My Father Fought the Sex Pistols
And the Sex Pistols won
It was 1978, and boring was in.
I spent most of my time trudging to and from seventh-grade classes on Long Island, devising ways to hide pot inside of my model airplanes, and falling asleep each night to a cassette of Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like an Eagle.
But then, like a brief comet across the Western sky, I discovered the Sex Pistols. Their snarling good looks, angry calls for anarchy, and slurred British accents were hypnotic. I was transfixed, confused, and fascinated when news broke that bassist Sid Vicious had apparently stabbed to death his girlfriend Nancy Spungen at New York’s fleabag-chic Chelsea Hotel in October 1978. Sid completed the punk Götterdämmerung less than four months later when he died of a heroin overdose.
Nancy’s death remains controversial (some believe she was murdered by a drug dealer); Sid never got his day his court. And while he may have never known it, he became a congressional campaign issue in the months before his death — figuring prominently into a protest bid for office on the Conservative Party ticket waged by my father, Howard Horowitz.
