Sex Pistols: “the American tour, a real carnage”
Paul Cookdrummer of Sex Pistolsstill remembers the chaos and fear that surrounded his band’s 1978 tour of the United States. “On that American tour everything definitely collapsed before our eyes,” the musician recalled during his recent appearance on The Rockonteurs podcast. “It was a disaster, to be honest.”
The Sex Pistols happily and consciously embraced their role as anti-authoritarian and non-conformist leaders in the UK, sparking riots at concerts and becoming the face of the punk movement. However in America it was a completely different matter and the group’s January ’78 US tour proved to be a disaster for the English band
Part of the problems that arose on that occasion can be attributed to the tour schedule. Rather than stop in more artistic and liberal cities like Los Angeles and New York, the group’s manager Malcolm McLaren booked the Sex Pistols at clubs in the Bible Belt. The Bible Belt is an area of America very distant from the spirit of Sid Vicious and his companions, with a strong religious, evangelical “propensity”. It can be located in an area that extends from the central and southern part of the east coast to the center of the USA.
The thought was, ‘Not up all these hip in New York, let’s go play in San Antonio and Dallas, Texas, cowboy bars,'” Cook said. McLaren anticipated – and even hoped for – a certain amount of clashes, assuming that this would also give the band some extra publicity. However, things went further than they expected.
“I thought someone was going to get seriously hurt or die,” Cook admitted. “While we were playing, there were marshals on the sides of the stage, with guns, just to make sure that nobody came out of this standing up while we were playing. And people were throwing all kinds of shit at us, bottles, pig ears, everything “. Further exacerbating the situation was bassist Sid Vicious’ drug addiction problem. “We had super tight security and Sid was always trying to find stuff. And he was freaking out,” Cook recalled. “Everything was falling apart, everything.”
The last show of the tour was the Sex Pistols’ only West Coast date, a stop at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. “Everyone was devastated, really. We just wanted to get it over with and leave,” Cook confessed. Despite an energetic crowd of around 5,000 people, the Sex Pistols’ anger and bitterness were evident. Frustrated by the exhausting tour and tired of internal difficulties, the group disbanded after the San Francisco show.
“Steve and I went back to the hotel,” Cook recalls. “And we said, ‘We want out of this. We’ve had enough.” John was in another hotel and Sid was at someone’s house somewhere in San Francisco overdosing.” Even decades later – with occasional reunions and public battles behind them – the ’78 US tour lives on as a bad memory in the Sex Pistols. “It was absolute carnage,” Cook said. “I don’t know how we got through it.”
In 1980 the documentary “DOA: A Right of Passage” was published which, in addition to telling the origins of the punk movement through interviews with many protagonists of that scene, tells of that disastrous tour of the Sex Pistols in America. Director Lech Kowalski followed them with handheld cameras into clubs and bars on their seven-city Southern tour.
The film contains interviews (including the famous interview with Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen in bed), behind-the-scenes footage of the tour, and interviews with members of the public who had strong and very different reactions to the group.
