More Dick!

After last night's post honoring the life of American Bandstand host Dick Clark, I found myself perusing clips of that show on the website www.slicingupeyeballs.com. The clips they posted showcased the various synth pop and new wave bands who had appeared, and I saw excellent performances by OMD, Berlin, Adam & the Ants, and a handful of others. One clip I watched was simply so awesome I had to put it up here as an addendum to last night's tribute. The band? Public Image Ltd. (featuring the infamous Johnny Rotten, ex-Sex Pistols).

Last time I saw this clip was in high school, and the sheer anarchy of it has always stuck with me. Johnny Rotten, wearing a white suit foreshadowing the style of "Miami Vice," wanders through the audience with abandon. Lip syncing be damned, he begins pulling girls up on stage to dance around the band. The band members barely pretend to play, swap instruments, and look unmoved by their surroundings.

The story goes that Dick Clark had a verbal altercation with one of the members backstage before taping and asked their tour manager "What can I expect from this asshole?" It went a little something like this: