{"id":792660,"date":"2019-02-02T07:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-02-02T14:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=787572"},"modified":"2019-02-02T07:00:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-02T14:00:47","slug":"flashback-sid-vicious-blows-an-audience-away-singing-my-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/flashback-sid-vicious-blows-an-audience-away-singing-my-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: Sid Vicious Blows an Audience Away Singing \u2018My Way\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The strings swirl, Sid Vicious<\/a> descends a staircase and begins doing his best Chairman of the Board impression (even if it sounds a bit more like Dracula than Sinatra), and then everything implodes in his cover version of \u201cMy Way.\u201d The bassist gave the song a punk-rock makeover for his star turn in The Great Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll Swindle<\/em> shortly before his death in 1979. When people finally saw it, upon the film\u2019s release in May 1980, it became one of Vicious\u2019 iconic moments \u2014\u00a0mostly because, as he sings, he did it his way.<\/p>\n

Paul Anka wrote \u201cMy Way\u201d in 1968 using the music to a French pop hit by Claude Fran\u00e7ois, \u201cComme d\u2019habitude,\u201d and coming up with lyrics that he felt suited to its intended singer. \u201cI said, \u2018If Frank were writing this, what would he say?’\u201d Anka recalled in a 2007 interview with England\u2019s The Telegraph<\/a><\/em>. \u201cI used words I would never use: \u2018I ate it up and spit it out,\u2019 but that\u2019s the way he talked. \u2026 I called Frank up in Nevada \u2014 he was at Caesar\u2019s Palace \u2014 and said, \u2018I\u2019ve got something real special for you.’\u201d The song made it to Number 27 on the Hot 100 in 1969 and became one of Sinatra\u2019s signature songs.<\/p>\n

Vicious made \u201cMy Way\u201d his when he recorded it in England in 1978. In the same way that the original was tailor-made to fit Frank Sinatra, Vicious liberally rewrote the lyrics for himself using words like \u201ccunt,\u201d \u201cqueer\u201d and references to his recreational activities like, \u201cWhen there was doubt, I shot it up or kicked it out.\u201d Around the time he recorded the song, he also shot his now-iconic scene in the movie, which ends with him blowing the audience away with (of course) a pistol.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really like the bit where Sid shoots the audience, especially singing \u2018My Way,’\u201d the film\u2019s director, Julien Temple, said in a 1979 NME<\/em> interview<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s a very good example of the Sex Pistols<\/a>\u2019 attitude. Especially given Sid\u2019s character as a kind of social actor, or whatever he was, with the annihilation of that song. To me it is tremendous. All the egotism and the individualism and the hypocrisy involved in that song and the audience lapping it up and getting shot to pieces is just wonderful to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vicious moved to New York City with girlfriend Nancy Spungen that August. Spungen died in October 1978 of a stabbing, and Vicious was arrested as the prime suspect. He was released on bail and four months later he died of a heroin overdose<\/a> on February 2nd.<\/p>\n

When Rolling Stone<\/em> reviewed the Swindle<\/em> album in 1979, it described the song as \u201cbuffoonish but now gruesomely ironic,\u201d given that Vicious was already dead. The single eventually made it up to Number Seven on the U.K. chart. In addition to becoming the most memorable part of the Swindle<\/em> movie, Vicious\u2019 recording later perfectly capped off Martin Scorsese\u2019s Goodfellas<\/em>.<\/p>\n

One person who was not amused by the cover, though, was Anka. He told the Telegraph<\/em>, he was \u201csomewhat destabilized by the Sex Pistols version. It was kind of curious, but I felt he was sincere about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The strings swirl, Sid Vicious descends a staircase and begins doing his best Chairman of the Board impression (even if it sounds a bit more like Dracula than Sinatra), and then everything implodes in his cover version of \u201cMy Way.\u201d The bassist gave the song a punk-rock makeover for his star turn in The Great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-792660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-13 09:44:51","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}