In the late 1980s, Strummer became involved in the Rock Against the Rich tour, which was an attempt to inject class analysis into the political struggle by promoting issues like the redistribution of income and other socialist economic policies. He also played a prominent role in the Free Nelson Mandela concerts organized by Amnesty International.21 Dick Rude describes Strummer’s politics “as having strong views that he was willing to change,” but overall it was “about taking care of his brother and of justice.” Strummer believed in certain political issues “so strongly he felt they needed to be repeated,” Rude tells me. Alex Cox added that Strummer’s “motto might have been ‘one mustn’t grumble’—which about personal things he never did” and that “he pursued politics as hard as he could for as long as he felt he could.” Finally, both Rude and Strummer himself describe Strummer “as an exemplar of the Rebel Way.” The “dark night” after the Clash and his brief flirtation with acting and soundtrack work was a time of creative reflection and political renewal. In the end, Strummer best sums up both this period and his life’s work: “To someone who says to me, ‘You were the spokesman for your generation and you fucked it up,’ I say, yeah, but we tried—whether we succeeded or failed is immaterial—we tried.”
BE BOP A LULA HERE’S JOE STRUMMER
By Ann Scanlon
Just within earshot of the barrow-boy cries on London’s Notting Hill market is a cramped café, offering whiskey-laced coffee and early morning refuge to anyone who needs it.
For the past four years, Joe Strummer has stared into an empty cup, half listened to the crackle of a caffeine-stained wireless and reflected on a broken past and perpetually uncertain future.
As the former leader of one of the most influential bands of the last decade, Strummer had plenty to think about.
And it took an awful lot of coffee before he was able to understand how the Clash had allowed such anger, passion, and street sensibility to dissolve into complacency, confusion, and parody itself.
“The Clash were fucked by success,” he realizes now. “We were singer/songwriters and the better we did our craft—and we tried to do it real good—the more it removed up from the frame of where we were writing from.”
But it wouldn’t be Strummer to wallow in coulda-always-been-a-contender contemplation forever. Armed with the hard learned lessons of the past twelve years, he’s back in the ring with an impressive soundtrack, Walker, and a clear vision ahead.
Until recently, it was Alex Cox who provided the main outlets for Strummer’s brooding madness. When the latter gate-crashed a Sid and Nancy party in ’86, Cox invited him to work on the score and Strummer ended up writing the central song, “Love Kills.”
A few months later, Cox gave Strummer a lead role in his spaghetti spoof Straight to Hell and subsequently asked him to appear in Walker.
Shot in Nicaragua, Cox’s fourth movie outlines the life of William Walker, the American soldier who declared himself president of Nicaragua in 1855.
Unlike Straight to Hell, which revolved around a small clique of the director’s friends, Walker drew on a huge pool of Hollywood stars and features the talents of Ed Harris, Miguel Sandoval, and Marlee Matlin.
Strummer’s acting capabilities are hardly stretched as Faucet the dishwasher or as a battle extra. “If I had any less of a role then I wouldn’t be there at all,” he says. “It would be best if we had it on video so I could press pause and say, Look, see that guy holding his hat running through the back of the battle scene—that’s me!
“Although I do have another scene where I dive into a river with a rope and try to lasso these naked women who are washing clothes in the water.”
Strummer and his Straight to Hell costar Dick Rude were initially written in as comic relief to the serious storyline but, as Walker was cut from its original three hours to half that length, most of their efforts ended up on the cutting room floor.
“At some point Alex decided that he had to reach the Rambo audience, which you can understand. But really his audience is the people who’d go up to the Gate cinema or the Scala, we could have sat and enjoyed a two-and-a-half-hour Walker, and now it seems to fall between the two stools.
“I think Alex started with both a great script and crew of actors. They were real professionals, no complaints, no tantrums, Ed Harris would sit down in the dirt with the extras, but everything was still very uptight.
“As soon as we got there it was (adopts phony drawl), Right, this is dead serious. This is a five-million-dollar picture and personally I didn’t enjoy the ten weeks we spent there.”
That said, Strummer was glad of the opportunity to visit Nicaragua and—just as on Straight to Hell, he had preferred to “method out” and sleep in a battered Dodge—so he and Dick Rude skipped the luxuries of Managua’s Hotel Intercontinental for a rented house in Granada.
“Nicaragua was just like being in a Gabriel García Márquez book. There’s nothing to do except sit outside on rocking chairs, rocking the mosquitoes away. You’d sit there in the afternoon and feel so clear in the mind that it was like being on a different planet.”
Because they were filming in the south, the Walker crew were well out of the war zone. But Strummer—who once dealt in the polemics of “Sandinista” and the more specific “Washington Bombs”—still maintains his support for the Sandinistas.
“Nicaragua is a country with nothing, and the Sandinistas are the first to admit that they’ve made every mistake in the book. But when they took over from Somoza (the dictator who was deposed in 1979), the first thing they did was to teach everyone to read and write and make sure that there was some sort of medical care.
“There’s a guy called P. J. O’Rourke who writes in Rolling Fucking Stone and represents the typical, Hey, dude, let’s party segment of America and probably doesn’t even know where Nicaragua is. Anyway, he went down there to slag it off, and of course he can go into a supermarket and see all the empty shelves, but he’s not talking about the real issue which is that America supports any kind of fascist dictator so long as he ain’t a commie.”
While Walker was being edited in Granada, Cox asked Strummer to write the score. “I banged the stuff off in two weeks. I had my trumpet, violin, myself, and two suitcases in this house, and every day I’d take a couple of new songs to Al.”
Less straightforward, however, was the actual recording when Strummer had to explain his arrangements to more than a dozen musicians in a San Francisco studio. “That was incredibly nerve wracking. I felt completely paranoid all the way through the first side because the Clash would just record, Bang! Bang! And that was it.
“There’s a song called ‘Omotepe,’ which I wrote with one finger on the piano, and when I explained it to the pianist I was almost apologizing for its simplicity. But she just said, I think that’s tough, and gradually I began to feel better.
“But it was only when we cut the second side country style that it was more like rock ’n’ roll and I could say, This is how it goes, boys. We’d do ten takes: a slow one, a long one, a fast one, a funny one—that’s the way rock ’n’ roll was made.”
On completing Walker Strummer returned to London and, within weeks, a guest appearance to the Pogues at Camden’s Electric Ballroom led to a three week tour of the States with them. “It was funny how it happened,” he smiles. “I’d met Jimmy the Red, a well-known drinker around Notting Hill, and he was telling me that he’d been to Narcotics Anonymous, had given up everything and was feeling great.
“So I decided to knock drinking on the head for a month, went home and sat there feeling all smug with my new decision when the phone rang and the Pogues’ manager Frank Murray said, Joe, you’re gonna come to New York with us in three days’ time.”
Standing in for ailing Pogues guitarist, Philip Chevron refueled his enthusiasm for playing live. “There’s something about thrashing an instrument to the limit and that’s what really appealed to me about the Pogues—the sheer physicality of the music. I’d just done
Walker and I loved the way we could really rock the house with a tiny little thing like a mandolin, rather than bludgeoning everyone into submission with a huge wall of sound.
“Philip Chevron is a fantastic rhythm guitar player, and it was scary enough to learn all that stuff let alone try and play it at nine hundred miles per hour.”
Four days after the last of these Pogues gigs, Strummer was back in LA writing a score for Permanent Record, a U.S. movie dealing with teenage suicide.
This time, he put together the Latino-Rockabilly War, a six-strong band which mixed psychobilly with Latin and jazz, and includes Zander Schloss of Circle Jerks and Poncho Sanchez, one of the most respected Latin/jazz musicians on the West Coast.
“I wrote all the songs in two weeks,” says Strummer, “and that’s the best way to do it, ’cos we’re being too damn precious. There’s not enough people pushing themselves to write.
“Instead of rewriting they’ll endlessly tart it up and take it to Memphis and take it to New York and take it to this magic mix master or that. Too much money is spent papering over the fact that it’s shit in the first place.”
Ever since Strummer heard the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away” as a ten-year-old in boarding school, he has thought of nothing but rock ’n’ roll. “It’s the only thing that’s living to me,” he claims. “I shall live and die and be judged by it.”
God knows, he even sold his marriage vows for it. In 1974 he married a complete stranger who needed immigration status in order to travel abroad, and used the resultant £100 to buy the black Telecaster that he has used every night since. “I’d like to get divorced,” he shrugs, “but I can’t find her.”
It’s not something that Strummer—now the father of two daughters—thinks about from one year to the next. “I’ve been with Gabrielle for ten years and we don’t need a piece of paper to tell us we’re together.”
And although he now accepts that the Clash have split for good, he and Jones are closer than ever. “Mick’s daughter Lauren and my daughter Jazzi are the best of friends—a terrible duo—so I see him all the time. I see Paul too and I’m goin’ to go and see Topper who’s been detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.”
Strummer is curious as to what Topper will make of the recent spate of Clash reissues. “When I heard that they were going to release ‘I Fought the Law’ I had a predictable reaction,” he admits. “But then I rang up Rob Steiner at CBS and he explained that he was a long-term Clash fan but hadn’t got ‘I Fought the Law’ because it was released on the since deleted EP, and now sells for £45. Until then I hadn’t thought about it in terms of the audience, and Rob convinced me that he’d made the right decision.”
Together with Jones, Steiner subsequently worked out a track listing. “Story of the Clash Volume One was my idea of a joke. I’ve got no right to assume there will be a second volume, but this double album is made up of all the main stuff and I think we’ve still got an interesting odd bag that might fit on a single LP in a couple of years’ time.”
For today, though, Strummer is back in his favorite Notting Hill retreat, staring into another cup of coffee but surer than ever of his next move. “Sitting here these past four years listening to stuff out of that,” he nods in the direction of an old radio behind the counter, “I’ve realized there’s no Bop Message. And I’ve decided that I’m going to deliver the Bop Message to anyone who’ll listen.
“It’s nothing to do with bebop, I call it the Bop Message ’cos I’m differentiating it from all the drivel that I hear on the radio, which has no message to me except that some fucker wants to be famous.”
It was while Strummer was working with the Latino-Rockabilly War, in a tiny studio in LA, that he fully realized the potential of the Bop Message. “Most of the studios in LA look like the London Rock Shop, but we found this Mexican place called Baby O which was just a simple wooden room. I’ve got a song called ‘Trash City,’ which is going to be released as a single off the Permanent Record soundtrack, and I asked my friend Jason Mael to bring his Super 8 camera and shoot a video.
“He just shot it as we were recording, and the whole thing cost six hundred fifty dollars. That to me is the Bop Message.”
But although Strummer’s message and method is simplicity itself, he is only too aware that promoting the Bop Message won’t be quite so easy. “Right now, I’m a one-man operation and it’s lovely and clear. I’ve got nobody to please but myself and that’s the way I want to keep it.
“Walker sold fifteen thousand copies in America, but there’s never been an advert, it’s not on the radio, and the film died in a week. So I’m not dispirited by those figures ’cos what that means is that there’s fifteen thousand hipsters in America who searched Walker out and found it.
“I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle to maintain so I can almost operate on that level. Whereas if I was trying to compete on a mega-mega level I’d have to have all these wankers polishing my mix and polishing my haircut. I’m just not interested enough in Joe Strummer to push Joe Strummer the way Madonna must push Madonna.”
Strummer might have resigned himself to indie sales figures, but he’s planning to return to the road nevertheless. “Touring is like a drug. You never forget what it was like to be high on that drug, but when someone comes along five years later and gives you another taste, you’re addicted again. And on the Pogues tour, I really felt the bite.”
“But what really annoyed me,” he continues, curling his top lip into the famous snarl, “was that for thirteen numbers the audience would be rocking away, having a great time, but as soon as I stepped up to do ‘I Fought the Law’ and ‘London Calling’ all these tossers would suddenly start gobbing.
“I’m going to go back onstage and when I do I’m going to play everything from ‘Keys to Your Heart’ to ‘Rock the Casbah’—I insist on playing my back catalog—but the first person to gob at me, I’m gonna jump offstage and have that Telecaster right through the center of their head.
“But,” he stresses, “I don’t want my songs to be about my hotel rooms or my ego. I’m a one man operation, and I’m not interested in becoming a superstar ’cos you can’t write.”
Strummer’s train of thought is interrupted by a stray busker who wanders over and unwittingly asks, “Can anyone tune a guitar?”
Within minutes the guitar is at the center of a fully fledged session, a café regular singing while Strummer and his friend Roughler Ray keep rhythm. “I am a sincere man,” echoes Strummer, translating the singer’s Spanish, “the most thing I want in life is to spit my words out into the air.”
And then he’s lost again, keeping time with his teaspoon as simply and effectively as he’d banged out one-finger piano patterns for Walker.
Joe Stummer might have been unsure about where he was going or even of what he was doing, but he could never lose sight of himself.
_____________________
Originally appeared in Sounds, April 2, 1988.
CLASH AND BURN
The Politics of Punk’s Permanent Revolution
By Dennis Broe
A sensuous mob, they think/only of food and drink; They ignore since food is their only goal/the immortality of the soul.
—“THE MIGRATORY RATS,” HEINRICH HEINE
I have the will to survive
I cheat if I can’t win
If someone locks me out
I kick my way back in
—“HATE AND WAR,” THE CLASH
If punk came to “tear away the veil,” to tell the world, and specifically the staid musical world of ’60s rock ’n’ roll, whose former dissent had been commodified, that revolution was in the air, though not on the airwaves, then its primary messengers were the Sex Pistols and the Clash. While the Sex Pistols opened Pandora’s box, negating, just like the Dadaists before them, the very ground on which their art form stood, it was the Clash who would, just as the Surrealists alchemized the Dadaist energy and turned it into something enduring, with their groundin
g in the specific moment of the rebellion of pre-Thatcherite English working-class youth, transform the pure negation of the Sex Pistols into an animus that would continue to rebound and grow to eventually take in hip-hop and then the worldwide expansion of a globalized multiethnic revolutionary youth culture. Of course Rotten and Vicious could only be about tearing down the false gods, but Strummer and Jones, one name indicating the endurance of the rock ’n’ roll guitar form, the other indicating commonality and the everyday aspect of its followers, would instead point the way toward the potential of lasting rebellion aimed not just at overthrowing the rules of a form that was proving more and more susceptible to cooptation but also at uniting that form with a consciousness that was about not finding a place in the market but shattering the marketplace. Strummer, Jones, and the Clash, most markedly in the first British album and subsequent singles, came not to save the world but to destroy and then to rebuild it.
This impulse sprang not from preordained theory but from an absolute honesty and identification with their moment, with a Britain that offered little to its working-class youth and was in the process of deindustrializing—offering less. Joe Strummer, the diplomat’s kid, was the theoretician, and Mick Jones was the street kid who would always “Stay Free,” that is, in the terms of one of his greatest songs, stay loyal to his working-class upbringing. In addition, both theory and practice were molded not just by white working-class consciousness but also, and crucially, and most adamantly among all the punk groups, by Strummer’s and Jones’s lasting interest in black forms, particularly reggae, and, in the deeper sense, by their interest in uniting, finding a rapprochement between, not only black and white musical forms, but also black and white working-class consciousness. Their radicalness came, as Dick Hebdige points out, in attempting to bridge this chasm at a moment when commercial interests were starting to move in the opposite direction, breaking down audiences into marketable segments. The Clash, the name itself giving voice to Marx’s historical dialectic of change through struggle, also became early commentators on record industry commodification, inscribing their own struggles with their record company, the corporate giant in the pre-conglomerate era, CBS, in their music. That they eventually lost the struggle, succumbing to the temptations of the U.S. market, in an early bout with globalization, in no way diminishes their achievement both in giving expression to an individual moment and in supplying the impetus for the eventual picking up of their torch first by rap in the United States and, then, when that was commodified, by hip-hop across the world.
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