Punksploitation gets pretty meta here, for what could be more exploitative than a single-issue magazine about the most exploitative and supposedly shocking band around, right? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I sometimes find it difficult to read about the Sex Pistols at all. So much of my so-called musical education was formed with them as the dominant example of “punk”, the band that had changed the world and so on. It’s hard to even contextualize those guys now due to over-familiarity. I’m also not all that hopped-up on their music, and never really have been.
However, in the spirit of late 1977 newness, especially in the US, it’s easy to recognize why the Stories, Layouts & Press publishing enterprise would have found it a strong business move to put this out. They even call it a “cash-in special” with no irony. The purpose is to introduce the band to the US public, and they absolutely revel in the salacious and the vile. The band is “besmeared with vomit, dripping with obscenity”, and right from the off there are several tales of how each of the Sex Pistols has gotten his ass royally kicked back in England multiple times.
There are mini-features on each band member. “The most horrible, the most ugly-looking, the one that leads the group is a 20-year-old deviant named Johnny Rotten”. “The Sex Pistols needed a guitar player, see, so they found one, a jerky lookin’ nerd with an asshole of a smile. The kid’s name was Steve Jones”. After that, it’s every page loaded with sneering photos of the band, sometimes with those same photos repeated on subsequent pages. Punksploitation any way you cut it, baby.
Inexplicably, there’s also a small scene report from London with live show pictures of Poly Styrene and….Angus Young of AC/DC (hunh?). Hannah Spitzer weighs in with a preposterously dumb “How To Be a Punk” piece to close it all off, which appears to borrow almost completely from the same piece she wrote in Punk Rock #2, I’ve reviewed previously and which came out right around the time this one did. Page count, Hannah! We have a page count to fill!
This whole magazine’s wonderfully crude and flaunts its capitalistic approach in multiple manners, even comparing England’s no-future problems with America’s so-called robust economy (this in 1978, the high-interest rate doldrum Carter years). If I’d somehow owned this at the time I’d have hidden it so, so deep into the crevices of my bedroom that even I wouldn’t have been able to find it. I lived in fear of encounters such as the one where my aunt found my cousin’s hidden Hell Comes To Your House comp LP, and told him, “I found your punk rock record, and I literally threw up”. No wonder misbegotten youth totally gobbled up the entire print run of this top-tier punksploitation special.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 
Wouldn’t this have been out of date by the time it hit the stands in 1978?
Damn, no article on Lydon playing Neil Young, Tim Buckley, David Bowie, and Irish folk music on the radio.
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” I’m also not all that hopped-up on their music, and never really have been.” The Saints could’ve blown them off the stage, but they were longhaired Brisbane hillbillies so they get written out of the narrative. I do remember the media frenzy when the Pistols played Baton Rouge, though; the Normals were supposed to open, but McClaren replaced them with a zydeco band, which was pretty brilliant.
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I would treasure this the typefaces alone. It’s a Primo ’78 vintage artefact, donchew know. And I can never get enough ‘How to be a Punk’ articles.
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