How heartening it was to hear that the Sex Pistols would not be showing up to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this evening. Last month the band officially declined the honor with a hand-written note posted on their website that echoed Jon Stewart’s famous riposte to Tucker Carlson.

“We’re not your monkeys and so what?” someone — it sounds more like Johnny Rotten than Steve Jones but who knows? — scrawled. The band was speaking as one. “Your not paying attention,” the rant continued — quoting the note newspapers wrote “sic” in parantheses to demonstrate that they knew the difference between “your” and “you’re” but with the Pistols the amendment should be “sick.” It was almost thirty years ago now that the band declared rock sick unto death, a pronouncement as surprising at the news that Barry Bonds used steroids.

I missed the Pistols in their last concert at Winterland, the one where they closed with “No Fun” and Johnny squatted on the floor and famously asked the crowd, “Ever have the feeling you’ve been cheated?” I was late to the party though glimpsing them on TV I knew that I had blown it. For those who loved rock but despaired of the cocaine-and-unrequited love music of Southern California or the nauseating prog rock of the UK, they were like a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart. (In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus recounts how Joe Strummer, then in a rockabilly band called the 101ers, ran into Graham Parker, then playing pub rock. “Saw the Sex Pistols last night,” Joe said. “Sex…pistols?” said Graham. “Whole ‘nother thing,” Joe said sagely and the next time they met, Strummer had changed his look and sound and was writing stuff like “Janey Jones.”)

“it’s where old rockers go to die,” Rotten once said of the institution called the Rock and Roll Hall of Shame, and anyone still trying to forget the image of Sly Stone performing at the Grammies last month knows that dying in public ain’t pretty. I did finally see Johnny a few years later, perfoming with PiL, howling through numbers like “Rise,” reminding the hysterical crowd that “Anger is an energy.” For the finale he showed the crowd his bare backside, smiling all the while.