While Mikey Dread is still in contention today with the Clash’s management over alleged unpaid publishing and lack of recognition for the album sales garnered by Sandinista!, his respect for Strummer’s and Simonon’s “reggae mission” remains.
“I see Joe Strummer as a leader in the rock world who never got the recognition that he deserved for his upfrontness, addressing issues that other people were reluctant to address—‘White Riot’ and all dem tings deh. When I met them, I was surprised that these people were supporting reggae, buying reggae every week, and up-to-date with what’s going on . . .
“One thing I can say about the Clash, they were no racists. There were a lot of times I been to places where skinheads and punks wanted to kick my butt, as a black man, and [the Clash] would warn me, ‘Tomorrow don’t go out alone, have one of us follow you.’ They start to wear their Doctor Martens shoes, and they buy me a pair as well so they know we’re on the war path. Anybody come, we just mess them up.”
Mikey Dread’s live performances with the Clash involved taking the stage alone to sing over recordings of his own “Dread at the Controls” rhythm productions and later joining the Clash for encores. This Jamaican dance hall–style performance was understood and received enthusiastically in Europe, but Mikey ran into problems at his first U.S. appearance. “I wasn’t supposed to be on tour with them, but they asked me to come along. They wanted to introduce me to their crowd, but I got a bad reception in LA. I’ll never forget Los Angeles. We played all over the world and when we came to Los Angeles, all the punkers tried to boo me off stage. The punks got really mad, and I’m looking at like 20,000 people and wondering what the hell is gonna go on. I told the guys, ‘I’m not playing tonight, cause they don’t want to see a black man out there.’ We had one black bouncer and me. That is it for blacks. And it was pure white man out there, some bad punks! They wanted to eat me alive! Joe Strummer is the one who was like ‘Go get them Mikey, don’t let them tell you what to do!’ And me just go out there and get serious and say, ‘You know, I’m coming to the United States, [and] I was thinking I was going to be meeting a lot of intelligent people, people who are open-minded, people who are cosmopolitan, people who are not prejudiced and racist, people who want the world to live in unity.’ I give them a speech and chastise them for their rude behavior. And trust me mon, the crowd went quiet like you could hear a pin drop. Then I said, ‘I know you’re here to see the Clash, but I’m going to introduce you to some reggae music, from the roots! Are you ready?’ And they say, ‘yea!’ And we just start lick some tune and that was it. We broke the ice.”
Vic Ruggiero of the Slackers performing in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Vic Ruggiero of the Slackers performing in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
Not only did the Clash cover reggae tracks like Willi Williams’s “Armagideon Time,” Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” and Tools and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop,” they name-dropped and referenced their reggae heroes in their lyrics—Prince Far I in “Clash City Rockers,” Dr. Alimantado in “Rudy Can’t Fail,” the Abyssinians’ “Satta Massagana” in “Jimmy Jazz,” and Dillinger, Leroy Smart, Ken Boothe, and Delroy Wilson in “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.” Strummer even documented his and Jones’s chaotic jaunt to Kingston in “Safe European Home.” (Curiously, Simonon—arguably the band’s biggest reggae head—was left behind in England, a major slight that he talks about with obvious residual bitterness in Don Letts’s Clash doc, Westway to the World.)
Strummer’s love of Jamaican music continued in his solo career. The lyrics on “Techno D-Day” from the Mescaleros’ Rock Art and the X-Ray Style describe “using the headphones for a mike; for Tenor Saw’s delight, I sang another new sound is dying,” a reference to Tenor Saw’s “Ring the Alarm.” Strummer also recorded a cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” with DJ Tippa Irie and the Long Beach Dub Allstars on the Free the Memphis 3 benefit album, and co-wrote the disquieting title track for Horace Andy’s Living in the Flood album, released on Massive Attack’s Melankolic label.
Over the last twenty-five years, the Clash’s embrace of Jamaican music has inspired like-minded efforts by musicians including Bad Brains, Massive Attack, 311, Rancid, Sublime, Long Beach Dub Allstars, and No Doubt. The punky reggae party that started so improbably way back in ’77 has never really stopped.
Originally appeared in Arthur, Spring 2003.
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Thanks to Jim Dooley and Stanley Whyte for the fact assists.
WHATEVER IT TAKES
By Antonino D’Ambrosio
It might have been twenty years ago. Maybe. I can’t really remember. I was walking down South Street in Philadelphia to a small music venue and saw a group of people attacking the stage. The club was crowded, not packed, but the searing energy from the audience blew me away. I watched the group onstage perform a blazing, furious set as if to an arena packed with tens of thousands. I didn’t catch the name of the band because I had to rush off and check out another band at a nearby club. Sometime later I was with my friend Markoos, a music lover of the highest order. He pulled out a cassette tape and told me to prepare myself for a sound combining rap, rock, and a guitar style on a turntable spinning a thousand different sounds. It was all melded together with a punk rawness and the technical mastery of a guitar virtuoso. The first tune was “Bombtrack.” Boom! I realized I had heard it before, on that night years before in the small Philly club. The band’s name was Rage Against the Machine and they soon were filling arenas and selling millions of records. Tom Morello is the guitarist.
Spend a moment with Morello, as I did for the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour, and you learn that the energy is all his. Pulsating, effervescent, and uninhibited, he seemed to share Joe Strummer’s enthusiasm. In between Rage breaking up and re-forming (sort of), Morello cofounded the Axis of Justice, a nonprofit that brings together musicians and fans to lobby for social justice, with Serj Tankian of System of a Down. He rolled out more than one Justice Tour, a concert series that benefits progressive causes, like independent media and labor. He connected with three other Let Fury Have the Hour film participants—Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Billy Bragg, and Boots Riley of the Coup—to become a key member of Jail Guitar Doors, an organization that donates instruments to those who use music to help rehabilitate prison inmates. And his venture with Boots Riley, Street Sweeper Social Scene, a project dedicated to “revolutionary party jams,” continues to reward devotees with political music that is intense and stirring. All the while, Morello has taken to heart the manifesto on Woody Guthrie’s guitar, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” He scrawls his own credo with his machine, declaring to do “whatever it takes” as the Nightwatchman, his alter ego solo act that preaches progressive politics.
Musician Tom Morello during the filming of Antonino D’Ambrosio’s Let Fury Have the Hour, November 11, 2010. (Photos by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
After sitting down with him at his home in Los Angeles, Morello gave me The Nightwatchman’s Little Red Songbook. “Let Freedom Ring!” he wrote on it when he handed it to me. From full throttle arena rock to performing a massive protest just before the police surged on the crowd instigating a riot at the 2000 Democratic National Convention to walking the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, in solidarity with workers currently under assault there, guitar in hand and leading the people in song, Morello is Pete Seeger with a flamethrower.
THE CLASH LEGACY
Speech to Induct the Clash into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2003
By Tom Morello
I had the good fortune to see the Clash play at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago when I was a teenager. It was an experience that changed my life. Even before the first note was played the transformation began. I bought a T-shirt in the lobby. I was used to buying heavy metal T-shirts with lots of garish wizards and dragons on them, b
ut this Clash shirt was different. It just had a few small words written over the heart: “The future is unwritten.”
And when I saw the Clash play, I knew exactly what that phrase meant. The Clash performed with passion, commitment, purpose, righteousness, and an unflinching political fire. There was such a sense of community in the room that it seemed like absolutely anything was possible. I was energized, politicized, changed by the Clash that night, and I knew that the future was unwritten. And maybe we fans and that band were going to write it together.
Watching the show, I realized that Joe Strummer was playing through the same little amp that I had in high school. They proved to me that you didn’t need walls of Marshall stacks and a castle on a Scottish loch to make great music. All you had to do was tell the truth, and mean it. I had never seen a better band before that night, and I have not seen a better band since.
The Clash was one of those rare bands that are greater than the sum of their parts, and yet the parts were amazing. Mick was the brilliant arranger and tunesmith, always looking forward musically and pushing the boundaries of what was possible for a punk band, of what was possible for any band. Paul was just so damn cool looking, and the image of him smashing his bass on the cover of London Calling sums up the fury and beautiful force of the band. He also wove in the reggae influence that completed the Clash chemistry of three chords, a funky groove, and the truth. Terry Chimes provided the cavalry charge beats that propelled some of their early anthems, but it was Topper who made it all possible with his drumming. He effortlessly, and with great originality and skill, steered the band through genres undreamed of by their peers. But really, the band had no peers, because at the center of the Clash hurricane stood one of the greatest hearts and deepest souls of twentieth-century music. At the center of the Clash stood Joe Strummer.
Joe Strummer died on December 22, 2002.
Joe Strummer played as if the world could be changed by a three-minute song, and he was right. Those songs changed a lot of people’s worlds forever, mine at the top of the list. He was a brilliant lyricist who, with anger and wit, always stood up for the underdog. His idealism and conviction instilled in me the courage to pick up a guitar and the courage to try to make a difference with it.
In the great Clash anthem “White Riot” Joe sang:
Are you taking over,
Or you taking orders?
Are you going backwards,
Or are you going forwards?
The Clash Legacy
When I first heard that, I wrote those four lines down, put them on my refrigerator, and answered those four questions for myself every day. And to this day, I still do.
Joe Strummer was my greatest inspiration, my favorite singer of all time, and my hero. I miss him so much. I was looking forward to him standing on this stage and rocking with his friends tonight. And I know he was too. I am grateful, though, to have the tremendous legacy of music that the Clash left behind. Through it, Joe Strummer and the Clash will continue to inspire and agitate well into the future.
In fact, the Clash aren’t really gone at all. Because whenever a band cares more about its fans than its bank account, the spirit of the Clash is there. Whenever a band plays as if every single person’s soul in the room is at stake, the spirit of the Clash is there. Whenever a stadium band or a garage band has the guts to put their beliefs on the line to make a difference, the spirit of the Clash is there. And whenever people take to the streets to stop an unjust war, the spirit of the Clash is definitely there.
Tonight we will honor the Clash and Joe Strummer with toasts and applause, but the best way to honor them is by putting the Clash’s philosophy into practice, by waking up each morning knowing that the future is unwritten, and that it can be a future where human rights, peace, and justice come first. But it is entirely up to us.
To me, that’s what the Clash was all about. They combined revolutionary sounds with revolutionary ideas. Their music launched thousands of bands and moved millions of fans and I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without them.
During their heyday, they were known as “the only band that matters,” and twenty-five years later, that still seems just about right.
Act IV
BETTER GET YOUR WEAPON READY
Musician Tom Morello during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour, November 11, 2011. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
THE WORLD IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR
Two Creative Activists, Michael Franti and Tim Robbins, Continue Joe Strummer’s Legacy
By Antonino D’Ambrosio
Action is the antidote to despair.
—JOAN BAEZ
Your silence will not protect you.
—AUDRE LORDE
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions, which have been hidden by the answers.
—JAMES BALDWIN
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.
—“THE MASK OF ANARCHY,” PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
As a kid growing up in early 1980s California, Michael Franti began to experiment with the scores of musical styles that would find their way into his own music. “I came to the Clash in kind of a backwards way,” he told me. “I was really into reggae and found out that Mikey Dread was working with them so I had to learn more about their music.”1 Mikey Dread is a music legend in Jamaica and the London music scene, where he was a prolific DJ, artist, and producer. Dread’s work with the Clash would come to be looked upon as some of the most creative and influential collaborative productions of the punk era. Clash songs including “One More Time,” “Bankrobber,” and “Police on My Back” became iconic recordings thanks in large part to Dread’s brilliance as a “dub master.”2
For aspiring young musicians like Michael Franti and Chuck D, the Clash’s experimentation with “black music” was inspiring. As Franti explains, the Clash’s approach was not your ordinary punk styling. “Their music was fun and exciting . . . it taught me to look at everything around me as an influence and that you could make good music with a decisive political message.” He adds, “When you listen to the Clash and the new Strummer recordings you understand that the world is a terrible, scary place but the world is worth fighting for.”
Franti is no stranger to fighting for the world and the people he believes in. Beginning with the Beatnigs, a San Francisco–based avant-garde group that fused industrial and punk music as a vehicle for social and political change, Franti began to make important strides in music and activism. Shortly after, Franti formed the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy with former Beatnigs band mate Rono Tse. The duo’s first and only album, Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury, established them as leading proponents of multiculturalism and justice. Their lyrics challenged hip-hop tenets like homophobia and misogyny while producing music with a distinctly intelligent, forward-thinking global analysis of issues including U.S. imperialism. Their 1991 song about the Gulf War—“The Winter of Long Hot Summer”—remains remarkably prescient in today’s political climate.
It all seemed so idiotic all the accusations of unpatriotic
The fall we’ll always remember, capitulating silence
election November before the winter
of the long hot summer
Somewhere in the desert
we raised the oil pressure
and waited for the weather
to get much better
for the new wind to blow in the storm
We tried to remember the history in the region
the French foreign legion, Imperialism,
Peter O’Toole and hate the Ayatollah
were all we learned in school
Not that we gave Hussein five billion
The loss of life on both sides
pushed the limits of resilience
The scent of blood in our nostrils
/> fuel of the fossil land of apostle
The blackness that covered the sky was not the only thing
that brought a tear to the eye or
the taste of anger to the tongues
of those too young to remember Vietnam
Other provocative Franti compositions include “Everyday Life Has Become a Health Risk,” “Television: The Drug of the Nation,” “Socio-Genetic Experiment,” and a brilliant reworking of the Dead Kennedys’ classic “California Über Alles.” His clarity and depth presented a radical counterpoint to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, which was dominating the music charts at the time and taking hip-hop into a decidedly different direction, mainstreaming gangsta rap and fashioning it as the new pop cultural force.
Franti’s current work with the group Spearhead has allowed him to develop and expand his music and activism. Like Strummer’s most recent work with the Mescaleros, Franti brings maturity and skillful musicianship to the compositions. Sandinista!, the much maligned fourth record from the Clash, is Franti’s musical model in many ways due to the expansive sounds, beats, styles, and musical compositions. “I realized that when you listen to the Clash, the music they create is the Clash,” he tells me. “You can’t point to any one style and the only way to describe the music when you hear it is ‘oh yes, this is the Clash.’” And that’s what he has been able to fashion with Spearhead. When you hear Spearhead it is unmistakably Michael Franti’s unique sound and emotion coming through.
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