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the dormitory towns will only know how to destroy. Much can be expected from the meeting of these two forces: it will define the revolution.”
    So one heard when Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s; so one might have heard, anyway.
IN 1975
    In 1975 a teenager who would be called Johnny Rotten turned himself into a living poster and paraded down London’s King’s Road to World’s End—the end of the street—with “I HATE” scrawled above the printed logo of a Pink Floyd t-shirt. He dyed what was left of his chopped-off hair green and made his way through the tourist crowds spitting at hippies, who tried to ignore him. One day he was pointed out to a businessman who was attempting to put together a band. The drummer remembered the teenager’s audition, which took place in front of a jukebox, the boy mouthing the words to Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen”: “We thought he’s got what we want.Bit of a lunatic, a front man. That’s what we was after: a front man who had definite ideas about what he wanted to do and he’d definitely got them. And we knew straight away. Even though he couldn’t sing. We wasn’t particularly interested in that because we were still learning to play at the time.”
    It may be that in the mind of their self-celebrated Svengali, King’s Road boutique owner Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were never meant to be more than a nine-month wonder, a cheap vehicle for fast money, a few laughs, a touch of the old épater la bourgeoisie. He had recruited them out of his store, found them a place to rehearse, given them a ridiculously offensive name, preached to them about the emptiness of pop music and the possibilities of ugliness and confrontation, told them they had as good a chance as anyone to make a noise, told them they had the right. If all else failed they could be a living poster for his shop, which always needed a new poster: before settling on Seditionaries in 1977, McLaren called his store Let It Rock in 1971, when it sold Teddy Boy clothes and old 45s; Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die in 1973, when it sold biker clothes and youth-gang accessories; Sex in 1974, when it sold bondage gear, nonmarital aids, and “God Save Myra Hindley” t-shirts commemorating the woman who along with Ian Brady had in 1963 and 1964 committed the Moors Murders—child murders, which Hindley and Brady recorded on tape as an art statement. It may also be that in the mind of their chief theorist and propagandist, 1960s art student and had-been, would-be anarchist provacateur Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were meant to set the country on its ear, to recapture the power McLaren had first glimpsed in Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” (“I’d never seen anything like it,” he said once, recalling a fellow pupil singing the song at a grammar-school talent show. “I thought his head was going to come off”), to finally unite music and politics, to change the world. Thrilled by the May 1968 revolt in France, McLaren had helped foment solidarity demonstrations in London and later sold t-shirts decorated with May ’68 slogans—even if, in his shop, “ I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES ,” the slogan of the Enragés, the tiny cabal of students that began the uprising, mainly helped closeted businessmen work up the nerve to buy McLaren’s rubber suits. McLaren would sell anything: in late 1978, afterex–Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious was arrested for the murder of Nancy Spungen, his girlfriend, McLaren rushed out “ I ’ M ALIVE—SHE ’ S DEAD—I ’ M YOURS” Sid Vicious t-shirts (to help raise money for Vicious’ defense, McLaren said). But not long before, he’d been carrying around copies of Christopher Gray’s
Leaving the 20th Century,
the first English-language anthology of situationist writings, which he and Jamie Reid had helped publish in 1974.
    American version of Malcolm McLaren’s shop
    He tried to get people to read it. “It’s