Kill Rod Stewart

'I want a slice of pizza." --Last public words of Sid Vicious.

THE SEX PISTOLS may have been the greatest thing to come down the pike since the survivors of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre took their human pyramid act out on the road. Vibrating with frantic energy, they gave a shock to the world of rock and roll that made such bands as the Talking Heads, the Clash and Elvis Costello and the Attractions possible, and jolted Mick Jagger and his Old Masters into renewal. The Pistols have left rock and roll to the others; Sid Vicious is dead, and Johnny Lydon (nee Rotten), in light of his recent efforts with Public Image, Ltd., might as well be. All that remains is a movie, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, due for release this summer, which promises, if nothing else, the usual bathukolpian prodigies of director Russ Meyer.

The soundtrack double album to that flick recently became available in import. The album raises the intriguing question of whether a defunct band can produce the best rock and roll of the year; the answer, despite the carping of the British press, is yes. The Great Rock and Roll Swindle gives us the most complete statement yet of the punk sensibility.

Punk rock emerged when rock and roll first became self-conscious, when the obvious possibilities of a new art form had been all but exhausted. The spontaneous creativity of the early years was replaced by an inhibiting historical perspective and a prevailing pessimism, a sense that there was nothing new left to do. George Thorogood, perhaps the most distasteful of a new breed of rock and roll reactionaries, declared his intention never to write his own songs because "Chuck Berry wrote them all already." Keith Emerson and other art-rock enthusiasts tried to lift the medium out of itself, and in so doing created something which, in Nick Lowe's phrase, had "as much to do with rock and roll as Walter Cronkite." Columnist Dave Marsh just got depressed and listened to old Who records.

BUT JOHNNY ROTTEN brought a new faith along with his vaseline-and-tale pomaded hair, a faith in rock and roll and its ability to survive its own history, a cocksure answer to the "Now what?" he mutters once between tracks on this wonderful new album. The answer consisted of a return to three-chord rock and roll and a reworking of old standards in an energetic new style. Their originality relied on performance, not form; rock and roll has always been wrapped up in personality and attitude, and the contumacious stance and demonic vigor the Sex Pistols brought to rock and roll renewed it and transformed it.

Seven tracks on Swindle exemplify this refurbishing of old hits. Rotten is in prime sneering form, fairly spitting out the three syllables of old Who warhorse "Substitute," bringing a feral edge to Boyce and Hart's familiar "Stepping Stone" and Faces standard "Whatcha Gonna Do About It." These old songs, worn by rehearing and rote performance, take on a new quality, derived from Rotten's conviction that they really matter, at least to him. Sid Vicious contributes two sock-hop numbers--"Something Else" and "C'mon Everybody"--and a rollicking remake of "Rock Around the Clock." Punk rock wants to be fun and these tracks succeed in being just that. As Johnny Rotten once said, "Rock and roll is supposed to be fun. You remember fun, don't ya? You're supposed to enjoy it. It's not supposed to be about critics, or spending 100 fucking years learning a million chords on the guitar. It's the spirit."

Necessarily, such a self-conscious form as punk will involve parody; as for the doomed Adrian Leverkuhn of Mann's Doctor Faustus, everything is a parody, of previous forms or even of itself. Creation of the new means the "deconstruction" of the old, and a sardonic snipe at other contemporary musical forms. The Pistols start parodying right off on side two with a symphonic version of "God Save the Queen," as much a parody of themselves as of art rock. A bizarre disco medley of "Anarchy in the U. K.," "God Save the Queen," "Pretty Vacant," and "No One's Innocent" follows on the same side. These, along with a French cafe version of "L'Anarchie Pour le U. K.," sung by Jerzimy on side four, and a delightfully absurd sax solo on "Belsen Vas a Gassa," evince a comic vision which makes this one of the funniest albums cut in a long time.

Mere parody, though, can never be satisfying. When, in Mann's phrase, "Art becomes critique," the self-consciousness of parody can be crippling and destructive. Perhaps the goal should be to combine a parodic sense with an underlying faith in the essential form and a dose of the new and vital. The Sex Pistols achieve this delicate balance on side two in their reclamation of "Johnny B. Goode" and Boston local Jonathan Richman's "Road Runner." Sure to be a legend of rock and roll, this track alone justifies the rather extravagant price which decorates the album jacket. Opening with the terrific backbeat and acid guitar which became the signature of the band. "Johnny B. Goode" leaps up an emotional notch when that manic wail of a lead vocalist begins to shrick:

Na na na na na na na na na New Orleans

Na na na na na na na na na evergreens

Na na na na na na na na na Johnny B. Goode

Go go go go go go go go go Johnny B. Goode

Go go go Johnny go go go go I don't know the words

It soon becomes apparent that Rotten knows maybe five words to the song--but who the hell knows the words to "Tumbling Dice," or could ever understand Bo Diddley? Rotten fills in with a banshee wail, like an infant tossed in boiling water. He begins a dialogue with the band: "It's fuckin' awful. Stop it. It's fuckin' awful. Oy oy Steve, Road Runner."

The band finally slips into "Road Runner"; Rotten doesn't remember that one either. With some help from drummer Paul Cook, he latches onto some random lyrics--the Stop and Shop, the modern world, and the refrain about the radio. He closes it off with "Do we know any other fuckin' songs?" ending one of the priceless moments in recording history.

It's not coincidental that Johnny Rotten sings these tracks. Rotten was the guiding genius of the band, Vicious the epitome of its ethos, a relationship similar to the Jagger-Richards symbiosis. Upon Rotten's departure, the remaining Sex Pistols ran into the problem of taste: Is this any good? How far do we go? It was a problem they were unequipped to handle. A song like "Friggin" in the Riggin'," a nautical round of masturbation and sodomy on a British man o'war which is sure to replace "Barnacle Bill the Sailor" on top of the fifth grade charts, has no business on this record. Part of the problem is the manifest influence of Malcolm MacLaren, the Sex Pistols' manager, who apparently drove Rotten from the band and tried to fill the vacuum. MacLaren is the same imbecile who tried to dress up the New York Dolls in Communist regalia and helped to ensure their demise. He actually sings a track on this album. "You Need Hands," but I have found that a carefully etched groove will cause your needle to skip over it entirely.

Two tracks deserve special consideration, as they are sure to be singled out for particular opprobrium. "Belsen Was a Gas," a live recording about the infamous German concentration camp which also found its way into "Holiday in the Sun," contains the chilling refrain "Be a man, kill a man" and Rotten's patented looney-bin hysterics. Roland Biggs, the fat old geezer who took over fronting the band after Rotten left, performs his own version of the song, complete with bogus German accent. He also marches on Martin Bormann in his "No One's Innocent".

God save Marty Bormann.

And Nazis on the run.

They wasn't being wicked, Lord

It was their idea of fun.

Facile condemnations of this sort of thing clearly won't do. It's hard to get a handle on the punk fascination with Nazism: Elvis Costello talks about emotional fascism, Johnny Rotten sings about Belsen, and the swastika is the dominant icon in punk life, but what does it all add up to? With Rotten, it may just be the shock value, as when he used to tell people he cut out his hemmorhoids with a razor. And just how is one supposed to react to something like Belsen, anyway?

The album closes with Sid Vicious's "My Way," already a punk classic. Sid hams it up in a thickened, quavering voice until Steve Jones's guitar breaks the song into the desperately vital punk mode. The poignancy of the lyrics, in light of Vicious's early death, need not be belabored here. Just let "My Way" stand as a testament to his visceral understanding of the punk aesthetic.

WHICH BRINGS ME to a long overdue obituary for Sid Vicious. Sid Vicious had the extraordinary good fortune of the very, very few who are born into an artistic movement that mirrors their inner sensibility, whose untrammeled self-expression jibes exactly, as if predestined, with the zeitgeist. He was the quintessential punk, with his chalk-white, emaciated body, his spiked hair and suicide-scars and drunken, fun-loving leer. When he danced the pogo, it became the rage; when he pieced together his clothes with safety pins, that device became the emblem of an entire subculture. He realized that old age would be a breach of decorum--that, like Keith Moon, he could never grow old. Sid Vicious was to rock and roll what Winston Churchill was to Western democracy, and to many of us there was not a hell of a difference in scale. John Kifner, in his often cruel and amazingly obtuse obituary in the New York Times, wrote. "Sid Vicious played electric bass and vomited," as if that epigraph could contain his short life. It was more, Mr. Kifner, much more than that.