Sid Vicious
Sid Sings

Demons.

Behemoth the great beast, Asmodeus the lustful, Echate with fiery eyes, Pazuzu who speaks to the pregnant, and Lucifer the bearer of light (and that's why, remember, God hates him more than all the others).

Where do they go when they're not gnawing at our Spirit, where do they sleep when they're not speaking to us?

I know.

They stay at the Chelsea Hotel.

They mingle their voices with those of Dylan Thomas and Thomas Wolfe, with the moans of Nico and the curses of Allen Ginsberg. They wander through the Victorian Gothic rooms and wrought iron balconies, where they suggested verses to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, saw Tennessee Williams and his Frank Merlo love in secret, and watched Basquiat die piece by piece.

And yes, among those voices, there are also Sid and Nancy's.

The demons know what really happened that October night in 1978, and now only they know, because even Roky Redglare passed away in 2001, taking with him that truth that, by now, only he (a dealer and a third-rate actor) knew.

Truth that, in any case, no one cared about.

Especially not the EMI, who, having paid the bail, hurried to set up a band for him — the Idols — to strike while the iron was hot, before that English idiot kicked the bucket. They knew very well that the album of a mad, drug-addled murderer would sell much more than that of a fool too high to help his woman dying slowly, bleeding out in a Chelsea Hotel bathroom.

And the Idols aren’t even bad, with two former New York Dolls included, but it’s Sid who doesn’t fit.

Sid never fit.

Maybe it was Anne's fault, his mother, who, always a drug addict, threw him out of the house at fifteen.

And on the street, he met Johnny, and then John Simon Ritchie became Sid Vicious, after his hamster.

But this isn’t right, he's turning into a romantic hero, and there's nothing romantic here.

I wanted to talk about punk.

The umpteenth label that doesn’t mean a damn thing, for lazy critics and listeners, but this time it does have a role (yes, precisely that word), oh yes it does.

Whether it was a critic from the Chicago Tribune who invented it, talking about Ed Sanders, or Dave Marsh on Creem, or Lenny Kaye in the Nuggets notes, what matters is that the term was in the air since the early '70s, and McLaren and the Pistols — simply — appropriated it.

They didn’t want to invent anything, McLaren and the Pistols, they wanted to become famous and make a lot of money. And Rotten Johnny (the only one with talent) became famous, and so did McLaren a bit, and they made quite a bit of money.

But the record companies, who spent that money and realized too late that they were getting screwed, had to make that term — now — profitable.

So out pops that little word for everything: Ian Dury's rock blues, the glam of the Test Tube Babies, the garage of the Damned, or just rock of the Clash. And many others. And even a lot of stuff that had nothing, but nothing to do with it: Siouxsie, Elvis Costello, the Jam, even XTC. Just to mention England.

Because in America (where this stuff was fundamentally born) they did even worse: Patti Smith (the punk priestess!), Television (!), Talking Heads (!!), Wayne County et cetera, et cetera.

Oh, The Ramones!

But the Ramones are the Beach Boys!

Born in the grayness of Queens and not in the sunshine of California, in Gerald Ford’s America (!!) and not Kennedy’s, without the purity of the '60s and without a Brian Wilson who thought himself to be a Great Composer, but always the Beach Boys (and I consider this a great compliment), what the hell did they have to do with that punk scam (and nonsense)?

And the worst was yet to come.

Because in the years that followed, they threw everything into the punk cauldron and to make everything fit into that cauldron, they started inventing bullshit labels and sub-genres (HC, melodic HC, Straight Edge, Oi, Emo, Queer, Thrashcore, Screamo...) for an increasingly inflexible and conservative public that measured solos with a ruler and got heated discussing what was punk and what wasn't.

Well then (to mention one), I can't conceive of a greater betrayal for a Power Pop monument like “Zen Arcade” than calling it punk.

Because, you see, for me, there are only two punk records, and one of them exists only in my imagination.

And among these two, there’s no “Never Mind....,” chic and overproduced (yes, overproduced, it’s not me saying it, Kurt Cobain did. Chris Thomas, a guy who had worked on the Beatles' "White Album," was involved!) and not even “Spunk!”, for similar reasons.

No, my two punk albums are this “Sid Sings” and one that exists only in my dreams.

I would give who knows what for an album played by a group composed of Glen Matlock on bass, Pete Best on drums, Tommy Hall (what would Tommy Hall have become if the singer of his band didn't make up his mind to chop him with an ax!) on jug and Anthony Phillips on guitar, those who were kicked out (or bailed out on their own) with a kick in the ass out of the myth. What a group it would be! They’d explain to us what it means to repeat to themselves for the rest of their lives that they could have been there, among the stars, eating strawberries and drinking raspberry juice, and Astaroth — who finds the things lost by men — would have been seated among them.

But they never recorded this album.

They recorded “Sid Sings.”

Because that English idiot really did kick the bucket, after trying twice, his mother, having organized a party for his temporary freedom, thought it wise to give him some of her stuff (a good deal). Result: a nice overdose and John Simon (or Sid) falls asleep forever in the arms of that deadbeat Michelle Robinson, a small-time actress they hurried to place next to him. And don't pull out that Redglare was still behind his death, it would be like really believing that the hand of Beelzebub, the great deceiver, was in this story.

Then Virgin takes a handful of covers from a concert, badly recorded a few months earlier at Max's Kansas City, the couple of things they managed to get him to record in those months (including the famous version of “My Way”) and throws this short half hour of stuff on the market, which even reached number 30 on the charts in the UK, and they recoup a bit of their expenses.

And, well, it would have ended there. Sid had asked to be buried next to his Nancy, but the Spungen family opposed it. So his mother has him cremated and, by night, spreads his ashes over Nancy's grave.

Romantic?

Told you: there’s nothing romantic here.

In fact, his mother didn’t even think about scattering Sid’s ashes somewhere and brought them back to England. But, when she arrived at Heathrow, she was so out of it that the urn slipped from her hands and the ashes scattered on the ground.

A good part ended up in the trash.

Now this, this is a punk ending.

Dedicated to @Pinhead, in the hope that it pleases you.