Ronn Spencer (1947-2023)

A remembrance of the man who re-tinted the Sex Pistols album here in America, uncredited. Thank you, Malcolm McLaren!

Ronn Spencer (left) with the album cover he redesigned for the U.S., without attribution.

Ronn Spencer died sometime last week, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And while you likely have no idea who he is, you should. Very quietly, he helped shape the course of punk rock and its attendant graphic design since the mid ‘70s, and was robbed of the credit for what was likely his most important work.

To clarify, have you ever wondered why this album was pink and green in America, when it was yellow and red in the rest of the world?

Have you wondered why this inner sleeve was only in the US edition of Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols?

It’s because Ronn Spencer was the American graphic artist for the Sex Pistols. 

He had a long protopunk pedigree. He took these famed photos of Andy Warhol and Lou Reed when he was an 18-year-old student at the Rhode Island School Of Design in the mid-’60s. (He received a BFA from RISD, and an MFA in Photography from the University Of New Mexico.) 

Andy Warhol (l) and Lou Reed, photographed by Ronn Spencer at Rhode Island School of Design, 1966.

During the ‘70s, he was involved in the Dada-inspired Mail Art scene, where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of William S. Burroughs and a pre-Throbbing Gristle Genesis P. Orridge, still trading under his Christian name of Neil Megson. Because no Mail Artist had money for things like typesetting, a lot of ransom note-style typography was used, alongside cut-and-paste collaging techniques, to create these off-center, provocative post cards they sent through the mail to one another.

Years later, after Ronn moved to Los Angeles, he’d attempted taking his Mail Art-stacked portfolio around various record company offices, seeking freelance design work. In the age of Fleetwood Mac, not a solitary label could figure out what to do with Ronn’s hard-edged graphics. Until Warner Bros. signed the Pistols. Suddenly, they had an American who shared certain sensibilities with Jamie Reid, the art school pal of Malcolm McLaren’s who’d been in charge of the Pistols’ graphic design work. He could give the band fresh graphics for the US that were still of a piece with Reid’s designs.

Ronn loved the Pistols. He saw everything in punk he’d loved about the Velvets, and he was the proverbial kid in a candy store (if all the sweets were laced with cyanide and razor blades). He liked Reid’s Bollocks design, so all he did was change the color scheme, to a pair of more fluorescent hues. Then he added that inner sleeve. Bristling under McLaren’s command that no designers should be credited (even Reid remained unacknowledged until the mid-’80s), he deliberately left in a Warner’s art director’s handwritten instruction: “Ronn, rearrange these in alphabetical order,” an arrow indicating the band’s names. A promo poster had a tiny credit, “Design: Ronn Spencer.”

McLaren called from the UK, raining high dudgeon. 

After hearing him pontificate on the Situationist International and Dada, Ronn simply fired back, “You know Malcolm, I went to art school too. I just think in the end, this is all bullshit.” McLaren sputtered a bit longer, then hung up. Ronn never got a credit again. 

He designed print ads, a picture sleeve for the U.S. 45 of “Pretty Vacant,” and a tour poster made to self-destruct: Ronn instructed the printer to put no stabilizer in the inks. Three weeks later, the design almost completely faded. Then he watched over the years, as his work was reproduced in projects such as Jon Savage’s brilliant UK punk history England’s Dreaming…credited to Jamie Reid.

This and those VU/Warhol photos (highly reproduced, and always given the credit he never got for his Pistols work) wasn’t the only thing Ronn’s responsible for. He primarily considered himself “a fine artist and a photographer that occasionally did commercial work.” This did not prevent him designing for the Dead Boys, Talking Heads, Marshall Crenshaw and Buddy Guy, among others. He took the most famous photograph of the Germs, from their sole posed, offstage photo session, because of his friendship with their manager, Nicole Panter Dailey.

The Germs, photographed by Ronn Spencer, 1979.

Panter Dailey, along with Ronn’s wife Louise, rock journalist Gene Sculati, Warner Brothers Publicity Director Bob Merlis, Jim Bickhart, and attorneys Gordon Rubin and Pete Paterno, formed White Noise Records, likely neck-in-neck with Dangerhouse and Slash Records as L.A.’s prime independent punk label. The 1978 release of VOM's Live At Surf City was one of their most notable, introducing the world to the musical talents of rock critics Richard Meltzer, Gregg Turner, and Metal Mike Saunders, the latter two of whom went on to form The Angry Samoans. (Ronn would eventually design the sleeve graphics for the Samoans’ Back From Samoa vinyl blitzkrieg.) The other significant White Noise record was the self-titled 1979 EP from San Francisco’s The Avengers, produced by Steve Jones. 

As the ‘70s shifted into the ‘80s, Ronn co-hosted with Sculati and produced a pair of back-to-back radio programs, the punk-oriented Unprovoked Attack on KPFK-FM from 1979-80, and the more successful The Cool And The Crazy. Running from 1984-88 on KCRW in Santa Monica, TCATC was a fun, dazzling collision of ‘60s Boss Radio and Firesign Theater, with Spencer taking the lead as raging narcissist DJ Art Fraud, Sculati as his sidekick Vic Tripp. Between skits, they managed to play a dizzying selection of classic oldies, punk and garage material. It was the best thing on Los Angeles airwaves in the ‘80s.

Ronn was an educator, teaching art at schools in Arizona and Australia. A New Jersey boy, he fell in love with the desert, living in Tucson for several years once he tired of Los Angeles, then Santa Fe for the last 15. He stayed busy, doing graphic work, photographing his longtime partner Blake Hines. For nearly 18 years, he had Parkinson’s disease. I'd gotten to know him beginning 2009, introduced by Panter Dailey. For the past year, he was harder to reach by phone. He complained of internal bleeding, and no doctor could figure out what was the problem. It turns out he had stage 4 esophageal cancer. He reportedly refused any nourishment for the last two weeks.

I interviewed Ronn a few months back for The Book, to finally get him the credit he deserved for his Sex Pistols graphic work. Like the Pistols, Vivienne Westwood and everyone else McLaren’s malignant narcissism touched, Ronn Spencer’s contributions were not acknowledged. They should be. I wanted to interview him forever. I suspect it was his final one.

Ronn Spencer was important. The truncated resume should indicate that. Anyone lucky enough to know him was inspired by him. RADIO NAPALM, which will be revived here as a paid-subscriber-only feature, was entirely shaped by The Cool And The Crazy airchecks Ronn sent me soon after we met. We would have hours-long phone calls over the years, solving the world’s problems, making each other laugh.

I carry two things he frequently said to me always, as sort of framed samplers knitted onto my heart. The first was how we are powerless to change the fucked-up path society is skating on, a greased downhill slide built by venal cowards and utterly contemptuous bastards. He felt the best thing we could do was create – create art, create music, contribute something that makes the world a better place, even momentarily. He also felt music was the highest of all arts, the one thing that truly made everything alright. The last few years, as his health got exponentially worse, he would close each call reminding me that it was important to let those you love know that you love them, everytime you talk to them, because you never know if you will have that chance again.

He knew how right he was. I am a better person for having known Ronn Spencer. I love him. He loved me. He was my big brother that I never had. This world does not know how empty it is now. May you rage on for eternity, Ronn. I will keep creating, because that’s what you want.

And yes, Ronn: This is the best of all possible worlds, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

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