Legendary rock journalist Legs McNeil tells his life story — and goes behind-the-scenes on his encounters with Joey Ramone, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and more — in his upcoming memoir Resident Punk, out September 15.
McNeil founded Punk magazine in 1975
at the age of 19, in this exclusive excerpt from the book, he writes about one of the genre’s most infamous bands, the Sex Pistols, and one of their more infamous gigs, a January 1978 concert at the Winterland in the still-hippie-filled San Francisco.
McNeil, who was backstage at the Winterland show, writes that tensions were so high, and the Sex Pistols so burned out, that Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious refused to take a photograph together for a Rolling Stone story. As fans of the Sex Pistols know, the show — “one of the most boring rock ‘n’ roll shows ever,” McNeil writes — was the band’s final gig before they imploded, with Rotten announcing the band’s breakup four days later.
The group would briefly soldier on without their lead singer with The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle, featuring the band’s pre-Bollocks recordings, Sid Vicious’ take on “My Way,” and other vocalists. Rotten (now John Lydon) wouldn’t rejoin his band mates until 1996.
My time in Los Angeles was about to come to an end, with or without a Hugh Hefner interview, and I was about to head north to infiltrate enemy territory: San Francisco, home of the hippie.
I finally got tired of waiting, and tired of Holmstrom nagging me over the telephone to join him and Roberta Bayley in San Francisco to see the Sex Pistols’ Winterland show. So I showed up at the Playboy offices on the Sunset Strip and met the receptionist. I was there as a last-ditch effort to interview Hugh Hefner for PUNK magazine. Harvey Kurtzman was lobbying on our behalf, but Hefner, being the control-freak asshole he was, kept blowing us off.
I went to the Playboy office to figure something out, and when I got there I met this tall, gorgeous, really skinny receptionist with black hair who had a wicked crush on me. Sometimes you can just tell.
I told her I was heading up to San Francisco to cover the Sex Pistols’ show, and when her face lit up I asked if she wanted to go. I arranged to pick her up at Playboy the next day.
My last night in LA, I was invited to a party on the other side of the Tropicana. I got all showered and shaved and thought tonight’s the night! Beautiful nymphs with long blonde hair, plump breasts, thick gold-en-tanned thighs that melt down into a perfect slenderly wrapped pair of legs. Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby . . .
Much to my horror, when I arrived I found out it was a punk party specially equipped with now-negative girls, all foul, their tans stripped from them with Easy-Off oven cleaner. Their beautiful long hair was cut to the skin with razors and dyed purple, pink, green-blue, and those creamy complexions were accented with acne, cigarette burns, and safety pins. I felt cheated.
You fucking Sex Pistols, why couldn’t you come next year!
Turns out, the Sex Pistols did in ten days what the New York scene hadn’t been able to manage: Make punk a four-letter word across America. An extremely unattractive teenage girl who resembled a forty-year-old matron in a women’s prison rather than a young woman fresh on the road to self-discovery approached me.
Knowing that I co-created PUNK magazine, she erupted in a verbal assault at the pretense of the New York scene. I didn’t want to hear it. I was already pissed off enough that no one here looked like Julie, the hot blonde girl from the Mod Squad, but she got nastier and kept on insulting me. I told her she was ugly and to leave me alone. She spat beer in my face and the alcohol burned my eyes. As soon as I wiped it out and my vision cleared, the first image to take focus was this snarling girl still glaring at me. I told her the beer didn’t help; she was still ugly. She belted me in the nose. I told her, yes, she was still fucking ugly.
Three seconds later, I was surrounded by hideous monsters who were probably nice kids before the local NBC news devoted the feature story on their prime-time show Weekend to an in-depth study of English punk. The kids were acting like they were on the dole when most of them probably lived in comfortable homes on a healthy allowance and gasoline credit cards for their very own car.
“Go back to New York!” is all I remember hearing as I left the disintegrating party. Instead, I went back to my motel room alone. I locked the door and watched TV and wondered why Hollywood was called “Sin City.” The bars closed at quarter to two, the drinking age was twenty-one, and no one likes to have fun. I sat sulking and slowly it dawned on me.
Who could blame these kids? LA sucks and they know it. It must get pretty depressing knowing your town’s biggest cash crop is Charlie’s Angels or Rona Barrett. In a city that constantly reminds you that if you’re nobody, you really ain’t anybody at all, it must get tedious dodging limos, Rolls-Royces, and Mercedes as you make your way to the unemployment office. It made sense that they found their salvation in punk, the best defense being a good offense. If you had to walk around all day looking at a bunch of bimbos with Farrah Fawcett haircuts and nipple boners giggling about the antics of their blow-dried polyester disco boyfriends, you’d want to vomit too. But there was no use trying to communicate. The Sex Pistols were due in San Francisco at any moment, and punk rock in America was about to climax.
Frustrated and depressed that the buxom blonde California girls of my dreams had been transformed into ugly punkette mutants, I left LA and joined John Holmstrom and PUNK magazine photo editor Roberta Bayley in San Francisco.
I’d arranged a ride up to the Bay Area for me and the Playboy receptionist in a van with a couple of minor bands, eight hours of hard road with a bunch of assholes. I can’t even remember who they were, I was just happy to be rid of them.
We got out of the van at the Miyako Hotel, one of the most luxurious places I’d ever seen. Every rock star rolling through San Francisco stayed there. At the hotel, John explained things weren’t going so well with the Pistols. It seemed Sid Vicious kept trying to kill himself every free moment he had; Johnny Rotten was playing spoiled superstar and pulling Greta Garbo routines; Malcolm McLaren was disgusted by Warner Brothers fighting him tooth and nail on every creative idea he had for promoting anarchy in the States.
In addition to the Warner Brothers executives calling the shots from some penthouse on the Sunset Strip, a goon squad of Warner’s thugs who reminded me of the Idi Amin babysitting service had surrounded Johnny and Sid, forcing them to travel for the entire tour in a Greyhound prison while Paul Cook and Steve Jones and McLaren flew. Malcolm seldom knew where the other half was. Divide and conquer.
But the Pistols still had an even more formidable enemy: San Francisco, the capital of hippie music. They should have gone straight to LA and played one set at the Whiskey a Go Go, causing a real riot on Sunset Strip by the disgruntled fans who couldn’t get in because of the small seating capacity. It might have been the birth of anarchy in the USA.
Instead, the ghosts of flower power rose from their graves and cursed the entire Sex Squadron with a thundercloud of paranoia from all the bad acid trips ever to hit Haight-Ashbury.
The Winterland gig itself was one of the most boring rock ‘n’ roll shows ever. Quite a hard task considering it was the Sex Pistols. Even Johnny Rotten knew it, scowling silently at the crowd while the other Pistols ground through a sludgy version of the Stooges’ “No Fun.” And it really was no fun.
Rotten finally broke his silence, famously sneering, “Ha-ha-ha! Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” before stalking off stage.
Immediately after the set, Holmstrom handed me a backstage pass. At the party backstage, one of the local opening acts was having a food fight with the poseurs and celebrity curiosity seekers. It was very boring, so I went to the dressing room, sat down, opened a Heineken and watched the Pistols. Sid had brought four girls from out of the audience back to the dressing room. “Who’s going to fuck me tonight?” he asked.
“How about a kiss first?” a cute sixteen-year-old groupie asked.
Rotten sat alone on an old, overstuffed couch and grumbled to himself while Sidney entertained the four ladies. One of the girls got up the nerve to approach Johnny and asked, “How do you do?” This set Johnny off into a tirade about how “How do you do?” was an invalid greeting. The girl blushed and backed off. Rotten looked scared, naïve, and pissed off. I think he sometimes envied Sid for being an idiot. Dumb, but happy. But Johnny was cursed with the fame, the intelligence, and a low self-image that made him terribly shy, and that he made up for by being terribly obnoxious. I used that one too.
Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz entered the room with all her flash equipment, umbrellas, and tons of cameras to take a cover photo for Rolling Stone. She wanted to get a picture of Rotten and Vicious together, but neither of them would join the other. Finally, Annie cajoled Johnny to pose for her in the bathroom, where she’d set up her gear. “Is my hair all right?” Johnny snarled loudly at her. No one looked like they were having fun. Even Sid, surrounded by four groupies, looked bored and unable to figure out what to do with the girls now that he had them.
I left the dressing room more depressed than ever, my jacket pockets packed with Heinekens, and bumped into notorious New York City groupie Damita, nine months pregnant, with a hole cut in her t-shirt to expose her belly. I ripped off my backstage pass, slapped it onto Damita’s swollen stomach, and said, “Go get ’em girl!” happy to be done with the Sex Pistols.
I headed back to my hotel room with the Playboy receptionist, just wanting to get in the bathtub with her. The bathtubs were fantastic, you poured packets of this green shit into the tub that allowed you to float, and then ordered more crabmeat sandwiches on English muffins, and me and the receptionist were in heaven.
The next day the Pistols would unofficially disband.
Printed with permission from Resident Punk: How I Smoked, Drank, and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond) by Legs McNeil (September 15, 2026; BenBella Books).
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