ynchronicity wound a couple of stray threads together and prompted a kind of a little landslide of mini-revelation to hit me today.
It started like this:
Girlfriend - i don't know why - suddenly had an old "Tomorrow Show" with Tom Snyder from Youtube playing through her computer. It was an interview I'd never seen from about 1983 with an incredibly youthful looking Clash. They were so
nice. Not in a pejorative way, like when a child shows you some stupid drawing and you say it's "nice" and "interesting" because it betrays not only no shred of discernible talent but also not the least clue what the intent might have been to start with. Not that kind of "nice." The regular kind. Like they looked like a bunch of scruffy nice-boys in a band popular with the kids bantering with a talk-show host. Mick Jones did punch a teddybear, but only after Joe Strummer had cutely cuddled it. Okay, maybe there was a little irony in the cuddle, but I still thought it was cute. And Jones' teddy-punch was hardly a basting, it was kinda cute and all ironic and playful. And I was sitting there admiring Joe Strummer - even as he implied he might still be squatting because rents in London were just too high - because he'd already poured God-knows how much dosh into making his teeth all straight and pretty. Which way back in the day, I recall, had some snot-nosed little shits shaking their heads and wagging their tongues about how that was some kind of anti-punk sell-out move. I mean, you know what his snaggly old teeth looked like BEFORE he got the work done? They looked
uncomfortable. I remember thinking, though at the time I was still a snotty little shit in short pants my own self, "Fuck a bunch of anti-dentistry judgmental bullshit. Good for him!" And hoping I'd have the same good sense if I were in his position.
Okay. I'm begging patience with my long and snaking windup before what I suspect may be a fairly slow and underwhelming pitch. Skip a bit if you like, or skip it all. I'm enjoying myself - so!
As I watched Tom Snyder for the first time since about 1981, when I was probably a junior in high school, I remembered watching his infamous
Public Image, Ltd. interview when it was first aired. I've told people ever since I saw it on its original airdate. I was mightily impressed with Misters Lydon and Levine. I could see Keith Levine was completely loaded even at that tender age. And I could see that John Lydon was being a brat, but I think that was the point. At the very end of that episode, in the last little 30 second bit of show before the credits, Tom Snyder had looked into the camera and bitterly spat something like "Well, I apologize to my viewers for tonight's show. But I had no idea how horribly my guests would behave, they were entirely different this afternoon. Anyway, if anyone wants {dripping with sarcasm... "as
if"} a transcript, send me a penny..."
So, because I used to write away to bands, fan clubs, the PotUS, and anyone else I felt like back then, I promptly wrote a short request for a transcript, stuffed it in an envelope with a penny dutifully included, called Manhattan directory assistance and got NBC's mailing address, and bunged the thing in the mail next day. Sure enough, after a little while, I got a nice big envelope back from NBC with a hasty and kind of sloppily transcribed manuscript of the evening's chat. With a shiny penny - very possibly my own - taped to the first page. Couldn't tell if that were a kind of dig or if they just didn't know what to do with the stupid penny, but it seemed kinda funny. Still does, now I think of it.
And for years I treasured that stupid transcript, and now and again would drag it out and reread my favorite parts. And because I actually had the transcript and reread bits a lot and the whole thing occasionally, I retold the interview with some confidence that I was being fairly reportorial and accurate.
So after we both fondly watched the young men who were then
The Clash, I told GF about the existence of the PiL interview and a couple of funnier moments (briefly), and the transcript I used to have. And then, naturally, noticed a link right beside the Clash clip that went to the PiL clip (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OirTyITUJ1Y).
Watching it was astonishing. Though I was close enough on most of the words (thank you, transcript), I'd badly munged reporting the atmosphere and the mood and affect of the three guys. And it was a funny feeling, because I think that what I remembered is what it really felt like at the time. And not because I was so different in particular, but because TV and chat shows and media and everything was so different... at least to some significant degree. Sure, I'm different. My grown-up self has a different - often appreciably different - perspective on almost every fucking thing than my 16 or 17 year old self had. But I had the strong feeling that the kind of difference in my memory of that interview and the way it looks now was fundamentally different than the usual. I remembered Tom Snyder having a real fit, but in fact he just looked kind of peeved. I remembered so distinctly how apparent his total meltdown was when he turned to the camera before a commercial break and asked rhetorically, "Isn't this fun gang?" But on re-watching, again, he just looks like a mildly peeved asshole. I think that TV personality meltdowns - not to mention reality TV meltdowns and the constant seething and fucking pathological hate constantly boiling out of FOX news - has changed the standard for what constitutes a "meltdown." And by the same sort of logic, Johnny Lydon looked far less provocative and outre. He seemed much more a run-of-the-mill TV brat. One I still particularly enjoyed, though. I don't like many bratty celebrities, but his brand of brattiness still appeals - maybe it's that I find him unaccountably charismatic or that he's at least fractionally more clever than the run-of-the-mill smartass... not exactly sure. Anyway.
Don't get me wrong -- the clip was still funny for the same reasons it was funny the first time. Johnny and Kieth fucking with the uptight chat-show host and the uptight chat show host going whole hog to rise to the bait and cede some measure of control of his show to the snotty Lydon and addled Levine. Snyder was clearly agitated and that's what they wanted - so it was funny. But it was funny much more like other stuff is funny watching it today. We've seen smartaleck shenanigans that are way more provocative and over-the-top, and we've seen people (Bill O'Reilly for instance?) be far more ballistic and angry with smartalecks. So the bar got moved. But I wasn't watching closely enough to notice it as it migrated along. It moved and I was totally unaware it moved.
So, at this point a little brainteaser arises on the way to the fucking point I'm trying to get around to making. Is the way I've been telling that interview a more or less accurate historical picture of the moment than you get actually watching the clip on youtube? I mean, my telling captures the mood and feeling of that time and the outrageousness of what was going on in a way that the actual clip - considering the bar has moved - just doesn't. Boils down to another question of which kind of truth is preferable to another, I guess.
So I had these two interviews suddenly come into my consciousness at once this AM. First I was stunned by how innocuous a bunch of good-hearted scruffs the Clash circa 1983 appeared to me now (from an interview with Snyder I'd never seen) and how much more naive and innocent Lydon and his silly taunting seemed in today compared to how it had felt back in 1981. And with those two factors, I found myself performing a little simple mental algebra, and was forced to wonder how the Clash would've looked to me had I seen that interview the first time it aired.
Would Strummer's insinuation that he might still be a squatter have seemed less like a slightly silly bit of largely harmless disingenuousness? Cuz that's all I got out of it, really, watching him this morning. And would their claim that they weren't doing the band so much to be entertaining as they were trying to "deliver news" seemed at all fresh or of any particular interest? Cuz it just sounded like one of those things "serious" rock bands and nasty gangsta rap acts from the 90s always say when I heard it this AM. It didn't have any weight at all. Just another fucking thing to say.
But then I think about how listening to the Clash was not at all like listening to just a great rock band back then. It was a fucking wholesale motherfucking REVELATION. Lester Bangs calling them "the only band that matters" and that making sense to me - I still totally get that he wasn't just being effusive, in some important and fundamental sense he really fucking MEANT that. Cuz I felt it, too. The Clash blew open whole new possibilities for tender teenage snot me - revelatory new ways of thinking about what rock music could be, what pop culture could be, what was wrong with everyfuckingthing and why and how the world was all fucked up. It WAS news, goddammit, to ME. And not just to me, I know it. I know that they scared people and pissed people off and that they were REALLY that different.... as well as energizing and beginning to open the eyes of a whole bunch of kids and people who heard them kinda like I did.
So I guess that the final pitch was even less revelatory than what I'd planned when I started whinging on at the beginning of this thing, but here goes... underhand, softball.
I think we all tend to forget sometimes how really fucking enormous the
Sex Pistols and the
Clash and the
Ramones and
Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers and all those bands really were. And I think we tend to forget that the punk rock explosion was more than just a mindblowingly fun hoot or a silly and affected little bubble. Even at this very moment - RIGHT NOW - I can hardly believe that it was also a real and radical and transformative thing. The idea seems like the hyperbolic hyperventilating of some old crank, or at least some kind of romantic idea about an important moment in my personal history. I worry that saying this will just make me look foolish or insincere. I mean, how could pop music have EVER really been any kind of serious factor - it was just just a bunch of innocuous but bratty provocateurs, right? Like Lydon and Levine on the Tomorrow Show?
