Joe Strummer: What a disaster that was. Poor Kurt Cobain!
Joel Schalit: Do you feel any affinity with the kind of backlash that Nirvana had to suffer?
Joe Strummer: It’s just typical, isn’t it? Cobain writes a brilliant record and everybody disses him. This is exactly what we had to put up with, way before Combat Rock even, back in London in 1977. As soon as you do something really brilliant, obviously it’s going to attract more from your fellow human beings. As soon as that happens, all of a sudden all of these hipper-than-thou people start railing off at you. These are the kinds of people you just have to shuck off, because you’re going to meet them in any corner of life. Any time you do something good, people are going to come and kick you down for it. You’ve got to be ready for it at any moment.
Joel Schalit: So for you, that’s what the whole discourse about selling out is: simply jealousy.
Joe Strummer: Exactly. That’s all it is.
Joel Schalit: I totally understand where you’re coming from, especially if you consider some of your more early lyrics on songs like “Hitsville U.K.” It’s not as though you weren’t critical of the process of commercialization. That’s why I think it was unfair to flog you for “giving in.” After all, you were writing songs about how it sucks to be a commodity.
Joe Strummer: What can you do?
Joel Schalit: I have very mixed feelings about the selling out thesis, particularly in the case of Combat Rock, because it was the most explicitly political record to top the American charts since the late ’60s. For god’s sake, any record that combines spoken word rants with funk and sneaks Allen Ginsberg into a top-ten album is pretty subversive in my book.
Joe Strummer: That’s true, so true. Good old Ginsberg!
Joel Schalit: How did he end up on the record?
Joe Strummer: I used to call him a hustler for a joke. He was just coming to hang out at the Combat Rock sessions. He was sitting there with Peter Orlovsky [Ginsberg’s lifelong companion, and a poet in his own right]. They’d just sit there and watch us record. After about a week, I just turned around to him and said, “You’re America’s greatest living poet and you’re going on the mic now.” He said, “Well great, what should I do?” I said, “I want the sound of God!” I told him, “You’re perfect for the role. I just want you to do the intro to ‘Ghetto Defendant.’” I gave him two or three minutes scribbling on the piano and on paper. And then there he was, “Slam dance the cosmopolis.”
Joel Schalit: [Laughs] He is acting as though he was an old Beat poet fronting a jazz band.
Joe Strummer: Absolutely.
Joel Schalit: That makes a lot of sense. I remember reading a lot of your press in places like the New York Times in the early ’80s, and recall how older rock critics were saying that the Clash were resurrecting a particular way of making popular art that they hadn’t seen since the mid-’60s. I seem to remember one critic even saying that the Clash were essentially modern contemporaries of the former Beat generation, and this was well before Ginsberg had collaborated with you.
Joe Strummer: For me, the Beats were the only game in town. During the ’60s, England was probably more like the ’50s were in America, but we carried it on longer. The Beatniks were exactly what we needed. The 1965 Beat poet’s reading at the Royal Albert Hall blew the lid off of everything—that was the day that the old culture died in England. We already had the Beatles and the Stones. When they hired the Albert Hall, the jewel of normal, boring culture and brought in all the Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg, it brought it all down and turned everyone on. That’s when the ’60s really began.
Joel Schalit: That makes sense, especially if you consider that in some respects British pop culture can be even more anti-intellectual than American pop culture.
Joe Strummer: Yes, I am completely anti-intellectual. I am pro-intuition and pro-instinct. We’ve already given too many props to intellectualism. The intellectuals’ time is over. They’ve done nothing for us. They write long, boring philosophy books that no one can understand except themselves. All we’ve ended up with is a world full of jet airplanes screaming overhead with laser-guided bombs and rockets. I figure that all the intellectuals should go off to an island somewhere and wear wooly clothing.
_____________________
Originally appeared in Punk Planet, January-February 2000.
A MAN THAT MATTERED
By Kristine McKenna
When the Clash burst on the scene in 1977, I dismissed them for the same reason I’ve always hated U2. Their music struck me as humorless, self-important political blather that wasn’t remotely sexy or fun. Definitely not for me. Nonetheless, being a dedicated punk I had to check them out when they made their Los Angeles debut at the Santa Monica Civic on February 9, 1979, and what I saw that night changed my mind—but only just a little, though. As expected, Mick Jones came off as a typical rock fop who clearly spent far too much time thinking about neckerchiefs and trousers. Joe Strummer, however, was something else. With the exception of Jerry Lee Lewis, I’d never seen anyone that furiously alive on stage. Legs pumping, racing back and forth across the stage, singing with a frantic desperation that was simultaneously fascinating and puzzling, he was an incredibly electric presence.
At the press conference following the show that night, LA’s ranking punk scribe, Claude Bessy, jumped up and snarled, “This isn’t a press conference—this is a depressing conference!” (Jeez, tempers always ran so high during that first incarnation of the punk scene! Who knows why the hell we were all so crabby!) I remember that Strummer looked genuinely hurt by the comment. Mind you, he was a working-class Brit so he wasn’t about to start sniffling in his sleeve, but he didn’t cop an attitude either. I was touched by how unguarded and open he was—and I was certainly impressed by the man’s vigor. I wasn’t surprised when I subsequently learned that Strummer ran three marathons without having trained at all. His preparation? “Drink ten pints of beer the night before the race and don’t run a single step for at least four weeks before the race.”
That first show at the Santa Monica Civic didn’t transform me into a Clash fan but Strummer interested me. So when the band showed up in 1981 in Manhattan, where I was living at the time, I decided to see what he was up to. The Clash had booked a nine-show engagement at Bond’s, an old department store on Times Square in Manhattan, and this turned out to be not a good idea. The place wasn’t designed to handle the crowds the band drew, and the engagement turned into a nine-day standoff between the band and the fire marshals. I attended three nights in a row and can’t recall them ever actually making it to the stage and performing. But then, that was business as usual during the glory days of punk, when gigs were forever being shut down, aborted, abruptly canceled. This was political theater, not just music, and nobody embodied that idea more dramatically than the Clash.
Cut to June 14 of the following year and I finally saw the Clash complete a full set at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. By then, I’d finally begun to appreciate the breadth and fearlessly experimental nature of the band’s music, and Strummer was at the peak of his powers as a showman. The huge hall was packed, and Strummer was a maestro conducting this undulating mass of sweaty people; he could raise or lower the pitch at will. Boots, beer bottles, and articles of clothing flew through the air, and people leapt on stage then leapt back into the arms of their friends, while Strummer stood at the microphone stoking the fire. Somehow he managed to keep the proceedings just a hairbreadth short of total chaos for two hours. It was a commanding display from a man who clearly knew his job and knew his audience.
Following the breakup of the Clash in 1985, Strummer charged head-on into a busy schedule of disparate projects. He acted in several independent films and composed six film soundtracks, including one—for Alex Cox’s lousy film of 1988, Walker—that was remarkably beautiful. I wrote an admiring review of the score for [now defunct] Musician magazine, and a few months after it was published Strummer was passing through LA
and invited me to lunch in appreciation for the supportive words. We were to meet at a Thai restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and though I was nervous on the way there, he put me at ease the minute we met. Strummer was such a genuine person that it was impossible to feel uncomfortable around him—I know it sounds corny, but he truly was a man of the people. He was funny and generous in his assessments of people, but he didn’t sugarcoat things either. He had no trouble calling an asshole an asshole when it was called for. The thing that ultimately made Strummer such a spectacular human being, however, is so simple that it barely seems worth mentioning: he was interested in people. He wanted to hear your story and know what was going on in your neighborhood, he asked how you felt about things and was an empathetic listener—he paid attention! The other thing I immediately loved about him was that he was an enthusiast and a fan.
Just how big a fan he was became clear to me a few months later when he guest-hosted a radio show I had at the time on Santa Monica radio station KCRW. My show was at midnight on Saturday, and the KCRW studio is hard to find, so our plan was to meet behind the Foster’s Freeze at Pico and 14th at 11:00 P.M. He roared into the parking lot exactly on time in a car with four pals, and the lot of them tore into the record library at the station looking for the records on Strummer’s playlist. His plan was to play all the records that shaped his musical taste as a teenager in the order that he discovered them, and the show he put together was equal parts history lesson and autobiography. Included in the farflung set were tracks by Sonny Boy Williamson, Lee Dorsey, Captain Beefheart, Bo Diddley, Hank Williams, and loads of fabulous, rare reggae and dub. His loving introduction to the Beach Boys’ “Do It Again” brought tears to my eyes. Several fans crashed the studio when they heard him on the air and realized he was in town, and he welcomed them all. It was a wonderful night. He had fun too, and as he thanked me and said goodnight, he kissed me on the cheek. I blushed.
Strummer spent the next ten years struggling to restart his career post-Clash and stumbling repeatedly. “The only thing that got me through was sheer bloody-mindedness—I just won’t quit,” he told me when I interviewed him in October 2001. We were talking on the occasion of the release of his second album with his five man lineup, the Mescaleros. Global A Go-Go was rightfully hailed as the best work Strummer had done in years. He was happy with the record, and when I saw him perform at the Troubadour a few weeks after we spoke, he seemed happy in general.
“I’ve enjoyed my life because I’ve had to deal with all kinds of things, from failure to success to failure again,” Strummer told a journalist from Penthouse magazine in 2000. “I don’t think there’s any point in being famous if you lose that thing of being a human being.”
That’s something that was never a danger for Strummer. During that last interview, I asked him what the great achievement of punk rock had been, and he replied, “It gave a lot of people something to do.” Though I loved the complete lack of self-importance in that answer, however, this isn’t to suggest Strummer ever broke faith with punk. “Punk rock isn’t something you grow out of,” he told Penthouse. “Punk rock is like the Mafia, and once you’re made, you’re made. Punk rock is an attitude, and the essence of the attitude is ‘give us some truth.’
“And, whatever happens next is going to be bland unless you and I nause everything up,” he added. “This is our mission, to nause everything up! Get in there and nause it out, upset the apple cart, destroy the best laid plans—we have to do this! Back on the street, I say. Turn everything off in the pad and get back on the street. As long as people are still here, rock ’n’ roll can be great again.”
The following conversation took place on the eve of Strummer’s final U.S. tour, during the winter of 2001–2002. He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty on December 22, 2002.
Kristine McKenna: You say the great achievement of punk rock was that “it gave a lot of people something to do.” What was its great failure?
Joe Strummer: That we didn’t mobilize our forces when we had them and focus our energies in a way that could’ve brought about concrete social change—trying to get a repressive law repealed, for instance. We’re stuck in a kind of horrible holding pattern now, and it seems to me that the only way to change it is if we get hipsters to stay in one place long enough to get elected. The problem is that no hipster wants to get elected.
Kristine McKenna: I saw the Clash several times during their U.S. tours of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I remember the sense that something profoundly important was at stake at those shows, that they were about something much larger than pop trends. What was at stake?
Joe Strummer: In the rush of youth you assume too much—and so it should be—but we felt that the whole machine was teetering on the brink of collapse. Some amazing things went down in Britain during the ’70s—the government decided they could disempower the unions by having a three-day week, for instance. Can you imagine that? Monday morning you wake up, and suddenly there’s only a three-day week, from Monday to Wednesday. There were garbage strikes, train strikes, power strikes, the lights were going out—everything seemed on the brink, and looking through youthful, excitable eyes it seemed the very future of England was at stake. Obviously, that’s very far from the feeling these days, when everything’s pretty much smugly buttoned down.
Kristine McKenna: Has England recovered from the Thatcherism that dominated the country during the years you were with the Clash?
Joe Strummer: It will never recover—and now we’ve got Blairism. We are so completely confused. If you think of England as a patient laying on the couch in a shrink’s office I’d say it’s time for the straitjacket. Imagine the party we had in England when Blair got into office after all those years of Thatcher. Everyone was cheering, “this is the dawn of a new day,” but since then we’ve had no vision or justice. The Blair administration just wants to get into bed with the richest corporations, and the very notion of labor has vanished into the mist. Obviously, the worse it gets, the better it gets for artists, so culturally, England is doing OK. But politically, it’s total mixed-up confusion.
Kristine McKenna: What’s the proper course of action when everything around you is falling apart?
Joe Strummer: It’s not a good idea to run away. You gotta smile, whistle, look self-assured, and try and fix things up a bit.
Kristine McKenna: Given that the Clash’s music grew out of a situation specific to England, did it strike you as odd that it was embraced in America?
Joe Strummer: No, because everybody feels the same on a certain level. The zeitgeist is a real force of nature, and although we don’t know how it’s transmitted, it’s like an invisible tidal wave.
Kristine McKenna: How would you characterize the zeitgeist now?
Joe Strummer: I think people are feeling a bit cheated and frustrated. They’ve come to realize that voting is basically useless because either side you vote for has no more than a shade of difference from the other side, and ultimately politics is about nothing but the mighty dollar. So OK, say the people, let’s forget politics and get into drugs or skateboarding—anything that passes the time and gives you some sense of freedom. People want to feel free, and it’s a hard feeling to come by in this world. People have a right to change their consciousness, too, and in the back of their minds they know they have that right. So people are gonna flout the laws established to prevent them from smoking marijuana or experimenting with Ecstasy, because they know that nobody—especially a politician half pissed on gin—has the right to tell you what goes on in your mind.
Kristine McKenna: You say it’s hard to experience the feeling of freedom: do you feel free?
Joe Strummer: No, I do not. If I invited nine friends over to my house and put on an acid house record, and we stood in the garden listening to it, we’d all be arrested and fined a thousand pounds each, because in the United Kingdom it’s illegal for ten or more people to listen to repetitive beats—this is in the statute books, “repetitive beats!” P
eople in Britain are much less free than people in many other counties because we’ve got really repressive laws. All bars there must close at 11:00 P.M., for instance. As to why I continue to live there, I really think all British people have a streak of sado-masochism. I live in the middle of nowhere, so you’d think I could get away with playing a record, but such is not the case.
Kristine McKenna: Why do you live in the middle of nowhere?
Joe Strummer: I’ve got no idea! If you wanted to be harsh you could describe the area where I live as nothing but an agribusiness abattoir—all you see is people wearing masks, riding tractors, and spraying god knows what onto the ground. I’m a townie, and I don’t know what I’m doing out there, although it is nice being able to see all the stars in the heavens at night.
Kristine McKenna: As a rule, people tend to resist change; why is this so?
Joe Strummer: Because they’re afraid of the new and the unknown, and familiarity is comforting. For instance, when you live out in the middle of nowhere as I do, you really appreciate small things, and one of the things I’d come to appreciate was this small bar not far from where I live. The guy who ran it was cool, he kept the lights low, and there would always be interesting jazz playing when you popped in there. In the middle of nowhere, that’s like a gold mine. I popped in the other day and the music was gone, it was brightly lit, and a smiling woman chirped, “Can I help you?” The bar had been sold, so the place I knew no longer exists. Arthur Rimbaud said “some destructions are necessary,” and that’s a lesson I’m really trying to learn.
Kristine McKenna: An overriding theme in all of your music is personal and political conflict. Why can’t people get along?
Joe Strummer: I think fear is the corrupting agent, and I don’t know how we can eliminate that. Of course, there’s no way to eliminate the most terrifying reality—that we all have to die—but at least the sun shines, and we’ve got a bit of time, so it’s not all sniveling. Maybe if every child in the world was shown a really good time, a new breed of human beings would appear. On the other hand, I believe some people are just born bad—I’ve met a few of them, too. Whether they were born bad, what happened to them was bad, or it was a combination of the two, by the time they’re teenagers you can see they’re gonna flip. No matter who loves them or what happens to them, they’re gonna smash up the room.
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