Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Remembering Nina Simone, born on this date in 1933. —Ed.

Nina Simone was truly one of a kind. A proud black woman unafraid to sing out about racial inequality—she would later say she wrote her defiant 1964 song “Mississippi Goddamn,” about the ugly events then occurring throughout the South, “in a rush of fury, hatred and determination”—Simone (who was later diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder) was notoriously irascible, tempestuous, and unpredictable.

Just how unpredictable? Well, she liked her guns, and once attempted to shoot a record executive whom she accused of stealing royalties. She also pulled a gun on a store clerk who refused to allow her to return a pair of shoes. (Suggestion to shoe clerks—give the woman her damn shoes!)

And in 1995 she actually succeeded in shooting a neighbor’s child with an air gun, unhappy because she found his laughter distracting. On the political front she went from preaching nonviolence to subscribing to the notion of violent revolution, and ultimately left the United States in protest against the Vietnam War to live out the remainder of her life in Barbados, Liberia, and various European countries, most notably France.

But all of that—with the exception of her fiery political beliefs and adamant commitment to civil rights, of course—is ultimately irrelevant, because in the end Simone will be judged a singer and songwriter of prodigious talent. From her beginnings as a lounge singer in Atlantic City in the mid-fifties Eunice Kathleen Waymon—who took the stage name Nina Simone because she didn’t want her family to know she was playing the Devil’s Music—developed a style of jazz singing all her own, and while her recorded output slowed after 1970 or so she continued to produce albums until 1993. (She died in 2003 in southern France.)

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Come late 1972, Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco wasn’t just another rock club on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip—it was a Glittering Glam Rock Oasis in El Lay’s country rock desert. There the tuned-in could dance to the latest glam rock singles from across the pond, rub elbows with the likes of Bowie, Iggy, the New York Dolls, and the Sweet, and ogle the jaded jailbait groupies who were one of the club’s chief draws—girls with names like Sable Starr and Lori Lightning. Said David Bowie, “Rodney single-handedly cut a path through the treacle of the sixties, allowing all us ‘avants’ to parade our sounds of tomorrow dressed in our clothes of derision.”

Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco didn’t cater to live music—the place was too small, and besides, it would have distracted from the real show, which was seeing and being seen. If you were the very wasted Iggy Pop, for instance, you spent most of your time staring at the very wasted Iggy Pop in one of the disco’s mirrors. If you were the Sweet, you were busy happily inhaling what Kim Fowley approvingly called the club’s “teenage stench.” Said author Nick Kent of Rodney’s underage vixens, “Talk to the bass player of the Sweet and he would probably say those were the best months of his life. But to someone with a bit of taste, who wasn’t just hopelessly addicted to pussy, it was pretty sordid.”

But while the latest Chinn and Chapman glam pop stompers were the listen of choice, the English Disco did have an impromptu house band of sorts, the very droogie-friendly Zolar X. LA’s first glam rock band took Bowie’s alien fetish to its logical conclusion, and remain one of glitter rock’s best kept secrets because they never managed to attract a record label. Indeed, their music didn’t see the light of day until 1982—and in the form of demos, no less.

And the release hardly made a splash; Barney Hoskyns, in whose 1998 book Glam! Bolan, Bowie and the Glitter Rock Revolution I first caught wind of Zolar X, wrote of them “Were they any good? We may never know, although Rodney Bingenheimer has some of their demo tapes.” 1982’s Timeless compilation on tres obscure Pyramid Records had obviously never crossed his radar.

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Remembering Robbie Bachman, born on this date in 1953. —Ed.

I may or may not have once described that inimitable Bachman-Turner Overdrive sound as meat and potatoes rock, minus the meat. And I may or may not have once called them Bachman-Turner Overweight. But if I did so, I was joking. I love BTO. They remain, no doubt about it, Manitoba, Canada’s finest ever contribution to the un-fine arts. The music critic Robert Christgau, a fan as am I, once summoned up the band’s lead-footed lumberjack charm with the words, “Clomp on.”

BTO were about as subtle as a blow to the head; imagine a Canadian Bad Company. They playfully entitled their 1974 LP Not Fragile as a retort Yes’ LP Fragile, because they felt their music could be “dropped and kicked” without suffering any damage. Hard rock doesn’t come any harder than this; when they call a song “Sledgehammer,” they’re not pussyfooting around like that English fop Peter Gabriel.

No, this is blue-collar rock, and to paraphrase Lynyrd Skynyrd, all you effete pencil pushers are advised to stay out of BTO’s way, especially when C. Fred Turner’s doing the singing. Compared to his gruff, no-nonsense vocals, Randy Bachman may as well be Mariah Carey.

It’s a pity that BTO is perhaps best remembered as the band that brought us “Takin’ Care of Business,” because while nobody in the band strikes me as a Mensa candidate, “Takin’ Care of Business” is too dumb for words. Me, I’d sooner remember them for such great songs as “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” “Roll on Down the Highway,” and “Let It Ride,” to name just a few of the band’s keepers.

Not Fragile’s title track is a midnight creeper, and could easily pass for a Spinal Tap song, and I mean that as a compliment. The only thing cooler than Turner’s singing, “Comin’ to you cross country/ Hoping boogie’s still allowed/ You ask do we play heavy music/ Well, are thunderheads just another cloud, And we do/ Not fragile, straight at you” is the way R. Bachman intones the words, “Not fragile” behind him. The guitar solo is pretty cool too.

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Celebrating Conor Oberst in advance of his birthdate tomorrow.
—Ed.

You know you’re in trouble when the most uplifting song on an LP is about a fatal airline crash. And yet in the case of the 2005 LP I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Bright Eyes’ front man Conor Oberst somehow makes it work. This album may not be a mood elevator, but it’s lovely from spiritually charged beginning to political end, thanks in part to Oberst’s excellent lyrics and thanks in part to the melodies, doleful as they often are.

Folk influenced, but with touches of musical discord, “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” left me cold at first, with the exception of the airplane crash classic, “At the Bottom of Everything.” But it slowly grew on me, like fuzzy green mold on the animated corpse of Rod Stewart. Oberst may truck in depression, and his idea of a happy song may involve mass death, but he’s not taking life lying down.

On “Ode to Joy” (which borrows, musically, from Beethoven), for instance, he defiantly faces down the darkness at noon, raging against the futility of war to the accompaniment of some cool guitar feedback before tossing in the great lines, “Well I could have been a famous singer/If I had someone else’s voice/But failure’s always sounded better/Let’s fuck it up boys, make some noise!” If all he’d written in his life were those last two lines, I would still love the man.

“We Are Nowhere and It’s Now” boasts a lovely melody and the vocals of Emmylou Harris, dueting with Oberst. Oberst is falling apart, what with the waitress at his favorite bar looking concerned and the drugs he’s taking giving him a “head full of pesticide.” The trumpet is great, the vocals are transcendental, and somebody else’s suffering has never sounded so good.

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A half century and change down the line, it boggles the imagination to think that Flint, Michigan’s Grand Funk (with or without that “Railroad”) were one of the biggest touring acts of the early Seventies. The proof lies in this shocking factoid—in 1971 (the Chinese “Year of the Funk”) the trio of Mark, Don, and Mel sold out Shea Stadium in 72 hours. It took The Beatles (The Beatles!) several weeks to do the same.

Manager Terry Knight was a key driver of the band’s success, and his messianic belief in their world importance took a hilarious turn in his liner notes (written on parchment scroll!) to the 1972 compilation Mark, Don & Mel. Wherein he compares “the Funk” to Moses, Cleopatra, and Napoleon and writes, “From the dawn of recorded history, stemming through the lifetimes of every man, woman and child who ever walked upon the earth, there have been but a handful whose fate it was to become known as Phenomenon.” It was quite a tribute to a band whose output included songs like “High Falootin’ Woman,” but you have to admire his grandiosity.

Knight’s hype, a manic album release schedule and over-the-top promotion (a huge billboard in NYC’s Times Square) helped fuel the fire, but Grand Funk did it mostly on their own, with nonstop touring and a high-energy, “obnoxiously loud” live show that emphasized shirtless torsos over finesse, subtlety, and great songs. Guitarist Mark Farner, drummer Don Brewer, and bassist Mel Schacher were three groovy dudes fashioning clunky, workmanlike grooves that not only achieved highly amplified mediocrity but came to personify it.

They were rock populists (fans loved ‘em, critics loathed ‘em) playing sledgehammer and potatoes rock for the zonked-out kid brothers of siblings whose musical palettes were more sophisticated, which is to say they were most likely listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. What a horrible time.

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Celebrating Peter Gabriel on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

When Peter Gabriel split Genesis to venture out on his own in 1975, his first solo album was 1977’s eponymous Peter Gabriel. In hindsight, he would judge it overproduced. But artists rarely prove the best judges of their own work. Come the end of his life Picasso would say, “What’s with the weird faces? Nobody looks like that.” Or maybe it was me who said that.

Gabriel featured an odd cast of characters. Gabriel brought King Crimson and art rock guitarist Robert Fripp and synthesizer innovator Larry Fast on board, while producer Bob Ezrin—best known for his work with Alice Cooper–lassoed Cooper guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, as well as bass player Tony Levin. Art rock met lowbrow shock metal on Gabriel, and it was Ezrin’s responsibility to make it work.

And he did, for the most part. One of the LP’s songs sounds like it crept in through a studio side door and bribed its way onto the record. But overproduced or not—and I fall into the camp that believes it isn’t—Gabriel is a powerful piece of work, and a move in the right direction by a guy who, come the punk revolution, would later say, “prancing around in fairyland was rapidly becoming obsolete.”

By “prancing” he might have been referring to Jethro Tull, or his band Genesis for that matter. At the close of each show of the live tour promoting 1975’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Gabriel would appear on stage in a ridiculous yellow body sock festooned with buboes that made him look like a day-glo leper. Prancing? More like dada gone horribly, horribly wrong.

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Celebrating Steve Hackett in advance of his 75th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Well, there goes another theory shot to shit. I always thought Genesis hit the aesthetic skids the moment Peter Gabriel split and drummer Phil “The Anti-Christ” Collins took over on lead vocals, but I’ve been listening to 1976’s Trick of the Tail, the first post-Gabriel LP, and I’m afraid I was sadly mistaken. Trick of the Tail is not a great album but it’s a very good one, packed with well-constructed tunes with lovely melodies that occasionally, but not too often, stray into the prog trap of technical virtuosity purely for virtuosity’s sake.

Peter Gabriel’s departure threw Genesis’ future into question. A Melody Maker writer went so far as to declare Genesis officially dead. But the band committed itself to proving it could make good music without Gabriel, and after a fruitless search for a new lead vocalist Collins, who wanted to turn Genesis into an instrumental act, reluctantly agreed to take on the vocal duties himself. Which in hindsight seems like a no-brainer, as Collins is a virtual vocal doppelganger for Gabriel and the obvious candidate as a replacement.

Album opener “Dance on a Volcano” has muscle and a fetching melody, to say nothing of some powerhouse drumming by Collins, whose exhortations (“Better start doing it right!”) sound convincing. There is some technical showing off for its own sake, especially at the end, but this one is more hard rock than prog, thanks to Steve Hackett’s guitar work and Tony Banks’ synthesizer. “Entangled” is a bit fey for my tastes, a quiet little pretty ditty, but it wins me over with its melody, which is simply lovely. There’s a beautiful synthesizer solo, which doesn’t attempt to mime classical tropes the way your more virulent and dangerous progmeisters would, and I like it for that.

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Celebrating Nigel Olsson on his 76th birthday. —Ed.

It took Elton John’s fabulousness a while to catch up to him. Until 1973, in fact, when Sir Elton abandoned the tortured singer-songwriter look (see the cover of 1972’s tres funky Honky Chateau) to reinvent himself as a glorious glam cartoon on the cover of double-LP masterpiece Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

At which point there was no looking back; on the cover of 1974’s Caribou he’s still a cartoon, but he’s A CARTOON IN REAL LIFE, right down to the tiger fur jacket (unzipped to reveal one very sexy chest pelt) and a pair of pink glasses of the sort I would later wear to disguise the fact that I was perpetually stoned.

And when it comes to fabulous how can you beat “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” which Elton almost didn’t include on the album because, well, let’s let Elton tell it: “That’s a load of crap. You can send it to Engelbert Humperdinck, and if he doesn’t like it, you can give it to Lulu as a demo.”

But if you thought Elton was simply couldn’t get any more Glam along came 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, on the cover of which Sir Pudgealot looks like A CARTOON OF A CARTOON, and is even riding a bucking piano like John Travolta in Urban Cowboy across a lurid background thronged with inexplicable beasties straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. When asked about the cover of the LP the human toon would say only, “Took me six years to crochet that.” Which just goes to show that Elton, who once leaped on stage during an Iggy Pop show in a gorilla suit and almost got beat up for his troubles, is a real wild card.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that Elton’s was Glam’s ultimate nebbish remake/ remodel unless you count Gary Glitter, who basically trundled himself up like a plump Christmas turkey in aluminum foil. But whereas Herr Glitter was a strictly English pop sensation, Elton was a worldwide entertainment phenomenon, and filling arenas in the Land of Opportunity across the pond, which he was celebrating in songs like “Philadelphia Freedom.”

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Celebrating Vince Neil in advance of his 64th birthday tomorrow.
—Ed.

When the news circulated about my sex tape with Pamela Anderson I went into a panic. What would my mother think? Then it came out that the sex tape in question featured Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Not so my mom. She called me in a huff and said “Here’s your chance to make something of yourself and you blow it. How am I going to face the ladies at my bridge club? Did you even have sex with the woman?” “I don’t think so,” I admitted. “I fell asleep while watching Baywatch and one thing led to another.”

Critics have been sniping at Mötley Crüe for decades. In a review of 1984’s Shout at the Devil the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau wrote “It’s hardly news that this platinum product is utter dogshit even by heavy metal standards,” but then Christgau’s an elitist and hates Guns N’ Roses too. God knows it’s easy to mock Mötley Crüe, both for their brand of hair metal and their fashion sense; their hair spray budget come the release of 1989’s Dr. Feelgood was $98,000 per week, and they were responsible for one-quarter of the world’s spandex sales. Without Mötley Crüe, many of Peru’s spandex farmers would have starved.

The important question when it comes to Dr. Feelgood is simple: Does it have a reason to exist? I would say yes. Vince Neil (vocals), Mick Mars (lead guitars), Nikki Sixx (bass and keyboards), and the aforementioned Tommy Lee collectively have the intelligence of a Cuban water rat, and their misogyny grows tiresome very quickly, but there’s no question they’re a top notch metal band. And a few of the songs on Dr. Feelgood—their first LP after being weaned from every mind-altering substance on planet Earth, as well as several they had to have shipped in special delivery from other regions of the galaxy—are well worth owning.

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You have to hand it to Radiohead. They’ve always been out there, mopes on horseback on the Mild Frontier of Sound, but in 2011 everybody’s favorite almost ambient band set their sights on a goal even their biggest detractors could get on board with—nonsentience. To quote band artwork guy Stanley Donwood, Radiohead were set upon producing a work that was “transitory… something that was almost not existing.”

At long last. Kid (Com)a!

Now you might have thought they’d do the expected thing and spend a week listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports over and over again. If it’s “almost not existing” you’re looking for, Eno is the perfect place to start. But if nothing else Radiohead are innovators, and they had a simply jolly idea on how to do it their way.

Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood describes their methodology, sort of: “We didn’t want to pick up guitars and write chord sequences. We didn’t want to sit in front of a computer either. We wanted a third thing, which involved playing and programming.” And that’s what they did, using turntables and vinyl emulation software and doing all kinds of looping and editing to create backdrops over which Thom Yorke wrote melodies and sang. According to producer Nigel Godrich, what was supposed to be a two-week experiment ended up taking six months. And at the end he was left with a “gigantic mess that took me about a year and a half to unravel.”

It sounds like the prelude to an LP destined for the Worst of lists of the rock world. Band Spends Inordinate Amount of Time and Money to Make Album People Don’t Even Know Is There. Now I’m no musical genius, but if I’d been Radiohead I’d have made an album consisting solely of Thom Yorke singing almost inaudibly over a backdrop of total silence. Goal accomplished!

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Celebrating Punky Meadows on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

Well I’ll be damned. The last time I spoke with Punky Meadows at his tanning salon in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, the legendary pretty boy guitarist for the long-defunct “Anti-Kiss” Angel told me he had no interest in returning to the rock stage, and was solely listening to, and playing his guitar along with, country music. But over the intervening years Meadows must have changed his mind, for he has just released his first-ever solo album, Fallen Angel, on Main Man Records.

Interviewing the famously androgynous Meadows, whose hair was invariably perfect and whose pout could beat Ben Stiller’s “Blue Steel” hands down, was an enjoyable experience, largely because Angel—which released six LPs during its career, which ended in 1981—was one of the most histrionic and inadvertently hilarious bands to ever mount a stage. All-white outfits, a giant head with laser beam eyes for a backdrop, Angel and its label Casablanca Records spared no expense in putting on a glamtastic hard rock show. The boys even appeared on stage amidst smoke via lifts under the stage floor, which once led to a real-life Spinal Tap moment when a band member’s lift refused to work. As he cried for help the band milled around on stage, uncertain of what to do. You’ve got to love them for that.

You’ve also got to love Punky for his good humor—when Frank Zappa produced a song called “Punky’s Whips,” which was anything but laudatory, Meadows gladly agreed to appear with Zappa on stage in his outrageous Angel outfit, to play the very song that mocked him. He could’ve held a grudge, but didn’t because as I can attest having spent time with the man, he’s a nice guy.

Anyway, new album, wow. Didn’t see that one coming from a guy who hasn’t played since 1981, and whose attitude towards the music biz was best demonstrated by the fact that after the demise of Angel he turned down offers to join not only The New York Dolls, but KISS, Aerosmith, and Michael Bolton to boot.

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Celebrating Alice Cooper on his 77th birthday. —Ed.

Could 1974’s Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits be the best album of the seventies? It’s a perverse and ludicrous notion, I know. But when I’m in the right mood, and I happen to be in the right mood right now, there isn’t an album I’d rather hear.

And is it such a perverse notion, when you come right down to it? I would direct the reader’s attention to Chuck Eddy, the perceptive and witty rock critic who wrote the brilliant, hilarious (and very much hated by metalheads) Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe. In said book Eddy puts Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits at No. 3 on his list. That’s right, No. 3, right below Led Zeppelin IV and Appetite for Destruction.

The fact is that Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits captures the highlights–albeit with some inexplicable omissions–of a band that melded razor-edged garage rock to grade B horror movie theatrics to create some of the most enthralling songs to emerge from your car radio in the early 1970s. I know plenty of purists who find greatest hits packages suspect. When it comes to making up “best-of” lists, greatest hits LPs don’t count. Me, I’m a populist and a utilitarian and I prefer Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits to Alice’s other product, although Love It To Death comes a close second. It’s time we let greatest hits LPs out of their ghetto!

Put simply, I like Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits more than any of the five albums whose tracks appear on it because Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits does not include any of the duds that made all five of those albums so uneven. 1971’s Love It to Death was as close as Alice Cooper came to producing a masterpiece, and is my AC studio LP of choice. Billion Dollar Babies finishes a not-so-close second. As for the other three, I don’t own them. Why don’t I own them? Because I have Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits. That’s what greatest hits albums are for.

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Celebrating Dave Davies on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Ray Davies is without a doubt the most fascinating and enigmatic figure to emerge from England’s whole Merseybeat movement. Was he a hard rocker or music hall romanticist, an ironically distanced and gimlet-eyed chronicler of an England in terminal decline or the biggest mourner at the funeral?

One can only conclude that he’s all of the above, and add that he was, during the late sixties, the smartest fellow on the entire English rock scene with the possible exception of the Bonzo Dog Band’s Vivian Stanshall. That he chose to exercise his estimable talents during this period writing seemingly modest vignettes—miniatures if you will—of middle-class English life should not stand in the way of our adjudging the results—in this case 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society—to be undeniable masterpieces.

The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society—which was released on the same day as the Beatles’ White Album—is probably Davies’ finest hour. Indeed, I for one think it’s the finest of the “concept” albums to be released by the great bands of the era, although I’ll hardly argue with you if you go with Pet Sounds. On its 15 tracks Davies attempts to do what Marcel Proust did with his seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu—namely, to recapture lost time, and in specific his lost childhood spent in the little village green near his home in Fortis Green.

The album is a wistful look back at a “simpler” time, albeit one tinged with knowing irony—the Ray Davies who sings, on the title cut, “God save little shops, china cups, and virginity” is, without a doubt, having us on. And yet there’s an edge of sincerity there too—why not save vaudeville and variety, if they’re sunny childhood memories? But the truly wonderful thing about this remembrance of things past is the way Davies holds out the hope that—as he sings in “Do You Remember Walter?”—memories remain even as people change.

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Mistrial? I say we try the album again and convict it this time because it’s guilty! Why, come to think of it, why don’t we do it now and get it over with! I’ll gladly serve as prosecutor! And I’ll settle for nothing less than the death penalty!

And rest assured I’ll be issuing peremptory challenges to the likes of knee-jerk Rock ’n’ Roll Animal apologists like Robert Christgau. He’d have acquitted an album of Lou sharting to the accompaniment of a calliope, while singing It’s a Beautiful Day’s “White Bird” in Farsi. Or worse, Lou rapping, as he does on Mistrial’s “The Original Wrapper.” In the original trial (I’ve studied the transcript carefully) the song was excluded from evidence on some legal technicality or other. Not this time.

Two Months Later

Well, it’s over. The trial was held at Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on January, 15, 2025, despite the defense’s attempt to have it held in American Samoa. A victory for yours truly, a bona fide attorney (I received my law degree from one of those children’s claw machines where you can win prizes like highly flammable teddy bears and bottles of highly combustible cheap tequila) because let’s face it—everybody in the Big Apple knows Lou Reed was an insufferable jerk. You could fill a book with people calling Lou Reed an insufferable jerk. Most of them were his friends, who tended to dive into open sewer grates at his approach because he possessed a gift for fucking over his friends that bordered on the supernatural, and which he actually acknowledges on Mistrial’s (1986) “Don’t Hurt a Woman”:

“I was angry, I said things I shouldn’t say
I must have lost control
Sometimes something clicks in my head
And I’m not myself anymore.”

A written confession if ever I’ve ever heard one.

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Celebrating John Lydon on his 69th birthday. —Ed.

Okay, so in everybody’s life there comes a day so bleak that not even Joy Division can do it justice. And on that day there’s only one recourse: to crank up Public Image Ltd.’s Second Edition. John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols band’s sophomore release, also known as Metal Box because it initially saw light as a metal 16mm film canister containing three 12” 45rpm records in 1979, was re-issued in 1980 as a double LP.

But regardless of format it was designed to brutalize the listener with music that was as remorselessly and relentlessly down-in-the-mouth as it was utterly hypnotizing, thanks to Lydon’s deranged vocal stylings, Jah Wobble’s loping and rhythmic dub-inspired bass, and Keith Levene’s splintered and utterly unique guitar riffs. Me, I find it soothing when I’ve reached the end of my tether; it lets me know I’m not alone.

Lydon was wise to abandon punk rock; he’d said everything that needed saying in that genre and knew damn well it was a dead end. And it’s a credit to his musical knowledge—which was far more wide-ranging than anyone would have given him credit for—that he went the avant-garde dub route.

Sure, the Sex Pistols posed an existential threat to everything that had come before them; but Second Edition is downright SCARY at times, and sounds every bit as demented as the Sex Pistols did menacing. Plus you could dance to it, as the band’s legendary (and hilarious) performance on American Bandstand proved.

The “death disco” (the alternative title of the song “Swan Lake”) of Second Edition marked a radical move away from the (relatively speaking) more conventional punk of 1978’s First Issue, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Lydon was not interested in making music for the masses.

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