By the time the Clash got around to releasing its next to final LP, 1982’s Combat Rock, the band was in total crisis and in deep debt to their record company, Epic, for various reasons, so the Clash decided that it was time to make a hit record. Combat Rock succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, making the band a household word in the United States on the strength of the video for “Rock the Casbah,” a song about the banning of disco music in postrevolutionary Iran, and a rather awkward opening slot on the Who’s Schlitz beer–sponsored premiere farewell tour.
Taking the Clash on tour with them made the Who look like a bunch of savvy opportunists seeking to have their opening band’s countercultural credibility rub off on their rapidly diminishing artistic relevance. However, for a band like the Clash, being taken on an American tour by a band that once smashed their guitars on stage and appeared on album covers mocking commercialism (The Who Sell Out), made perfect sense. Having been raised in the ’60s, they were the Who’s artistic offspring.
No British punk band at the time was more historically self-conscious about analogies like these than the Clash were. They were positioning themselves as inheritors of the ’60s rock ’n’ roll legacy. Nevertheless, playing “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” in Shea Stadium was a far cry from the riot-plagued Bonds Casino shows that the Clash played in New York the year before with the Bad Brains.
While reams have been written about what happened to the band after the Combat Rock tour, the only thing relevant is that the Clash began to fall apart. Having lost drummer Topper Headon before the tour began, Strummer’s primary songwriting partner Mick Jones was forced out. The only surviving original members were Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon.
In a way, it’s kind of fitting for the band to have lost it after the Combat Rock tour. Anyone who accomplished what the Clash did with that record was bound to suffer, especially if you consider the album’s political significance. Based loosely around Strummer’s concept of what he called an “urban Vietnam,” Combat Rock was a highly overproduced but nonetheless jarring record that tried to see the emerging world order of the 1980s through the eyes of the African American ghetto. It was a colonial battlefield, where the American military acted as world gatekeeper and the experience of Vietnam was being repeated in all of the world’s ghettos. A grandiose and highly ambitious gesture, yes, but the commercial success of such an outrageously conceptual political album outweighed the band’s subsequent interpersonal failures.
The Clash went on to record one more album, 1985’s Cut the Crap, but by then, it was clear that aside from that record’s only memorable track, “This Is England,” everything was pretty much over. The group disbanded not long thereafter. Band members went on to pursue solo projects of various kinds: Mick Jones’s better-than-average Big Audio Dynamite, Paul Simonon’s barely passable Havana 3AM, and Joe Strummer’s short-lived but illustrious career acting in Jim Jarmusch, Alex Cox, and Aki Kaurismäki films. However, Strummer took a ten-year break from recording his own albums.
Constrained by contractual problems with Epic over the next decade, Strummer made only one solo album, 1989’s distinctly unmemorable Earthquake Weather, while contenting himself to play sideman in bands like the Pogues, Big Audio Dynamite, Shaun Ryder’s brilliant, cynical dance act, Black Grape, and the all-star comedy band with artist Damien Hurst, Fat Les.
How fitting then that after a decade, Strummer would come forth with his best album since Combat Rock, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, issued by Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat Records. The first of three full-lengths issued by the label over the next three years, Rock Art is a slightly inconsistent but otherwise beautiful record that reestablished Strummer’s significance as a songwriter in leagues with peers such as Patti Smith.
In the midst of a fall 1999 promotional tour of the United States to plug the record, I got a chance to speak to Strummer while he was visiting his new label’s office in Los Angeles. When I picked up the phone at the appointed time, and the publicist asked “Punk Planet, are you ready to rock?” the only thing I could think of was how far away rocking was from my mind. I wasn’t going to rock. I was going to talk to Joe Strummer.
Joel Schalit: One of the ironic things I noted with your record coming out now is that when you were in the Clash, there was no one else taking as much of a critical stance towards American imperialism and American cultural and military hegemony than you. Yet you issued your first full-length record in ten years at a point when American world power is at its highest. The Cold War is over, the Soviets have been defeated. America is literally everywhere. It’s more present in Europe, it’s more present in the Third World. How do you feel about your timing? I find something poetic about it.
Joe Strummer: You have to understand that I’m a European. You guys did a great job from the ’30s until now. Everybody loves American culture in Europe. You’ve done a great job of putting it out over there—we’re all steeped in it. We get all your shows and we have all the films that you have, but we tend to get them a bit later than you. I think they show American films quicker in Tel Aviv than they show them in London. But what we like in Europe is the good American culture, not the generic one.
Joel Schalit: That bias is definitely reflected in the specific types of American culture you’ve personally appropriated as an artist.
Joe Strummer: I’d like to kick for a minute this scene they’ve got here in Hollywood where they re-edit films according to the audience’s reaction sheet. That’s not art. Obviously they’d laugh at me for even suggesting such a thing, but American films between the ’40s and ’70s were art. They were mass entertainment, but they were also art. Now they police audiences by changing a film every week to suit the latest screenings. Obviously it makes monetary sense—studios are making a fortune off of this method. But when you’re seventeen, you want to see something grown up, not made for your benefit. When you’re seventeen, you want to stretch a bit, you want to enter the grown-up world. You don’t want everything to be tailored for your tastes. This is a danger, I think.
Joel Schalit: You can definitely see your new record as being an example of what you’re saying popular art ought to be about. It has nothing to do with American popular culture in the sense that you’re describing it. I think that’s inherent in Rock Art’s global feel—not in the sense of a Peter Gabriel record, but in the manner of a Clash record. In that sense, your work still maintains an implicit critique of American imperialism.
Joe Strummer: That’s true. As long as we keep entertaining the people, we’ll be doing good.
Joel Schalit: I’ve been listening to your work since 1978, when I was in the fifth grade. One of the things I’ve always noticed about your songwriting is that you’ve always had a very ambivalent relationship with the United States.
Joe Strummer: [Laughs] It’s love and hate!
Joel Schalit: On the one hand you’ve been very critical of American politics and foreign policy. But on the other hand you’ve so thoroughly assimilated American pop culture.
Joe Strummer: Certainly, yeah. But let’s point out that the British government is just as bad as the American government.
Joel Schalit: That’s true. So what’s your take on Tony Blair?
Joe Strummer: I came up with this nickname for him the other day. I thought, let’s call him Tony Baloney, he’s a lot of baloney, yeah. I told my friend, “We’re going to get this into the national language within twelve hours.” So I went to this Clash party after they showed the Clash film [a BBC documentary on the band] and I drew on my T-shirt “Let’s get rid of Tony Baloney—the Tuscan Liberation Front,” because Blair goes on holiday to Tuscany. So I wore the shirt into the party, and all these journalists were there. They all asked me “Where’d you get that shirt?” I told them that I’d just come back from Fashion Week in Milan, and that everyone was wearing them. All the reporters immediately got out their notebooks and wrote everything down that was on my shirt. We got it in the first edition of the Even
ing Standard the very next day. Twelve hours later! [Laughs]
Joel Schalit: There’s not too many Tuscan guerrilla groups.
Joe Strummer: “Fronta Liberazione di Toscana!” But it was all spelled wrong. I wrote it in Italian and misspelled everything, but no one knows it.
Joel Schalit: I’m sure the British press totally ate that up. I know what you mean about Blair, he’s totally fucking noxious. I just read the text of his speech to the recent Labour Party convention . . .
Joe Strummer: Oh no! It’s terrible. We’re never going to get rid of him. Blair’s machine is so perfect that I reckon that if we can get rid of him in fifteen or twenty years, we’ll be lucky.
Joel Schalit: It seems to me that Blair is a charismatic leader in the tradition of Margaret Thatcher—that seems to be what he’s deliberately going after.
Joe Strummer: They’ve learned from the American machine. In fact, it’s even more chillingly machine-like than the Americans have got it so far. Labour has certainly learned from them. You can’t even have an opinion in the party. Say you’re an MP [Member of Parliament] and you go, “Hey Tony, I think that policy sucks,” the Labour Party would go, “Dock that guy’s card. Get rid of him.” There’s no debate there. It’s terrible. We don’t have any debate. We don’t have any dissension. Blair might as well be Stalin.
Joel Schalit: And yet Blair portrays himself as a radical democrat spreading multiculturalism and human rights around Eastern Europe, like all of his posturing during the war in Kosovo, for example.
Joe Strummer: Exactly. Maybe we’ve come to realize that all leaders want is power. They couldn’t give a damn what they say or have to do to get it. But this is quite a hard thing to come to terms with. What are we going to do now?
Joel Schalit: It must be an interesting experience for you, coming from the same generation as Blair. You guys are very close in age.
Joe Strummer: Oh, I know. I’m bewildered by this Blair development. We’re all very confused right now in England.
Joel Schalit: Is there an alternative?
Joe Strummer: That’s why I was saying it’s going to take twenty years to get rid of Blair. There is no alternative. We’re all standing around flapping our arms going “What are we going to do now?” I don’t know. It’s going to be interesting. At least it’s a comedy . . .
Joel Schalit: Do you think it’ll be good for the British counterculture?
Joe Strummer: I think so, definitely. Comedians are having a great time with him. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Joel Schalit: Yeah, it’s true. Margaret Thatcher was great for punk rock.
Joe Strummer: We should make her an honorary punk rocker. I should go over to her house in Chelsea and give her a pink wig or something.
Joel Schalit: Doesn’t she have one already?
Joe Strummer: [Laughs] That’s true.
Joel Schalit: I know a lot of people have criticized the Clash over the years for not having thought out their politics very carefully. For example, you never aligned yourselves with any particular political parties in Britain, yet you wore Italian Red Brigade T-shirts. Or how once the band broke up, you went on the Rock Against the Rich Tour sponsored by Class War, an organization dedicated to violent revolution, after you’d become wealthy.
Joe Strummer: It was all my fault.
Joel Schalit: [Laughs] To an outsider, this sympathy for violence made sense, especially given the kind of street imagery that the Clash always employed. How did you respond to being criticized for adhering to double standards at the time? Where do you see your politics fitting in? Does it have a framework?
Joe Strummer: Right now I realize that in Britain, my vote is useless. We’ll never get rid of Blair because there is no alternative to him. So I ask myself what I’ve got, and I find that I have a dollar bill in my pocket. So I’m going to vote like that. I’m going to shop locally—that’s how I’m going to use my dollar bill—as a vote. I’m not going to give it to the corporations.
Joel Schalit: You’re going to support small business . . .
Joe Strummer: Putting my money into records and food, anything I’m going to try and buy. I think of my dollar bill as a vote. Every time I spend it in a small, independent local spot, it’s like one less dollar I’m giving to massive global corporations. The only vote we’ve got is the dollar bill in the pocket. Obviously you’re going to have to take your kids to McDonald’s when they’re screaming, but this is what I want to push myself to do.
Joel Schalit: I understand what you’re saying, but how then does it feel to be working with Mercury Records in Europe? They tend to symbolize a lot of the things you don’t like.
Joe Strummer: At least they had the guts to come forward with me. There must be a lot of companies in Europe, but every man jack of them went, “Get out of the office.” But Mercury said, “This is pretty good.” I have to respect them for that, because it was looking pretty bleak.
Joel Schalit: It doesn’t seem like your politics were about typically punk things like being independent. Rather, your music has consistently proffered some kind of radical multiculturalism symbolized by your early experiments synthesizing dub and reggae with rock ’n’ roll. To me that’s a pretty identifiable political position.
Joe Strummer: Don’t forget that our entry into hip-hop culture was back in 1980 with “Magnificent Seven.” It was a huge hit in New York that summer on WBLS. I want to point out that because we always get passed over in these hip-hop histories. Whoever puts together these accounts just hasn’t done their onions.
Joel Schalit: Right, I agree. Such accounts tend to attribute the kinds of breakthroughs that the Clash pioneered to groups like the Beastie Boys. Not to diss them, but that’s generally what’s assumed.
Joe Strummer: Nineteen years ago we entered into hip-hop culture. Nineteen years ago! So lick upon that! [Laughs]
Joel Schalit: The first time I heard “Radio Clash” was on a black radio station in New York back then.
Joe Strummer: That’s incredible. Stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore.
Joel Schalit: You also experimented a lot with remixing in the early ’80s.
Joe Strummer: And it still sounds good too. When you hear that “Radio Clash” remix, it sounds like some guy just did it down the block.
Joel Schalit. The experimentation and international slant that the Clash took seems to have come from—or at least been influenced by—your own background. I’ve been reading a lot about your personal history and your background recently. You grew up all over the world. I read that your dad served in the British Foreign Service.
Joe Strummer: That’s right. I was born in Ankara, Turkey. I spent a couple of years there, followed by Cairo for a couple of more years. We also lived in Mexico City for a couple of years, followed by this fairly boring town in Germany called Bonn. Then I went to boarding school in England. My parents went on to move to Tehran. They spent five years in Iran.
Joel Schalit: Hence “Rock the Casbah.”
Joe Strummer: [Laughs] Then they went to Malawi, in central Africa.
Joel Schalit: That certainly explains the cosmopolitanism of your musical arrangements. On that tip, you employ a bit of Arabic on the new record, especially in the song “Yalla Yalla.” You want to tell me what that’s about?
Joe Strummer: It came out of the idea of a bunch of us coming down the street in London, in top form, shouting, “Yeah, we’re free.” I found out that in Arabic it means, “Come on, let’s go.” When I came up with the song’s chorus, I wondered if I’d had it stored away somewhere in my brain and it just popped out. But what the song is about is that freedom is gone and we’re fucked up in Britain. All we’ve got to do is fight with each other on the streets after dark. When they close all the bars at eleven, it can get kind of grim out on the street. So “Yalla Yalla” is a story starting with Adam and going through “C’mon, let’s cut out of this scene. Let’s go grooving.” If there’s some culture happening in Glasgow 600 miles awa
y, we’re going to go 600 miles—there’s no object. And then it gets to the freedom verse, “Yalla Yalla Yalla Yallah.”
Joel Schalit: It’s interesting that you’re talking about freedom. It seems to me that a search for freedom (particularly given your contractual problems with Epic) led to your transition to film after the dissolution of the Clash. Some people saw that as a radical break in your career at the time, but it made metaphorical sense because there’s a real cinematographic quality to your songwriting.
Joe Strummer: Seeing people work in front of cameras, people who’d been thinking about it all their lives, makes you realize that you can’t really jump in on a game. You might get lucky though. There are exceptions, like Tom Waits, who can easily move between the two roles. And there are other actor-singers who can do it great. But for myself, I figured that I have to really own up that there’s no way to be better than these actors because they’ve been thinking about acting since they were born. I don’t think you can catch up on that; I think you have to respect that. I’m just going to stick to plugging the guitar in and trying to make something interesting with that. Leave the acting to the actors. Personally, that’s my hope.
Joel Schalit: Nonetheless, you got to act in some seminal indie films.
Joe Strummer: I had my go and appreciated it.
Joel Schalit: Then let’s get back to music. I bet that one of the things which must amuse you making rock ’n’ roll after all these years is how people still fight over what’s “punk.” I distinctly recall how much shit you took for making Combat Rock. That bore many parallels with what Nirvana had to deal with nine years later. When Nevermind came out and the shit hit the fans, it was as though no one could remember that the popularity of Combat Rock triggered many of the same cultural crises about punk going mainstream as Nirvana later did.
Let Fury Have the Hour Page 17
