A Sex Pistols Encore, Decades in the Making
Forty years ago this month, the Sex Pistols started their first tour of America. It was also their last. After seven electrifying, antagonistic performances, the band broke up.
Without permission from the group or its record label, Warner Bros., the filmmaker Lech Kowalski captured as many of the shows as he could for what would become the documentary “D.O. A.: A Right of Passage.” He then flew to England, interviewed the bassist Sid Vicious and filmed more punk bands, including Generation X and Sham 69. But Sid Vicious and the movie’s financier both died before its completion, and by the time the film’s distributors secured the Waverly Theater in New York for its 1981 premiere, every other band featured in it had broken up, too.
“D.O. A.” has since existed as a cult totem, popularized by word of mouth and circulated illicitly in degenerated quality. The film briefly appeared on videotape, issued by HarmonyVision in 1983, but it quickly went out of circulation. This month, it finally got an official home video release from MVD Rewind, but Mr. Kowalski, 65, is reluctant to speak about it.
“There are things I’ll talk about ‘D.O. A.’ with you, and other things that I will not talk about, because I don’t want to promote this DVD release,” he said from France. Because of licensing issues, two Iggy Pop recordings on the soundtrack have been replaced with alternate versions. It destroys, Mr. Kowalski said, “a special film that I’ve been protecting.”
Only those who worked in the trenches of the production, Mr. Kowalski said, “really know the great history of the film, and the blood, sweat and tears it took to make it.”
At the time, Mr. Kowalski wanted to capture “the clash between two cultures: the English punk culture and whatever we would meet in America,” he said. He approached Tom Forcade, the founder of High Times magazine, a counterculture publication, for funding.
Mr. Forcade gave the green light only days before the first concert of the tour, and he and Mr. Kowalski repeatedly tried to contact the band in various, unusual ways, even tailing them by helicopter.
“It was like espionage,” said Maureen McFadden, Mr. Forcade’s former assistant.
Mr. Kowalski’s crews were able to locate the band’s hotel rooms at every stop, but this only stoked the group’s — and the record label’s — paranoia.
Mr. Kowalski recalled the atmosphere becoming increasingly frantic. The two discussed how they might place Sid Vicious into rehab, and even considered smuggling him to Jamaica.
Mr. Forcade’s cash flow, meanwhile, had been cut off by High Times in New York.
The Sex Pistols, for their part, were barely communicating with one another. After the last performance, in San Francisco, the band was finished.
The interview that Mr. Kowalski landed with Sid Vicious was nearly incoherent, an intimate but harrowing glimpse into the heroin- doomed lives of the bassist and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. Sid Vicious was arrested and charged with killing Spungen in October 1978. Mr. Forcade shot himself in November. Sid Vicious died from a heroin overdose in February 1979.
Nearly 40 years passed before all the music rights for the MDV release were secured. Mr. Kowalski sounded wistful after he shared his “D.O. A.” story. “Now, of course,” he said, “all this stuff is going to make people want to buy this.”