{"id":432863,"date":"2026-09-11T14:22:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T14:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/432863\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T14:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T14:22:10","slug":"sex-pistols-finally-make-their-return-to-dallas-nearly-50-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/432863\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex Pistols finally make their return to Dallas nearly 50 years later"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1978, the Longhorn Ballroom\u2019s marquee advertised \u201cTonite: Sex Pistols\u201d above an upcoming show by country legend Merle Haggard \u2014 a pairing that captured the strange, combustible clash at the heart of one of Dallas\u2019 most infamous punk nights. That marquee wasn\u2019t a mistake. And nearly 48 years later, the punchline has come full circle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Friday, Sept. 11, the Sex Pistols return to the scene of the crime<\/a> at Longhorn Ballroom to open the North American leg of their 50th-anniversary \u201cAnarchy in the UK\u201d tour, playing the very stage where, on January 10, 1978, beer bottles flew and a young Sid Vicious took one to the head, leaving him bloodied and grinning in front of a room full of Texans who mostly came to gawk. It was chaos of the highest order. And it stuck.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t even know it was a bar. I thought it was a ballroom,\u201d says Jeffrey Liles<\/a>, who was a 15-year-old with a fake ID that night, and is now the artistic director of both the Longhorn Ballroom and the Kessler Theater. \u201cThe first thing that popped in my head, it was like a ballroom with a chandelier, ballroom dancing or something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

What he got instead was a founding document of Dallas punk history<\/a>. Liles had discovered the band a few months earlier when a clerk at Sound Town Record Store in Richardson shoved a copy of \u201cNever Mind the Bollocks, Here\u2019s the Sex Pistols\u201d into his hands and told him to get it out of the store. He took it home, where he says it \u201cjumped out of the speakers.\u201d He didn\u2019t know what \u201canarchy\u201d meant. He wasn\u2019t sure the U.K. was England. He figured \u201cfascist regime\u201d might be some new punk-rock slang the band had invented.<\/p>\n

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THANK YOU!<\/p>\n

You’re all set.<\/p>\n

CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Pistol whipped<\/p>\n

Tickets were $3.50, about a third of what a classic-rock show cost at the time. And the staff, Liles remembers, \u201cwere just anxious to get the show over with.\u201d Nobody even carded him.<\/p>\n

That was by design. Band manager Malcolm McLaren had deliberately routed the Pistols through Texas honky-tonks and rodeo halls to engineer a culture clash, and the band walked in blind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cComing from London, we knew very little about America,\u201d guitarist Steve Jones recalls of the tour. \u201cWe just thought we were playing another venue.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Drummer Paul Cook remembers a crowd fueled less by the music than by the tabloid legend of a band that had been briefly denied visas. People arrived thinking they were \u201csupposed to throw things.\u201d The whole tour, Cook admits, felt \u201ca little scary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing Liles will tell you straight: musically, the Pistols \u201ccouldn\u2019t pull it off\u201d that night. Original bassist Glen Matlock, the one who actually helped write the tunes, was already gone. Sid Vicious \u201cdidn\u2019t know how to play bass\u201d and \u201cbasically stood there pretending to be part of the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was more of a spectacle than anything else,\u201d Liles says of that fateful night. What he witnessed instead was a frontman turning on his own crowd. Johnny Rotten sneered at the paying customers, needling them with the question that would become his signature: \u201cEver get the feeling you\u2019ve been cheated?\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones onstage at the Longhorn Ballroom during the Sex Pistols\u2019 infamous 1978 Dallas stop.<\/p>\n

For Liles, a Creem Magazine kid raised on the confrontational writing of Lester Bangs, it clicked. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the first time I\u2019d ever seen an artist really just show contempt for the people who bought tickets to come see him,\u201d Liles recalls. <\/p>\n

Which brings us to the delicious wrinkle of 2026. The band walking back into the Longhorn isn\u2019t quite the band on the wall. Rotten sat this reunion out and dismissed it as \u201ckaraoke.\u201d In his place is Frank Carter, a frontman with bundles of energy and no interest in impersonating anybody. And Matlock, the man Vicious replaced in 1977, is back in his old slot.<\/p>\n

In other words, this lineup may actually be closer to the original creative engine than the version that bled all over this stage in \u201978. Matlock wasn\u2019t at that Dallas show, but his fingerprints are on the songs everyone\u2019s coming to hear. Liles has seen the reformed Pistols twice with Matlock, in 1996 and in the mid-2000s, and calls the difference \u201cnight and day\u201d compared to the Longhorn debacle. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey were great, both of those shows,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

History doing what history does<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the poetry, and Dallas has a serious case of it this week.<\/p>\n

Nearly 50 years after that marquee stacked the Sex Pistols on top of Merle Haggard, the Pistols now play the night before Ben Haggard, Merle\u2019s son, who is set to take the same Longhorn stage as part of the \u201cStill the King\u201d lineup alongside Asleep at the Wheel, Summer Dean and others. Punk on Friday, outlaw country on Saturday. The culture clash McLaren manufactured as a stunt has aged into something that feels almost like a handshake between two rebel traditions that always had more in common than either wanted to admit.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Sex Pistols, now featuring frontman Frank Carter, bring the mayhem offstage and into the crowd. <\/p>\n

And the timing gets stranger. The first-ever Republican Midterm Convention landed in Dallas<\/a> this week. Liles can\u2019t help but connect the dots back to 1984, when the Dead Kennedys set up and played outside the Republican National Convention here, the biggest punk moment the city had seen to that point.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, that is kind of a bookend for the trajectory of punk rock,\u201d Liles says. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like a total eclipse of the sun. The stars are aligning.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s realistic about the crowd. The band\u2019s members are mostly in their 60s and 70s now; Jones only just recovered from the broken wrist that scrapped last year\u2019s dates<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s going to feel more like a high school reunion,\u201d Liles admits. But he\u2019s holding out hope that a few suburban kids wander in the way he did in \u201978. \u201cI\u2019d love to be pleasantly surprised.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jones, for his part, is simply ready. <\/p>\n

\u201cMissing out last year was a drag when I broke my wrist,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we\u2019re doing what we didn\u2019t do and a bunch more shows. Me and the lads are well up for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019ll play \u201cNever Mind the Bollocks\u201d front to back, with Panic Shack opening. The bottles, presumably, will stay in the crowd\u2019s hands this time.<\/p>\n

Nearly half a century ago, the Sex Pistols showed up at a Dallas country ballroom that nobody thought would survive, played a set the locals still argue about, and left. The room itself outlasted the band\u2019s original run, cowboy portraits and all. On Friday, it gets to host the encore. <\/p>\n

Ever get the feeling you\u2019ve been vindicated?<\/p>\n

The Sex Pistols featuring Frank Carter play the Longhorn Ballroom (216 Corinth St.) at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11, with Panic Shack. Tickets are still available through the Longhorn Ballroom\u2019s website<\/a>, with general admission starting at $83.92. Ben Haggard\u2019s \u201cStill the King\u201d show follows Saturday, Sept. 12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1978, the Longhorn Ballroom\u2019s marquee advertised \u201cTonite: Sex Pistols\u201d above an upcoming show by country legend Merle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":432864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1467,102,104,103,64,8386,3503,2174],"class_list":["post-432863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-concert-previews","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-events","tag-history-nostalgia","tag-rock-music","tag-touring-artists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/432864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}