This playlist presents all 3 sets and the entire 2 hours of music and stage banter that occurred at Winterland on January 14th, 1978. Bill Graham convinced Ian McLaren and The Sex Pistols that they could fill the 5,000 person venue and, once they were booked, he rounded out the bill with local San Francisco punk bands The Nuns and The Avengers. Within 48 hours of the show, The Sex Pistols would be broken up and this would become the last show to feature the Sid Vicious line-up.
For personnel listings and more complete information, please click on the individual concerts in the Related Concerts box to the right. Here, I've taken the liberty of quoting some of my favorite parts of those summaries:
The Nuns:
-Listen to the lyrics of the closing number, "Suicide Child," on this rare live recording of the Nuns and you are likely to be creeped out. Alejandro Escovedo screams out the story of a drug addict's girlfriend who bled to death from a knife wound "on that dirty, filthy bathroom tile"...Only a few months later, Pistols bassist Sid Vicious would wake up from a heroin high to find his girlfriend dead from a knife wound on the tiled bathroom floor of the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.
-With songs like “Mental Masturbation,” “Cock In My Pocket,” and “Decadent Jew,” it’s clear that the band certainly knows how to make a statement.
-During its heyday, the band was considered the West Coast answer to Blondie, but their music was too brooding and lyrical themes far too dark to become a comparable act commercially.
The Avengers:
-By 1977, the stinking fog of punk rock had crept all the way to the West Coast where untamed youth that might have been doused in paisley and patchouli a decade earlier were now taking razorblades to clothing and safety pins to earlobes. If peace and love were curious and troubling to establishment squares in the ‘60s, the abject nihilism of this new subculture must have been positively terrifying.