Too Fast to Live

by Mark DemingThe greatest moment of John Simon Ritchie's life was also the same thing that sent him off on a downward spiral from which he would never return -- becoming a member of the Sex Pistols. While the other three members of the group may have been screwups and delinquents of various stripes, they at the very least had some idea of who they were, what they wanted to do, and what they wanted to be. Poor Ritchie was nothing more than a half-bright loser who saw that his old school chum John Lydon had stumbled into one of the greatest rock bands of their day and reinvented himself as Johnny Rotten, and naturally he wanted to do the same. But the boy who would be Sid Vicious always lacked Johnny Rotten's native intelligence and creative spark -- while Rotten created a sound and image that wasn't quite like anyone else around him, Sid was the first cookie-cutter punk, a cipher with spiky hair, a leather jacket, and a chain, and the sad truth was that the thousands of kids who would use Sid as their image were usually just as strikingly unimaginative as he was. And while the initial standard line on the Sex Pistols was that they "couldn't play," that was always code for "Steve Jones can't play like Steve Howe or Robert Fripp"; Sid, on the other hand, really couldn't play at all, and it's worth mentioning that for many of his live shows with the Sex Pistols, the rest of the band would turn off his amp so he wouldn't interfere too much with the performance. With all this in mind, it's hard to say why anyone with half a brain would want a "definitive Sid Vicious solo collection," but that's pretty much what Too Fast to Live aspires to be. Too Fast to Live pulls together Sid's vocal numbers with the gone-stale post-Rotten Sex Pistols ("Something Else," "C'Mon Everybody," "My Way," and the audio collage "From Beyond the Grave") alongside ten mega-sloppy live performances (no dates or musician credits included, though most apparently come from Sid's Max's Kansas City gigs with Mick Jones and a handful of former New York Dolls) and a few demos and rough mixes. What you have is 17 tracks from a guy who couldn't play his instrument, didn't sing very well, had zilch imagination in choosing material, and is best remembered today as a garbagehead junkie who may or may not have murdered his girlfriend. If you have to have a Sid Vicious CD, Too Fast to Live will do, but if you want to idolize a former member of the Sex Pistols, you'd be better off with Public Image Ltd.'s Second Edition -- or I Didn't See It Coming by the Professionals.