The band that nearly tore John Lydon apart
Remarkably, the Sex Pistols were only active for about three years, from 1975 to 1978.
In that time, they released one album and four singles, played around 170 gigs, give or take, went through two bass players and were, for most of those years, arguably the single most infamous presence in British pop culture, loathed by as many as they were loved.
Thus, despite being together for little more than a cup of coffee, it was still something of a miracle they spent that much time together. Any band with John Lydon up front isn’t exactly built to last.
On a macro and micro level, the band had everything going against them. For one, democratically elected members of Parliament were debating whether their music constituted treason. They were arrested as many times as they had played live and were attacked in the street just as often, and that was just from external pressures. Life within the band wasn’t exactly smooth sailing either, considering that their daily routine was little more than a proxy war between manager Malcolm McLaren and Lydon for control of the group.
McLaren formed the group, yet Lydon was its lyricist. Both felt that they were the beating heart of the Sex Pistols and had convincing arguments to support that. Yet one can imagine that McLaren’s desire to oust his singer from the band came only partially from wanting to control the band. It must have also come from the fact that dealing with Lydon was a living nightmare for everyone involved, who must have deeply envied original bassist Glen Matlock when he was given his marching orders by Lydon.
One can maybe forgive him for his rampant ego and bullying streak at the time. He was all of 22 when the Pistols came to an end, and who among us was at our best at that young age? As life after the Sex Pistols has continuously shown, dealing with Lydon is evidence that he wasn’t just called Johnny Rotten because of the state of his teeth. The man has continued to be a consummate annoyance both on and offstage, who seems to love nothing more than pissing people off for the sake of pissing them off.
Which rock legend wanted to attack John Lydon?
If you want to be really, really generous to a man who has done precisely nothing in his public life to deserve that generosity, you could say John Lydon is a man trapped in his own reputation. He came to prominence as a professional irritant who developed a reputation for being a dangerous, defiant rabble-rouser. Someone who doesn’t care what anyone thinks and will try to shock the system at any opportunity. If he tried to be anything other than “Johnny Rotten“, he wouldn’t have a career.
This, of course, completely ignores a public figure like Snoop Dogg. Someone whose notoriety at his prime made Johnny Rotten look like Walter the Softy from The Beano. Like, the man was literally on trial for murder in 1996. In comparison, sneering that dear old Queen Bess “ain’t no human bein'” looks positively juvenile.
Today, though, Snoop is America’s beloved unc, more likely to be found palling around with Martha Stewart at the Olympics than still trying to shock people like it’s still the early 1990s.
Contrast this to the kind of stunts John Lydon was still trying to pull a decade and a half after the Pistols’ heyday, and it gets pretty sad. In 1994, Lydon appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien as a way of promoting the Pistols’ reunion tour. He took this opportunity to slag off the musical guests of that episode, The Allman Brothers Band, throughout the show. O’Brien himself reminisced about this in a return appearance from The Allmans in 2012 and revealed Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts watched the whole thing happen backstage, before turning to each other and saying, “Let’s go get that English fella!”
Lydon scarpered the moment he found out that The Allmans were out for his blood, and when O’Brien asked Gregg if he’d have actually beaten him up if he’d found him, Allman is strangely graceful about his response.
In typical Southern gentleman style, Allman smiled and said, “There’s nothing like a good set of fisticuffs now and then”. Truer words, Gregg, truer words.
