Kristine McKenna: Do you believe in karma, or do some people get away with smashing up the room?
Joe Strummer: Surely karma must be one of the few things we can believe in. Even if it were proved to me that it wasn’t in play here on earth, I’d still hope that in another dimension, in the spirit world, it does exist. I do think it operates in this world.
Kristine McKenna: What forces played a role in shaping your sense of morality?
Joe Strummer: My mother was Scottish, and a no-nonsense kind of woman, and maybe I got some vibes from her.
Kristine McKenna: What’s been the most difficult year of your life?
Joe Strummer: I took a long breather after the Clash broke up, and I had a really hard time about half way through that. I needed a rest, so I was kind of grateful for the break, but at a certain point I became overwhelmed by a sense of self-doubt. In the music business, an eleven-year layoff is like 111 years, and felt like I’d blown it and would never get up there again. The only thing that got me through was sheer bloody-mindedness—I just won’t quit! Every time I think “you’ve had your lot, now just shut up,” a larger part of me says, “no, there are things you can say better than anyone, and you must say them.” The other thing that carried me through that period was the fact that I had a lot of responsibilities—I’d managed to have children, and both my parents died during those years.
Kristine McKenna: How were you affected by the death of your parents?
Joe Strummer: I wasn’t close to them, because when I was eight years old I was sent to a boarding school, where I spent nine years. I saw my father once a year between the ages of nine and twelve, then twice a year from then on. As to whether I felt cheated by his absence, I didn’t bother with that, because I was in a hard place. You know Tom Brown’s School Days? Imagine being in a second-rate boarding school in South London in 1961. You had to punch or be punched, so I became hard and ceased being a mama’s boy pretty quickly.
Kristine McKenna: You’ve been referred to in the press on several occasions as “the son of a diplomat who dropped out of art school to be a bohemian.” Is that an accurate description?
Joe Strummer: No. In my first ever interview in Melody Maker, when I was suddenly regarded as “somebody,” I said that my father was a diplomat simply because I wanted to give him his due for one time in his life. My father was an excellent eccentric who liked nothing better than dressing up for a party, and he was great fun, but he was basically a low-level worker in the hierarchy of the British embassy, and we actually had fuck all. A four-room bungalow in Croyton was all he managed to accrue during his life, and Croyton is not much of a salubrious suburb.
Kristine McKenna: When you were twenty years old, your older brother, David, committed suicide. How did that mark you?
Joe Strummer: I was deeply affected by it, and I don’t know if I’ve come to terms with it yet, because it’s a mysterious thing to try and understand. We were only separated by eighteen months, but we were opposites: whereas I was the loudmouth ringleader who was always getting everybody into trouble, he was quiet and never said much. When we were teenagers in the ’60s, there was a load of shouting about Rhodesia, and that led to his becoming a member of the National Front in 1968. At the time, I was too busy listening to Jimi Hendrix to really understand what was going on with him, but I don’t think his politics had anything to do with his suicide. I think it had more to do with his shyness.
Kristine McKenna: What’s the most valuable thing you could teach your children?
Joe Strummer: I don’t think I’ve taught them anything, and don’t feel like I’ve been a very good father. My first marriage split up after fourteen years when my two daughters were still relatively young, and you feel guilty about that forever. They get born, and suddenly the thing they were born into is pulled apart. It eats away at my mind, particularly since my parents stayed together.
Kristine McKenna: You married again in 1995; what’s the secret of a successful marriage?
Joe Strummer: You have to love your partner more than you love yourself—and I do.
Kristine McKenna: What’s the most widely held misconception about you?
Joe Strummer: That I’m some kind of political thinker. I definitely am not. I think about politics all the time, but it’s become increasingly difficult to know what’s going on in the world. I grew up hearing my parents go on about World War II, which was an episode of history that seemed very clear: Hitler equals bad, everyone else equals good. People are basically lazy and we want to see a good guy and a bad guy. Obviously, nothing is black or white, yet we yearn for that beautiful clarity, but I’m finding it more and more difficult to come to those kinds of conclusions—possibly because we’re getting more information and we have to sift through it. I used to believe it was possible to learn what was going on in the world by reading the newspaper, but that began to change around the time that the Balkans thing kicked off. Either the newspapers aren’t up to snuff or I’m losing my mind, but I found it very difficult to get a grasp on what was going on there.
Kristine McKenna: Do you believe music has a responsibility to address social and political issues?
Joe Strummer: I do, but I would add that the climate of the times dictates the way people write.
Kristine McKenna: How are you evolving as a songwriter?
Joe Strummer: Oh god, backwards man! I’m trying to be less idiotic. Every writer likes to feel that when he sits down to write he’s gonna zoom off into a new field he didn’t even know existed, but the truth is that writing is basically a process of blundering in the dark, and there’s a lot of luck that comes into play.
Kristine McKenna: Are there specific issues that are particularly well suited to being addressed in music?
Joe Strummer: Love—because with music, you have the extra dimension of melody to communicate things that are beyond language.
Kristine McKenna: Name a song that never fails to make you cry.
Joe Strummer: Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia.” It has a quality of yearning and reminiscence that are incredibly moving to me.
Kristine McKenna: What was the last record you bought?
Joe Strummer: The Call, by Alan Skidmore, who was a bebop saxophone player who could probably be described as washed up, not to be too rude. He went to South Africa and hooked up with a group called Amampondo, and they made this record together that’s basically a bunch of crazed drumming with a bebop guy free-falling all over it. It’s not bad, but when I put it on everyone else leaves.
Kristine McKenna: What’s your favorite Clash song?
Joe Strummer: I really like “If Music Could Talk,” which is on side 21 of Sandinista! [Laughing] I like it because it’s quite weird, and it shows we were willing to try stupid things all the time.
Kristine McKenna: What do you miss about being in the Clash?
Joe Strummer: That was so long ago that it’s all faded, and I’m never on the nostalgia tit, but we did have a very good camaraderie and an extremely acute sense of humor. It was fun being in the Clash.
Kristine McKenna: Was there ever a time when you believed the myth of the Clash?
Joe Strummer: No, and that’s why I managed to survive. They say you should never read your press, and that comes in handy when they’re saying you suck.
Kristine McKenna: Does the adversarial nature of the music press help keep musicians honest, or does it simply undermine them?
Joe Strummer: On several occasions it’s definitely knocked me for six, but then I’d grudgingly get up and dust my clothes off, and say better that than the other way. The press is harsher in England than it is other places, but I think it’s a good thing because it keeps you on your toes and prevents you from getting too pretentious. Yes-men tend to collect around famous people, so the conditions are really conducive to becoming pretentious. So you might as well get the mean guys in to flay you alive.
Kristine McKenna: How has fame been of use to you?
Joe Strummer: It
obviously has its uses, but it’s really more of a liability than an asset to anyone interested in writing. If you want to write, the first thing is, you’ve got to experience life like everyone else experiences it. Secondly, you need room to think. If you’re incredibly famous, all you can think about is, “oh my god, has that person over there recognized me, and did I bring enough bodyguards to the supermarket with me.” By accident I managed this quite well, because the Clash never went on television in Britain. If you wanted to see the Clash you had to actually get up and go out to one of the shows. Consequently, I’m able to move about Britain without being recognized, for the most part.
Kristine McKenna: Are fame and money invariably corrupting?
Joe Strummer: Definitely. The Clash never had to struggle with the latter of those two things, however, because we never got any money. The music business is a bad racket, and the people on the first crest of a wave never get paid. I don’t like to moan on about money, but you have to realize that although you might’ve heard of the Clash, we didn’t sell any records. Nobody sends me five pounds every time somebody’s heard of the group. We never had any real power, either, other than in an abstract, poetic way. What I wrote on a piece of paper might influence someone somewhere down the line, and that’s something I still take great care with. Not writing things that are stupid or easily misconstrued is something I keep onboard at all times. But it would’ve been nice to have the power to say, “50,000 people down to the Houses of Parliament now!” We might’ve been able to get 1,500 people at the height of our power, but ultimately, it’s the big money men who have the power. Then again, I suppose somebody must’ve seen us as some kind of threat back in the day, because we were constantly being arrested for petty shit. We’d go to play small towns in the north of England and you could almost hear them thinking, “here they come, those punk rockers from London—we’re not having any of that!” So they’d pull over our cars, search us, shake down our motel rooms—it was all very petty.
Kristine McKenna: Does the legacy of the Clash continue to get in your way?
Joe Strummer: Not anymore, because enough time has passed. But certainly, for ten years after the group broke up, I found it difficult to deal with. But I managed to chill long enough that it’s allowable for me to come back and knock in a few good albums. It’s not pissing anybody off.
Kristine McKenna: You’ve traveled quite a bit as a touring musician; what’s the scariest place you’ve ever been?
Joe Strummer: Mozambique. There was a war going on there, and I was only there for a day, but the entire time I was there I was nervous about who might be lurking in the bushes along the roadside. It was also a little unnerving playing Ireland with the Clash, but you have to laugh. You fly in there, you check into the Europa Hotel in Belfast, and the clerk cheerfully informs you that this is the most bombed hotel in Europe. Twenty-eight bombings so far! Then you go up to your room where you ask yourself; should I crawl under the bed? Do I dare stand at the window? We were quite pragmatic and decided to just get on with things, because we couldn’t see how either side could gain anything politically by blowing up a rock ’n’ roll show. It wasn’t as if the whole world was saying, “Oh wow, the Clash are in Belfast.” The only people who cared that we were there were the other scrawny punk rockers walking around Belfast.
Kristine McKenna: In A Riot of Our Own, the 1999 book about the Clash written by Johnny Green and Garry Barker, everyone in the band comes off well, with the exception of Mick Jones, who’s depicted as being ridiculously obsessed with his wardrobe. Is the book accurate?
Joe Strummer: Yes it is, but you need some of that in a rock ’n’ roll band! If Paul Simonon hadn’t been in the Clash I doubt that we would’ve been as successful as we were, because you need to look stylish. People don’t think of Bob Dylan as a glamorous guy, but he was actually pretty good-looking. When you think of his Cuban heel phase, with the curly head, the Carnaby Street clothes, the polka-dot tab collars, the tight jeans, the boots—he was pretty styling.
Kristine McKenna: Rumor has it that Bob’s had a face-lift.
Joe Strummer: That’s probably a good idea. You have to remember, this is show biz, and it’s not as if Bob’s a merchant banker or a film critic or something. If he wants to go out on the road for another twenty or thirty years, he’s gonna want to tuck it up a bit. It’s not as if we’re novelists who can hide in our studies like J. D. Salinger and never have our photos taken. It’s easy for those people to say what the heck. You don’t know what it’s like having photos taken of yourself all the time. It’s appalling to regularly see the destruction of age marked out sharply on your face in photos, videos, and on television. This is a visual thing we do. Johnny Cash dyes his hair, and I think it’s only right that we try and scruff up a shambling face.
Kristine McKenna: At what point did you become an adult?
Joe Strummer: Are you kidding?! I’m nowhere near becoming an adult.
Kristine McKenna: What do you think you represent to the people who admire you?
Joe Strummer: Maybe they see a good soul.
Kristine McKenna: Tell me about someone who inspires you.
Joe Strummer: Bo Diddley is inspiring. When he was a young musician starting out he needed some maracas, so he went to the local scrap yard, got some of those floating balls that sit in the tank of a toilet, filled them with black-eyed peas, then used them to invent a whole new kind of music. That’s heroic and inspiring.
Kristine McKenna: What’s the biggest obstacle you’ve overcome in your life?
Joe Strummer: I wouldn’t say I’ve overcome it yet, but it’s my sheer laziness. I’d rather sit and watch Popeye cartoons than do anything. Nowadays I’m into The Simpsons, South Park, and SpongeBob Squarepants.
Kristine McKenna: The second album by your current band, the Mescaleros, is dedicated to the late Joey Ramone. What was the nature of his genius?
Joe Strummer: A sharp intelligence. People think of spirit when they think of the Ramones, but the more I listen to those records the more I’m struck by how smart they are.
Kristine McKenna: Where do you think Joey is now?
Joe Strummer: He’s in heaven.
Kristine McKenna: Do you believe in heaven?
Joe Strummer: Maybe not for me, but certainly for Joey Ramone.
Kristine McKenna: What’s the most one can hope for in life?
Joe Strummer: The sense of having accomplished something—and I don’t have that feeling yet. Being in the line of work I’m in, you hold yourself up against the real greats like Dylan, Ray Davies, Jagger and Richards, Paul Simon, Lennon and McCartney, and John Fogerty. I’m not in that pantheon yet, but I’m gonna get there.
_____________________
Originally appeared in Arthur, Spring 2003.
WHEN THE TWO SEVENS CLASHED
By Carter Van Pelt
When Bob Marley sang his 1977 reggae-stepper “Punky Reggae Party,” he called out “The Damned, the Jam, the Clash. . . . ” Marley may have overlooked the Pistols’ reggae-loving Johnny Rotten, but few in the London punk movement were drawn to the party with the passion of the Clash’s Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, and nobody did more to represent reggae to the punk rock scene.
Members of the Clash grew up in close proximity to the Jamaican community that relocated to England in the post–WWII period. Paul Simonon’s “Guns of Brixton” is a direct reflection of this experience, as is Strummer’s “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.” The latter documents Strummer’s night in a Jamaican dance hall in West London, as he explained in 1991: “All over the world people are oppressed and in London there were the dreads and there were the punks, and we had an alliance. England is a very repressive country. . . . Immigrants were treated badly. “So these people had a sense of pride and dignity, and when we went into their concerts, where we should have had the grace to have left them alone. . . . “And they didn’t jump us, they didn’t stomp us, they didn’t beat the seven shades of you-know-what out
of us. . . . “They understood that maybe we needed a drop of this roots culture. And ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ is a song that was going through my mind while I was standing in the middle of the Hammersmith Palais . . . in a sea of thousands of Rastas and dreads and natty rebels. That song was trying to say something realistic.”
Vic Ruggiero of the Slackers performing in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Evidence of the group’s interest in reggae could be seen before it was heard. The picture sleeve of the first single, “1977,” strongly resembles the cover of Joe Gibbs and the Professionals’ State of Emergency album—men lined up with their backs to the camera, hands on a wall, on the verge of arrest. On the “1977” sleeve, the theme was augmented by the Jamaican political slogans on Strummer’s clothes—“Heavy Manners” and “Heavy Duty Discipline.” These ideas were likely gleaned from Prince Far I’s Under Heavy Manners album, an often-cited Clash favorite. Later visual references to the group’s cultural interests include the cover of Black Market Clash, which features a picture of a lone Rasta in defiance of riot police at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival. Strummer’s and Jones’s experiences at Notting Hill in 1976 were the inspiration for the song “White Riot.”
The Clash’s first attempt to work with reggae musicians was a short alliance in 1977 with the “Rasputin of reggae,” Lee Perry. The result, “Complete Control,” was less than inspired, but the group kept at it, achieving intercultural consanguinity in 1980 when they brought Jamaican deejay/producer Mikey Dread to the controls. Their collaboration on “Bankrobber” and “Robber Dub” (from Black Market Clash) was followed by the “Train In Vain,” B-side “Rockers Galore-UK Tour,” and the tracks “Junco Partner,” “Living In Fame,” “One More Time,” “One More Dub,” “If Music Could Talk,” and “Shepherd’s Delight” on the massive Sandinista! album. (Mikey Dread’s vocals can be heard on “Living in Fame,” “One More Time,” and “If Music Could Talk.”)
Let Fury Have the Hour Page 19
