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Recording artist, manager of the Sex Pistols, provocateur, fashion designer, impresario — Malcolm McLaren, who died of cancer April 8th at 64 was all those things. He was also, briefly, the manager of the New York Dolls just before their breakup in 1975. Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain spoke with Rolling Stone about his encounters with McLaren. “I always thought the most important member of the Sex Pistols was Malcolm McLaren,” Sylvain says. “When they got back together in the ’90s, I thought, ‘They’re missing their most important star, and that was Malcolm.’ ”

When did you first meet McLaren?
It was at a clothing trade show back in 1971 in New York City. I had a knitwear company, and he and Vivienne [Westwood] were down at the end of the hallway with their clothing line Let It Rock, which was basically rockabilly clothing. Malcolm had this long blond pompadour, long sideburns and white baggy pants. He was like Jerry Lee Lewis, really cool looking. On the last day of trade shows, designers sell their samples, so I said to David Johansen and Johnny Thunders, “You gotta come over.” So we bought some things from Malcolm and Vivienne and invited them down to see us at the Mercer Arts Center. He fell in love with the New York Dolls, and we fell in love with them. Vivienne would tell us, “You boys look so much better in women’s clothing.”

How did he end up managing the Dolls later?
In 1975, I saw him at the Chelsea Hotel and I had a long face. He asked me what was going on and I said, “Things aren’t going so good. We’re about to break up.” He was really sad and said, “I’d love to help you guys.” He became our personal manager. He got us a loft on 23rd Street in Chelsea and we started practicing and writing songs and came up with the red-patent-leather show. We all started wearing red — red shoes, red pants — and Malcolm said, “Why don’t you put up a red flag?” Which was a brilliant idea. Of course, it was the final blow of the New York Dolls. A famous New Yorker said to me, “Now you’re gonna do the Communist thing?” No one really got it. It was art for art’s sake.

Why did Malcolm champion the Dolls so much?
Because it was raw. It was a slap in the industry’s face. He saw that in us. He saw that you didn’t have to be a great singer or to be like Jeff Beck to call yourself a guitarist. It was the love of different and weird. And, if you’re not weird, maybe you should be! Malcolm didn’t follow the crowd — that wasn’t him.

What happened after the Dolls collapsed during that tour?
We were in Florida and they all went home, and me and Malcolm were left down there. He rented a Plymouth station wagon for the tour, and I said, “Have you ever been to New Orleans?” We drove there and went to clubs and record stores. Somehow he called up Allen Toussaint and we managed to meet him at his studio. There Allen was, playing the piano and saying, “If you boys ever need a recording studio, think of us.” It was just amazing what Malcolm could do. When we got back to New York, we went to the warehouse he had with Vivienne. They were into their bondage trip — a lot of rubber and all kinds of stuff. I took him around to my friends. We went to Debbie Harry’s house and sold her stuff right out of the back of the station wagon, like spiked high-heel shoes and black patent leather. He was a great salesman.

Is it true he wanted you to front the Sex Pistols?
He said to me, “Don’t worry.” He said the Sex Pistols were gonna be my band and he wrote me this seven-page letter that’s now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He said, “This is gonna be your band! It’s going to be called the Sex Pistols!” He had some photos from a photo booth and on the back of them he would write things like, “We’re thinking of calling this one Johnny Rotten. He can’t sing, but he can definitely sing better than David Johansen!” I just never went, basically. I signed to RCA and had my own band. I used to describe that letter to my friends and they would say, “Sylvain’s full of shit.” When my mom died in 1991, I found it while cleaning her apartment in Brooklyn. On the back he wrote, “Please give this to your son, from a friend in England.”

What was McLaren’s contribution to punk?
He loved Richard Hell’s ripped T-shirt and the whole attitude. When he went back home to London, he packaged it and introduced it to the whole world. He knew you had to package things and impact them with the whole five fingers. He did that so well and so naturally. We might’ve discovered it and invented it, but he put it on the map. I was in China recently and there were all these punk shops. Can you imagine that ever being? If it weren’t for Malcolm, that wouldn’t have happened.

So what his legacy?
He had the goods, as they say. In the clothing business, you have to be five years ahead of yourself and come up with tomorrow’s goods today. You have to be able to read the future. He did that so well. And what I learned from Malcolm is: If you don’t toot your own horn, no one is gonna do it for you.

Photo: Mazur/WireImage

On Sunday, the Who became the latest in a growing list of classic rockers — along with the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Prince — to play a Super Bowl halftime. Why did they do it, what was it like being onstage at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, and why a hits medley? For the answers, we went directly to the Who’s Pete Townshend the day after the performance. For more from Townshend, grab the next issue of Rolling Stone, on stands February 17th.

Relive the Who’s explosive Super Bowl set in photos.

What was your first reaction to being invited to play the Super Bowl?
I really wanted to do it. I felt it would be easy to do [chuckles]. I felt that doing this would be a great thing to do at this particular time because it would let people know that we’re alive and kicking and that Roger and I still do stuff together and intend to do whatever we can in the future together. You feel part of something that’s bigger than you and you feel part of a huge team. It’s a monster gig.

How did it feel being onstage, in the midst of that spectacle?
A couple of people said to me they could have done with more Who and less football. But I suppose it’s best if I tell the truth. I felt nothing. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a great big football stadium or a little club somewhere. As soon as I get close to a stage, I feel very at home and very safe and secure. It feels completely normal. When the NFL started to talk to us about this, one of the things they started to talk about was the numbers. I looked at Roger and looked at them and I said, “I’ve done a solo show in front of 80 million people on TV.” The abstract numbers make no difference.

I heard that Roger and Simon Townshend [Pete's brother and guitarist in the Who touring band] came up with the medley, not you.
That’s right. I thought we’d just do the CSI songs ["Won't Get Fooled Again," "Baba O'Riley," "Who Are You"]. My pitch was just to do three regular-length songs. We could fall back on what was very familiar. But Roger felt he needed something that gave him more narrative scope, as he described it. He and Simon and one of the lieutenants in the crew put together a track and surprisingly I thought it worked really well. Roger and I have a great relationship these days; it’s very warm and close. So I trusted him to do that job.

Were you wearing sunglasses up there?
No, I was wearing reading glasses. I like to be able to see the guitar.

What was it like finally experiencing an American football game?
English people still find the rules almost incomprehensible, like Americans finding cricket incomprehensible. It’s very difficult to understand how the game operates. But it’s a real sporting event and very exciting backstage and very dignified and serious. Some of my friends have been quite sniffy and said, “We watched it and it was like fucking Disneyland.” But when you’re on the inside of it, there’s a real sense of it being a job, a passion. I learned a lot about it yesterday, and it was all good.

What was the most surprising thing about it?
Not seeing a single cheerleader. Not anywhere. It was terrible. There are lot of girls who’ve said, “I used to be a cheerleader once.” But as hard as you try to persuade them, they won’t do it again.

Check out photos of music’s big names rocking football’s big game.

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If any band knows the power of viral videos, it’s OK Go. Five years ago, the band broke through when clips for “A Million Ways” and “Here It Goes Again” (the “treadmill” video) were passed around the Web. The band assumed the same would be the case for the first two videos from its new Of the Blue Colour of the Sky album (for “WTF” and “This Too Shall Pass”). But that was before the music business began groping for any additional ways to generate income in light of plummeting CD sales.

Thanks to a 2006 agreement between Google and the major labels, the two clips are officially confined to MySpace and YouTube and can’t be posted anywhere else. In the Google arrangement, which was renewed with the labels last year, the four majors receive at least 50 percent of ad revenue based on streams of videos on YouTube.

OK Go’s response? Go around the system. In an open letter to fans posted on the band’s site on January 18, singer-guitarist Damien Kulash explained the situation — and then provided a code so that bloggers and fans can embed both videos on their own sites. “We’ll put ‘em up anywhere we can,” says Kulash. “Our label is unlikely to start suing us for putting our videos up.” OK Go plans to make at least four more videos from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, including one in which Kulash will be thrown across a room in a giant slingshot.

According to Kulash, OK Go didn’t realize the restrictions until angry fan e-mails began arriving at the band’s Website. “It’s kind of a stupid decision,” says Kulash. “It doesn’t matter all that much to me if people are passing around our videos on one platform over another. But if the casual person who just wants to stick it up on their Facebook page can’t embed it, they send you a nasty comment and move on. You’ve just lost the two to 200 people who might have read that page.”

Although EMI declined to comment (but did not dispute Kulash’s claims), a YouTube spokesman confirms that the label made the decision to prevent those particular videos from being embedded elsewhere. OK Go manager Jamie Kitman says the band asked the label if they could skirt around the rules. “But they said, ‘That’s the policy — what can we do?’” he says. “It’s unthinkable to us that they wouldn’t want to spread videos virally, but they have a corporate policy.”

Kulash says he understands the industry’s rationale. “As fucked up as the industry is, it does provide investment money for bands,” he says. “For them to continue to do that, they do need some income.” But he also says that’s about all he comprehends about streaming videos and additional income. “Basically I have no fucking idea how it works. The last accounting we saw said that for 600,000 streams, we got $31. How can that be worth this?”

With Natalie Maines on an indefinite hiatus, the other two Dixie Chicks — guitarist-banjoist Emily Robison and her sister, fiddler Martie Maguire — have recorded an album on their own, as Court Yard Hounds (a reference to the best-selling novel City of Thieves). “Emily and I had the itch,” Maguire says, “and every time we’d call Natalie and say ‘are you ready?’ she wasn’t ready. She wanted a clear-cut break.”

Recorded mostly at Maguire’s home studio in Austin, the intimate pop-folk album features Robison’s first-ever lead vocals and songs inspired by her recent divorce from country act Charlie Robison. “When Natalie’s singing a song it has to strike a chord with her,” Robison says. “These songs are very personal.” Robison is joined by Jakob Dylan on “See You in the Spring.” The duo will debut their new band at South by Southwest in March, with the album dropping in May and a tour to follow.

Check out photos of the Dixie Chicks, onstage and off.

Although Robison and Maguire insist the Chicks haven’t disbanded, they admit they rarely see Maines, who lives in L.A. “I’m hoping she’ll come out to one of our shows,” Maguire says (the group’s last album, Taking the Long Way, came out in 2006). “Maybe it’ll inspire her to want to do music again.”

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In 1980, music journalist Robert Palmer was invited to drop by the sessions for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy in New York. When Palmer arrived, Lennon was adding background vocals to “(Just Like) Starting Over.” Palmer noted that Lennon had sung his parts perfectly in key. Lennon, impressed by Palmer’s ear, said, “You’ll do.”

As Lennon learned, Palmer — who died in 1997 of complications from liver disease at 52 — led a life immersed in music. He was an author (of Deep Blues, a history of Mississippi Delta music), a record producer, a documentary filmmaker, a college professor, even a horn player. But Palmer was foremost a critic equally skilled at writing about John Contrane, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Philip Glass — and his work has been anthologized for the first time in Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer.

Compiled by Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis, Blues & Chaos collects revealing interviews with Eric Clapton, Jerry Lee Lewis and William S. Burroughs; liner notes for box sets by Led Zeppelin, Ray Charles and Bo Diddley; and in-depth stories on the history of Texas blues and the early years of the Band. Palmer was so prolific that DeCurtis spent years tracking down thousands of old clips. “Bob deserved that treatment,” says DeCurtis, who was Palmer’s editor at RS in the 1990s. “This is somebody who really believed that music could take you to another world.”

Rolling Stone editor Ed Ward recruited Palmer to write for the magazine in 1970, which he did for the rest of his life. In 1981, Palmer became The New York Times‘ head pop critic, introducing readers to everyone from Sonic Youth to blues-guitar great Otis Rush. In 1988, Palmer left the Times and returned south — to Mississippi and later Louisiana — to teach and also to deal with addiction to cocaine and heroin. Fighting hepatitis C, he fell ill in 1997 and died while awaiting a liver transplant. In a sign of the regard with which Palmer was held, Patti Smith, Allen Toussaint, Alex Chilton and others played a series of benefits to help pay his medical bill.

“He talked the talk,” says Robbie Robertson, who met Palmer in Arkansas in the Sixties. “He would look further inside of what you were doing, and he knew where things came from. It was so moving to me that somebody knew what well you got your water from.”