Joint crowd plays along with pistols

He swapped bondage pants for pajamas, blown snot for blown kisses, though his eyes still bulged from their sockets like felons on a jailbreak.

In defiance of his surname, Johnny Rotten was trying to make nice, sort of, at a sold-out Joint on Saturday night, smiling impishly, like a toddler passing gas, while missing more teeth than the NHL.

"Thirty f!@#in' years and Americans are still shy around us," the Sex Pistols frontman quipped between songs, clad in striped peejays. "When will you learn that we're your friends?"

Rotten even extended an olive branch of sorts to his arch nemesis, the dreaded hippie, which was kind of like Satan asking Jesus if he'd care to split a Pabst.

Dedicating a thoroughly implausible cover of Hawkwind's space rock opus "Silver Machine" to "our long-haired friends," Rotten got down with the once-abhorrent classic rock set, blanketed in laser-fire synth lines and dense pockets of feedback.

But then it was back to business as usual.

"Was that as bad as the original?" he asked when the song was finished, and it was a moment that encapsulated an evening given to lots of spirited mugging, punk rock bear hugs and a winking, self-knowing impudence from a band smart enough to know when to play dumb.

Sure, the Pistols are punk legends, with Rotten's trademark curled-lip snarl potent enough to enjoin a whole generation of disaffected youth to poke safety pins through their flesh.

But they were never defined by any sort of rigid scene ethos, just the kind of all-purpose anti-authoritarianism that courses through the veins of most young men.

As such, their message holds up well three decades later, primarily because there wasn't that much of a message to begin with.

It's like that famous scene from archetypal biker flick "The Wild One," where a girl asks a brooding young Marlon Brando what he's rebelling against.

"What've you got?" he responds, and the Sex Pistols are driven by a similarly opaque, open-ended notion of upheaval that manifests itself in any number of ways.

At the Joint, Rotten drifted in and out of character, chastising security, bemoaning the abundance of dudes at the Hard Rock pool and twisting his rubber-faced countenance into so many painful-looking contortions, it was as if his features were made of silly putty.

But he was also pretty glib and good-humored at the same time, cheekily acknowledging his surroundings by opening the show with a schmaltzy lounge version of "Pretty Vacant."

"Is it all right if we enjoy ourselves?" he asked at one point, clearly needing no one's approval to do as much.

The crowd happily played along, singing loudly through such chestnuts as "Bodies" and "Holidays in the Sun" for an evening of punk rock karaoke where the band was there mainly to provide the backing music.

With an emphasis on torque and testosterone, the Pistols delivered all the hits in loose, occasionally roughshod fashion, with the band playing almost deliberately sloppy at times, such as on a herky jerky version of "Sub-Mission."

But to dissect the Pistols' playing is like critiquing the dialog in a Roger Corman flick: it's not about subtlety or refinement, it's about power, attitude and audacity.

It's the difference between "Schindler's List" and "Death Race 2000."

As such, there's always been a bit of gamesmanship inherent in this bunch.

And so when Rotten led the crowd in a chant of "No future!" during the band's signature "God Save the Queen," it was with the implicit knowledge that this band most definitely still has one.

Contact Jason Bracelin at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com.