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Twisted Tales: Sid Vicious Remains a Punk, Even in Death

The story of Sid Vicious' ill-fated relationship with Nancy Spungen is the stuff of punk legend. Less well-known is the twisted saga of Sid's remains.

Born to a hippie mother and a father who was reportedly a guard at Buckingham Palace, John Simon Ritchie took the punk surname "Vicious" from Johnny Rotten's pet hamster. Following the infamous flameout of the Sex Pistols, Sid attempted a solo career, drawing rowdy crowds to the New York nightclub Max's Kansas City. He and Spungen were deep into mutual drug dependency, holed up in their room at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan, when Nancy died of a mysterious single stab wound to the stomach, on their bathroom floor. Sid claimed to have no recollection of the incident. Though some speculated the murder may have been committed by one of two known drug dealers to have visited the room, others believed Sid had failed to hold up his end of a suicide pact.

Several days after Nancy's death, Vicious was hospitalized at Bellevue Hospital after an attempt to kill himself. Meanwhile, Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren arranged for prominent defense attorney F. Lee Bailey to take Sid's case, and McLaren's London shop started selling T-shirts that read, "I'm Alive. She's Dead. I'm Yours."

Having posted bail after being charged with Nancy's murder, Sid was arrested for assaulting Patti Smith's brother Todd with a glass at Max's. From December 1978 to early February 1979, he served time at Rikers Island. Out again on bail, he managed to score some potent heroin. Clean since his jail term, his tolerance level was low, and he overdosed in his sleep that night. By some accounts, it was Sid's own mother, Anne Beverley, who gave her son the drugs that killed him.

After Sid's body was cremated, his mother found a suicide note in his leather jacket. In it, he asked to be buried next to "my baby" in his leather jacket, jeans and motorcycle boots. Legend has it that his mother climbed into snow-covered King David Cemetery in Bucks County, Penn., to scatter his ashes over Nancy's grave, despite the Spungen family's repeated warnings to be left alone.

According to Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren, however, Beverley actually brought her son's ashes home to London. In a drunken accident at Heathrow Airport, she supposedly spilled the remains all over the arrival lounge.

If that was Sid's ignominious end, his old friend Johnny Rotten would have found it sadly fitting. "There's nothing glorious in dying," as the punk anarchist would write in his autobiography. "Anyone can do it."

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fnster674

My sister’s friend was a college student who had a caretaker’s job at the King David Cemetery in Bensalem, PA. He was not a punk rock fan but knew that I was, so he told my sister that I might be interested in what he saw at work one day. A limo from New York pulled into the cemetery and some punk-y looking people got out and gathered at Nancy Spungen’s grave, where they spread some ashes. It had not yet been a year since her burial, and because of the violation of the Jewish tradition of not visiting a grave during the first year after death, the old man who was the head caretaker became angry and chased them off. He also felt that the ashes desecrated the grave. He went into a tool shed and found an old coffee can holding some nails. He emptied the nails and used the can to scoop up as many ashes as he could. Not knowing what to do with the can of ashes, he placed it on a shelf in the tool shed. … Years later, I told this story to a friend of mine who was heavily involved in the Philadelphia music scene and he said he knew someone who had ridden in a limo with Sid’s mom from New York to the Spungen grave, and then to Philly International Airport so that Sid’s mom could return to London. … So is this what happened to all or some of Sid’s ashes? I don’t know for sure, but the elements of the story seem to add up.

August 14 2011 at 11:53 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply