Let Fury Have the Hour

by Antonino D'Ambrosio

  Maybe this is a good thing. The blood rush you get listening to Strummer’s cry of “London’s burning!”; the brutish chords of “Guns on the Roof”; the pause-littered path of “Clampdown” can only be done partial justice in words. And Lester Bangs already hit the redline in that foolhardy endeavor way back in 1977. He describes Strummer’s inspired performance one night as “a fury unleashed on the stage and writhing in upon itself in real pain that connects with the nerves of the audience like summer thunderbolts.” In the face of this overwhelming intensity, bouncing up and down struck him as a hopelessly inadequate response. “It’s not your class system, it’s not Britain-on-the-wane, it’s not even glandular fever, it’s the cage of life itself and all the anguish to break through which sometimes translates as flash or something equally petty but in any case is rock ’n’ roll’s burning marrow.”4 Yet as sublime as the Clash could be in the heat of the moment, their real legacy wasn’t records or concert performances, but the remarkable ability to realize their values in the mundane stretches between storms. Bangs understood. He had seen the band at their hotel-trashing worst, but it didn’t matter. “Here at last is a band which not only preaches something good but practices it as well, that instead of talking about changes in social behavior puts the model of a truly egalitarian society into practice in their own conduct.”5

  It’s hard to imagine a tougher standard to measure oneself against. That Joe Strummer resolutely refused to settle for a more modest one, even at the height of the Clash’s fame—they played New York’s Shea Stadium, for goodness sake, just like the Beatles—testifies to his steely political will. When a band gets that big, though, problems of scale emerge for which the DIY ethic is ill-equipped. Every new piece of equipment, every roadie required to set it up takes the concert tour out of the realm of the common man. By the time they released their scathing third single “Complete Control” in September 1977, the Clash already understood the depth of the trouble: “On the last tour my mates couldn’t get in/I’d open up the back door/But they’d get run out again.” Yet the band pressed on in its quest for world domination for five more years, willing to forsake the intimacy of a personal relationship with their most devoted fans for the promise of reaching listeners who probably wouldn’t have given them the time of day on the street. All successful major-label acts confront this paradox. But its pressures must have been overwhelming for a populist punk band like the Clash.

  Punk has struggled with the contradictions of popularity ever since the Sex Pistols first made the headlines. As the 1970s came to a depressing close, the artiness of postpunk drew in the community’s borders. And a little later, hardcore militarized them. While the Clash was cracking the Billboard Top Ten for both the album Combat Rock and the single “Rock the Casbah,” uncompromising bands like Black Flag, HüskerDü, Minor Threat, and the Minutemen were reconquering the rocky highlands of punk for true believers. In its relentless deferral of the simple pleasures of pop music, hardcore functioned much as bebop had within the jazz world of the 1940s. Independence became the watchword as the resolutely anticorporate magazine Maximum Rock and Roll and its followers reshaped the terms of debate. Do-it-yourself metamorphosed into a synonym for don’t-do-it-on-a-major-label. The collective identity that the Clash had struggled so hard to inspire solidified into a relatively stable “we,” but at the expense of connections to the wider world. Although few artists had the nerve to overtly trash the Clash, the band’s financial success and corporate backing made them a poor fit within the interconnected local scenes of second-generation punk. Perhaps this explains the development of bands like the San Francisco Bay Area’s Operation Ivy, which came eerily close to capturing the special Clash sound that they almost seemed like a cover band on a politically correct independent label.

  After the dissolution of the Clash, Strummer kept a low musical profile for several years, focusing his attention on the world of film. When his first solo record, 1989’s underrated Earthquake Weather, did poorly in the marketplace, he was held captive by the recording contract with Epic—now a division of Sony—that he had inherited from the Clash. Even if this silence was purely an accident, the forced hiatus kept him above the fray during the new wave of discussion about “selling out” that accompanied Nirvana’s unexpected commercial breakthrough in 1992. Kurt Cobain was not as overtly political as Strummer, but they shared a desire to instigate social change. Unlike Cobain, however, Strummer never let himself be paralyzed by self-doubt. The difference between them was partially a matter of context. Strummer didn’t grow up at a time when the purity of self-marginalization was highly valued. Although he and his band mates might have lamented the Clash’s position in the industry, he never felt the need to beat himself up for signing to a major label. “Complete Control,” after all, was not a one-off 45 for an obscure indie label, but a major-label single like its predecessors. The band’s critique of corporate machinations was a matter of content rather than its mode of distribution. More broadly, Strummer didn’t waste much time beating himself up for anything. His generosity extended to himself. That may sound like a curious formulation. But in a world where self-loathing is a prime motivational tool, Strummer’s ability to fuse attentiveness with contentment stands out.

  Once Strummer figured out how to extricate himself from his contract with Epic, he turned to an independent label. An imprint of the American independent label Epitaph, Operation Ivy and Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat was the perfect political and musical fit. While Strummer probably could have landed a major-label contract if he had wanted, he recognized the advantage of working with people who truly respect your work. But his decision also represented an endorsement of the third-and fourth-generation punk acts signed to labels like Epitaph. As good as Strummer’s new music was—the Mescaleros records are sounding better with age—this willingness to make connections within a punk community radically different from the one that gave birth to the Clash was every bit as important. In nearly every interview he conducted after forming the Mescaleros, Strummer took pains to give props to younger artists, some of whom weren’t even born when he started performing. An interview published by the resurrected Punk magazine after his death is a good example. “I’m into all the new punk. I like to hear Green Day on the radio. It’s a lot better than the other shit they play in England, let me tell you that. I just toured with the Offspring and got really tight with them. And my favorite group of the moment is Hepcat, from LA. They’re the best ska band ever born in the United States of America, bar none.”6 The names change, depending on the interview, but in each case Strummer clearly has a sense of who needs a chair and who needs a beer.

  He was always paying attention. That’s what makes some of his more controversial moves so interesting to ponder. When an interviewer for a fan website asked him about the use of “London Calling” in an American television commercial for Jaguar, he took full responsibility. “Yeah, I agreed to that. We get hundreds of requests for that and turn ’em all down. But I just thought Jaguar . . . If you’re in a group and you make it together, then everyone deserves something. Especially twenty-odd years after the fact. It just seems churlish for a writer to refuse to have their music used on an advert and so I figured out, only advertise the things you think are cool. That’s why we dissed Coors and Miller.” It’s surely no accident that, even though Strummer’s own career had been reborn on an independent label, he chose to praise major-label punk bands like Green Day, the Offspring, and even Blink 182—a fave of one of his daughters—along with his label mates. While he steadfastly promoted the virtues of independent record labels, underscoring the artistic bankruptcy of the corporate conglomerates that own the majors, he cheerily undermined the ideologues’ demand for purity. “Putting your music to an advert is a compromise. But a good advert with cool music can turn on a lot of people. I know when I’m watching TV and you get a good ad, it’s an up.”7

  Joe Strummer never lost the ability to imagine his listeners’ lives, t
he sort of people who feel the burdens of the moment ease, however slightly, when they hear a good song on a commercial. He never lost it because he was always listening to music himself, because he listened to what his fans told him before and after his shows, because he was always a good listener. Although he only made it to fifty, Strummer was old and famous enough to have been tempted by the prospect of retreating to the mirrored walls of the self-satisfied mind. But he never gave in. That’s why we owe him an incalculable debt, not only for his prodigious musical legacy, but for staying true to the carefully crafted self he made famous in the Clash, the middle-class diplomat brat John Graham Mellor transformed into the proletarian hero Joe Strummer. He showed us how to get big without going soft. And he showed us how to stay big without becoming too hard. Because he recognized that there is equal danger in bending over backward and refusing to bend an inch. Either way, you’re liable to end up broken. Joe Strummer knew how to stay in one piece. His greatest gift to us is not any particular song or story, but the way all his songs and stories were bound together by the clarity of his consciousness. Even after his death, he’s paying too much attention to let any ashes fall.

  WHITE RIOT OR RIGHT RIOT

  A Look Back at Punk Rock and Antiracism

  By Antonino D’Ambrosio

  And the society that spawned them

  Just cries out who’s to blame?

  And then wraps itself in the union jack

  And just carries on the same.

  —“THE FEW,” BILLY BRAGG

  At the height of the White Riot tour an earnest political journalist asked me, “What are you going to do with all the energy of your audience? How can you harness it? What do you think happens to it?” I said, “It slides under the door and out of the hall.”

  —JOE STRUMMER

  The scene was utter mayhem. Or at least that’s what the newspaper headlines blared the next day. The frenzied crowd gathered at London’s Rainbow Theatre in May 1977 to see the Clash ripped chairs from their moorings and threw them at the stage. “Playing the Rainbow that night,” Strummer said, was the equivalent of “playing Madison Square Garden . . . we knew that punk had arrived.”1 Coming on the heels of civil unrest throughout England, including a recent spate of IRA bombings, the Clash’s full-throttle performance was a statement that it was time to find purpose and create “the movement.” Punk was not swearing on TV, as the Sex Pistols famously did only a few weeks before, but becoming an active agent for collective social change, echoing the nineteenth-century poet Rimbaud’s invocation to “change life.”2

  Freedom, both personal and political, was the driving force behind their performance that night. They issued a spirited declaration that the Clash were going to take charge in the all-important struggle ahead; anything is possible for those who are willing to stand up and fight. The song that “kicked things over that night,” as Strummer said, “was ‘White Riot.’” The Clash wanted to destroy racism and spread the message of unified rebellion. This song was their rallying cry, which aimed to transform Clash followers from passive concertgoers into a guerrilla army tired of “going backwards” and ready “to take over.”

  Yet a closer look at punk’s approach to opposing racism reveals that it was far from effective. In some instances, it actually bred racism and undermined any serious attempt to bring together multiracial communities and working-class whites.

  The Clash tried to lead the antiracist charge within the punk movement. They took a prominent role in Rock Against Racism and were committed supporters of the Anti-Nazi League.3 There were a number of reasons for the group’s antiracist activism, primarily the influence of Strummer and Paul Simonon, the Clash bassist. They both greatly admired Afro-Caribbean music (reggae, dub, ska), particularly Simonon. Both had grown up in proximity to multiethnic communities.4 The respect that members of the Clash felt for the music influenced their interest in and concern for the struggles of Afro-Caribbean communities in England. This attitude reflected the general influence of blacks within English culture following World War II and helped shape the punk movement’s antiracist activism. Conversely, it also limited and weakened the movement’s scope and value.

  Beyond the reggae rhythms and ska beats or the important reggae cover songs like “Police and Thieves” and “Pressure Drop,” the group’s antiracist political message was not easily conveyed to their listeners. Two songs that the Clash recorded early on—“White Riot” and “White Man in Hammersmith Palais”—reveal the ambiguity of their multiethnic message. In the latter song, Strummer describes his experience with Simonon at a reggae event at the Hammersmith Palais, recounting the duo’s disappointment in the performances, and his realization that unity between the Afro-Caribbean people and white punk youth seemed nearly impossible. In the song, Strummer describes the fighting and robbing as counterproductive and ultimately dangerous as it further splintered blacks and whites. The true enemy was the state, as Strummer wrote in the following lyric:

  Dress back jump back this is a bluebeat attack

  ’Cos it won’t get you anywhere

  Fooling with your guns

  The British Army is waiting out there

  An’ it weighs fifteen hundred tons

  To a certain degree, the ambiguities of “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” work in the song’s favor as the listener gets the sense that Strummer is making a plea for true unity. “I was really trying to get at the division between the black rebels and white rebels and the fact that we got to have unity or we’re just going to get stomped on,” Strummer explained nearly a decade later.5

  “White Riot” was written after Strummer, Simonon, and the Clash’s manager Bernie Rhodes were caught in a riot between the police and Afro-Caribbean youth gathered at the Notting Hill Carnival on August 30, 1976. In the song, Strummer cries: “Black people gotta lotta problems/But they don’t mind throwing a brick/White people go to school/Where they teach you how to be thick.” While discussing the song Strummer said, “Our goal was to prod those people who were complacent and comfortable . . . it was important to join the struggle with those groups being beaten down and who were willing do something about it . . . ’cause we all were being beaten down . . . we had to realize we were all in the some boat and unity was a necessity or we would get smashed.”

  To complicate matters, England was on the cusp of a period of intense political and social conservatism that would dominate the country for the next two decades. The reaction was creating a hostile, violent environment in which many were choosing sides in the escalating conflict between marginalized communities and the white power structure. The Tory Party effectively seized the opportunity to lure working-class white youth to join their party, blaming immigrants and racial minorities for the terrible economic conditions. And in terms of racial violence, the National Front was not alone. The violent Anti-Paki League directed abuse at the South Asians who were rapidly populating cities throughout Northern England. For this reason, “skinhead” came to embody anti-Asian hatred and much of the neofascist music was basically anti-Asian rants.6

  The National Front, a sinister, neofascist hate group that draped its racist and xenophobic beliefs with the Union Jack, was building a small but significant electoral base among disaffected white working-class voters.7 As Strummer acknowledged, the same misery that caused people like him “to search for positive solutions” stirred feelings of anomie and hatred among others who ultimately “chose the route of fascism.” The neofascist punk band Skrewdriver became the cultural face of white supremacy, proudly taking up the flag to wage a race war. Their music, described as racialist, helped spread a message of hate while recruiting English youth to join along.8

  Even among listeners of the Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, and the Jam, the subtle antiracist message caused confusion resulting in a gross misinterpretation of the artist’s intention. Roger Sabin explains that “in terms of song lyrics, anybody who used the word ‘white’ could be asking for trouble.”9 As a result, songs
like “White Riot” became anthemic favorites of the National Front and were given much press in their magazine Bulldog. Furthermore, the incorporation of fascist iconography into their aesthetic by some bands and musicians, including Joy Division (who took their name from Hitler’s military brothel), Siouxsie and the Banshees (who performed wearing swastikas and singing about the Nazis), and even Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, who were in a group called the London SS before they founded the Clash, sent a troubling message to their audiences.10

  The myopia of the antiracist punk movement was further revealed by its indifference to and participation in other forms of hate crimes. The racism directed against Asians, Hispanics, and Jews was essentially ignored.11 Rock Against Racism tried to organize events in areas highly populated by Asians, for example, but these events generally failed thanks in large part to the racist blunders of the bands involved, including Sham ’69 and Adam and the Ants.12 Songs like “White Riot” and the Stiff Little Fingers’ “White Noise” revealed the tenuous line some musicians walked in an effort to promote an ideal of unified rebellion.13 These songs held a romanticized view of the struggles of oppressed Afro-Caribbean and black communities believed to possess a music, style, and approach to life that was exciting and therefore should be celebrated. Asians, Jews, and other minorities were not represented, begging the question: How does supporting a certain community’s music or culture make one antiracist? Of course, the alliance between punks and the Afro-Caribbean community became the stuff of myth when Bob Marley recorded “Punky Reggae Party” immortalizing the supposed unity: