999,869: Sid Vicious - My Way

In Frank Sinatra’s hands, “My Way” was a proud, unapologetic look back on a tumultuous lifetime of accomplishment from one of the most important figures in all of American popular music. In the hands of doomed and musically incompetent punk rocker Sid Vicious, “My Way” was something very, very different. Vicious was never really a musician; he was chosen to replace Glen Matlock as the Sex Pistols’ bass player largely because lead singer Johnny Rotten needed a friend and ally in the band, and bass couldn’t be THAT hard to learn, could it? Well, as it turns out, learning the bass becomes considerably more difficult when your new junkie girlfriend gets you hooked on smack. By the time the Pistols broke up, Vicious was a certified waste-case with little bankable talent, aside from a threatening media image that stemmed from a number of violent incidents.

He certainly didn’t have a voice that could support a solo career, as becomes instantly clear in the orchestral opening of his “My Way” version. Knowing full well that he can’t sing for shit, Vicious doesn’t even try, actively making his voice do things that could get him booed off of even a karaoke stage. You could read it as a snotty sendup of Sinatra-style crooning, but it’s abundantly clear that no matter the commentary, this approach is born of a complete lack of talent. Vicious also starts changing the words, replacing “My friends, I’ll say it clear” with the endlessly clever “You cunt, I’m not a queer.” It’s the sort of parody lyric you could get from any number of bored high school students, including this author circa 1992.

After the first verse, the electric punk-rock guitars kick in, and Vicious delivers the rest of the song in a piss-poor Johnny Rotten imitation. This despite his having fallen out with Rotten over the issue of drug addiction, and mocking Rotten as a prat who wears hats in the last verse of the song. It’s less possible here to think of Vicious’ vocals as snotty sendups of the original article; Rotten’s style was by his own admission the product of a less than stellar singing voice, but he at least had an ear for what he could do with it that would fit the music. Vicious, by contrast, sounds like he has no idea how else to sing. And as amateurish as Rotten could be, he still sang in tune, with a steady pitch. Vicious sounds practically tone-deaf here, unable to maintain vocal control even on the extremely basic level that a convincing Rotten imitation would require. He also can’t enunciate very well, which makes it hard to tell exactly how many lyrics have been changed over the rest of the song (although it’s clear that “I did all that” becomes “I killed a cat,” and “I ate it up” becomes “I shot it up”).

But, in the end, this is all exactly what the song is about. The transparent lack of musical talent, the poorly thought-out rebellion, the pointless self-destruction, the terrible life choices that would later culminate in the possible murder of his girlfriend…the utter failure of Sid Vicious is unabashedly celebrated here, and no matter how big a joke the musical results are, it’s conceptual genius. To some, it’s become an iconic punk statement, thanks to the symbolism of inverting Sinatra’s big statement into such a clear antithesis of everything it originally meant. And in one sense, Vicious’ version rings truer than Sinatra’s: when Sinatra sang “And now, the end is near,” he lived almost another thirty years. When Vicious sang it, it was literally true. As such, his version hews more closely to the spirit of the lyrics, providing an epitaph that’s every bit as messy as the life it capped.