Tuneless Spectacles: Two Bootlegs that Made Me Very Happy

I'd spent all of Sunday morning in front of a machine, expending far too much time and energy on a job that would, in the end, be seen by maybe eight people, tops. But by early afternoon, it was finished, so I decided to take a stroll around the neighborhood, which is what I normally do in these situations. n Five minutes and one wrong turn later, I found myself in the midst of an unexpected street fair.

This was not good. Not only was there no beer to be had?thanks to recently passed measures?but if I find myself alone in the middle of these things, no one there to lead me around obstacles and swooping children, I have a tendency to panic. First chance I had, I darted toward an empty side street, reached for a cigarette and caught my breath for a moment before deciding that it was about damn time I headed for the safety of the apartment again.

Halfway up the block, I noticed a sidewalk sale outside one of the local video stores?obviously trying to cash in on the foot traffic generated by the street fair (including those of us trying to escape the street fair). Unable?ever, really, geek that I am?to pass by a sidewalk video sale without taking at least a cursory glance, I stopped.

It only took a moment to see that all the tapes were bootlegs. Specifically, bootleg tapes of concert performances. I could feel my interest waning. I've always found it hard to sit through those things, even if the band in question was someone I liked. So very dull, most of them are.

So there was a ton of Dylan and Beatles and Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead. Lot of Kansas, too?and Zeppelin and ELO, and a Journey tape. Some Zappa, and more Stones. My interest continued to wane. A moment later, however, I struck gold where I never expected to (which is always the case), and handed the friendly, longhaired gentleman some money for two bootlegs that made me very happy. I guess the Fates?or someone?were rewarding me for not screaming or lashing out at the street fair.

"You wanna check the quality first?" he asked. "I can pop 'em in and show you?they're both real good."

"Y'know," I told him, "I appreciate that?I really do?but I think I'll just trust you." Then I walked up the street, my steps quickening to prevent anyone from snatching away my copies of two of the most significant musical performances in the history of popular music?the final concerts of both Elvis and the Sex Pistols.

Oh, I'm sure there are people out there who will argue with me about that. They'll cite Hendrix at Woodstock or the Stones at Altamont or everyone at the US Festival, or something Frankie Valli did in Vegas once, or that time Dylan fell asleep onstage?but for my money, these two concerts?which took place just seven months apart?pretty much summed up everything there was to sum up about where pop music had been, and where it was headed.

For the record, I was at the Winterland that January night in 1978. I don't say that to brag, either. I was 12 years old, and had a cousin who happened to work there. Knowing I was a peculiar child, he figured it would be something I might enjoy.

Well, he was very, very wrong. I hated the noise, hated the crowd, hated the people in that crowd. I stayed out of harm's way, of course, never saw the stage, and remember nothing about that show except for having a miserable time.

I was also lucky enough to have seen Elvis at the Brown County Veteran's Memorial Arena some four months before he died, on his next-to-last concert tour. I sat way up in the nosebleed seats with a friend of the family, who was much more excited about being there than I was. Being the pre-jumbotron days of 1977, Elvis was little more from where I was sitting than a small white glob down on the stage?and one that didn't move too much. The acoustics were horrible, and I couldn't understand or recognize anything he sang. The show, as I remember, lasted about 20 minutes.

As I got older, my attitudes toward both the Pistols and the King changed considerably, and I realized, only far too late, that I had been present at moments of Great Cultural Significance. Now I had a chance to witness them with the eyes I wish I had when I was 12 (well, except for the whole "blind" part).

By the time of the Winterland show, the Pistols were imploding, and only they knew it. This is all old history. Miserable ill-conceived American tour, etc. I popped the tape in. I'd seen scenes in various documentaries?most notably D.O.A. (I haven't seen The Filth and the Fury yet)?but this was the first time I had a chance to watch the whole thing from beginning to end.

First thing that surprised me was the impeccable quality of the tape?and the original camera work. I've seen plenty of early, grainy, shaky Pistols footage, and it always left my head hurting. This, however, was something else. Well, so to speak.

It's clear from the opening that Paul Cook and Steve Jones still think they're rock stars, that Sid is just a big doofus pretending to be a rock star, and that Mr. Rotten was pissed. Pissed and bored, which, I'll tell you, is a bad combination.

"How does it feel to have sad taste?" he asks the audience at one point. At another, he offers, by way of introducing the next song, "Well, here's another tuneless spectacle."

I had to keep reminding myself of the fact that the Pistols, at the time, were just a few years older than I was, really. They were about my sister's age. Yet here they were, making fun, both of what they were doing and of the much older audience who'd packed the Winterland to see them that night.

Between songs?and there's a lot of time between songs?Jones retunes his guitar, Cook fastidiously wipes the sweat from his face, Sid tries to figure out where he is and Rotten wanders around the stage, picking his nose, or picking up some garbage thrown by an audience member, scrutinizing it closely, then tossing it to the ground again.

In between the long quiet bits, however, the performance was as great as anything I've ever heard them do. There are times, listening to Never Mind the Bollocks, when I find it easy to think, "Y'know, they really were nothing more than a hard rock band." But watching this performance?realizing that they're just teenagers for chrissakes, and that the world was a quarter century younger?yeah, this was something savage. They weren't rock stars.

At the end, as the painfully appropriate encore, "No Fun," plods to a close, Rotten is already sitting on his haunches, muttering, "Oh, bollocks, why do I go on?" Then the final swipe?"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" just before he stalks offstage, a bitter smirk on his mouth. You realize then it really was the whole "bang-whimper" scenario all over again, and that people would once more become boring rock stars the very next day.

Then there was Elvis.

Like so many other contemptuous punk-rock kids who grew up too late, time was I got a big kick out of the fat Elvis of the years just prior to his death. Sweaty, mumbling, incoherent Elvis. Ha ha ha. (I got over that, too.)

As a result of that infatuation, however, I spent many years tracking down Elvis in Concert?the two-album set that featured recordings from his final tour. Included were the remarkable, oft-cited ramblings that substituted for (and for a while there, when I was a smarty-pants, I thought deconstructed) the spoken-word section of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" and several instances of his inability to pronounce the word "album."

Ha ha ha.

Though I had seen snippets from the televised concert from which the album was made, I never saw the entire show.

CBS taped Elvis in Concert in June of 1977, during the 10-day swing through the Midwest that would turn out to be Elvis' last. Most of the footage that made it into the special was filmed in Omaha, NE, and Rapid City, SD. It would later be televised in October, a little over a month after he died.

The tape (which was also of remarkably high quality for a bootleg) opens, like the album does, with a series of quick-cut interviews with fans in the parking lot before the show. Normal people, people from all over, just talking about how much they love the King. Then, after a few shots of the crew setting up the stage, we see Elvis backstage, and he's looking mighty bad.

Well, I guess we all know what he looked like back then.

After Also Sprach Zarathustra and the opening vamp, one of his trainers helps him up the steps. Elvis (like Sid) straps on a guitar he won't be doing much with, and the show begins.

Now, here's the weird part. I know this concert backwards and forward from the recording. You can't fool me. And every single time he's about to launch into some tripped-out foolishness, the CBS editors cut away to another parking lot interview, then cut back again when he's finished. During "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" for instance, just as he reaches the spoken-word part, we're out in the parking lot again, where a young, straight-haired woman is talking about how she saw Elvis on the television when she was a little girl, and he was bending down to give some wheelchair-bound polio poster child a kiss?and how she knew right then that she had to see him in person. Then she tells a very long and uninteresting story about how she came about her ticket to tonight's show. By the time that's over with, we cut back inside, and Elvis is finished talking and has kicked into the final chorus of the song.

It was all very strange, and a little frustrating.

The fourth time CBS pulled that stunt, something occurred to me. Every person they talked to was crippled or damaged in some way. The people at the beginning of the show weren't. They were perfectly reasonable, normal folks, there to see a show. But the people used to cover up the King's little "accidents" are just plain wrong.

"I'm 42 years old," one man says, "and still live at home... I work for the post office, and every penny I earn goes to seeing Elvis concerts. But it's been worth it."

At another cutaway, we see a middle-aged couple. The man?complete with wraparounds, Elvis sideburns and a cowboy hat, explains that their house blew away in a tornado a few weeks earlier, and they both ended up in the hospital. He's got a back full of stitches, and they held him a few days longer than they held his wife here. Their kids are fine, though?they were staying with their grandmother (he put a strange emphasis on the word "grandmother")?which is a good thing, because their rooms were completely destroyed. But he got out of the hospital in time, so they were able to make the trip down here for the show, thank goodness.

Of course, E's people are a strange and rare breed.

After the half-hour performance, Elvis (still, admittedly, in fine voice) was helped off the stage and whisked away. Then there's a creepy postmortem message from Vernon, which is also on the album, and has always unnerved me.

I can understand why CBS would edit out all the embarrassing stuff. Showing all that a month after the man died would just be mean. Strange thing is, though, they released the album around the same time, completely uncut. They weren't fooling anybody!

Anyway. I have nothing new or interesting to say about either the Winterland show or the Elvis concert. I just thought it was interesting that in those two brief moments just seven months apart, everything that might have, at one time, been potentially revolutionary about rock and roll music just sort of limped away quietly and sadly.

That's all.