Part 6 (1/2)

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

For the first tienuinely shy, alht-hearted reason,” he replies ”While ere on that tour I went to a zoo, where I saw a Sun Bear, a sentle, like a house pet, and doesn't exist anywhere but in japan The next day I had lunch with one of the japanese 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 aniet close to, but if you did, it would shock your very conception of life”

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

life & death in the uk: the sex pistols, public ie 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 tothat culture suffer the world outside-its moral horror, its self-i tenure with the sex Pistols-the definitional punk band of the late 1970s-had the effect of disrupting rock & roll's sound, style, andthe band only once, as I did at San Francisco's Winterland in January 1978, brought hoht, Rotten danced-waded, actually-through afrom shoes, coins, books, and umbrellas, all heaved his way by a tense, adulatory crowd Draped in a veil of s so h it all like so 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

Theafter the show, the other sex Pistols and their er, Malcolroup and purportedly engineered its rise and fall, charged that Warner Bros (the Pistols' Ae between Rotten and the rest of the band, and that Rotten hile 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 fuckin' country, not fly over it” It is nearly 1 AM, and as we talk we are seated in the bar at a Los Angeles Sunset Strip hotel, drinking rum and cokes

”If you really want to know, I think the sex Pistols failedthe last ith a thespian flourish ”Actually, it was a bit e 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 sex Pistols to fore Ltd-ionist: a tedious, ill-affected artiste who deserted his own dread visions for fear theyexclusively in abstract ier has to run the risk of caring-which(Director Julien Temple-who made the sex Pistols feature The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, and would later filinners-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 ai punk rock-by blackening its the himself from the merciless primitivism of the sex Pistols, Lydon found a fatal flaw in rock & roll itself-namely, that it imparted the illusion of order and transcendence-and decided to re PiL, Lydon announced that he wanted to forroup that was ”anti-music of any kind I'm tired of melody” To help him realize this end, Lydon recruited two friends-classically trained guitarist and pianist Keith Levene, who'd been a founding meae enthusiast Lydon also saw all this new e as a chance to debunk thethe surnames: on PiL's albuh in conversation he generally refers to himself as Johnny Rotten) ”Malcol that Rotten ie,” 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

”Ito bassist Sid Vicious' arrest for the en, 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 hiic, but ht his public iroup Public Ie is lie,” was an indictment of the Pistols and McLaren But the real focal point of the song, as well as the subsequent albue, 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 round, Brian Eno, avant-garde coroup Can, while the actual sound mix resegae dub production In actual effect, Lydon and PiL si it to song structure, and in the process, authored the first rify rock parlance since Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

The rock press, though, la Stone terland's New Musical Express dismissed it as a ”Zen lesson in idolatry” (Warner Bros declined to release the albuh PiL rerecorded and rereed with the critics: ”They all slagged it,” says Keith Levene, ”because it was self-indulgent, nonsiood points But that's the kind of music we intend toold-fashi+oned, twelve-bar rock & roll”

But in 1980, critical perspectives on PiL start to shi+ft In part, that's because the group has colish postpunk , doleful bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division, and many others It's also because PiL's own inally released in Novein Records, in limited edition as Metal Box-a set of three 12-inch forty-fives packaged in a filuitar 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 fro about his mother's death)

”Now all the critics love us,” Lydon says with a scornful smile At 2 AM 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 aited until the Pistols were over before they accepted them And I'e is more than just a band I' 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 fuckin' want,” he snaps ”I gave up a long ti 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 becouably plain with the band's next (and probably best) album, Paris au Printemps

Paris au Printeh never released in the United States) is the album 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, bassist Jah Wobble, and dru deliberate rhythms and backhanded ns and , protean vocal perfor ”Chant” and ”Careering,” so terrifying-invoking ies of mob rule one minute, murder the next-as to be almost unendurable

But e hear on Paris au Printemps is more than animated, frictional ainst, even threaten, people who aren't ready for it By the LP's second side, the crowd-a horde of recherche, loud-othics-have had about all the cacophony they can handle They want pogo beats, block chords, primal thrums-in short, the fa these, they start to taunt Lydon, spitting jeers, de lethally into his vocals, narrowing the distance between hi 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 fucking stage if you keep spittingDog!” Minutes later, at the close of ”Poptones,” that's exactly what he does, dropping hisinto the wings In that moment, you can hear Lydon further remove hiht 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 Printeroup'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 feeeks 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 albu that the bassist 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 htening music Lydon has lent his voice to since ”Anarchy in the UK” (A bit too frightening for PiL's British-based label, Virgin, which initially balked at issuing the new LP, clai it was arrantly noncommercial Meanwhile, Warner Bros, which declined to release either the first PiL albureed to a sroup's earlier records-on which Levene and Lydon piled thick, splayed layers of guitars and synthesizers on top of thunderous, bass-heavy rhythm tracks until chance melodies and imperative teain-The Flowers of Romance pares PiLmix 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 Froue, with Atkins pounding out an aberrant h the clatter, chanting an obscure, dreaeance

Later, in ”Under the House”-in which John Lydon and Martin Atkins carry their colloquy to a harrowing peak-Lydon can't see'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 s cease to ives in to theaniht fend off doo on The Flowers of Ro self-interest The title tune has already been described by certain critics as John Lydon's belated farewell to Sid Vicious (who, before joining the sex Pistols, once belonged to a band called Flowers of Romance-na, with its disdainful references to failed friendshi+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 ro For that rate or refuse so many possible alliances over the course of this LP-sexual co the Door”), and notions of round he seems left with is the narrow path of his own hubris

Suddenly, in the album's final compositions, ”Go Back” and ”Francis Massacre,” the world closes in ”Go Back,” which features Keith Levene's only flaring guitar part on the record, is asketch of life in Tory Britain, where the future has been banked on recycled ibes Lydon ”Have a cup of tea-good days ahead/Don't look back-good days ahead”)

”Francis Massacre,” on the other hand, is about a future sealed off forever It's a scanty, discordant account of Francis Moran-aa life sentence in Ireland's Mountjoy Prison forIrish penal officials and Lydon's own representatives-cares to disclose any specifics about either Moran or his cri litany of ”Go down for life/Go down for life”) how Lydon feels But the sheer desolating force of the , claustrophobic, rapacious tu-seems to act out the passions ofto annihilate those passions, which (toa deed of protest aslike those incandescent moments in the sex Pistols' ”Bodies” or ”Holidays in the Sun” when the singer sought to illuh, John Lydon ainst a world that contains sorecourse available is a brutal, racking cry of unwavering outrage

THE MUSIC OF Joy Division-an art-lish postpunk band that initially struck reviewers as a tuneful version of PiL-sets forth an even loom 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 hie 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 ravity 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 album, Closer (recorded just prior to Curtis' death and released shortly afterward by Factory), beca independent-label LPs in British history By the end of 1980, it had topped several critics' and readers' polls as best albuion of Joy Division emulators-most notably Section Twenty-Five, Crispy Ambulance, Mass, Sort Sol and the Naland, each professing the same icy passion for sepulchral rhyther in all of this griraphy, of course, is that it serves to idealize Curtis' death and ignores the fact that he contributed and sub the act of self-ly dead-end and depressing? Maybe because, in the midst of a movement overrun by studied nihilis to hear soed beyond mere truisms Maybe because Ian Curtis' descent into despair leaves us with a deeper feeling of our own frailty Orto hear aaway, little by little, bit by bit Yet none of that really saysJoy 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 roup's earliest work-demo tapes recorded under the na (some of which appeared in a later compilation)-was a worthy but hardly exceptional exae art-rock influences (mostly David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Roxy Music) and primitivist archetypes (some sex Pistols, a little Who) into a frenetic counterpoise By the time of their first LP, Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division had te it down to a doleful, deep-toned sound that often suggested an elaborate version of the Velvet Underground or an orderly Public I ht,” and ”Nen Fades,” with their disorientedrhythms-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 cole ”Transuitars-seeedly 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 thrashi+ng guitars and dru out the same insistent backbeat that i, then surrenders to the plaint of a solitary synthesizer and Ian Curtis' frayed singing ”When routine bites hard,” he h/But eain” By tune's end, Curtis has run out of will, but thethe 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 ood/Just can't function no ned to fatality froic all its own, fro scenario of ”Atrocity Exhibition” (a story borrowed froradation of the flesh as sport) to the raw, raging ”Twenty Four Hours,” in which Curtis allows hi vista of existence: ”Just for one ht I found my way/Destiny unfolded/I watched it slip away”

But Closer doesn't stop there Instead, it takes us through the nu 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 hell's darker chaed ourselves in

Watched fro

We saw ourselves noe never have seen

Portrayal of the traueneration

The sorroe suffered and never were free

The unkno appears known,”We're inside now, our hearts lost forever,” sings Curtis in a voice as rueful as Frank Sinatra's So moment

In the end, Closer accedes to horror, settles into frozen straits of inviolable daray, and steady because itis unreness is quiescent Joy Division's art is re tone of revolt that PiL's work, even at its ent, 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 hiured out a way (more than once) to knock off the world and live beyond it

Guitarist Bernie Albrecht, bassist Peter Hooke, and dru uitarist naroup called New Order This band faces not only the task of living up to its ownby 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, vehe with taut cross lines of blaring guitars and an indomitable, botto with the hi-hat so that his singing sibilates in pulsing waves, Bernie Albrechtan impassioned tale about bitter memories, ineradicable losses, and unbeaten deteres of resolve and recovery seeest the same conviction that Joy Division-who, after all, took their name from the euphemism used to describe the prostitute 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 andelse about Joy Division'sless than a surpassing testament to the life force itself

A FOLLOW-UP on PiL and New Order: I saw Public I the time I wrote the above stories (which was in 1980 and 1981) On each occasion, it becaly evident how hard-if not impossible-it would be for John Lydon to outdistance his past with the sex Pistols In truth, the audience sieles debut-at the city's don Olympic Auditoriu, but the audience that asseish-looking jar-head punks who eventually becaed the show It was the first tie, 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 saing ideas of music, but instead exalted the event (or myth) of his personality When PiL played at the Pasadena Civic Center in 1982, mee, and so speakers only to leap back onto the crowd below Seeing PiL with that audience was both a tiresome and reckless experience I spoke with ain

I felt the sah not because of the audience so ood 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 ly 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 rowth: They merely wanted to thrash in the spectacle of his presence And though Lydon's manner still proved fearsoed performer He chatted, joked, and flirted with the audience (When one excitable girl juushed ”Guess I must be a sex sy fun at his own ot out there?” he inquired of the massed punks), but it was also meant to assure 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 theversion of PiL that I would see Lydon had asseroup (he didn't mention their na the former PiL's adventurous sound, but who added a new sense of sharpness and resiliency to it