The Avengers were, as their lone studio album testifies, the great West Coast punk band. In a better world (so to speak) they and the Screamers would have looked down on the Sunset Strip from enormous billboards.

It’s belatedly come to my attention that pro-shot footage of the Avengers’ entire January 14, 1978 set at Winterland, opening the Sex Pistols’ final (pre-90s-reunion) show, is up on YouTube. The only Avengers video of this vintage I’d seen before was the blurry and generally unsatisfying Target VHS. By comparison, this is like the color turning on in The Wizard of Oz. It’s a sharp recording of a killer performance, and if nineteen-year-old Penelope Houston singing “The American in Me” doesn’t resonate with you in 2016, then like Magic 8-Ball says, “Outlook not so good.” May you be more fortunate in the next life.
 

 
You can also watch the Nuns’ full set from that night and, of course, the Pistols’. What you won’t find on YouTube is a trace of the evening’s emcee, the legendary rock critic Richard Meltzer, who was thrown out before the show ended. He writes:

At the Sex Pistols show in San Francisco I was asked to emcee, and I went out and provoked the audience and they threw things at me and Bill Graham, who was promoting it, chucked me out of the building—what a rush.

 

 
The set list:

“The American in Me” (0:04)
“Desperation” (1:47)
“Paint It Black” (3:59)
“Don’t Throw It Away” (6:55)
“Open Your Eyes” (9:11)
“No Martyr” (11:17)
“Teenage Rebel” (13:52)
“Crazy Homicide” (16:25)
“The End of the World” (18:48)
“Change” (a/k/a “Summer of Hate”) (21:43)
“We Are the One” (23:38)
“I Believe in Me” (26:03)
“Car Crash” (29:14)

Penelope Houston’s entire catalog, with and without the Avengers, is available here.