There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  In the mid-1970s, Chrissie had moved to London from her native Akron, Ohio, and hung out with all the musicians who would start the punk bands. She told me that the scene was ruined when the Heartbreakers came over to London from New York with their drugs. “The Heartbreakers already had respect because of the Dolls,” she told me. “No one gave a shit about any of the other New York bands. The Heartbreakers were the first young rock and roll band we saw that played twelve-bar blues progressions. So even though it was a little old fashioned, the musicians were impressed. Johnny Thunders was a big inspiration. He was a great guitar player. Plus, he was really New York street, and cool. No one had seen anything like this. And the Heartbreakers were all stoned on smack. They brought Nancy Spungen, who had been a junkie since her schoolgirl days, to London with them. She wanted to find someone to marry so she could stay in London. Sid [Vicious] was basically a lovely guy whose heart was in the right place, but when he got drunk, he got violent. When Nancy got together with Sid, everyone told him, ‘get rid of her, man, she’s fucked.’ But that’s like telling a kid not to put his hand on the stove. And Sid was a kid. A whole string of casualties came after the Heartbreakers arrived on the scene.” Talking about the Clash, Chrissie said, “I tried to work with Mick for a long time, and he was great, super enthusiastic. But we couldn’t meet on a musical ground. I’d bring over a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels album or an R&B record from Bobby Womack and Mick would just be listening to Mott the Hoople. And Joe’s no spring chicken. He’d be listening to Cajun and country and western music. I’d say, why don’t you try to play music that you’d listen to?”

  • • •

  Scenes aren’t meant to last. The best of them sneak or burst into the consciousness of a few. They blow up into something they weren’t to begin with. And then, they eventually burn out. Discussing the Laurel Canyon music scene in California in the early 1970s, Stephen Stills told me, “It wasn’t Paris in the ’20s, but it was a vibrant scene.” Until it wasn’t. By the end of the 1970s, “punk” had become a category, a “genre.” It attracted an audience and a notoriety that had nothing to do with its original intention or love of “underground” music. Disco doyenne Regine threw a “punk party” at her Paris nightclub New Jimmy’s and served beef stew in dog dishes and chocolate mousse in a toilet bowl. At that time, writer Bob Colacello told me that Regine was “thrilled” when some “real punks” crashed, started fighting with the “fake punks” hired to loiter around the place, and she had to call the real police. Yves Saint Laurent’s “muse” Loulou de la Falaise had a punk band at her wedding. TV specials on punk featured narratives similar to those in the old 1950s, black and white “Rock Around the Clock” movies: “loud, violent, filthy music.” The English punks on those shows were pictured strangling each other as they leaped around London clubs. Zandra Rhodes charged a then-unheard-of, obscene $600 for ripped up “punk” dresses. Punk boutiques appeared in Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Time magazine did a cover story on the “punk phenomenon.” As usual, they got it all wrong.

  Pressed by my editors, I wrote columns with comments about punk from more established musicians. Eric Burdon of the Animals said, “Anything that publicizes hot rock or more sex is all right with me.” The Who’s Roger Daltrey said, “This is good old rock and roll hype. It’s not that original. It’s like reading about the Who smashing up hotel rooms.” Bette Midler asked me, “So, tell me about these English punk bands. Is the music any good?” Mick Jagger told me, “Punk rock? Oh, I’ve been into it for years, dear. Actually, I saw the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club [in London] and thought they were pretty good. Well, not good, really, but they could be. This scene has been going on in the streets for three years. The press just picked up on it now.” Ray Davies told me, “I like the music, but already, it’s a business. It’s like what [playwright] John Osborne said: that now he’s part of all the things he rebelled against years ago. In the end, you become a part of everything you hate, basically, if you mean it. Because if you become successful, you use the same machinery to do it. I think if you really want to do it, you have to create a new form. Unless you decide that all the money you make, you’ll give away.”

  • • •

  In 1981, I asked Joe Strummer what his hopes were for the Clash. “Making good music is my priority,” he said. “If you can write a song in twelve lines that ain’t rubbish and tells the truth, I think it’s the highest form of writing prose. In most prose, you can get away with one or two daft lines, but with a song, you can’t. You boil it down to its purest form. If we make good music, then it’ll go somewhere. Something you can listen to in fifty years.” I asked if he thought we’d all be around in fifty years. “Yeah,” he said. “Boring isn’t it?” Optimistic, I said, given the state of the world. “Well,” he replied, “I remain optimistic. You can’t blow the world up. There’s no money in it.”

  At the end of May 1981, the Clash caused riots when they put tickets on sale for a week’s worth of shows at Bonds International Casino in Times Square. The gigantic venue, a former menswear store and later, a discotheque, was overbooked. The fire department threatened to close it down for faulty sprinkler systems, too few fire exits and whatnot. The shows were quickly re-scheduled and during that time, the band stayed at the nearby, crummy Iroquois Hotel. Joe and Paul liked it because James Dean had stayed there. Joe and I did a lengthy interview and we talked about James Dean and Montgomery Clift. Joe said he recognized a tendency he had for self-destruction but, he said, “I don’t want to drink myself into a fat slob and keel over and die on the floor. It doesn’t have any dignity in it. I have a drinking personality, probably a fatal attraction to it; but I could never go out drinking every night; I’d never get any work done.” I asked him about the word “punk” and he said, “Punk music was more desperate, more paranoid, more schizophrenic, more sick, more demented. It just reflected the times. I believe that talking fast is one of the finest things America has ever invented. Fast talking. It’s like if you go into a shop, you can make your deal in ten seconds flat. So I think that ‘punk’ is a good handle, because you know what I mean, right? Otherwise, you’d have to say ‘loud, thumping music with people shouting’ . . . blah blah . . . long sentence. This way, you’ve got the idea already. To me, punk is a good way of looking at the world I want to maintain at all costs.” We talked about early punk days in London and Johnny Rotten in particular. “It was a game of tennis,” Joe said. “He serves well, but he’s got a weak backhand.”

  • • •

  In 1982, the Clash had an actual Top 40 hit with “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (which was, as I pointed out to the band on numerous occasions, a dead ringer for the old Righteous Brothers song “Little Latin Lupe Lu”). By October 1982, they received a gold record for their album Combat Rock. Their video for “Rock the Casbah” was played constantly on MTV. And on October 9th, they were on Saturday Night Live with host Ron Howard. There was some fuss about what songs they would and wouldn’t play on the show. They refused to play their hits, opting instead for some quasi-political song unfamiliar to the network TV audience. That week, the band went to Harlem to buy records (they went without a film crew—unlike U2, who years later, took one with them for an “impromptu” scene in their movie Rattle and Hum). Clash fans now included Jim Jarmusch, John Cusack, Johnny Depp and Matt Dillon. The band made an extremely brief appearance in Martin Scorsese’s underrated masterpiece The King of Comedy. Despite their initial intentions, the Clash—what with the hits and the SNL appearance and the heavy MTV rotation—were now mainstream.

  *

  When the Clash opened for the Who in stadiums in 1982, Joe had mixed emotions. On the one hand, he was pleased that so many people were getting a chance to see the Clash. On the other hand, he knew damn well that people weren’t getting to see the Clash. The band had to perform “Should I Stay or Should I Go” and “Rock the Casbah”—and forgo “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” Of course, when they
did “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.,” it got massive cheers. But it no longer meant what it meant when they wrote it in 1976; now it was just ironic. On September 25th, at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, Joe told me, “I’m of two minds sometimes about the Clash getting bigger. It’s like having a split personality. Of course you want to get bigger so that people can hear your songs and all that. On the other hand, I’m a bit wary of it getting too big to handle. You know, you always think you can handle it, but you never know.” (That show was attended by Mick Jagger, who, accompanied by his eleven-year-old daughter Jade, arrived by helicopter and posed for photos with the Clash.) Joe told me he thought rock and roll was best in venues of 3,000 people: “With the pit for the energetic people and the back for the geriatrics.” At that time, the band was selling 500,000 records, but Joe said, “It still isn’t on the level of, say, Barbra Streisand. She gets the Top 10 hits with those ghastly ballads that go on for ten minutes.” After their set at JFK Stadium, I asked Joe how he felt. “Awful,” he said.

  *

  In 1983, I went with the Clash from Los Angeles to San Bernardino by helicopter to the US Festival. They were on the bill for “New Wave Day.” All I recall about that ride was that there were far too many people in that helicopter, and some people had to stand during the short flight. I’ve never liked flying. I especially hate helicopters. I was terrified. Promoter Bill Graham (a friend of mine who would later die in a helicopter crash) was at the site. He had promoted the festival the year before along with Apple’s Steve Wozniak, and Bill was alternately hilarious and scathing about the whole punk scene. The band’s manager Bernie Rhodes insisted that the Clash hold a press conference before the show to denounce something or other about slum conditions in Los Angeles. No one remembers this the same way, but my notes from that day read that after the Clash’s set, but before an encore, the stage crew thought the band was done and shut off the amps. A furious Mick Jones kicked someone, and a full-scale fistfight ensued onstage. I watched all this from the side of the stage. Drummer Topper Headon had already left the band a year or so earlier because of his drug problems, and Joe and Mick, and Mick and Paul, were barely speaking to each other. That day marked Mick’s last performance with the Clash.

  The following day, U2 did a set complete with Bono leading the crowd in a singalong of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” He waved a massive white flag as he danced along the stage scaffolding—as was his habit during U2’s early days. After U2’s set, a hoarse and exhausted Bono sat and talked with me backstage. “Tell Joe Strummer that I’m the biggest Clash fan in the world,” he said, “but I will never buy another Clash album again if they don’t apologize to that stage crew. It was disgraceful. These are working people; they’re the very people the band claims to care about.”

  *

  In 1984, I was staying at Claridge’s Hotel in London. I set up an interview with Joe to talk about the post–Mick Jones incarnation of the Clash. I felt it necessary to warn the snobby doorman and the staff at the front desk that “a very famous rock star” who “looked like a ruffian” was coming to do an interview with me. I asked if we could borrow a suite for a few hours. My room—which was then $90 a night—wasn’t appropriate. When Joe arrived, accompanied by his road manager Kosmo Vinyl, the concierge called and said somewhat stiffly, “Madam, a Mr. Kosmo is here.” The hotel set us up in the massive presidential suite, where previous guests had included Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. At the time, I thought, how fabulous, they’re aware of the Clash, they’re making a lovely accommodation available. Later I realized that they probably just didn’t want Joe Strummer seen in the bar.

  In 1984, in that luxurious presidential suite at Claridge’s, with its extremely high ceilings, tapestries, marble tables and huge, glass chandeliers, I reminded Joe that three years earlier, he had told me, “You’ve got to stick at it. Many groups break up on the spur of the moment, in the middle of a fight. Sometimes the next day you don’t even remember what you were fighting about.” Now, I asked Joe why he kicked Mick out of the band. “I thought I’d rather dig a ditch than put up with the behavior I had to put up with,” Joe said. “He had no enthusiasm whatsoever. He was sarcastic about everything. He wouldn’t turn up at recording sessions. We wasted our energy arguing with each other for three or four years. I tried to get him to snap out of it, but in the end, I just couldn’t see how you could make music together with all that gloom and doom. That’s what drove me to the end of my tether. Groups have an atmosphere. At first it’s all enthusiasm and idealism. It’s fun to play music. And then one day you turn around and realize you can cut the atmosphere in the room with a knife. So I thought, well, you can shove off. While we’ve been arguing, people like Mick Jagger and Sting have been having a field day.”

  • • •

  The Clash fumfered on for a year or so with two new guitarists and the drummer they hired after Topper left. But it wasn’t the same, and it wasn’t very good. For years after Joe broke up the second incarnation of the Clash in 1986, and Mick Jones was touring with his band Big Audio Dynamite, there were persistent rumors of an original Clash reunion. Those who knew them well knew they would never do it without Topper, who still wasn’t healthy. In 1996, Kosmo Vinyl sneered when he heard about a Sex Pistols reunion. He told me that the former members of the Clash had all gone to see the Velvet Underground reunion, which they thought was terrible, and it put them off doing one. He added that there was no real need for Johnny Rotten to do a Pistols reunion. “[His wife] Nora’s got money,” Kosmo said, “and John isn’t that interested in helping the others. In fact, he was only in the band for two years, twenty years ago. Can you imagine John onstage screaming at the kids? At his age? He’s older than their parents. It would be like your crazy art teacher.” When I brought up a possible Clash reunion to Joe, he said, “I’d be busy that day.”

  *

  In 1998, producer Rick Rubin recorded a song with Joe and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello for the South Park soundtrack. Rick and Joe were friends, and whenever Joe would go to Los Angeles, he’d drop by Rick’s house on Miller Drive. “I’d come home and Joe would be swimming in my pool,” Rick recalled. “One of those days in 2002 when Joe was in the pool, I was in the studio with Johnny Cash. I invited Joe to come in and watch. He was so excited. He was supposed to go back home to England the next day, but I remember he stayed an extra week. He would just come in and lie on the floor in the corner of the control room and look through the glass and watch Johnny sing. Joe was obsessed with Johnny, but Johnny had no idea who Joe was. And every day we’d leave the studio and Joe would say, ‘Okay, what time are we starting tomorrow?’ One day I suggested they do a song together. Joe said, ‘I’ll do anything. What should it be?’ We thought a Bob Marley song would be a good idea; Johnny had always wanted to do a Bob Marley song and Joe had never done one. We picked ‘Redemption Song,’ and we did a version where Johnny sang the whole thing and one where Joe did the whole thing.” I asked Rick if it was magical, and he said no. Neither of them really knew the song, Rick said, both of them had trouble singing the song, it was more like a lot of work. “This was just cool guys who I liked and got to spend a lot of time with,” Rick said. “What was cool about it was the different eras, and trying to explain to Johnny who Joe was. What finally got through to Johnny was when I played him Joe’s version of ‘I Fought the Law’ [which many people thought Joe actually wrote] because Johnny knew the original [Bobby Fuller] version. Johnny was old, and ill. If you were in the room with these people, you would think that Johnny was the one who was going to die. The fact that Joe died before Johnny was shocking.”

  • • •

  On December 22, 2002, while taking a walk outside his home in Somerset, England, Joe Strummer died at the age of fifty of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. By 2004, Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone were all dead. Two bands that thought they would change the world—the Ramones and the Clash—were over. Today, there
are books exclusively devoted to the Clash. Epic Records has released Clash boxed sets and DVDs. And U2, a band who went from a “new wave” band to, in Bono’s mind, a “punk” band after hearing the Ramones and the Clash, may have raked in the cash as the writers of the critically panned—albeit initially successful—Broadway show Spider-Man. Green Day, the cartoon version of punk, also had a huge Broadway hit—American Idiot. And I can’t help but remember that night thirty-three years ago at the Minskoff Theatre at West Side Story, when Joe and Mick told me that one day, they’d love to do a Broadway musical. So much of what you remember about bands, and music, has to do with your age, where you lived and when you lived there. Where you were when you first heard a particular band. For me, the Clash were more important than the Ramones. Maybe I knew the Ramones too well, saw them too often at CBGB’s, couldn’t get past Johnny Ramone’s demeanor, his rudeness, his . . . Republicanism. Growing up in my liberal family, to be a Republican was something akin to being a fascist. For me, the Clash songs are more sophisticated, more complex, more intense, more urgent. Because Joe Strummer was more sophisticated, more complex, more intense, more urgent. Today, “London Calling” is played on TV during Wimbledon. It’s also referenced in an iPhone ad. It’s hard to know, but I’m not sure if Joe would be pleased.

  Seven

  The first person who told me about U2 was a gay makeup artist who would ultimately die of AIDS or a drug overdose, or both. He was not the typical U2 fan. It was 1982, and MTV was pushing “new wave” bands who were considered the latter day versions of “glam.” These supposed descendants of David Bowie and Roxy Music had, for the most part, one hit song. They had the hair and makeup but none of the talent of their predecessors. Exceptions were Boy George (Culture Club), and perhaps Duran Duran, who had some good songs accompanied by over-the-top videos featuring yachts and models. They also wore suits made by Antony Price, Bryan Ferry’s tailor. Later on in the decade, there was an onslaught of “hair bands” who wore spandex and screeched. U2 was not in either of these categories. U2 was, as Bono told me early on, “plain.” U2 was very straight—even slightly butch. Their music wasn’t funky—they didn’t have blues references or R&B influenced bass lines. No four on the floor dance beats. No Motown inspired drumming. Their music was very white. There was more rock, less roll. Bono initially had a really unfortunate hairdo that was half mullet, half Flock of Seagulls.