Got quite a kick out of watching “Pistol,” the six-part mini-series (on FX and Disney+) directed by Danny Boyle – known for such films as “Shallow Grave,” “Trainspotting” and “Slumdog Millionaire” – and based on the memoir “Lonely Boy: Tales from a Pistol” by Sex Pistols guitarist turned Los Angeles radio DJ Steve Jones. Which sets me a bit apart from many of the critics compiled online at Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, which doesn’t bother me but I find interesting (and I intend to address in a future column).
I’ll pull rank on many who weighed in on the show by pointing out that, in a way, I was sort of there: out at the New York City clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City where the Big Apple’s punk/new wave scene was burgeoning and twice visiting London, where “Pistol” is set and was filmed, in the fall of 1977 right around the time that the notorious album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” was released. The look at atmosphere of “Pistol” feels right for the times to me.
When I returned to New York with that album, as yet not officially released in the US, I put it on the turntable, dialed the volume up high, and broke out in hilarious laughs of joy as it blasted from my stereo speakers. It was a fierce one-two punch at all the pretensions and occasional downright silliness that had begun to plague rock music in recent years, offering a much-needed corrective of returning to the music’s electric guitar-driven basics. To me the sonic blast of it all was less the snarling anti-establishment vocals of front man Johnny Rotten neé John Lydon and more Jones’s crackling, roaring guitar chords. As the musical heart of the band and the most truly “punkish” of the combo – a larcenous working-class lad who stole musical equipment from English rock stars. His story provides an effective way into the Sex Pistols’ tale.
As an aside, one of my big regrets as a music journalist was not taking the opportunity to see the Pistols live on their brief tour of America in January of the following year. I was visiting my parents for the Christmas/New Year’s holiday in the Dallas/Fort Worth area when they were booked to play the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, a long-running country music venue that was once the home base of Western swing legend Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, where the bar had been run by Jack Ruby, who shot and killed accused John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The bizarre mismatch of band and venue seemed like it would be as interesting as the band’s performance. The show was just a few days after my scheduled return flight to NYC. And I considered changing my ticket to catch the gig, now the stuff of legend. But I figured they would play New York as most every touring musical did. But just a few days after the Dallas show the band broke up following a concert in San Francisco. Oh well …
Boyle brings a slightly cartoonish quality to telling the story, which is quite fitting, as much of punk rock and its culture was almost like it had emerged from some anarchistic and twisted comic book. And he very wisely had all the musical concert performances played live by the actors, so rare in the rock biopic genre as to be all but non-existent (save the performances in one of the first movies in the genre, “The Buddy Holly Story”).
The characters feel human, and as much as the Pistols sang about anarchy and destruction, there’s a warm beating heart within the movie and in Jones along with his onscreen relationship with Chrissie Hynde (of The Pretenders), dramatically expanded in “Pistol” to enhance the story arc. Yeah, this happens a lot in these music biopics and TV series. This conflation, unlike most all of them, is fine with me.
In the end, “Pistol” happens to be slightly delinquent fun that largely gets the broad strokes of history, the atmosphere of the place in time and the people right.
So never mind the critics, here’s “Pistol.”
Book: “Why Patti Smith Matters” by Caryn Rose – Part of the Music Matters series from the University of Texas Press, this smart tome that intertwines critical assessment with biography and the author’s passion for her subject underscores why musician/poet/National Book Award-winning author Smith was the goddess of New York City’a punk rock scene and now, nearly 50 years later, she’s an icon whose influence and eminence mark her as one of rock music’s landmark artists.
TV Documentary: “Plague at the Golden Gate” – When the Bubonic Plague broke out in San Francisco in 1900, the scenarios that followed had strong parallels to what we’ve experienced the last few years with COVID-19. This fascinating PBS American Experience doc offers a prime example of the famed Yogi Berra saying about “deja vu all over again.”
Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email robpatterson054@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2022
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