The Trib report on the closing of Maxwell Street ends with these words on a sign stuck up on the site:
A new show on cable features a theme song that sounds familiar:
Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs is the severe, almost wholly unapologetic memoir from John Lydon, onetime Sex Pistol and more recently a fading modern-rock star. The book at once reanimates the band’s concussive celebrity and also, almost accidentally, puts it in perspective. The Sex Pistols were a collection of not-so-petty thieves and incipient hoodlums–created through the incendiary alchemization of their grossly opportunistic but undeniably effective manager and a waspish, repellently charismatic singer–who, over the course of a nasty, brutish, and short career scandalized a nation and turned pop culture upside down. The band’s story is a unique one; with Lydon’s unbridled and vicious telling it makes for scorching reading. He settles scores with foes and friends, alive and dead–Sid (“He took it all too far, and boy, he couldn’t play guitar. David Bowie reference”), Nancy (“She was so utterly fucked up and evil”), and Vivienne Westwood (“Silly bitch. She went nowhere fast after punk”)–and delivers one of the least romantic images of rock ‘n’ roll ever enunciated: “I don’t care how big-headed the lead singer is, it all comes down to the fact that he must eat shit in the rehearsal room. The histrionics of the lead guitar, the excesses of the drummer, and the stupidity of the bass player have to meet on equal footing.”
