The Mayor and the Sex Pistols

A true story from the bowels of rural Montana

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Edinburgh Castle Pub in San Francisco hosted a regular reading series. The events were fantastic. It was a great, slightly unhinged showcase for local and visiting writers. I participated in many of these shows. By day I was a freelance journalist, and after hours, if I was asked, I would rack my brain to come up with things to read out loud in front of an audience. This story was one of those pieces. It was never published, and I only read it once. But it seems time to share it now.

In rural Montana, the default style of music was country. Jukeboxes blasted songs about “a hot-rod Ford and a two-dollar bill.” A wedding band would kick out the jams with “Rhinestone Cowboy.” At a steakhouse, people would set down their forks and hit the dance floor when they heard “I’ve got a tiger by the tail it’s plain to see.”

If you were a high school kid in the ’70s, with scruffy hair and agitated hormones, interested in rock and roll, this was sheer torture. You had to wait until nightfall when the local AM station KATL—yes, “cattle” radio—would trot out whatever version of the devil’s music was allowed. Smooth wimp-rockers like the Eagles, or Peter Frampton. And if you waited for the solo, the Gerry Rafferty song “Baker Street.”

The nearest arena concert was two states away, and that was a long drive to hear a half-baked regional band like Head East or REO Speedwagon. The only alternative was a Saturday night at the National Guard Armory, a grim windowless cinderblock building near the end of Main Street. For most of us, the Armory shows were our first glimpse of live rock and roll. 

We would hang out beforehand in the gravel parking lot, leaning against pickups and listening to 8-tracks. When the bands started up, everyone finished their Coors and packed inside. Kids danced around in down vests and snow boots, as a guitarist wearing puka shells climbed on top of an Army tank, straddled the barrel, and played a version of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” that was, well, close enough. On a big night, you might see a band from Minneapolis.

With no MTV or internet, our only window to the big bad world of rock and roll came in the form of music magazines like Circus and Rolling Stone. My friends and I studied them as if they were sacred texts. We’d slowly turn the pages, gazing at photos of rock stars performing in far-off exotic places like Wembley and Madison Square Garden. They certainly weren’t coming to the Armory anytime soon. The biggest act that ever hit my hometown was Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, which played a concert at the local rodeo. They were so drunk the show ended after a half hour, and the band was run out of town.

So I resigned myself to listening to tapes with friends, driving the dusty streets. By this time, rock music had reached a zenith of excess. Gods of the electric guitar, slashing their axes through the night skies like medieval Huns destroying a village, the high-pitched squealing so fast and powerful it was as if the guitar had somehow been possessed by its own potential and leaped out of the player’s hands, and he was forced to chase the instrument down the street. You could only listen to so much of this stuff. We wondered, would there ever be musicians who didn’t play 11-minute guitar solos named “Extraterrestrial Traveller Part I—The Voyager.” 

A typical weekday morning. I was a senior in high school, sitting in my parents’ kitchen, tying my shoes for school. The network news blasted from the television, as my father prepared for his daily drive to work at the ranch. Suddenly there was the sound of loud guitar music. I looked up to watch. A segment was reporting on the American tour of a new rock band from England called the Sex Pistols. Something called “punk rock.” People were being interviewed, coming out of the show. Comments ranged from “It was great—they were spitting on people!” to “It was disgusting—they were spitting on us!” Footage of the actual concert showed a group of scuzzy little guys onstage, covered in blood, sneering and getting pelted with projectiles. My excitement grew. The camera then showed the band’s hotel room, littered with beer bottles. A voiceover explained, with some contempt, that the reporter attempted to interview members of the band, but they had refused, demanding ten dollars each. At that point, a bunch of hands appeared and covered the lens. My father snorted in disgust, and I immediately thought, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. 

After school, I headed for the town’s only music store, called The Melody Shop, which sold records, instruments and accessories. The same store where, years before when I was taking piano lessons, I would buy sheet music for Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” They didn’t stock the Sex Pistols album, of course, so I approached the elderly woman behind the counter and asked her to order it. I remember coaching her as she wrote down the information in her old-fashioned penmanship. “Yes…that’s sex, and then pistols. Like the gun.” 

I called the shop every week to check on the progress, and each time she’d say it hadn’t arrived. I eventually forgot. One day I was in the store, flicking through the vinyl, when I heard a voice behind me: “Sir? Sir?” I turned, and the old lady sniffed, “Your tape’s here.” She slid the tape across the counter with one finger, eager to get it out of her store. Only five weeks. It must have been air-dropped in.

I called up my friend Curt and said, It’s a go. We spent the next week listening to the tape over and over, cruising Main Street, bouncing along the dirt roads outside of town, giving horses and cattle an uninvited blast of “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the UK.” We were now officially dangerous. Punk rock, motherfuckers. Except we couldn’t dress punk, because the cowboys would kick our asses. We forced our friends to listen to all the nasty lyrics: “She was a girl from Birmingham, she just had an abortion.” Cool, they even wrote a song about Alabama.

It was soon apparent that this newfound treasure needed a larger audience, and we knew exactly who needed to hear it. Our civics teacher, George Kurkowski. His class was the worst for seniors, because it was about Washington and government, which had just collapsed during the Watergate hearings. And nobody cared about politics at that time. What was the point? We all watched the president resign in disgrace on national television.

George Kurkowski was a scowling, gangly man with a wide necktie and a voice like a drill sergeant. Stingy and arch-conservative, he took perverse pride in flunking kids out of the class. Captain Kirk, as we called him, was fond of sitting at his desk, and grumbling a disparaging comment for each student as they entered the room. In my case, he looked out the window at my pimply little Toyota Corona, and growled, “Is that your car, Boulware? You won’t catch me driving one of those Jap jobs.” I asked him what he drove, and he replied, “Jeep. American all the way.”

The next day of class, George Kurkowski arrived late, sat down at his desk and stopped. Sitting front and center was a photo of the Sex Pistols in full plumage—spiked hair, safety pins, ripped clothing, sneering and giving the finger. He looked up and asked who it was. “The Sex Pistols,” said a voice. “From England,” said another. He asked who put it on his desk, and of course, nobody answered. And then, to our shock, he ripped the photo into several pieces, threw them to the floor, stood to his feet and stomped on the shreds, grinding them into the linoleum. He carefully deposited the remnants into a wastebasket, and glared at the class. “If I ever caught my daughter hanging around with that motley crew, I’d wring her neck.” This routine continued the rest of the week, until we ran out of photos.

Eventually I realized the Sex Pistols were actually a political and social statement. They were rebelling for reasons other than the fact that bands like Supertramp were really lame. My musical tastes moved on. About 20 years later, I was back in Montana for the holidays. I ended up in a crowded bar. Decorated, as many are, with dead animal heads. Standing off to one side, in a brown sportcoat, was George Kurkowski. After retiring from teaching, he had achieved a political dream of some sort, and became mayor of the town. He stood there, whiskey in one hand, cigarette in the other. I’d heard life had kicked him around a bit. One of his sons died. People didn’t seem to be talking to him. But it felt like we still had some unfinished business.

I walked up and introduced myself. He remembered me. I asked if he recalled seeing photographs of the Sex Pistols on his desk during the class, and he fell into an inexplicable fit of laughter. This continued for about 30 seconds, him wiping tears from his eyes. He’d start to speak, and then bust up again. His wife stepped in and exclaimed, “He hasn’t laughed like this in years!”And then I realized, all this time we were laughing at Captain Kirk, he was laughing at us. All the ripping and stomping on the photos was just for show. I bought him another drink, which is what you do in Montana, and we continued chatting. But there wasn’t going to be anything more interesting to talk about, and so we stood there, the mayor and the student, catching up with the Sex Pistols.