Let Fury Have the Hour

by Antonino D'Ambrosio

  As a teenager, Strummer became fascinated with cinema, including Hollywood gangster and cowboy pictures as well as politically radical films like Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and Burn! Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and George Raft were a few of the screen actors who helped shape the Clash’s rebel persona. For young filmmakers of the day, the rise of punk and its mix of bold music, brash personalities, and theatrical live performances presented exciting cinematic opportunities. For a group like the Sex Pistols, the music was initially secondary to their posturing, as they seemed to be characters from A Clockwork Orange come to life.

  On the other hand, the Clash offered politically charged music buoyed with a raw charisma and delivered via fiery live performances that offered a message of hope. The group also looked the part in clothes pieced together and emblazoned with political slogans. For example, Strummer stenciled PASSION IS A FASHION onto his boiler suit and controversially wore a Brigade Rosse (Red Brigade) T-shirt.3 This made the band a dynamic subject for film.

  Early Clash film work would include a feature-length political film and some short films that foreshadowed music videos. Still, music videos, MTV, and the revolution in filmmaking it would cause were years off.4 Even so, for aesthetically conscious and politically active bands like the Clash, film was a natural step toward getting their music and message out to a larger audience. With this in mind, the Clash set about making a film that aimed to capture the simmering social unrest of mid-1970s England and place the band squarely in the middle of the political and popular culture fray.

  Set against this backdrop, the Clash began participating in an ambitious film project, Rude Boy. It would merge the Clash’s political radicalism, unique aesthetics, and raw performances in hopes of becoming the ultimate agitprop film. But when it was released in 1979, the film was a haphazard mix of Clash concert footage placed over a disjointed narrative that attempted to deal with contemporary issues like racism and state repression. As Strummer pointed out, Rude Boy is not a good film and is not interesting to watch for most of its two-hours-plus running time. “Rude Boy does not even seem to have the participation of the Clash,” Rude explained. And according to Strummer it did not.

  Rude Boy is set in 1977 London and opens with a long scene where the police and protestors square off as the National Front attempts to march through an Afro-Caribbean community. It follows the hapless Ray, played by Ray Gange, a disaffected youth who becomes a Clash roadie. From the opening performance of “Police and Thieves,” this plot device gives the filmmakers, Jack Hazan and David Mingay, a great opportunity to film concert footage of the Clash in their electrifying prime. The film fails to capture the flavor of the political and social unrest of the time despite using actual footage of social unrest and fascist group demonstrations. Far more effective at highlighting the group’s political ideals are their performances. We see them performing a blistering set at the Rock Against Racism event, Carnival Against the Nazis in 1978.5

  As the film unravels, the only engaging scenes, other than the live footage, are those few moments when Strummer attempts to offer the unsympathetic Ray a political education—while drinking in a pub, washing his Brigade Rosse T-shirt in a hotel room, or playing “Let the Good Times Roll” on a piano. The film is not the agitprop work that the Clash hoped it would be, but rather equal parts documentary, social commentary, and concert film. When it was released in 1980, the Clash distanced themselves from the film as it seemed like an attempt to exploit their enormous success and popularity rather than offering anything more substantial. In Punk Productions, Stacy Thompson explains, “But for all of the film’s attempts to link the band to the ongoing racial and political clashes and violence occurring in London in the late ’70s, it stops well short of ever suggesting that any identifiable effects resulted from this particular intersection of punk, race, and politics.”6

  While Rude Boy did not live up to what many had hoped from the Clash, the band was entering a stage of unprecedented success and influence. It assumed the mantle of the world’s greatest rebel rock band with the release of London Calling. Making their way to America once again in 1981 in support of Sandinista!, the Clash played a three-week stretch of shows on Broadway now known as the Bonds Residency. They would play seventeen shows during this residency, attracting thousands of people from divergent sectors of American society including two emerging pop culture icons who were huge Clash fans: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. They listened to the Clash incessantly, particularly during the filming of Raging Bull. Peter Biskind writes that Scorsese “would go into his trailer, put on the Clash at top volume, and sit there revved up by the music, pacing back and forth.”7 Scorsese hoped to cast the Clash in his Gangs of New York project. The admiration was mutual—Strummer later shaved his head into a Mohawk à la De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver for the Clash’s punk rock guerrilla phase.

  When it became apparent that Scorsese would not get Gangs of New York produced, he shelved the project and began working on the darkly satirical King of Comedy.8 Strummer and his band mates make a fleeting appearance as “street scum.” The Clash had prepared to produce their own film in New York with close associate Don Letts, the Rastafarian DJ at the Roxy Club in Covent Garden. Letts was a talented young filmmaker who made Punk Rock Movie, a Super 8 film documenting the 1977 London punk scene. He was traveling with the Clash to New York City to shoot a video for “This Is Radio Clash” and film the short documentary Clash on Broadway.9

  Much of this footage appears in the Letts documentary Westway to the World, released in 2000. At the center of Letts’s film are the charming and often heartbreakingly honest interviews given by each member of the band. Intercut with exceptional concert footage, the documentary follows the band from their celebrated rise to their cheerless end with fascinating anecdotes spotlighting the group’s originality and influence. Jones, Simonon, and Headon each offer thoughtful historical accounts, but Strummer steals the show as he movingly speaks about the music and the politics that drove the band.

  At one point Strummer explains, “I quickly realized that either you became a power or you were crushed—and that we were trying to grope in a socialist way for some kind of a future where the world is a less miserable place than it is.” The film is neither nostalgic nor sentimental and serves two important roles—a historical document and a revelatory primer for the uninitiated. Strummer concludes the film by discussing the band’s demise after Jones’s departure and the sadness of an opportunity squandered. “We weren’t parochial. We weren’t narrow-minded. We weren’t little Englanders,” he says. “At least we had the suss to embrace what we were presented with, which was the world and all its weird varieties.”

  While Westway to the World is a look backward, Let’s Rock Again is a moving glimpse into Strummer’s new life and the bright future that was ahead. Directed by his friend Dick Rude, the film was meant to get his new music out to a larger audience and to serve as a memoir. Spending an afternoon in New York City with Rude, best known for his role as Duke in the film Repo Man, I learn that the film is an intimate, loving portrait of a person Rude describes as his “brother, best friend, mentor, hero—he remains all things to me.” The film began after Rude went to Strummer’s Somerset farm in an effort to convince him to document the then impending Global A Go-Go tour.

  Let’s Rock Again was filmed over a period of about seven weeks and it took eighteen months to complete. Strummer was resistant at first, objecting that “I’m not interesting” and that filming him would be like making “a home movie.” He tried to encourage Rude to make a different documentary about an old woman in Rude’s apartment building in Los Angeles. “That would be much more interesting,” Strummer told him. “No one’s gonna wanna see this.” Strummer finally relented, not suspecting that his decision would have enormous consequences. And while the film does promote his new music, it takes on an entirely different tone, symbolizing a life loving music and a musician loving life.

  Rud
e’s film received only two screenings, both at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. It has no official release date and is still in search of a distributor. A strange twist of irony to be sure, since Rude and Strummer had hoped that this film would help get his new music out. In the film Strummer tells an interviewer that Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, the first album he recorded with the Mescaleros, lost money and that he worried he was taking these young musicians down the road of failure. “I don’t know if they realize what they are in for,” he quietly tells one interviewer. I ask Rude if the other members of the Clash had a chance to watch his film. “I had private screenings both for Mick and Paul,” he tells me. “They each said, ‘Wow, I wanna be like that’—they did not know the man he really was, how pure he was—the person he had become after hitting the bottom spiritually, he was realizing his true self.”

  Let’s Rock Again opens with a quick but powerful montage of Strummer’s days with the Clash. It is a perfect complement for the scenes ahead where Rude captures Strummer’s performances with the Mescaleros in all their glory. “When people see this film,” Rude told me, “especially all those who would not normally appreciate Joe, they get sucked in to the person he was—they come to love him.”

  Rude catches Strummer behind the scenes and offstage almost unawares. Relaxed and disarming, Rude tells me it was “like we were just hanging out—once he committed to the project he was open and accessible.”10 The moments on film with the band—at the time, Martin Slattery, Tymon Dogg, Scott Shields, Antony Genn, and Pablo Cook—displayed a real unity. Rude explained that he initiated some of the scenes including those that find Strummer traveling to a local Atlantic City radio station in hopes of getting on the air to promote his show and the new album, or Strummer handing out homemade flyers to people on the boardwalk. Both scenes elicit a strong reaction from viewers, often pity and sympathy. One person at the screening asked Rude, “Was Strummer bitter or angry that he had fallen on such hard times?” Rude takes umbrage to this narrow viewpoint. “When people respond like that they are missing the point—in those scenes, I see a man who is doing something he loves with the wonderment, energy, and enthusiasm of when he was a young musician and playing with the Clash.”

  Rude poignantly adds that “while he was alive and had trouble getting his music on the radio, people were like ‘so what?’ and now that he is gone there is a desperation to fill this void instead of being in that moment when he was here and enjoying his music.” In the end, Let’s Rock Again achieves this, and more significantly, helps us deal with Strummer’s loss as not a tragedy but as a celebration of an artist who leaves behind a legacy that can never be duplicated. “There is only one Joe Strummer,” Rude says, “and since the days of the Clash there has been no group that has even come close to doing what they did.” Rude is determined to keep Strummer’s music and message alive to influence generations to come.

  Rude first met Strummer during the production of Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy. Strummer was recording two songs for the film’s soundtrack. Rude was in London to write the sequel to the 1984 cult classic Repo Man, which was directed by Cox and starred Rude along with Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton.11 The sequel was never produced but a scene from the script became Straight to Hell. Shot on location in Spain in 1986, this spaghetti Western parody starred Strummer, Rude, and Sy Richardson as bumbling hit men who decide to rob a bank. The film features many cameos from musicians including Elvis Costello, who plays a waiter who is never without a tray of coffee.

  Cox worked with Strummer on three film projects, each a bold political and cultural statement. Cox describes Straight to Hell as a political response: the “Reagan/Thatcher maniac front was working overtime to destroy the Sandinista revolution by any means. Thatcher had even attempted to criminalize the word ‘Sandinista’—hence the Clash album of the same name. It would be a mistake to underestimate the power of the punk movement at that time. The Clash, the Jam, the Pistols, and their successors were almost the only beachhead many of us had against a tidal wave of reactionary politics.”12

  Cox told me Strummer “was a brilliant film composer, who got better and better as we worked together. He was interested in being an actor as well, but in the case of Walker, used that as a way of being immersed in the production and the place “I think by that point he’d realized he was a composer and musician rather than a thespian.” Cox describes Walker as “a comedy about how badly Americans behave abroad.” The film follows William Walker, a nineteenth-century American adventurer who becomes a soldier of fortune and eventually dictator of Nicaragua.13 “Walker was such an unpleasant character, a coward, and a liar,” Cox adds. “You can’t make a film about that seriously because he’s an idiot.” Strummer’s committed anti-imperialist stance and his support for the Sandinistas and other Latin American revolutionaries explains the film’s remarkable soundtrack. Cox’s film fit perfectly with his political sensibilities and as Cox confirmed, “I think Walker is one of the best film soundtracks ever composed, a pity it’s no longer available.”14 Rude agrees, describing Strummer as “not confident as an actor” but his “soundtrack work is genius.”

  Interestingly, Strummer was not credited with playing anything on the Walker soundtrack, only singing. Strummer told Bill Flanagan of Musician magazine in March 1988, “I couldn’t credit myself playing because I was afraid of getting sued by Sony, to be honest. I got permission from CBS/Sony to sing on it. See, I can write it, conduct it, produce it, okay? I can do all that and have it on any label quite freely. But should I sing on it or play, then some deal has to be made. So because Walker’s on Virgin I made a deal for the singing with CBS/Sony. Then when I began to compile the credits I thought, Anything I’ve done I better not put on there, ’cause for all I know there may be a separate deal for playing it. It could open a can of worms, right? So I just put down ‘Vocals’ but in fact I’m probably playing some rhythmic instrument on every track, whether it’s piano, guitar, or marimba.”15

  Nevertheless, critics who believed that Strummer was incapable of producing good music without Mick Jones as a reassuring partner were impressed with the Walker soundtrack. Charles Shaar Murray, who had years before derided the Clash as a garage band and supplied the motivation behind the song “Garageland,” wrote that it was “a remarkably elegant, loose-limbed, and accomplished set of ersatz Latin themes spiked with delicate country touches.”16 And NME’s Gavin Martin explained, “You may be a little stunned and staggered at first (I was) to find the man with the demon bark and three-chord bite has composed every note here. But from lustrous samba percussion, through flamenco horns, and country inflections, it’s all gorgeously effective and superbly detailed.”17

  David Byrne, who won an Oscar along with Cong Su and Ryuichi Sakamoto for their score of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, echoed these sentiments. After accepting the Oscar, Byrne told the press he believed that Strummer should have been given the award for his work on the Walker soundtrack. Rude explains, “Strummer could explore both darkness and light in a way few musicians could and that’s what makes Walker and also Permanent Record18 such compelling work.”19

  “Because he was a talented artist in another area—music—he realized that you could not do things halfway, you have to be studied,” Rude adds. “While he had that powerful charisma he was not studied enough to be an actor—he was a hack like me.” Although many felt Strummer possessed a natural, unforced ability as an actor, Strummer was the first to admit that this period of acting was more a cathartic experience rather than a serious attempt to become a full-time actor. “I played myself,” Strummer amusingly told me referring to his 1989 role in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. “It was my best performance.”

  Joe Strummer and Curtis Vorde Hall in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. (Mystery Train © 1989 Mystery Train Inc. Photo by Sukita.)

  Mystery Train is Jarmusch’s discerning examination how various outcasts, outsiders, and foreigners view America. Jarmusch sets the film
in Memphis, Tennessee, using the American obsession with Elvis Presley as a grim metaphor for what passes as America. Jarmusch gives us three charming vignettes, each offering a markedly unique perspective. In the first, we follow a young Japanese couple essentially on a pilgrimage to Memphis to explore the city where their American rock heroes (Elvis and Carl Perkins) once roamed. From the young Japanese hipster couple we meet Luisa, an Italian widow. Memphis now serves as an allegory for loss and renewal with Elvis appearing as her spiritual guide, promising comfort and hope. Finally, we encounter Strummer’s Johnny in a bar, a Brit caricature of a 1950s rockabilly outlaw who goes by the nickname “Elvis.” In fact, Johnny is a small-time crook wallowing in desperation after his wife left him, with only his brother-in-law, played by Steve Buscemi, to console him.

  Jarmusch’s Memphis in Mystery Train is equal parts exciting, mythical, and dangerous. Yet the film’s allegorical narrative offers a critical analysis of a country as a paradox using the city that became famous for Elvis and rock ’n’ roll as a stand-in for America. As each vignette intersects at a hotel that counts Howlin’ Wolf’s night clerk and Cinque Lee’s bellhop as employees, the film plays on the troubling contradiction of a once thriving and bustling American city that is now hollow and gray, mostly inhabited by African Americans who live with the legacy of a white man who became famous for performing black music.

  Top: Joe Strummer as Johnny/Elvis in Mystery Train. Above: Joe Strummer, Steve Buscemi, and Rick Aviles in Mystery Train. (Mystery Train © 1989 Mystery Train Inc. Photos by Sukita.)

  Strummer’s performance in Mystery Train is engaging and clever. Jarmusch, an innovative director, places Strummer in this part and gets out of his way. Jarmusch describes Strummer as “so incredibly valuable to me, both as a friend and for all the things he created.” He adds that while bands like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were about “reduction,” Strummer and the Clash took “everything that flowed into their hearts and souls—grabbed onto that essence and used it to make it a part of themselves.” In a final gesture of Jarmusch’s affection and admiration for Strummer, he helped film the video of “Redemption Song.” It was shot in New York City and followed the creation of a mural painting dedicated in Strummer’s honor on a wall on East 7th Street. The mural consists of an image of Strummer in 1950s rebel rock pose with slogans “The Future Is Unwritten” and “Know Your Rights” over a red, gold, and green flag emblazoned with the lion of Judah, a symbol of power and mercy in the Rastafarian religion.20