FILTER REISSUES
Deliverance
Deliberately taking English punk rock to redneck country in America’s Deep South: a bad idea then, but priceless vérité now.
By Pat Gilbert.
Sex Pistols
★★★
Live In The USA 1978
UNIVERSAL. CD/DL/LP
L ONG BEFORE HE shot dead Lee Oswald, President Kennedy’s supposed assassin, nightclub owner Jack Ruby ran a cowboy joint in Dallas called the Longhorn Ballroom. His taste in music was impeccable: as well as Western Swing and country acts, he also booked Nat King Cole, Count Basie and Ruth Brown (this in ’50s Texas). Probably best for all parties, then, that Ruby had long expired before the Sex Pistols performed at the club on January 10, 1978, their junky bassist sporting the legend “Gimme A Fix” in magic-marker on his bare chest and goading audience members to fight him.
The Longhorn Ballroom gig, the fifth date of the Pistols’ messy – and, as it would transpire, terminal – two-week tour of America, is one of three concerts gathered in a new box set, Live In The USA 1978. Many fans will already know the material from the numerous bootlegs that have circulated down the years. But while some of those featured edited or incomplete recordings, here we’re treated to pretty much the entire shows. Which, with the inclusion of, say, Steve Jones trying to tune up his guitar for a full minute, or Sid’s witless between-song showboating, makes these albums priceless verité documents of a band spiralling to their doom.