2011 TOPPS GYPSY QUEEN CARLOS BELTRAN
Over at Wolfgang’s Vault you can watch video of what would turn out to be the Sex Pistols’ last concert, at Winterland in San Francisco back in January of 1978.
This show came at the end of a short but brutal tour through the American south, where it was thought that the Pistols would bring London punk to the colonies by playing the Mickey Gilley circuit.
Of course, it devolved into a sideshow, and each stop on the tour was met with enervating local news segments about the safety pins and the bondage gear and the projecting of various bodily fluids and the etc, etc, etc…
You can see the anger and exhaustion on Johnny Rotten’s face in this performance. He slinks around the stage like a Richard III marionette being manipulated by a drunken puppeteer, snarling and screaming not so much at the World, but at his world.
The first wave of punk had essentially run its course by early 1978. It had become a leather-and-smack addled parody of itself (see Sid Vicious and his bandaged forearms), and it needed to die.
The Pistols ended the show with a meandering and cacophonous version of No Fun by the Stooges, a fitting way to acknowledge both their roots and the reality of their situation. Rotten famously ended the song by asking “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” before dropping his mike to the floor and walking off the stage.
It wasn’t really a question. It was more like an exclamation.
All of which sums up pretty much exactly how I feel about this 2011 Topps Carlos Beltran Gypsy Queen Mini Parallel Gypsy Back Parallel.
Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Click here for the back image of the card
Hey Doug I need some clarification here. Are you cheated by:
A – This card
B – Beltran’s performance with the Mets
C – The Mets’ performance while Beltran’s been here
I always thought the Johnny Rotten quote was directed not towards the audience, but towards his bandmates and McLaren, which leads me to “C” above.
I don’t get the whole “Gypsy Queen” thing anyway. What’s the point of the set? Was GQ a brand of tobacco back in the day?
Hey Brian.
None of the above, really.
In my analogy (which I warn you won’t stand the weight of too much intellectual rigor), the card hobby (and by extension, Topps) is punk rock. It has become formulaic and self-parodic (a parallel card of a parallel card in a retro set?). It is dying, and it needs to die, and it is somehow fitting that one of its key progenitors is helping to kill it.
This GQ set is Rotten crouched on the stage singing a retro song: “This is no fun at all”…
And cheated? Well, I’ve spent $30 on GQ just as sure as I once spent it on The Great Rock and Roll Swindle and Flogging a Dead Horse.