Monday, January 7, 2013
Revisited Sex Pistols' Atlanta gig turned 35 this weekend
Posted by Chad Radford @ChadRad on Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 11:11 AM
In case you missed it over the weekend, January 5 marked a significant date for Atlanta music history. It was the 35th anniversary of the Sex Pistols' American debut at the Great Southeast Music Hall. The venue, formerly located in Lindbergh Plaza, is long gone now. There was a K-Mart right near there for years; now it's all part of a mixed use living-shopping monstrosity ... I guess Johnny Rotten may have been onto something with the whole "no future" mantra after all.
Anyway, check out CL's Music Editor Murray M. Silver Jr.'s nod to the show (published Jan. 7, 1978), and breathe in the rich irony of his tough critical stance: " ...whether or not there is any merit to the movement is debatable ..."
In the opening salvo of his Jan. 16, 1978 review for Village Voice, self-anointed "Dean of American Rock Critics" Robert Christgau opined: "If the Sex Pistols believe that by skipping punksymp sanctuaries like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Detroit on their first American tour they'll get to confront the true Amerika head-on, then I hope they take their debut to heart, because they opened in a shopping center."
Sounds like Atlanta to me ...
Christgau went on to write:
"Mere sensationalism - the Pistols aren't especially ugly. Guitarist Steve Jones, a beefy bloke in a flash red-and-black stage suit, and bassist Sid Vicious, who bared his long, scrawny chest after the first song, did contort their faces into nominally hideous sneers and grimaces, but the drummer, Paul Cook, who was wearing a mint Warner Bros. Never Mind the Boolicks T-shirt, didn't even bother with that. And Rotten was beautiful. With the layered look of a busker in the Piccadilly subway - ill-fitting overcoat, suitcoat, vest, shirt, necktie - he reeled around generating charisma like there was no future. Rotten's presences defies superlatives; take away the mocking, wistful grin and the awkward-seeming poses he strikes in the middle of getting his body from one place to another and you'd still have those preternatural eyes, eyes like blue Christmas-tree lights that go on and off with some irrefutable logic of their own. Midway through the set Bob Regehr, the Warners a&r chief who signed the Pistols and whose career may well depend on theirs, strode over and shouted: "Christgau, I don't care what happens any more, they're all right. It was all worth it and Johnny Rotten is a fucking superstar." I know what he was feeling - this boy is one of a kind."
Continue reading Christgau's review of the show ...
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