A final note on the contributors and contributions that make this book come alive. When approached to put this book together, I decided to include a mix of essays from the past (Greil Marcus, Sylvie Simmons) as well as new pieces (Dennis Broe, Charlie Bertsch). Even more, it was important to speak with a wide range of musicians, directors, actors, writers, and everyone in between whom Strummer influenced spiritually, creatively, and politically. In some cases, these individuals contributed their own work to the book, such as Billy Bragg, who continues to be an important musical and political voice, and was the very first to contribute to this volume with “The Joe I Knew,” a passionate eulogy.
Joe Strummer mural on the wall of musician Jesse Malin’s Lower East Side, New York City, bar, Niagara. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Perhaps the greatest testament to Strummer was the generosity and support of everyone I spoke with. Many, including Kristine McKenna, Billy Bragg, and Carter Van Pelt, donated their work in tribute to Strummer to be part of this important project. Michael Franti and Chuck D took time out of their hectic touring schedules to speak with me. Then there are those who could not contribute material to the book but offered wonderful support like Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Tony Kushner who told me he “loved, loved, loved Joe Strummer” as his work served as a model for him throughout his life and continues to do so.
Let Fury Have the Hour is not only a testament to a profound creative activist but also serves as a historical record to motivate, encourage, and inspire others to take the difficult yet rewarding path of thinking for others instead of merely for themselves. Strummer was always most interested in getting his new music out to as many people as possible who would truly listen—a tougher task than one would think for someone like Strummer. He remained undaunted even when his new music was not selling well and when, sometimes, people even said, “Joe who? You used to be in what band?”
The excitement he displayed at sharing his new music or his love of new artists like Manu Chao was as infectious as when he first plugged in his old Telecaster guitar and cranked out “London’s Burning” on that wondrous blur of a night long ago in 1976. By the end of his life, Strummer was making music for “people who are beyond the parameters of the demographic fascists who decide what sells and what gets advertised and what gets on playlists.”7
This book was written during a period I consider one of the darkest and most distressing in our history. In the months that led up to the book, the American occupying force in Iraq massacred civilians in Fallujah and were exposed for participating in torture and sexual abuse at the Abu Ghraib detention facility. America’s credibility abroad has been badly damaged, while domestically unemployment has skyrocketed alongside tax cuts for the wealthy. Money that should be going into health care, public education, and the environment continued to be siphoned off to further fund the military. As Strummer asked over a quarter of a century ago, “Are you going backwards?/Or are you going forwards?”
As I wrote the essays and edited the work for Let Fury Have the Hour, the process became a wholly invigorating and necessary one. It became a labor of hope sustained by the belief that I was putting something out to the world that could, in some way, move us forward. One of the last things Strummer told me in our April 2002 meeting in Brooklyn was that the goal all along was to keep things hopeful and remain optimistic. “We must be positive and know that truth is on our side,” he said. “Music can turn people on to the beauty of a life still to be lived . . . we choose to not sit idly by and not be miserable.” He left this world having achieved much more than he realized; he was a person who changed countless lives by becoming the unofficial leader of a people’s movement. Echoing a favorite statement of his, the future is indeed unwritten—how we write it and what we do offers us all a grand hope and a compelling opportunity.
—ANTONINO D’AMBROSIO
New York City, May 2004
OPENING 1:
ARTISTS AS FIRST RESPONDERS
By Wayne Kramer with Margaret Saadi Kramer
People are storytellers. Through stories we learn who we are and where we have come from. This artistic process, this means of communication, helps us understand where we may be heading collectively. Throughout my life art has assured me that I am not alone. And that’s what I strive to express in every melody, every lyric, every arrangement.
I’ve heard it throughout my life: freedom isn’t free. Decades ago, as a teenage bandleader, I somehow understood the concept of participatory democracy and I thought that my music could change the world. Furious is what I was (and perhaps naive), but I certainly understood at least that democracy is not just some theory. It’s something to do and as artists, we are its first responders. We create something in the world that wasn’t there before. We tell stories of the events around us and then project these stories back into the world in music, film, books, dance, theater, sculpture, painting, video games, graffiti, and myriad other forms of art that are still emerging. We are striving to explain what it feels like to be alive today. We are marking out history to see where we got it right and, maybe more importantly, where we fell short of the mark.
There is a tradition of activism in art built on the principles of America’s founding documents that are being fulfilled in Let Fury Have the Hour. If fury is the emotion, then the hour is now. So when Joe Strummer or Billy Bragg or Tom Morello or Saul Williams or Chuck D or Jill Sobule sing songs about the injustice they see with their own eyes, and speak with their own hearts, then filmmakers like John Sayles and Michael Moore and Antonino D’Ambrosio and Adam McKay make movies exposing the contradictions of a nation divided, I am encouraged and I am inspired. And then what happens? I make more art and it starts all over again.
Wayne Kramer performs in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, November 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Antonino’s work in film and literature is hammering home the inexorable truth that change is the one and only thing we can count on. Fury is a visual essay about what is happening—today—in the real and wide world. The entire world, actually. The United Kingdom, Europe, and America are joined by all the other developed and emerging nations of the world in a new global consciousness. The Arab Spring has inspired the Wall Street Occupiers who have, in turn, inspired a worldwide “Occupation” movement. The cell phone and mobile applications have transformed politics in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and hopefully Syria and Iran soon. All the while occurring in real time to soundtracks from Rage Against the Machine and the MC5 to Khaled and Public Enemy and Ramy Essam. Art and music are the universal language of all freedom-loving people on earth today and it connects us with one another instantly. It is an exciting time to be alive. Dangerous and romantic, too. That sometimes makes for better art. It seems to me that the best art is dangerous art.
Let Fury Have the Hour is a look under the hood at how artists are facing and exposing the forces of repression and corruption. With international economic and political elites enjoying absolute freedom from accountability, heaven knows we need the voices and visions of our artists more now than ever before. The work of artists—along with a handful of journalists who are committed to holding the feet of the rich and powerful to the fire of legal and public scrutiny—is all we have today.
Wayne Kramer performs in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, November 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
In America, we have become a nation that accepts rampant criminality by the political class. From Gerald Ford’s pardon of “law and order” president Richard Nixon (as a result of multiple felonies he committed in office) to Iran-Contra and the Bush era’s warrantless wiretaps of millions of Americans’ phones and emails, and the pardon of “Scooter” Libby right up to today’s congressional representatives extolling the virtue of unlimited wealth as birthright while we incarcerate millions of the least powerful for petty crimes in numbers never before realized in history and mandating longer and more severe sentenc
es than any country on earth, something is out of line here. Seriously out of line.
The founders had no illusions about the potential emergence of a powerful political class that would make the corruption of the monarchy pale in comparison. They constantly wrote about such a danger. They warned us repeatedly. They understood human nature. They built as many safeguards as they could come up with into the structure of government. They were sending us a message and the message is clear: Tell the truth. Honor your fellow man as yourself. Hold public officials accountable to the rule of law. If something is wrong, then change it. If we don’t answer the call by speaking truth to power, then we jeopardize what we cherish in democracy as a way of life. If the rule of law means one thing for people of color and limited economic means but something entirely different for political and economic elites, then we have betrayed their vision. We ignore these fundamental rights and responsibilities at our own peril. We need artists and art built on the principles of human rights and equality for all. We demand art built on passion and a commitment to greatness and to the highest aspirations of the people, not the greatest profit.
Real art makes you think, ask questions. Art that doesn’t challenge tired old ways of thinking and offer a new perspective only serves to amuse and distract people from the reality of who and what is really controlling their lives and futures. Picasso’s Guernica shows the tragedy of war and the suffering it inflicts on individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work is revered because it is a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war. It has become an antiwar symbol and an embodiment of peace. Such fury must always be encouraged.
Without the fury of discontent, fury of injustice, fury in opposition of mediocrity, we fail as a civilization. The greatest building blocks of civilization are the aspirations of humankind: the rule of law applied fairly to all people, the right to a good job, to a quality education, to health care, to be secure in our persons and homes, and to justice for all.
So sing on, sister, and play on, brother. Cherish your rabble-rousers and brutal truth-tellers. And goddamn right, let fury have its hour.
OPENING 2:
FOR, NOT AGAINST
By Antonino D’Ambrosio
A moment. November 4, 1980. Trouble. Ronald Reagan is now the fortieth president of the United States, to the tune of “Happy Days are Here Again.” But Reagan was careful not to let anyone see beyond the greatest acting job since his one brief moment in The Killers. “Well, I could change that in a hurry,” Reagan says just before slapping Angie Dickinson hard across the face as John Cassavetes looks on through eyes filled with rage. Foreshadowing? Happy days! While everyone was laughing at Jimmy Carter—a decent man held face down, drowning in an indecent situation—they were checking the box for Reagan. Happy days for me! Reagan promised greatness for all. A shining city on a hill illuminated by camera lights. A staged production: the evil empire trumped by the real empire. Nearly 44 million votes, many from people who never voted that way. Happy days are here again. But someone forgot to ask, Happy days for whom?
One thing about that night remains buried in my brain: my bricklayer father staring silently at the television, lost in his thoughts or perhaps wrestling with his grave concern for the uncertainty that lay ahead. I later learned that Bruce Springsteen was sitting watching the election results unfold just like my father. Silent. Confused. Angry. The next night, Springsteen anxiously climbed on to the stage before a sold-out crowd in Tempe, Arizona. The moment was a strange one for the rock musician who found stardom in the 1970s greeting us from Asbury Park and then letting loose with “Born to Run.” As Springsteen grabbed the microphone, almost without thinking and with his heart racing, he shouted, “I don’t know what you thought about what happened last night but I thought it was pretty terrifying.” Swinging down his right arm hard on his guitar, Springsteen didn’t wait for the crowd to roar back its approval or rejection. Instantly, with the E Street Band backing him, the venue was boiling hot with “Badlands”: “Baby I got my facts learned real good right now/You better get it straight darling/Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings/And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.”
Joe Strummer’s Telecaster guitar before his performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, April 5, 2001. Still from the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Springsteen offered a prophetic proclamation that night. Soon Reagan swept aside one culture while dumping a new, bogus Americana on top of the country. Smothering us with evasion and superficiality. A linguistic attack: stand in front of the flag, right hand over your heart, smile wide, and mouth the words. A wink and a nod, here’s the Reagan revolution. No need to defend his agenda as the right course of action; just declare that there is no alternative, no other approach to consider. No need to convince anyone of anything: it’s morning in America again. A sleight of hand and a shift of dialogue: states’ rights versus human rights. Get in the General Lee with the Confederate flag proudly displayed on the roof and ride roughshod over this land straight to reelection in 1984. A hit reality television show broadcast around the world from the Oval Office with Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” brazenly used as the soundtrack. “This was when Republicans mastered the art of coopting anything and everything that seemed fundamentally American,” Springsteen explained. “If you were on the other side, you were somehow unpatriotic. You see in the Reagan election ads on TV, you know, ‘It’s morning in America.’ Well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh.” At one point Reagan left a wreath at a German cemetery that included SS graves: “Thanks for your efforts.” Were our brains hanging upside down? The Ramones thought so: “Bonzo goes to bitburg then goes out for a cup of tea/as I watch it on tv somehow it really bothered me/drank in all the bars in town for an extended foreign policy.” Reagan was not for but rather against democracy. Terrifying.
A moment. October 27, 1964. First strike. Reagan appears on national television. Sponsored by Goldwater-Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater for President, Reagan opens in a prerecorded speech: “I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used ‘We’ve never had it so good.’ Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we are always ‘against’ things, never ‘for’ anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” Reagan planted the seeds of his revolution, which took root sixteen years later and now have blossomed into an overgrown forest, dense and foreboding. A revolution not just against the Great Society but against society. Marlon Brando saw it from the first moment. “Reagan was a hack to Brando,” David Thomson writes. “An actor and politician who does not bother to care . . . he steps out of one fake light into another, and seems able to call them both sunshine.” “You may be a one-eyed jack around here,” Brando says in the great western he directed. “But I’ve seen the other side of your face.” Brando knew Reagan was always against.
“Mourning in America” from artist Shepard Fairey ‘s Reagan & Friends mural series inspired by Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Courtesy Shepard Fairey.)
A moment. May 4, 1979. Retrograde. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister of England. Her first remarks are borrowed from the prayer of Saint Francis: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Thatcher’s decade in office was a consistent contradiction of this initial statement. A truer story is told by flipping each sentence: Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despai
r. “Society doesn’t exist,” Thatcher said. There are only individuals. We are unequal and we all have the right to be unequal. “Thank heavens,” Thatcher exhaled in relief. Against.
“Top-Elite Faschions for Sale” from artist Shepard Fairey s Reagan & Friends mural series inspired by Antonino D’Ambrosio’ film let Fury Have the Hour. (Courtesy Shepard Fairey.)
A moment. Two record releases. Strike back. December 14, 1979. CBS Records releases London Calling in the U.K., composed with the specter of Thatcher looming just outside the studio door: “Now that war is declared—and battle come down.” January 1980 and Epic Records releases London Calling in the U.S., where it soars to the top of the charts despite the lead weight of Reagan pulling it down. “From every dingy basement on every dingy street/ Every dragging handclap over every dragging beat/That’s just the beat of time—the beat that must go on.” The album recorded with—to borrow the words of Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney—“hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.” Their solidarity and ranging interest in the human condition is on full display right from the title tune inspired by the scary Three Mile Island core meltdown just outside my Philadelphia front door. The Clash was all the way in: for. The music was a balm, rubbed on to counteract the cultural rash, the political inflammation shaping history breaking out against. The album borrowed the typography from Elvis Presley’s first album but breaks clear with an emotional image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass on the New York City Palladium stage. Less an iconic image of rock star egomania and more a warning shot blasting out a generation’s frustration: “But I know there’ll be some way/When I can swing everything back my way/Like skyscrapers rising up/Floor by floor, I’m not giving up.” In between the notes, underneath the chords, in the breaths separating the words it was all there: the world is worth fighting for!
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