Holidays in the Sun

The Sex Pistols' final show at San Francisco in 1978

Sex Pistols 2026, photo by Giuseppi Craca.

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Three of the four original Sex Pistols—Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock, along with Frank Carter—recently announced North American tour dates for later this year, rescheduled from 2025, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the band’s debut single, “Anarchy in the U.K.” Opening date will be September 11 in Dallas, Texas at the Longhorn Ballroom, and the band plays San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre on October 14.

It’s only fitting that these same cities were included in their disastrous 1978 tour of the United States. At the time, media hype was unprecedented. This wasn’t screaming-girl Beatlemania. This was a dangerous, seditious band that was going to poison the minds of American youth! Every gig made headlines. It began in Atlanta, and crashed and burned nine days later in San Francisco, after which the band disintegrated and went their separate ways. Rotten would soon form Public Image Ltd., Steve Jones and Paul Cook would play in other bands, and a year later, Sid Vicious would be dead of an overdose.

During this very brief American tour, I caught my first glimpse of the Pistols on NBC’s Today Show, watching it with my dad, while tying my sneakers to go to high school. The segment was intended to portray the group as disgusting and offensive, but as you can see it’s pretty hilarious. Band members refused to be interviewed on camera, and demanded ten dollars each. My dad snorted with disgust. I was sold immediately, and ran off to buy the cassette:

Today Show segment with reporter Jack Perkins, and hosts Jane Pauley and Tom Brokaw.

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The final Pistols appearance with Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious took place on January 14, 1978 at the Winterland in San Francisco. It was notorious for a number of reasons. The sound was terrible. The Pistols did not play well. Many critics called it the death of punk rock. And of course, Rotten’s famous onstage comment, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” For our 2009 oral history Gimme Something Better, Silke Tudor and I devoted an entire chapter to this concert. We interviewed people who went to the show, as well as members of opening bands the Avengers, The Nuns, and Negative Trend. A glossary of who’s who appears at the bottom.

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Winterland marquee for the Sex Pistols show, via Rock History Live!

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Al Ennis: I’d stop by the newsstand, and you could follow it week by week. Sex Pistols sign with this record company. Next week, Sex Pistols get kicked off. Next week, Sex Pistols get signed again.

Rozz Rezabek: People thought it was gonna be like the whole counterculture ’60s thing. People were really threatened and scared.

Jello Biafra: A Denver store called Wax Trax claimed to have had the first Sex Pistols record in the United States, possibly the day it was released. I went to check it out. Right on the front door of Wax Trax was John Denver’s Greatest Hits, with nails through his eyes and blood coming out.

Dave Dictor: I lived in Austin and I picked up Gary Floyd hitchhiking. He was going to see the Sex Pistols in Dallas. He asked if I was gonna go. I was like, what? That was the first time I ever heard of the Sex Pistols.

Ruth Schwartz: I was going to Santa Rosa to JC and we saw them on the news: “They’re in Texas, oh my god, this band’s in Texas! We have to go see them when they come to San Francisco.”

Sammytown: When I was 12 we were living in Wales, that’s when I first heard the Sex Pistols. It was awesome. When I got back to the States, my dad was like, “Hey, the Sex Pistols are playing in San Francisco.” It was on the news, and he called me in to watch. He’s like, “Isn’t that that band that you were telling me about?”

Sheriff Mike Hennessey: I heard that they were coming to Winterland, and dragged my girlfriend—who’s now my wife—to see that show.

Danny Furious: I received a phone call in early December from a Mr. Howie Klein, asking if the Avengers were interested in opening for the upcoming Sex Pistols show. Naturally I said, “Yes!” He went on to say we’d only be paid 100 bucks and that if that wasn’t okay, there were literally hundreds of bands who would play for nada. That didn’t sit well with me but we accepted, of course.

Johnny Strike: I got a call from Bill Graham’s people. “Do you want to open for the Sex Pistols?” I said, “Yes, absolutely. We’ll take it.” Everybody was excited. About two weeks later we got another call. “Well, something happened. It turns out that the Avengers met Malcolm [McLaren] and so they’ve got that slot, but we still want you guys on the bill. You’ll have the third slot.” So I went back and talked with the band. It was unanimous. We’re not playing.

Hank Rank: We wouldn’t open for the Avengers. The Avengers always opened for us. We were the senior band ’cause we formed a good two months before they did. It was a little longer than that. But that was our thinking.

Johnny Strike: Not only did we not play, we didn’t go. We completely boycotted the show.

Steve Tupper: Whatever was going on in their brains, I never knew. Crime totally shot themselves in the foot.

Penelope Houston: The Nuns, who did open for us, called me up and said, “Do you want to switch places?” And I was like, “No.” We’d only been together six months, and I think that the other established San Francisco punk bands really thought they should be on the bill.

Jennifer Miro: We almost didn’t get it. Bill Graham just hated us, but Jerry Pompili was kind of managing us, and he was Bill’s righthand man. And he really liked us.

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The Pistols at Winterland, via Rolling Stone/Getty Images.

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Howie Klein: This is terrible and I don’t know if this has ever been written before. I feel bad about saying this, but I’m gonna tell it. Malcolm McLaren came over to me and goes, “Who’s the worst band in the scene?” And I said, “Well, Negative Trend.” He said, “They’re godawful?” I said, “They’re absolutely godawful.” He said, “Can they play?” I said, “No, not at all.” He said, “Okay, can you find them for me?” Bill had already put the show together, and Malcolm comes in and says, “We want this band opening for us.” He said he wouldn’t play if they weren’t on the show. So then Bill says, “Okay, you want them on the show? They’re the headliner.” So Malcolm went for that.

Rozz Rezabek: We were excited because it’s true, we were the worst band in San Francisco! And all of a sudden we’re at the scene of this big swirling controversy 48 hours before the show, where the headline act, the Sex Pistols, is not gonna play unless Negative Trend is on the bill. We didn’t know if we were gonna play. The night before the show, we took our posters and made this Negative Trend symbol about 30 feet high, on the side of Winterland, with wheat paste. Cans and cans of spray paint. We got it bad. I don’t know what got into us. Bill Graham was furious. Furious. He called us a “Nouveau Revolutionary Band.”

Penelope Houston: It was sold out. There were between 5 and 6,000 people. The biggest show we’d ever played, and it was the biggest show the Sex Pistols had ever played at that point.

Insane Jane: Me and my foster brother Mike Munoz showed up at 10:30 in the morning in our ripped-up army jackets with Vaseline in our hair. There were two girls already in line, one of them was wearing a yellow, Devo-style jumpsuit. This punk dude strides up and says, “So, you’re gonna be first in line, eh?” The two girls jumped up and squealed, “Sid! Sid!” and had him sign a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks, which he deeply gouged his signature into. He seemed very happy when my brother told him he was ten years old. Then some dude jumped out of a car and said, “Anybody have an extra ticket for sale?” Sid mockingly repeated what the guy said, then snatched off the dude’s wraparound shades and threw them into the street. Sid then took off, saying, “See ya later inside.”

Jennifer Blowdryer: I definitely put on my “Anarchy” T-shirt and some horrible off-suede lace-up open-toe boots I’d found in a thrift store, and a slip. A woman on BART called me “sister,” thinking I was a whore or something. I was so offended.

Jennifer Miro: Johnny Rotten was hanging around, it was nerve-wracking but it was just so cool. There was no punk in L.A. yet. It was so behind San Francisco.

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Drummer Paul Cook and Johnny Rotten at Winterland, photo via PMA magazine.

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Danny Furious: I remember John onstage alone after their sound check, while I was setting up my kit for ours. He looked like the unhappiest, angriest person in the world. And then in bounced Sid, trying to con me out of the hammer/sickle T-shirt the Dils had loaned me for the show. When I looked up, Rotten had fucked off, so I never had the chance to have my head tore off by him by saying hello.

Bruce Loose: I found thousands of pairs of those glasses that the doctor gives you when they put drops in your eyes to keep the light out. At Goodwill, for like a nickel, I bought 100 dollars’ worth, and I scratched “Sex” in one lens, “Pistols” in the other. Filled them in with DayGlo paint, and tried to hand them out. I had a little past shoulder-length hair. These English punks that came along with the Sex Pistols would take them from my hand, throw them on the ground and step on them. Push me on the shoulder. Give me all this attitude.

James Stark: It was one of the most intense, chaotic shows I’ve ever been to. It was just mayhem. Everybody was jumping and yelling, a constant barrage of flying projectiles. I tried to get up close to take some photographs and it was just impossible. People came from L.A. and up north and from all over. You had a lot of kids from the suburbs.

Gary Floyd: It was a real opportunity for people to strut their punk-ness. “The Sex Pistols are here, and here we are in San Francisco and we’re punks, too, and we have weird hair and we’re going to do our shit tonight!” Everybody was just strutting like it was a little parade. It was very surreal.

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Winterland crowd photos by Jeffrey Heyman (top) and Armando Gallo.

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Sheriff Mike Hennessey: I remember sitting up in the balcony with Beverly. The crowd was loud and obnoxious and yelling. And when the Sex Pistols came on, a lot of people were heaving spit. I knew the music already, because I’d had the album. It was loud, and hard to understand.

Steve Tupper: Up at the stage, you couldn’t move at all, crushed in from all sides. As an experiment, first I raised one foot, and then the other off the floor. And just hung there for a couple seconds.

Jennifer Miro: I was dating Brittley Black, who was in Crime, and he broke up with me the night before the show. So I was crying the whole night. I went on first, all by myself, the very first person on the stage, and I was wearing this green taffeta vampire-collared mini-dress with black spike-heeled boots. I was terrified, in the spotlight, and I just stood there, and they cheered. After that, you can’t go back to a normal life.

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Jennifer Miro from The Nuns at Winterland, via punkrockgraveyard.

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Penelope Houston: There were only maybe 500 punks between L.A. and San Francisco. So who were the other 5,500 people? The crowd was frightening, that’s what I really remember about it most. The stage was covered in spit when the Nuns were done. And I walked out and slipped on a big gob. I didn’t hit the ground but almost. I was scared. “Everybody, um, take a couple steps back because the people in the front here are turning blue.”

Danny Furious: We were nervous. We’d never played for more than a couple hundred, at best. When I hit my snare, the volume from the drum monitor behind me literally knocked me off my stool. I’d never had a drum monitor.

Jennifer Blowdryer: The Sex Pistols didn’t play very long. I didn’t pay too much attention, ’cause they didn’t seem that serious or engaging, so why would I be? I went to the ladies room and there was this woman, Blondine, who had like part dark blond, part light blond hair, and some kind of silver short trench coat, and bright blue eye shadow. I was attracted to that. Really, the stripper in the bathroom made the biggest impression on me.

Penelope Houston: Sid was really not a good bass player. The other members of the band were holding it together. And Johnny Rotten probably knew it was their last show.

Dennis Kernohan: The Avengers blew them away. The Avengers killed the Sex Pistols that night. So much so that Malcolm McLaren wanted to produce them.

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Penelope Houston and the Avengers at Winterland.

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Howie Klein: I was on the stage for the whole show. People were throwing coins, which Bill Graham and I picked up afterwards. I was going for the quarters, he was going for everything.

Penelope Houston: The Sex Pistols went off to a dressing room up in some offices. We were backstage, hanging out with Negative Trend and some of the Nuns.

Howie Klein: I was watching the Sex Pistols’ equipment coming off the stage and it was just a circus. Everyone started leaving except for the same 25 people that would have seen Negative Trend anyway. I felt bad for them.

Rozz Rezabek: We thought we were going to go on. These guys were leadin’ us, then the next thing I knew, they were shoving us out a side door. And then we were let back in. Immediately. But our instruments had mysteriously disappeared, and the house lights were up, “Greensleeves” was playing. They said, “Go ahead. You’re on!” I was like, “Where are our instruments?”

There was a huge backstage area and we just started destroying stuff. There was like 60 garbage cans full of little Olympia beers, we knocked every single one over. These little six-ounce cans, we were throwin’ ’em like snowballs. There was ice about two inches deep through the back area.

There was a hot dog cart, so I asked for two hot dogs with relish and threw them at the first person that had a camera light. There was all the major networks there: ABC, CBS, NBC, doing a live-for-TV thing. Britt Ekland was there, Rod Stewart’s girlfriend at the time, so I fuckin’ slammed hot dogs right in her face! We were completely rioting, and nobody seemed to stop us.

Ginger Coyote: The Sex Pistols were staying over at the Miyako Hotel and I remember going by there. Rumor had it that Zsa Zsa Gabor was also staying at the hotel and had been partying with Steve Jones.

Jennifer Miro: We were whisked away in a limousine to a party. Sid Vicious kissed me on the head and he invited us all to stay with him in London. He was very polite. There was this long line of people shooting heroin.

Rozz Rezabek: I remember bits and pieces of the after-parties. This one place in the Haight, they were just like knocking down the walls, to the drywall. And Sid occupying the bathroom. He peed his pants a bunch. He was drinking peppermint schnapps. We were like, “Why are all these girls all over him?”

Danny Furious: Sid fucked off with Lamar and other punk junkies to the Haight where he OD’d. The Avengers went to the Mabuhay to very little fanfare. I went home to bed, wondering just what had happened.

Rozz Rezabek: I don’t remember anything ’til a couple days later, waking up with really chapped lips on the beach.

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The entire Pistols set is available to watch on YouTube.

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In order of appearance:

Al Ennis - co-founder, Maximum RocknRoll Radio
Rozz Rezabek - vocalist, Negative Trend, Theater of Sheep
Jello Biafra - vocalist, Dead Kennedys, proprietor of Alternative Tentacles Records
Dave Dictor - vocalist, MDC (Millions of Dead Cops)
Ruth Schwartz - Maximum RocknRoll Radio, Mordam Records
Sammytown - vocalist, Fang
Sheriff Mike Hennessey - punk-rock-loving sheriff of San Francisco
Danny Furious - drummer, the Avengers
Johnny Strike (RIP) - co-founder & guitarist, Crime
Hank Rank - drummer for Crime, film producer
Steve Tupper - proprietor, Subterranean Records
Jennifer Miro (RIP) - vocals & keyboards, The Nuns
Penelope Houston - vocalist, the Avengers
Howie Klein (RIP) - executive, 415 Records, Sire Records, Reprise Records
Insane Jane - San Francisco punk drummer and artist.
Jennifer Blowdryer: author and poet, vocalist for the Blowdryers.
Bruce Loose (RIP) - vocalist, Flipper
James Stark - early punk photographer & author
Gary Floyd (RIP) - vocalist, The Dicks, Sister Double Happiness
Dennis Kernohan (RIP) - vocalist for The Liars, Sudden Fun
Ginger Coyote - Punk Globe magazine, vocalist for White Trash Debutantes