I noticed on Facebook -- courtesy of local photography hero Allan Tannenbaum -- that it's been, *gulp*, thirty-five years this week since Sid Vicious was led out of the Chelsea Hotel in handcuffs under suspicion of murdering then-girlfriend Nancy Spungen.
Three-and-a-half decades after the fact, there's still a lot of speculation over whether Sid really was the guilty party in this particular matter. The surrounding fog of punk mythology hasn't made divining the genuine facts of the case any easier, being that most of the characters involved have been reduced to cartoon characters. Some might further allege that they reduced themselves into cartoon characters to begin with, but that's a different argument.
Personally speaking, by this time this all went down in October of 1978, I was literally a day away from turning a ripe 11 years old. I'd heard the name "Sex Pistols" from some of my classmates (notably the preternaturally hip Zachary T. who -- even as a fellow snot-nosed fifth grader -- was light years ahead of the rest of us in terms of clueing into what was cool), but was still otherwise obsessed with KISS and "Star Wars." That would soon change.
I do remember watching the news reports about the case on the local stations, and naively wondering how it was that this lanky, spiky-scaled gent landed such a fitting surname. I probably didn't give it another thought until my friends Ralph M. and Brad O. convinced me to stop listening to KISS and Queen and check out Never Mind the Bollocks.
Today, the name Sid Vicious packs about as much genuine menace as the name Count Chocula, but I still can't walk west on 23rd street and pass the Chelsea Hotel without a `Pistols tune blaring through my head. I doubt I'm alone in that capacity.
Recent Comments