{"id":23324,"date":"2022-07-12T05:30:53","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T09:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=23324"},"modified":"2022-07-07T13:29:20","modified_gmt":"2022-07-07T17:29:20","slug":"sf-music-history-the-sex-pistols-at-winterland-january-14-1978","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2022\/07\/12\/sf-music-history-the-sex-pistols-at-winterland-january-14-1978\/","title":{"rendered":"SF Music History: The Sex Pistols at Winterland, January 14, 1978"},"content":{"rendered":"

Danny Boyle\u2019s new FX miniseries Pistol<\/i><\/a> has brought legendary punk rock group the Sex Pistols back into the public\u2019s mindset. But in terms of the band\u2019s importance and influence, they never really left.<\/p>\n

Formed in 1975, the Sex Pistols didn\u2019t invent punk; NYC\u2019s Television and the Ramones were among a coterie of groups making brash, stripped-down high-energy music a year earlier. But outside the hip musical cognoscenti, all were unknown.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Across the Atlantic in England, and with the help and direction of self-styled svengali Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols would create their own compelling take on the new musical style. From the start, the Pistols recognized that media and image were at least as important as the music; from their clothing and hair to their public statements, they cultivated outrage at every turn, building an ardent following along the way.<\/p>\n

Released in November 1976, the Pistols\u2019 debut single \u201cAnarchy in the U.K.\u201d was a blast of fury and a poke in the eye of the establishment. May \u201877 saw a second single, the confrontational \u201cGod Save the Queen,\u201d released to coincide with Queen Elizabeth\u2019s Silver Jubilee. Banned by the BBC, it nonetheless stormed to the top of the charts. Punk had gone above-ground.<\/p>\n

Chris Knab knew the album would be popular among his clientele at San Francisco\u2019s Aquarius Records (itself the subject of a 2022 documentary<\/a>); he scored two boxes of the band\u2019s LP Never Mind the Bollocks<\/i>, and Aquarius quickly became the Bay Area\u2019s exclusive source for the record. (In a punky turn of events, after selling all of the copies in a matter of hours, Knab was robbed at gunpoint and lost all the filthy lucre.)<\/p>\n

Perversely, when the band mounted a brief U.S. tour, they scheduled most of their shows in unlikely locales: Memphis, Baton Rouge, Tulsa and the like. The final date of that nine-day adventure would also be the group\u2019s final performance before splitting. Taking the stage at Winterland Ballroom on January 14, 1978, the Sex Pistols lit a fuse that would ignite a local music scene.<\/p>\n

Two local punk groups \u2013 the Nuns (with a pre-fame Alejandro Escovedo) and the Avengers with vocalist Penelope Houston \u2013 opened the Winterland show. (Negative Trend \u2013 a band featuring members who’d go on to form Flipper \u2013 took to the stage after<\/i> the Sex Pistols, by which time most in the audience had left. They never got to play.)<\/p>\n

It was an event<\/i>, one that would serve to galvanize scores of nascent Bay Area punk rockers. Having attended the show became a badge of honor. And the Sex Pistols\u2019 sound, attitude and look would inspire many in the Bay Area to chart their own musical paths. Existing bands like Crime, Negative Trend , the Dils and the Offs found validation for what they had been doing, and new groups (Dead Kennedys, Romeo Void, U.X.A. and many others) sprang up in the wake of the Pistols\u2019 Winterland gig.<\/p>\n

The Sex Pistols burned brightly and briefly. Singer Johnny Rotten concluded the Winterland performance<\/a> and signaled the end of the band as he simultaneously invented the mic drop: \u201cEver get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Danny Boyle\u2019s new FX miniseries Pistol has brought legendary punk rock group the Sex Pistols back into the public\u2019s mindset. But in terms of the band\u2019s importance and influence, they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23325,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,59],"tags":[4393,1932,4883],"class_list":["post-23324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-punk","tag-san-francisco","tag-sex-pistols","tag-winterland","cat-27-id","cat-59-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23326,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23324\/revisions\/23326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}