Real Life Rock Top 10: June 2, 2025

How Johnny Rotten Went Under the Berlin Wall, Two Women in Nashville, and a Very Old Movie

1 & 2 Sex Pistols, Live in the U.S.A. 1978 (Southeast Music Hall, Atlanta, January 5, 1978, Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, January 10, Winterland Ballroom San Francisco, January 14, Universal Music Recordings) & Hari Kunzru, Red Pill (Vintage, 2020). When the Sex Pistols played the opening show of their American tour, it was just short of twenty-two years since Elvis Presley was first seen on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s CBS Stage Show on January 28, 1956. I remember looking at those shows many years later with shock. They let that on television?

When the Sex Pistols arrived in the U.S., Elvis was just short of five months dead (“Elvis was dead before he died, and his gut was so big it cast a shadow over rock ’n’ roll in the last few years.” Johnny Rotten said when he heard the news. “Our music is what’s important now”), the band itself had only weeks of itself left, and listening back to what happened then the shock is still there: they let people do that in public? In a place? In front of other people? The corrosion in Johnny Rotten’s voice is like a disease. “Only one movement is possible,” said a Paris delinquent who’d attached himself to a group of would-be poets in Paris in 1952, they were trying to come up with a manifesto, he was supposed to write something: “that I be the plague and award the buboes.” The person born John Lydon put that into sound and made it feel like a crime. I remember Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen telling me about the Memphis Sex Pistols show the day after Atlanta: how standing near him in the crowd was a well-dressed couple, looking like they’d wandered in by mistake, and the woman weeping uncontrollably, as if she were being taken apart piece by piece.