Some years ago, our daughter (born January 15, 1978, relevance forthcoming) was talking about someone she had met recently that she thought I might have heard of. Our daughter thought this woman might have been a punk rocker once upon a time. Her name was Penelope. "Penelope Houston?", I asked. Yes, that's it. Well, I said, the next time you see Penelope, tell her that your father saw her at Winterland the night before our daughter was born, opening for the Sex Pistols. Ah, the pre-cellphone days ... between each act, I would go to a pay phone, call my wife, and see if she'd gone into labor. She held out until the next day.
I saw them that same night. It was fraught partly for reasons I won’t go into, but mostly because of what was coming off the stage even before theses Pistols. The awfulness of the Nuns. The explosions in everything the Avengers did. Richard Meltzer’s racist rant. He later asked me if the reason I didn’t invite him to contribute to ‘Stranded’ was because of that. I said yes. He said, Don’t you realize what I said was meant to offend people like you? I said if you think standing on a stage and saying Nigger over and over is a brave act meant to set you apart from cowards, it will usually work.
Some years ago, our daughter (born January 15, 1978, relevance forthcoming) was talking about someone she had met recently that she thought I might have heard of. Our daughter thought this woman might have been a punk rocker once upon a time. Her name was Penelope. "Penelope Houston?", I asked. Yes, that's it. Well, I said, the next time you see Penelope, tell her that your father saw her at Winterland the night before our daughter was born, opening for the Sex Pistols. Ah, the pre-cellphone days ... between each act, I would go to a pay phone, call my wife, and see if she'd gone into labor. She held out until the next day.
I saw them that same night. It was fraught partly for reasons I won’t go into, but mostly because of what was coming off the stage even before theses Pistols. The awfulness of the Nuns. The explosions in everything the Avengers did. Richard Meltzer’s racist rant. He later asked me if the reason I didn’t invite him to contribute to ‘Stranded’ was because of that. I said yes. He said, Don’t you realize what I said was meant to offend people like you? I said if you think standing on a stage and saying Nigger over and over is a brave act meant to set you apart from cowards, it will usually work.
One of my favorite passages in Lipstick Traces is when you wrote of the concert in the context of Quatermass and the Pit.