Night Beat Part 6

"Just where did the name Sun Bear come from, anyway?"

For the first time in our conversations, Keith looks genuinely shy, almost humble. "It's a very light-hearted reason," he replies. "While we were on that tour I went to a zoo, where I saw a Sun Bear, a small bear that looks real gentle, like a house pet, and doesn't exist anywhere but in j.a.pan. The next day I had lunch with one of the j.a.panese recording engineers, and I asked him about the bear because I remembered its face-a real friendly little face. And he said, 'Yeah, it's a beautiful bear, but if you get close enough, it knocks you about three blocks down the street.'

"I just liked that whole idea of an animal that looked like it would be nice to get close to, but if you did, it would shock your very conception of life."

It's my guess that if it ever came to blows between Keith Jarrett and a Sun Bear, that little bear might have to reexamine a few conceptions of its own.

life & death in the u.k.: the s.e.x pistols, public image ltd., joy division, new order, and the jesus and mary chain Johnny Rotten was one of the few terrific anti-heroes rock & roll has ever produced: a violent-voiced bantam of a boy who tried to make sense of popular culture by making that culture suffer the world outside-its moral horror, its self-impelled violation, its social homicide. His brief, rampaging tenure with the s.e.x Pistols-the definitional punk band of the late 1970s-had the effect of disrupting rock & roll's sound, style, and meaning, unlike any pop force before or since. Even seeing the band only once, as I did at San Francisco's Winterland in January 1978, brought home their consequence with an indelible jolt. That night, Rotten danced-waded, actually-through a mounting pile of debris: everything from shoes, coins, books, and umbrellas, all heaved his way by a tense, adulatory crowd. Draped in a veil of smoke and sweat, the scene resembled nothing so much as a rehearsal for Armageddon, and Rotten rummaged through it all like some misplaced jester. But when he sang-railing at the crowd, jeering the line, "There's no future, no future, no future for YOU!"-he was predatory and awesome. It was the most impressive moment in rock & roll I have ever witnessed.

The morning after the show, the other s.e.x Pistols and their manager, Malcolm McLaren, fired Rotten. McLaren, who conceived the group and purportedly engineered its rise and fall, charged that Warner Bros. (the Pistols' American label) had purposefully driven a wedge between Rotten and the rest of the band, and that Rotten himself-who had influenced punk ethos more than any other single figure-had turned into a glory-basking rock star. "What really happened," Rotten will tell me more than two years after the band's end, "is that the other Pistols [guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook] wouldn't speak to me anymore. Malcolm flew them around in airplanes, while Sid [Vicious] and I traveled across America with roadies. You come here to see the f.u.c.kin' country, not fly over it." It is nearly 1 A.M., and as we talk we are seated in the bar at a Los Angeles Sunset Strip hotel, drinking rum and c.o.kes.

"If you really want to know, I think the s.e.x Pistols failed . . . miserably, Rotten says, spouting the last word with a thespian flourish. "Actually, it was a bit embarra.s.sing. The other people in the band never understood what I was singing about."

IN CONTRAST TO Johnny Rotten, John Lydon-who rose from the ashes of Johnny Rotten and the s.e.x Pistols to form the experimentalist postpunk band Public Image Ltd.-impresses some erstwhile followers as just a plain antagonist: a tedious, ill-affected artiste who deserted his own dread visions for fear they might destroy him. In a way, that may be true. By dealing exclusively in abstract images and accidental sounds, Lydon no longer has to run the risk of caring-which means he no longer needs to run the risk of meaning. (Director Julien Temple-who made the s.e.x Pistols feature The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, and would later film Absolute Beginners-once told me: "What John understands is that if people love you, they have control over you, because they can always say they don't love you and destroy you. But if they hate you, and you hate them in return, then you're freer.") It's also true that Lydon rankles critics and punk diehards alike because he's repudiated his past. By his own admission, the music he has made with PiL aims to devastate cla.s.sicist rock & roll-including punk rock-by blackening its themes and confounding its forms. It's as if, after distancing himself from the merciless primitivism of the s.e.x Pistols, Lydon found a fatal flaw in rock & roll itself-namely, that it imparted the illusion of order and transcendence-and decided to remake the genre. In creating PiL, Lydon announced that he wanted to form a group that was "anti-music of any kind. I'm tired of melody." To help him realize this end, Lydon recruited two friends-cla.s.sically trained guitarist and pianist Keith Levene, who'd been a founding member of the Clash, and Jah Wobble, a novice ba.s.sist and reggae enthusiast. Lydon also saw all this new musical change as a chance to debunk the myth of Johnny Rotten. (Actually, he delights in interchanging the surnames: on PiL's alb.u.m jackets he lists himself as John Lydon, though in conversation he generally refers to himself as Johnny Rotten.) "Malcolm and the press had a lot to do with fostering that Rotten image," Lydon says. "I chose to walk away from it because otherwise you have all these people out there waiting for you to kill yourself on their behalf.

"I mean, look what happened to Sid," he adds, referring to ba.s.sist Sid Vicious' arrest for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, and his subsequent 1979 death by heroin overdose. A plaintive look crosses Lydon's face, and he stares into his drink for a long moment. "Poor Sid. The only way he could live up to what he wanted everyone to believe about him was to die. That was tragic, but more for Sid than anyone else. He really bought his public image."

It is fitting then, that Lydon named his new group Public Image Ltd. ("The name," he says, "means just that: Our image is limited"), and that their debut single, "Public Image," was an indictment of the Pistols and McLaren. But the real focal point of the song, as well as the subsequent alb.u.m, Public Image, was the musical content: amorphous structures and unbroken rhythms, paired with minimal melodies and Lydon's hoodoo vocals. The concept had its roots in the drone and modal experimentalism of the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, avant-garde composer La Monte Young and the German group Can, while the actual sound mix resembled the prominent ba.s.s and deep-echo characteristic of reggae dub production. In actual effect, Lydon and PiL simply rerouted the Pistols' much vaunted anarchism, applying it to song structure, and in the process, auth.o.r.ed the first major attempt to transmogrify rock parlance since Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica.

The rock press, though, lambasted Public Image. Rolling Stone termed it "postnasal drip monotony," while England's New Musical Express dismissed it as a "Zen lesson in idolatry." (Warner Bros. declined to release the alb.u.m in America, even though PiL rerecorded and remixed parts of it.) Basically, PiL agreed with the critics: "They all slagged it," says Keith Levene, "because it was self-indulgent, nonsimplistic, and non-rock & roll. Those are all good points. But that's the kind of music we intend to make. We don't want to be another Clash, making old-fas.h.i.+oned, twelve-bar rock & roll."

But in 1980, critical perspectives on PiL start to s.h.i.+ft. In part, that's because the group has come to be seen as progenitors of the English postpunk movement, which at the time includes electronic, theorizing, doleful bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division, and many others. It's also because PiL's own music matured measurably. With Second Edition (originally released in November 1979 in Britain by Virgin Records, in limited edition as Metal Box-a set of three 12-inch forty-fives packaged in a film canister), Levene fas.h.i.+oned a mesmerizing, orchestral guitar and synthesizer mesh that embroiders and enwraps the dance beat-oriented rhythm section, while Lydon wrote some of his most forceful lyrics (particularly those to "Poptones," a deathly account of rape told from the victim's point of view, and "Swan Lake," a song about his mother's death).

"Now all the critics love us," Lydon says with a scornful smile. At 2 A.M. the waitress calls for last rounds. Lydon orders a double (I can't help but copy him), then he continues: "I don't trust all these people who praise us now. They're the same ones who waited until the Pistols were over before they accepted them. And I'm not sure the press appreciates at all that Public Image is more than just a band I'm in."

But, I note, when people open Rolling Stone and see a picture of Lydon only-since Keith Levene wouldn't be photographed-doesn't that help reinforce the notion that PiL is, indeed, Lydon's band?

His eyes flicker. "They can think what they f.u.c.kin' want," he snaps. "I gave up a long time ago bothering about people's opinions and impressions. If Keith don't want his picture taken, that's fine. It's a band decision, is it not? Just appreciate it for that."

BUT, OF COURSE, PiL was John Lydon's band-which would become inarguably plain with the band's next (and probably best) alb.u.m, Paris au Printemps.

Paris au Printemps (recorded live in France in January 1980 though never released in the United States) is the alb.u.m on which PiL's formlessness finally became formulated-which is to say that if they could reproduce their apparently inchoate, unpremeditated music letter-perfect live (and they could), then it wasn't really orderless or even all that experimental. Yet it was visceral. Guitarist Keith Levene, ba.s.sist Jah Wobble, and drummer Martin Atkins play momentously throughout, interweaving deliberate rhythms and backhanded melodies into a taut webwork of crosscurrent designs and motions. Lydon offers a stunning, protean vocal performance: by turns gleeful, derisive, virulent and, during "Chant" and "Careering," so terrifying-invoking images of mob rule one minute, murder the next-as to be almost unendurable.

But what we hear on Paris au Printemps is more than animated, frictional music: We hear the way that music can rub up against, even threaten, people who aren't ready for it. By the LP's second side, the crowd-a horde of recherche, loud-mouthed, self-conscious gothics-have had about all the cacophony they can handle. They want pogo beats, block chords, primal thrums-in short, the familiar punk mannerisms they know how to react to. Not getting these, they start to taunt Lydon, spitting jeers, demands, and audible gobs of phlegm at him. John Lydon returns the contempt, leaning lethally into his vocals, narrowing the distance between himself and the implied violence, turning the insensibility of the moment back into the faces of an audience he helped conceive but can no longer abide. "Shut up!" he barks at one point, his scorn echoing through the hall. "I'll walk off this f.u.c.king stage if you keep spitting . . . Dog!" Minutes later, at the close of "Poptones," that's exactly what he does, dropping his microphone on the saliva-soaked floor and stomping into the wings. In that moment, you can hear Lydon further remove himself from any conceivable culture or subculture that might contain him. He kisses off the whole oppressive orthodoxy of punk mindlessness, just as he once decried the manifest hopelessness of British society.

Little wonder that Paris au Printemps also depicts an end of sorts for PiL. Following the group's 1980 American tour, Martin Atkins (the finest drummer PiL's ever had; he made the music pounce where others made it loiter) left to form a puerile and comedic postpunk band, Brian Brain. Then, a few weeks later, Lydon, Levene, and hidden member Jeanette Lee (who handles much of PiL's business) parted company with Jah Wobble after he released two solo alb.u.ms in quick succession, charging that the ba.s.sist had used PiL backing tracks without permission.

THE FLOWERS OF ROMANCE-released in 1981-sounds as if it were recorded to scorn a myriad of losses. Only Lydon, Levene, Lee, and, on a strictly work-for-hire basis, Atkins make the music this time, and it's probably the most brutal, frightening music Lydon has lent his voice to since "Anarchy in the U.K." (A bit too frightening for PiL's British-based label, Virgin, which initially balked at issuing the new LP, claiming it was arrantly noncommercial. Meanwhile, Warner Bros., which declined to release either the first PiL alb.u.m or Paris au Printemps in America, grudgingly agreed to a small pressing.) In contrast to the group's earlier records-on which Levene and Lydon piled thick, splayed layers of guitars and synthesizers on top of thunderous, ba.s.s-heavy rhythm tracks until chance melodies and imperative tempos seemed to take perverse shape and then pull apart again-The Flowers of Romance pares PiL music down to a minimalist, primordial-sounding mix of mostly vocals and percussion. In the first cut, "Four Enclosed Walls," Atkins' drum shot cracks the air like rifle fire, and Lydon answers it with a quavering howl. From there, the track turns into a fierce drum-and-vocal dialogue, with Atkins pounding out an aberrant martial pattern and Lydon ululating through the clatter, chanting an obscure, dreamlike conjuration about Western dread and Islamic vengeance.

Later, in "Under the House"-in which John Lydon and Martin Atkins carry their colloquy to a harrowing peak-Lydon can't seem to separate the nightmares from wakeful terror. Something's after him: maybe a cadaver, maybe a mercenary, maybe even a bad memory-it's hard to say exactly what. Specters of fear, death, and flight stack up so fast that words and meanings cease to matter much. All that counts is the way the singer gives in to the momentum of his tale, letting animistic horror possess and propel him, as if he might fend off doom with its own likeness.

Almost everything on The Flowers of Romance pulls back, shrinks into s.h.i.+elding self-interest. The t.i.tle tune has already been described by certain critics as John Lydon's belated farewell to Sid Vicious (who, before joining the s.e.x Pistols, once belonged to a band called Flowers of Romance-named by none other than Johnny Rotten). And indeed, the song, with its disdainful references to failed friends.h.i.+ps and its resigned air of parting, sounds like some sort of remembrance. But it could just as easily be about what the lyrics purport: a ruined romance that Lydon had no difficulty leaving. For that matter, the singer manages to denigrate or refuse so many possible alliances over the course of this LP-s.e.xual commitment ("Track 8"), punk fandom ("Banging the Door"), and notions of musical accord in general-that sometimes the only ground he seems left with is the narrow path of his own hubris.

Suddenly, in the alb.u.m's final compositions, "Go Back" and "Francis Ma.s.sacre," the world closes in. "Go Back," which features Keith Levene's only flaring guitar part on the record, is a methodical, mocking sketch of life in Tory Britain, where the future has been banked on recycled mottos ("Improvements on the domestic front," gibes Lydon. "Have a cup of tea-good days ahead/Don't look back-good days ahead").

"Francis Ma.s.sacre," on the other hand, is about a future sealed off forever. It's a scanty, discordant account of Francis Moran-a man presently serving a life sentence in Ireland's Mountjoy Prison for murder. n.o.body-including Irish penal officials and Lydon's own representatives-cares to disclose any specifics about either Moran or his crime, and it's hard to tell from the lyrics alone (a yowling litany of "Go down for life/Go down for life") how Lydon feels. But the sheer desolating force of the music he and Levene make-a blaring, claustrophobic, rapacious tumult of atonal piano, metallic drums, and furious singing-seems to act out the pa.s.sions of murder while simultaneously seeking to annihilate those pa.s.sions, which (to me) seems as jolting a deed of protest as music can perform.

It's something like those incandescent moments in the s.e.x Pistols' "Bodies" or "Holidays in the Sun" when the singer sought to illuminate terror by embodying it. In "Francis Ma.s.sacre," though, John Lydon means to turn the terror outward-to level it against a world that contains so much pain and so many nightmares that the most reaffirming recourse available is a brutal, racking cry of unwavering outrage.

THE MUSIC OF Joy Division-an art-minded English postpunk band that initially struck reviewers as a tuneful version of PiL-sets forth an even more indelible vision of gloom. In fact, it's a vision so steeped in deathly fixations that it proved fatal: on May 18, 1980, the group's lead singer and lyricist, Ian Curtis-a shy, reticent man who'd written some of the most powerfully authentic accounts of dissolution and despair since Lou Reed-hung himself at his home in Macclesfield, England, at the age of twenty-three. According to journalistic accounts, he'd been depressed over failed love. According to his songs, he'd looked upon the horror of mortal futility and understood the gravity of what he saw: "Heart and soul-one will burn."

In the United Kingdom, Curtis' suicide conferred Joy Division with mythical status. The band's second and last alb.u.m, Closer (recorded just prior to Curtis' death and released shortly afterward by Factory), became one of the fastest-selling independent-label LPs in British history. By the end of 1980, it had topped several critics' and readers' polls as best alb.u.m. More significant, an entire legion of Joy Division emulators-most notably Section Twenty-Five, Crispy Ambulance, Ma.s.s, Sort Sol and the Names (names n.o.body now remembers)-cropped up around England, each professing the same icy pa.s.sion for sepulchral rhythms, minor-mode melodies, and mordant truths.

The danger in all of this grim-faced, wide-eyed hagiography, of course, is that it serves to idealize Curtis' death and ignores the fact that he contributed and submitted to the wretchedness he reviled by committing the act of self-murder. Why bother then with music so seemingly dead-end and depressing? Maybe because, in the midst of a movement overrun by studied nihilism and faddish despair, it's somehow affecting to hear someone whose conviction ranged beyond mere truisms. Maybe because Ian Curtis' descent into despair leaves us with a deeper feeling of our own frailty. Or maybe even because it's fascinating to hear a man's life and desire fading away, little by little, bit by bit. Yet none of that really says much about how obsessing Joy Division's music can be, how it can draw you into its desolate, chiaroscuro atmosphere and fearful, irretrievable circuits. Draw you in and threaten to leave you there.

ACTUALLY, JOY DIVISION didn't make all that much music. The group's earliest work-demo tapes recorded under the name Warsaw and a debut EP, Ideal for Living (some of which appeared in a later compilation)-was a worthy but hardly exceptional example of a band attempting to forge art-rock influences (mostly David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Roxy Music) and primitivist archetypes (some s.e.x Pistols, a little Who) into a frenetic counterpoise. By the time of their first LP, Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division had tempered their style, planis.h.i.+ng it down to a doleful, deep-toned sound that often suggested an elaborate version of the Velvet Underground or an orderly Public Image Ltd. In its most pervading moments-in numbers like "Day of the Lords," "Insight," and "New Dawn Fades," with their disoriented melodies and punis.h.i.+ng rhythms-it was music that could purvey Curtis' alienated and fatalistic sensibility. But it was also music that could rush and jump and push, and a composition like "Disorder"-or better still, the later single "Transmission," with its driving tempo and roiling guitars-seemed almost spirited enough to dispel the gloom it so doggedly invoked.

Yet Joy Division never really aspire toward transcendence. In fact, their most obsessive, most melodic piece of music, "Love Will Tear Us Apart," raises the possibility and then sadly shuts the door on it. A flurry of thras.h.i.+ng guitars and drums-cras.h.i.+ng out the same insistent backbeat that impels the Clash's "Safe European Home"-launches the song, then surrenders to the plaint of a solitary synthesizer and Ian Curtis' frayed singing. "When routine bites hard," he murmurs, "And ambitions are low/And resentment rides high/But emotions won't grow . . . /Then love-love will tear us apart-again." By tune's end, Curtis has run out of will, but the music hasn't. Thick, surging synthesizer lines-mimicking the hook from Phil Spector's "Then He Kissed Me"-surround and batter the singer as he half talks, half croons the most critical verse of his career: "And there's a taste in my mouth/As desperation takes hold/Yeah, that something so good/Just can't function no more."

Closer seems resigned to fatality from the start. It descends, with a gravity and logic all its own, from the petrifying scenario of "Atrocity Exhibition" (a story borrowed from J. G. Ballard about a world that proffers degradation of the flesh as sport) to the raw, raging "Twenty Four Hours," in which Curtis allows himself a last, longing glance at the fading vista of existence: "Just for one moment/Thought I found my way/Destiny unfolded/I watched it slip away."

But Closer doesn't stop there. Instead, it takes us through the numbing ritual of a funeral procession ("The Eternal") and then, in the mellifluent "Decades," into the very heart of paradise lost: We knocked on the doors of h.e.l.l's darker chambers.

Pushed to the limits, we dragged ourselves in.

Watched from the wings as the scenes were replaying.

We saw ourselves now as we never have seen.

Portrayal of the trauma and degeneration.

The sorrows we suffered and never were free.

The unknown now appears known, maybe even comforting. "We're inside now, our hearts lost forever," sings Curtis in a voice as rueful as Frank Sinatra's. Somehow, it's the alb.u.m's most beguiling moment.

In the end, Closer accedes to horror, settles into frozen straits of inviolable d.a.m.nation. The music turns leaden, gray, and steady because it means to fulfill a vision of a world where suffering is unremitting and nothingness is quiescent. Joy Division's art is remarkably eloquent and effective, yet it lacks the jolting tone of revolt that PiL's work, even at its most indulgent, boasts: that desire to attack and disarm the world, to make it eat its own hopelessness. Ian Curtis died for reasons that are probably none of our business, but it would seem, at least in part, that he killed himself to slay that portion of the world that so hurt and appalled him. John Lydon lives because he's figured out a way (more than once) to knock off the world and live beyond it.

Guitarist Bernie Albrecht, ba.s.sist Peter Hooke, and drummer Stephen Morris (the three surviving members of Joy Division) have, with a guitarist named Gillian, formed a group called New Order. This band faces not only the task of living up to its own mythic past, but of getting by the pain of that past and the shadow of Ian Curtis. New Order's initial single, "Ceremony" (reportedly written while Curtis was still alive), says that they probably can. It's a transfixing, vehement, big-sounding piece of music, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with taut cross lines of blaring guitars and an indomitable, bottom-heavy rhythm section. Behind it all, mixed somewhere along with the hi-hat so that his singing sibilates in pulsing waves, Bernie Albrecht makes a chancy vocal debut, telling an impa.s.sioned tale about bitter memories, ineradicable losses, and unbeaten determination.

Ironically, these images of resolve and recovery seem to suggest the same conviction that Joy Division-who, after all, took their name from the euphemism used to describe the prost.i.tute section of German concentration camps-intended to convey in the first place: that no horror, no matter how terrible, is unendurable. Maybe that sounds as joyless and morose as everything else about Joy Division's music, but it shouldn't. In this case, it's nothing less than a surpa.s.sing testament to the life force itself.

A FOLLOW-UP on PiL and New Order: I saw Public Image Ltd. on three occasions in the years surrounding the time I wrote the above stories (which was in 1980 and 1981). On each occasion, it became increasingly evident how hard-if not impossible-it would be for John Lydon to outdistance his past with the s.e.x Pistols. In truth, the audience simply wouldn't allow it.

At PiL's 1980 Los Angeles debut-at the city's downtown Olympic Auditorium-the band played terrifically and Lydon was plain transfixing, but the audience that a.s.sembled to celebrate the band's appearance, a crowd of thuggish-looking jar-head punks who eventually became dubbed the area's "hardcore" subculture, very nearly upstaged the show. It was the first time this audience had made its ident.i.ty felt in such a large, collective, and forcible way. And though its members perhaps couldn't relate to the abstract rhythms and forms at the heart of PiL's music, they knew Johnny Rotten was still a punk icon, and that was cause enough to turn the whole show into one long skirmish.

Lydon would remain stuck with that same crowd of punk holdouts who didn't care much for his changing ideas of music, but instead exalted the event (or myth) of his personality. When PiL played at the Pasadena Civic Center in 1982, members of the audience attempted to overrun or command the stage, and some scaled the towering speakers only to leap back onto the crowd below. Seeing PiL with that audience was both a tiresome and reckless experience. I spoke with many fans who vowed they would never see the band again.

I felt the same way, though not because of the audience so much as simply that, as good as PiL were, all their aspirations to innovation had begun to seem as tired and dated as the old rock & roll styles they had once set out to subvert. But when they played the Hollywood Palladium in June 1983, the main draw (at least for me) was the news that Keith Levene (who had written much of PiL's best music but had become increasingly undisciplined in the studio, and was a boor to boot) had quit the group. This forced Lydon to see if he could still rise to the task of leading a band.

Of course, the punk contingent in the audience didn't care much about Lydon's personal growth: They merely wanted to thrash in the spectacle of his presence. And though Lydon's manner still proved fearsomely charismatic, he seemed in many ways a much changed performer. He chatted, joked, and flirted with the audience. (When one excitable girl jumped onstage to give him a kiss, Lydon kissed her back, then gushed "Guess I must be a s.e.x symbol!") At times, Lydon's easy manner had the effect of poking fun at his own myth ("How many Johnny Rottens have we got out there?" he inquired of the ma.s.sed punks), but it was also meant to a.s.sure the audience, if not himself, that this new version of PiL still aimed to put music above mystique. And indeed, it turned out to be the most impressive performing version of PiL that I would see. Lydon had a.s.sembled an all new, tuxedo-clad group (he didn't mention their names) that not only did an exemplary job of replicating the former PiL's adventurous sound, but who added a new sense of sharpness and resiliency to it.

But as involving as the new PiL were, they still couldn't match the temerity of their audience. Throughout the group's near hour-long show, punk after punk would scrabble onstage from out of the pressed ma.s.s down front, and dance and flail around Lydon or try to pat his red-tufted head, until some beefy security hack would heft them off their feet and toss them over the heads of the audience. At times it would resemble a melee, but in truth it wasn't: It was a carefully orchestrated ritual (though the punks possessed a good deal more grace, and sometimes restraint, than the guards), and though the punks' behavior may have seemed an unnecessarily stupid, ruffian activity, it also made for a great spectator sport (probably a great partic.i.p.ant sport too, if you prefer bowling from the ball's perspective).

But all the audience's excitement, and the pleasure that some of us took in PiL's musical growth, seemed secondary to one generous, surprising, and revealing gesture by Lydon at the show's end. "We're going to do an oldie for ya," he said in his familiar mocking tone, as the band returned for their first encore. "Sing along-you know the words." With that, PiL vaulted into a roaring version of the s.e.x Pistols' greatest moment, "Anarchy in the U.K." It didn't have quite the startling, shearing effect that the Pistols' rendition of the song did at Winterland in 1978, in their final performance, but it was still d.a.m.n exciting, and the audience responded by thras.h.i.+ng in near-religious fervor.

In 1996, Rotten made a career out of that moment. He and the original s.e.x Pistols-guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, and the band's first ba.s.sist, Glen Matlock-re-formed for a tour of Europe and America. In one way, it meant nothing, not even nostalgia, since they were simply playing their old songs again but without the context of daring and risk that they brought to every stage they mounted from 1976 to 1978. In another way, it meant a great deal: The late-1990s s.e.x Pistols showed they were still up to the job of a.s.saulting rock & roll with as much venom and intelligence as anybody, and more important, their shows were reminders of what a d.a.m.n fine, indelible, and perfect body of rock & roll songwriting (matchlessly inventive anthems) they wrought in their brief, world-changing season twenty years prior. For those few nights in 1996, John Lydon was undeniably Johnny Rotten again, and it seemed wonderfully possible that rock & roll might still be the fiercest, most frightening popular art on earth.

NEW ORDER'S STORY also continued-in fact, still continues. More or less.

At first it was obvious that the band couldn't immediately surmount the loss of Ian Curtis, who had pretty much shaped and dominated Joy Division's thematic image. Some fans, in fact, felt his presence was so overpowering that it held the band back onstage. But for all of Curtis' deadly excesses, he also had a clear-cut point of view: Curtis knew that d.a.m.nation was what he stood for, and he didn't flinch from what that entailed.

By contrast, New Order didn't seem to have much of an idea of what they stood for, except outliving the grim shadow of their past. Just when an audience was finally eager to hear what this band had to say, they lost the personality who had made them notable in the first place. And while n.o.body in New Order seemed to want to imitate Curtis, n.o.body in the band seemed up to replacing him either.

In such early singles as "Everything's Gone Green," and their disappointing debut alb.u.m, Movement, New Order didn't offer much more than a synthesized reworking of their once thick, surging sound. It was prettier and more disciplined than Joy Division's sound, to be sure, but also less exciting and involving. Whatever was being said about their new life-that of a band that had to live with an ineradicable loss-was never clear. The words, and even the vocals themselves-delivered by guitarist Bernie Albrecht-got lost in tricky mixes that reduced lyrics to a kind of atmospheric filler. As a result, Movement didn't matter as much as Joy Division's music or myth had. As the U.K. scene s.h.i.+fted to a more rhythmic aesthetic, Joy Division's influence diminished, and with it, perhaps, New Order's best chance for preeminence.

And then in 1983, New Order rebounded with Power, Corruption and Lies-one of the most compelling alb.u.ms of that year, and nearly the equal to their former achievements with Joy Division. Still, it was pretty much impossible to say what Power, Corruption and Lies was "about" in the way that one could say what Joy Division's music was about. If anything, New Order seemed to be a band about form. Their version of postpunk sound was a clean, taut, swirling lacework of interlocking guitar and synthesizer motifs, b.u.t.tressed by a ma.s.sive, uniform dance pulse-a sound that overshadowed the emotions and meanings within it, to the degree that sound became the sole medium and object of those emotions. This idea first came across in the group's wondrous 1982 single "Temptation," but it came into its own fully with Power, Corruption and Lies.

The collective elements of sound on that alb.u.m (still New Order's best) feel as if they're about a great deal indeed. The sharp-edged arpeggiated guitar lines and swathed synthesizer webs on "Your Silent Face," "Leave Me Alone," and "Age of Consent" interweave over pulsating dance patterns as though the sound were meant to put across a vital meaning-yet as if that feeling and meaning were simply the expression of the sound itself. By comparison, the vocals aren't much more than a fine touch of emotional embellishment, putting forth some surprisingly axiomatic notions of romantic desperation as if it was finally time to acknowledge the truth of Ian Curtis' dissolution. Yet the words aren't what carry Power, Corruption and Lies' substance. Even the best vocals and lyrics on the alb.u.m pale beside the eloquence of the guitars and synthesizers which surround and overwhelm them.

Power, Corruption and Lies was a synthesis of rhythm, texture, and emotion, existing for its own pleasure. In 1983, it sounded like rhapsodic, impa.s.sioned pop: music with a force of human heart that counted all the more for the hard truths it had to withstand to find its own confidence and soul. But New Order never really surpa.s.sed that moment. They went on to make several more alb.u.ms, some rapturous-sounding, some forgettable, and none that ever helped make up for what they lost on that fatal day in May 1980.

WHAT WOULD HAVE happened if a group dared to resurrect or reinvent punk in Britain with the same mix of arrogance and vision that the s.e.x Pistols once flourished? No doubt that group would have been condemned and resented as Johnny Rotten's band was-which is just what befell the most controversial and perhaps most important British band of the mid-1980s, a ragged-looking, glorious-sounding quartet called the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Like the Pistols, the Jesus and Mary Chain played music that was immediately a shock, music that demanded you come to terms with its perspective, if only to reject or fight it. The group's early singles, "Never Understand" and "Upside Down," pitted lovely tunes and dreamy vocals against screeching feedback and relentless pandemonium-a mix that, as one British writer put it, suggested a plausible teaming of the Beach Boys and Cleveland, Ohio's, late 1970s great avant-garde pre-punk band, Pere Ubu. This approach was both acclaimed and derided in England, where the Jesus and Mary Chain, much like the s.e.x Pistols, largely had to be seen to be heard. (The band's early concerts reportedly incited strong reactions-sometimes outright crowd convulsions-just like early punk.) While the group's 1985 debut alb.u.m, Psychocandy, didn't win over many detractors or break through the hegemony that ruled that period's British and American radio, the alb.u.m nonetheless showed that the Jesus and Mary Chain's musical conceptions probably had both substance and mileage. The band's mix of mellifluence and noise held up beautifully over Psychocandy's forty-minute-plus length. Every track on the alb.u.m had a life and magnetism of its own, and they all sounded affecting, galvanizing, and inventive.

But for all the brave new territory Psychocandy staked out, at times it seemed to summarize or refas.h.i.+on pop-punk style instead of breaking with it. Between the alb.u.m's wailing dissonance and lovely melodies, one could find allusions to many musical parents, not merely the Pistols (while the Jesus and Mary Chain caught that band's howling guitar sound, they preferred patient rhythms to galloping ones), but also hints of the Beatles (Jesus' "Just like Honey" took "Love Me Do" and fused it with "Helter Skelter"), elements of mid-1960s pop styles (imagine Motown as it might have sounded played by the Seeds and produced by Phil Spector), and, of course, strong echoes of such earlier trailblazers as the Velvet Underground and Joy Division.

Psychocandy proved among the finest, most provoking British alb.u.ms of the mid-1980s. By balancing sweet melodies and raw cacophonies so powerfully, the Jesus and Mary Chain were saying that dreams and anguish, hope and fear, are necessary counterparts in both life and music. By a.s.serting that obvious truth, the group reinvented (if only briefly) punk's original courage and vision, on the band's own terms.

Whereas punk drew a dividing line across rock & roll and demanded that you stand on one side or another, the Jesus and Mary Chain drew a line and then occupied it alone, turning that line into a scary and alluring union of two opposing worlds. Jesus and Mary Chain-like the s.e.x Pistols or Joy Division-pretty much ended up as one of the few that truly made good on the possibilities that their music raised. The band went on to make other terrific records-the mesmerizing Darklands (1987), as well as Barbed Wire Kisses (1988), Automatic (1989), Honey's Dead (1992), and Stoned and Dethroned (1994). None of them, though, would prove such a wailing judgment of what became of British punk and pop style as 1985's Psychocandy. All these years later, it is still a record that can thrill you-like the best and worst stolen o.r.g.a.s.ms of your life-or that can drive you into a bad, spooky corner of your mind and spirit, as if you just finally realized how mad, worthless, wonderful, and disarrayed life truly is, regardless of your best efforts to impose hope and design on to all its unbeatable final disorder.

the clash: punk beginnings, punk endings.

"f.u.c.k that s.h.i.+t," says Joe Strummer, the thuggish-looking lead singer of the Clash, addressing some exultant kids yelling "Happy New Year" at him from the teeming floor of the Lyceum. "You've got your future at stake. Face front! Take it!"

In sleepy London town, during the murky Christmas week of 1978, rock & roll is being presented as a war of cla.s.s and aesthetics. At the crux of that battle is a volcanic series of four Clash concerts-including a benefit for Sid Vicious-coming swift on the heels of the group's second alb.u.m, Give 'Em Enough Rope, which entered the British charts at number 2. Together with the s.e.x Pistols, the Clash helped spearhead the punk movement in Britain, along the way earning a designation as the most intellectual and political punk band. When the Pistols disbanded in early 1978, the rock press and punks alike looked to the Clash as the movement's central symbol and hope.

Yet, beyond the hyperbole and wrangle that helped create their radical myth, the Clash brandish a hearty reputation as a rock & roll band that, like the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen, must be seen to be believed. Certainly no other band communicates kinetic, imperative anger as potently as the Clash. When Nicky "Topper" Headon's single-shot snare report opens "Safe European Home" (a song about Strummer and lead guitarist Mick Jones' ill-fated attempt to rub elbows with Rastafarians in the Jamaicans' backyard), all h.e.l.l breaks loose, both on the Lyceum stage and floor.

Like the s.e.x Pistols, the Clash's live sound hinges on a ma.s.sive, orchestral drum framework that b.u.t.tresses the bl.u.s.tery guitar work of Jones, who with his tireless two-step knee kicks looks just like a Rockettes' version of Keith Richards. Shards of Mott the Hoople and the Who cut through the tumult, while Strummer's rhythm guitar and Paul Simonon's ba.s.s gnash at the beat underneath. And Strummer's vocals sound as dangerous as he looks. s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his face up into a broken-tooth yowl, he gleefully bludgeons words, then caresses them with a touching, R & B-inflected pa.s.sion.

Maybe it's the gestalt of the event, or maybe it's just the sweaty leather-bound ma.s.s throbbing around me, but I think it's the most persuasive rock & roll show I've seen since I watched the s.e.x Pistols' final performance in San Francisco earlier in the same year.

I try to say as much to a reticent Joe Strummer after the show as we stand in a dingy backstage dressing room, which is br.i.m.m.i.n.g with a sweltering mix of fans, press, and roadies. Strummer, wearing smoky sungla.s.ses and a nut-brown porkpie hat, resembles a roughhewn version of Michael Corleone. Measuring me with his wary, testy eyes, he mumbles an inaudible reply.

Across the room, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon have taken refuge in a corner, sharing a spliff. "You a Yank?" Jones asks me in a surprisingly delicate, lilting voice. "From 'ollywood? Evil place, innit? All laid back." According to the myth encasing this band, Jones, who writes nearly all of the Clash's music, is the band's real focal nerve, even though the austere Strummer writes the bulk of the lyrics. In the best Keith Richards tradition, the fans see Mick as a sensitive and vulnerable street waif, p.r.o.ne to dissipation as much as to idealism. Indeed, he looks as bemusedly wasted as anyone I've ever met. He's also among the gentler, more considerate people I've ever spent time with.

But the next evening, sitting in the same spot, Mick declines to be interviewed. "Lately, interviews make me feel 'orrible. It seems all I do is spend my time answering everyone's charges-charges that shouldn't have to be answered."

The Clash have been hit with a wide volley of charges, ranging from an English rock-press backlash aimed at what the critics see as reckless politics, to very real criminal charges against Headon and Simonon (for shooting valuable racing pigeons) and Jones (for alleged cocaine possession). But probably the most damaging salvo has come from their former manager, Bernard Rhodes, who, after he was fired, accused the band of betraying its punk ideals and slapped them with a potentially crippling lawsuit. Jones, in a recent interview, railed back. "We're still the only ones true to the original aims of punk," he said. "Those other bands should be destroyed."

THE CLASH FORMED as a result of Joe Strummer's frustrations and Jones' rock ideals. Both claimed to have been abandoned at early ages by their parents, and while Strummer (the son of a British diplomat) took to singing Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry songs in London's subways for spare change during his late teens, Jones retreated into reading and playing Mott the Hoople, Dylan, Kinks, and Who records. In 1975, he left the art school he was attending and formed London SS, a band that, in its attempt to meld a raving blend of the New York Dolls, the Stooges, and Mott, became a legendary forerunner of the English punk scene.

Then, in early 1976, shortly after the s.e.x Pistols a.s.sailed London, Mick Jones ran into Strummer, who had been singing in a pub-circuit R & B band called the 101ers. "I don't like your band," Jones said, "but I like the way you sing." Strummer, anxious to join the punk brigade, cut his hair, quit the 101ers, and joined Jones, Simonon (also a member of London SS), guitarist Keith Levene (later a member of Public Image Ltd.) and drummer Terry Chimes (brilliantly renamed as Tory Crimes) to form the Clash in June of 1976. Eight months later, under the tutelage of Bernard Rhodes, the Clash signed with CBS Records for a reported $200,000.

Their first alb.u.m, The Clash (originally unreleased in America; Epic, the group's label stateside, deemed it "too crude"), was archetypal, resplendent punk. While the s.e.x Pistols proffered a nihilistic image, the Clash took a militant stance that, in an eloquent, guttural way, vindicated punk's negativism. Harrowed rhythms and coa.r.s.e vocals propelled a foray of songs aimed at the bleak political realities and social ennui of English life, making social realism-and unbridled disgust-key elements in punk aesthetics.

But even before the first alb.u.m was released, the punk scene had dealt the Clash some unforeseen blows. The punks, egged on by a hysterical English press, began turning on each other, and drummer Chimes, weary of ducking bottles, spit, and the band's politics, quit. Months pa.s.sed before the group settled on Nicky Headon (also a member of Mick Jones' London SS) as a replacement and returned to performing. By that time, their reputation had swelled to near-messianic proportions.

When it was time for a new alb.u.m, CBS asked Blue Oyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman to check out the Clash's shows. "By a miracle of G.o.d," says Pearlman, "they looked like they believed in what they were doing. They were playing for the thrill of affecting their audience's consciousness, both musically and politically. Rock & roll shouldn't be cute and adorable; it should be violent and anarchic. Based on that, I think they're the greatest rock & roll group around." Mick Jones balked at first at the idea of Pearlman as their producer, but Strummer's interest prevailed. It took six months to complete Give 'Em Enough Rope, and it was a stormy period for all concerned. ("We knew we had to watch Pearlman," says Nicky Headon. "He gets too good a sound.") But nowhere near as stormy as the alb.u.m. Give 'Em Enough Rope is rock & roll's State of Siege-with a dash of Duck Soup for comic relief. Instead of reworking the tried themes of bored youth and repressive society, Strummer and Jones tapped some of the deadliest currents around, from creeping fascism at home to Palestinian terrorism. The alb.u.m surges with visions of civil strife, gunplay, backbiting, and lyrics that might've been spirited from the streets of Italy and Iran: "A system built by the sweat of the many/Creates a.s.sa.s.sins to kill off the few/Take any place and call it a courthouse/This is a place where no judge can stand." And the music-a whirl of typhonic guitars and drums-frames those conflicts grandly.

THE DAY AFTER the Clash's last Lyceum show, I meet Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon at the Tate Gallery, London's grand art museum. Simonon leads us on a knowledgeable tour of the gallery's treasures until we settle in a dim corner of the downstairs cafe for an interview.

We start by talking about the band's apparent position as de facto leaders of punk. Strummer stares into his muddy tea, uninterested in the idea of conversation, and lets Simonon take the questions. Probably the roughest-looking member of the group, with his skeletal face and disheveled hair, Simonon is disarmingly guileless and amiable. "Just because I'm up onstage," he says in rubbery English, "doesn't mean that I'm ent.i.tled to a different lifestyle than anyone else. I used to think so. I'd stay up all night, get p.i.s.sed, party all the time. But you get cut off from the workaday people that way. I like to get up early, paint me flat, practice me ba.s.s. I see these geezers going off to work and I feel more like one of them."

But, I note, most of those same people wouldn't accept him. They're incensed and frightened by bands like the Clash.

Strummer stops stirring his tea and glowers around. "Good," he grunts. "I'm pleased."

This seems a fair time to raise the question of the band's recent bout with the British rock press. After Give 'Em Enough Rope, some of the band's staunchest defenders s.h.i.+fted gears, saying that the Clash's militancy is little more than a fas.h.i.+onable stance, and that their att.i.tude toward terrorist violence is dangerously ambiguous. "One is never entirely sure just which side [the Clash] is supposed to be taking," wrote Nick Kent in New Musical Express. "The Clash use incidents . . . as fodder for songs without caring."

Strummer squints at me for a moment, his thoughtful mouth hemming his craggy teeth. "We're against fascism and racism," he says. "I figure that goes without saying. I'd like to think that we're subtle; that's what greatness is, innit? I can't stand all these people preaching, like Tom Robinson. He's just too direct."

But that ambiguity can be construed as encouraging violence.

"Our music's violent," says Strummer. "We're not. If anything, songs like 'Guns on the Roof' and 'Last Gang in Town' are supposed to take the p.i.s.s out of violence. It's just that sometimes you have to put yourself in the place of the guy with the machine gun. I couldn't go to his extreme, but at the same time it's no good ignoring what he's doing. We sing about the world that affects us. We're not just another w.a.n.k rock group like Boston or Aerosmith. What f.u.c.king s.h.i.+t."

Yet, I ask, is having a record contract with one of the world's biggest companies compatible with radicalism?

"We've got loads of contradictions for you," says Strummer, shaking off his doldrums with a smirk. "We're trying to do something new; we're trying to be the greatest group in the world, and that also means the biggest. At the same time, we're trying to be radical-I mean, we never want to be really respectable-and maybe the two can't coexist, but we'll try. You know what helps us? We're totally suspicious of anyone who comes in contact with us. Totally. We aim to keep punk alive."

The conversation turns to the Clash's impending tour of America. "England's becoming claustrophobic for us," says Strummer. "Everything we do is scrutinized. I think touring America could be a new lease on life."

But the American rock scene-and especially radio-seems far removed from the world in flames that the Clash sing about. (While the Clash may top the English charts, they have yet to dent Billboard's Top 200. "We admit we aren't likely to get a hit single this time around," says Bruce Harris of Epic's A & R department. "But Give 'Em Enough Rope has sold forty thousand copies and that's better than sixty percent of most new acts.") I ask if a failure to win Yankee hearts would set them back.

"Nah," says Strummer. "We've always got here. We haven't been to Europe much, and we haven't been to j.a.pan or Australia, and we want to go behind the iron curtain." He pauses and shrugs his face in a taut grin. "There are a lot of other places where we could lose our lives."

THE NEXT TIME I meet the Clash, over three years later, is in fact in America-in the city of Los Angeles.

By way of greeting me, Joe Strummer points at the roughhewn crop of Mohawk hair that flares from the top of his head, his thumb c.o.c.ked back like a pistol. "You know why I did this, don't you?" he asks, leaning forward, a conspiratorial smile shaping his lips. We're seated in a dressing room backstage at the Hollywood Palladium, where the Clash are midway through a five-date engagement-their first appearances in the area since the group's 1980 London Calling tour. Strummer and his bandmates-guitarist Mick Jones, ba.s.sist Paul Simonon, and drummer Terry Chimes (the latter, newly returned to the Clash's fold)-are about to hit the stage for the afternoon's peremptory soundcheck, but first Joe wants to share a little revelation about his newly acquired headdress.

"I did it," he says, "to try to force some confrontation this time around. I wanted people to react to it, to ask me just what the h.e.l.l I'm on about. I thought it might stir up a little friendly conversation, if you know what I mean."

And has it? I ask.

Joe gets a look that's part disappointment, part bafflement. "No, not much. Maybe people find it a little too scary, you know, too serious. Over here, you Americans never seem to know how to take matters of style. It's like you view it as a threat, as rebellion. In England, style signifies, um . . . like ident.i.ty. I would never equate something as simple as a radical haircut with a true act of rebellion."