Keith Levene, Public Image Ltd. Guitarist, Clash Co-Founder, Dies at 65

He met fellow Clash co-founder Mick Jones in the mid-1970s and formed an early version of that band; he and manager Bernard Rhodes were actually the ones who convinced singer Joe Strummer to join. But Levene was unimpressed with the then-embryonic band’s musical skills and left, after co-writing the song “What’s My Name,” from the group’s galvanizing 1977 debut album. He briefly formed a band with Sid Vicious (who left to join the Sex Pistols) before uniting with Lydon, drummer Jim Walker and bassist Jah Wobble in Public Image when the Pistols imploded.

While many may have expected PiL to be a Pistols Mark II — and their debut single, also called “Public Image,” is an exhilarating blast of punky energy — they proved to be a much more challenging prospect. Deeply influenced by the experimental early ‘70s “Kraut-rock” of groups like Can and Neu, the group’s sound combined Levene’s brittle guitar sound with Wobble’s booming, reggae-influenced bass while Lydon ranted over the top. While their self-titled 1978 album was a deliberately provocative missive, the 1979 follow-up “Metal Box” (titled “Second Edition” in the U.S.) was a sprawling tour de force of challenging sounds and styles. Packaged in the U.K. in a metal tin box resembling a film cannister, the album was pressed onto three 12” singles, making for such a loud bass sound that it could causes turntable styluses to jump from the vibrations. With songs like “Poptones,” “Careering,” “The Suit” and “Graveyard” (a brittle instrumental that, in characteristic fashion, had a vocal track that the group decided to discard; the vocal version was released as a B-side titled “Another”), the album set a new standard for where post-punk could go.

While the group’s sound could not be pigeonholed as punk, their confrontational attitude most certainly was: Their concerts were famously shambolic, as captured on the 1980 live album “Paris au Printempts,” and the group didn’t even pretend to mime on a surreal performance on the U.S. pop-music TV show “American Bandstand,” with Lydon leading the baffled audience onto the floor with the group, where they danced awkwardly while the bandmembers lurched around the stage.

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However, the story largely ended there. The band’s lineup was always fluid and Wobble had left by the time the group released its third LP, the even more challenging “Flowers of Romance,” which was largely percussion and exotic instruments; Levene played guitar on just one song. The group rallied to record a fourth album but Levene left during the sessions; the resulting album, 1983’s “This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get,” features many songs co-written by him but none of his playing, although a bootleg of early recordings of the songs that do feature him called “Commercial Zone” has long been available. Lydon has continued PiL as a fairly straightforward rock act over the years, but the innovation had already been done.

Levene kept a low profile in the following period, largely due to a battle with heroin, but relocated to Los Angeles and fell in with the music community there. He re-emerged in 1987 with the “Violent Opposition” EP — featuring members of the Chili Peppers and other young L.A. bands like Fishbone and Thelonious Monster — and produced demos for the Chili Peppers’ second album, “The Uplift Mofo Party Plan” (ironically, that group’s debut album was produced by Gang of Four’s Andy Gill, who played in a style very similar to Levene’s).

Levene continued to work and release a series of solo albums over the following years, including a reunion with Wobble during the 2010s.