Editor's note: One of the last things the Sex Pistols did before they broke up in 1978 was play Cain's Ballroom. John Wooley tracked down a firsthand account of the infamous night for This Land's Fall 2015 issue, a tale of vodka slushies, Jesus people, a bomb threat and unfettered punk rock.
Although Tulsa’s Cain’s Ballroom later became famous for catching future superstars like U2, The Police, and Van Halen on their ways up, perhaps the single best-known show of Larry Shaeffer’s 24 years of ownership came not long after he’d assumed full control of the place. On the night of Wednesday, January 11, 1978, a crowd estimated at between 700 and 800 braved snowy weather to catch the notorious—and trailblazing—British punk-rockers the Sex Pistols at the Cain’s. It would turn out to be one of only seven shows the band played on its American tour, which had its beginning in Atlanta and wound through the South and Southwest until the group’s final stop at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. The Cain’s show was the next-to-last concert the band would ever perform. The Sex Pistols broke up a few days after the Winterland engagement.
Interestingly, the infamous punk group had performed the previous night at Dewey Groom’s Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, which had formerly been the Bob Wills Ranch House, a later headquarters of the man who’d made the Cain’s famous back in the 1930s. The Sex Pistols members, said Shaeffer, had “shown up on my doorstep at 10am the day of the show, ready to get off the bus,” after having ridden all night instead of staying in Dallas. The reason, according to Shaeffer, was that they were trying to avoid a fight with some Texas boys over a camera lead singer Johnny Rotten had smashed. (Other sources indicate that bass guitarist Sid Vicious had kicked a female photographer and picked a fight with a security guard at the Longhorn, so there was no shortage of possible reasons for the lads to hightail it out of Texas.)
“Their manager, Malcolm McLaren, was brilliant,” Shaeffer noted. “He put them on tour in America after they’re huge in London as the bad boys of rock. Smartly, he doesn’t play them in New York, Detroit, Chicago, or L.A. He puts them down South where there’s probably going to be some redneck and Southern Baptist resistance.”
Cain’s indeed saw a bit of that resistance, according to the Tulsa World's Vern Stefanic. In his January 12th review of the show, Stefanic mentioned that the “vomiting on stage, spitting and violence” that had marked other Sex Pistols concerts seemed to be absent at the band’s Cain’s appearance. “In fact,” he added, “the most intense emotional display came from about 30 ‘Jesus People’ outside Cain’s before the show. The youngsters greeted Cain’s customers with sermonettes, reading material and a ten-foot long sign which read ‘Jesus Loves You.’ ”
“I had every undercover cop in Tulsa County in there,” Shaeffer said, “with their trench coats and their white socks and loafers. They were thinking they were going to arrest these guys for doing something crazy onstage. There were dozens and dozens of people with cameras. Maybe 30 or 40 percent were people from Tulsa, most of whom didn’t know who the Sex Pistols were, but they were curious.
“You had to be a person somewhat informed to know who they were,” he added. “There wasn’t a single bit of airplay [in Tulsa]. You had to be reading Rolling Stone or something.”