Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Interior spread from “We Started a Nightclub”: The Birth of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge as Told by ...
[+] Those Who Lived It by Brian Butterick, Susan Martin, and Kestutis Nakas (Some Serious Business/Damiani Books, 2024). “Regrets, I've had a few.” Queue Sid Vicious’ knockout-cocktail of vainglory, eccentricity, and sanctimoniousness served up in his Cockney-accented cover of My Way on the Sex Pistols' soundtrack album, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1979) and his own live album, Sid Sings (1979).
The bassist who sometimes shoved frontman Johnny Rotten to the side is not to be forgotten for his rendition of the song written by Gilles Thibaut, Jacques Revaux, and Paul Anka, and popularized by Frank Sinatra a decade earlier in 1969. I imagine Julie Hair, one-time bass player for 3TK4 (3 Teens Kill 4) — the East Village band founded in 1980 by Brian Butterick, Jesse Hultberg, and legendary painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist, David Wojnarowicz — hearing the same line playing on a loop in her head after realizing what she’d missed a decade after the Vicious’ cover, on July 18, 1989. She was working the door when Nirvana played their first show at New York’s Pyramid Cocktail Lounge (A.
K.A. Pyramid Club).
“When Nirvana played they were not known, and I stupidly didn’t bother to take a break from working the door to go watch them. .
