joey intones the most devastating breakup song this side of the Shangri-Las’ “Remember (Walking In The Sand)”:

I told you why we just can't make it

I want you still but i just can't take it

The time has come we ought to break it

Someone had to pay the price

It makes you wanna slit your wrists in a warm bath, doesn’t it?

So, yeah. It kinda fits that the two albums that really kicked off the international punk rock revolution essentially were issued back-to-back, and by the same US label conglomerate, even. Neither sold huge amounts, except over the course of time, as catalog items. But both had impact far beyond their sales figures. It can be argued they both influenced the whole of early punk, maybe the Ramones’ record even more so. Their anniversaries should be celebrated annually, until this planet ceases to rotate and the sun refuses to shine.

There’s a Kym Whitehead-sized hole in Austin, on Earth, in the universe. For someone so full of life, who defined the term “gusto,” it does not seem right that we will no longer see her at her perch, on the tall stool reserved for her at the Kick Butt Coffee bar, egging on some band or other. The Austin punk scene had no greater supporter, cheerleader and den mother than Kym, who passed away over the weekend. The grief was palpable and widespread as news leaked out Monday morning. Her ever-buoyant spirit, her activism, her encouragement, her wisdom, and her inspiration should shine as an example to the world – just be better. She will certainly live on, in the many she touched, and blessed with her friendship. Goodbye, Kym. You are irreplaceable.

#timstegall #timnapalmstegall #timnapalmstegallsubstack #punkjournalism #sexpistols #nevermindthebollocksheresthesexpistols #45yearsold #greatestrocknrollalbumeverrecorded #ramones #rockettorussia #also45yearsols #bestramonesalbum #crucialpunkrecordings  #kymwhitehead #RIP

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