Second, Strummer points to Cash’s work as a member of the Highwaymen in 1980, a quartet that included fellow “music outlaws” Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson, as an example of Cash’s ability to keep growing. Strummer explained that Cash seemed to teeter on the edge of a cliff “and risk everything, seemingly inviting the end” in an effort to find a new voice. The musician John Mellencamp echoed this sentiment, describing Cash as “an American original, uncompromised in his craft and incomparable in its execution. He makes you feel that he is playing solely to reach the best part of your spirit.”
In 1994 Rubin approached Cash about recording an album of songs composed by contemporary musicians, including Nick Lowe, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits; Strummer was one of many who contributed an original composition. The album, American Recordings, brilliantly captured Cash’s crossover appeal and introduced him to a new audience. Rubin explained that he worked with Cash because “he was an outsider who was never part of a trend . . . a rock star is a musical outlaw and that’s Johnny Cash.” The song Strummer wrote and Cash recorded, “The Road to Rock ’n’ Roll,” remains unreleased, although Strummer recorded it for Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. Strummer remained determined that Cash should record one of his songs. In the early 1990s he recorded a demo of “Long Shadow” and submitted it to Rubin and Cash for their consideration. Cash never had a chance to record the song for any of the four albums he recorded with Rubin.
It now stands as both a tribute to Cash, the rebel mentor and hero outlaw, and a desperate, poignant epitaph for Strummer. He scrawled the lyrics to “Long Shadow” on a pizza box, supplemented by a paper towel and roll of insulation tape. And this is how Strummer presented it to Cash. Rubin describes Strummer as very thoughtful during the duration of recording, slipping away into his car to listen to his cumbia tape again and again. Rubin explained that for Strummer this served as a source of inspiration and chance for meditation in helping him gain energy and strength in their recording sessions together.
“Redemption Song” and “Long Shadow,” the heart and soul of Streetcore, were the only two songs Rubin produced for the album. Strummer preferred to record the music in a garage on a small tape recorder rather than Rubin’s state-of-the-art studio. When you listen to “Long Shadow” along with the other nine songs that appear on this album, Strummer’s pure emotion and joy come shining through. You can almost see the glint in his eye, the flash in his smile, and the quiver in that famous guitar leg when he sings the anthem-like refrain of the revolution-themed “Arms Aloft” and the Telecaster-soaked jam “All in a Day.” “Burning Streets” is a moving follow-up to the Clash classic “London’s Burning” with Strummer quietly declaring that the new century has brought us little relief from the hostilities that divide and ultimately destroy cities and nations. Closing the album is “Silver and Gold,” a heartbreaking cover of “Before I Grow Too Old,” penned by Bobby Charles and recorded by Fats Domino.
Strummer was humbly writing the next chapter in his life without realizing that the journey was coming to an end. Yet as Dick Rude explained to me in describing Strummer’s new work, this is far from an ending; Strummer’s life and work will continue to manifest itself for generations to come. Strummer once said that “we must go back to sortin’ things out” and that “getting back to the bad seeds” and “going underground” is where music needed to return. Johnny Cash and Strummer were both “bad seeds.” The quintessential rock outlaw, Cash supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War, just two of the unpopular political stances he would take throughout his life. For Strummer, Cash was someone who lived comfortably outside the lines because standing within them meant complicity in the injustice and hypocrisy that stain our society. Cash fought the law with little regard to winning, walking the line only for love and never compromising his integrity.
“Are you taking orders,” Strummer once sang, “or are you taking over.” Cash famously responded to those who asked why he wore black: “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down/Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town . . . But ’til we start to make a move to make a few things right/You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.” Authority for both was a system of control that had no inherent wisdom. “Just look around,” Strummer asked when I met him. “Does the march to war now represent the interests of the world’s people?” Music, whether punk, rock ’n’ roll, country, blues, tropicalismo, is a pure expression of what must be said and what must be done.
Ultimately, Cash and Strummer forged a bond between two people coming from entirely different places but meeting with the same purpose in mind. Both were storytellers motivated by innate instincts rather than the ideological trappings of celebrity. Just as he was poised to offer the world his best music to date, Strummer left us. Cash resisted nagging health problems that dogged him for many years, recording until the end. “Joe was a nice man, a good man,” Cash said following Strummer’s death, “and a good musician.” No one could say it better. And for Strummer, I could only imagine that it would be the ultimate compliment. I can just hear him saying with that innocent enthusiasm of his, “Can you believe it? Johnny Cash thinks I’m a good musician.”
“LONG SHADOW”
Written by Joe Strummer for Johnny Cash
Performed by Joe Strummer; appears on Streetcore
Well, I’ll tell you one thing that I know
You don’ face your demons down
You grab ’em, jack ’em
And pin ’em to the ground
The devil may care
And maybe God he won’t
Better make sure you check on
The do’s and the don’ts
Crawl up the mountain
To reach where the eagles fly
Sure you can glimpse from the mountaintop
Where the soul of the muse might rise
And if you put it altogether
You won’t have to look around
You know you cast
A long shadow on the ground
Then one day I can tell my tracks
By the holes in the soles of my shoes
And that’s the day I said
I’m gonna make the news
And
Falling back in the garden
Of days so long ago
Somewhere in the memory
The sun shines on you boy
Playing in the Arroyos
Where the American river flows
From the Appalachians
Down to the Delta roads
A man could think so long
His brain could well explode
There’s trains running through junctions
And king cotton’s down the road
And if you put it altogether
You won’t have to look around
You know you cast
A long shadow on the ground
Listen to the country, to night jar and the bell
Listen to the night streamliner
Sounding like all the wolves of hell
Head for the water—the waters of the cleansing spell
It was always our destination
On the express of the ne’er do wells
And we rock through Madison city
And we didn’t even know she was there
And when we hit the buffers in Memphis
And Beale Street didn’t have no prayer
And I hear punks talk of anarchy—
I hear hobos on the railroad
I hear mutterings on the chain gang
’cause those who men built the roads
And if you put it altogether
You didn’t even once relent
You cast a long shadow
And that is your testament
Somewhere in my soul
There is always rock ’n’ roll
Yeah!
Act V
TRANSCONTINENTAL HUSTLE
Senegalese musicians performing in Athens, Greece.
(Still from Let Fury Have the Hour. Photo by Yrthya Dinzey-Flores.)
GLOBAL CITIZENS, DANGEROUS CREATORS
Eugene Hütz
By Antonino D’Ambrosio
Again I am, waho, Vasco da Gama
In my headphones is Bob Marley and a-Joe Strummer
I’m on a quest for solar amalgama
I’m on a quest for Never-Neverest
With my contaminated friends
—“TRANSCONTINENTAL HUSTLE,” GOGOL BORDELLO
July 7, 2007. London. The spirit of legendary Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, watching and listening, must have been elated by the scene unfolding on the Wembley stage. A world-class pop star invited two members of a Gypsy punk band to join her in singing the 1987 pop hit “La Isla Bonita” (The Beautiful Island). Madonna’s Live Earth concert aimed to amplify the issue of climate change. When Gogol Bordello’s guitarist/vocalist Eugene Hütz and violinist Sergey Ryabtsev joined her on stage, she didn’t know that the occasion would also uplift a people and culture that had been under attack for centuries. On this day, performing with Madonna, Hütz made sure that the voice of the Roma people would be heard. With hundreds of millions of people watching around the world, Hütz sang in Romani, a language spoken by millions of people spread throughout Europe and Latin America. “Afterwards, I got so many messages from Roma people all around the world about it,” Hütz says. “I still get messages. Hearing their language out loud blasted around the world was something very important, very special.” Wherever Bartók is now, I’m sure he was smiling wide with admiration.
Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello performing Joe Strummer’s “Johnny Appleseed” in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, September 23, 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)
The performance was set against the backdrop of a new wave of attacks on Roma people taking place throughout Europe. In Italy, my family’s homeland, Silvio Berlusconi’s government, heavy on fascist ideals of racial purity, planned to register the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies. Roberto Maroni of the xenophobic Northern League insisted that fingerprinting of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove children from their parents. Italy’s highest appeals court ruled that discriminating against Roma on the grounds that “all Gypsies [are] thieves” is acceptable. This antiquated racist idea would be laughable if these events weren’t really happening. The situation continued to escalate as official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps were augmented by vigilante attacks. In Naples, rumors that a Gypsy woman abducted a baby fueled a rampage of racist violence against Roma camps. Thugs wielding iron bars torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes. The Camorra, the local mafia, organized dozens of attacks. The reaction of Berlusconi’s government to the bombing and ethnic cleansing was not surprising: “That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies,” Maroni noted callously. Fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi proudly stated, “The people do what the political class isn’t able to do.” Wherever Bartók is now, I’m sure he’s crying with shame.
In 2010 Nicolas Sarkozy’s French government initiated a program of repatriating Romanian and Bulgarian Roma, even though these groups are allowed to enter France without a visa. Just as in Italy, the policy led to a surge in violence with vigilantes and hooligans attacking Roma camps. European Union justice commissioner Viviane Reding described the deportations as a “disgrace,” citing a 2004 EU directive on freedom of movement, which affirms “the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States.” Reding added, “This is a situation I had thought Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War.”
What the situation facing the Roma confirms is that a shadow element emerges when people believe a certain group endangers them. One element of the population is unleashed on another, with terrifying results. This conflict has existed throughout history due in large part to nativist upheavals stoked by the fears and uncertainties that crop up during an economic downturn. In 1863 the New York drafts riots occurred, “the largest civil insurrection in American history other than the South’s rebellion,” Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University explains. In order to raise an army, the United States ordered a draft. A man could avoid the draft by paying $300, a steep sum that only the very wealthy could afford. By Tuesday, June 12, 1863, artisans and craftsman had organized themselves into a mob. Their anger boiled over into violence unleashed at the wealthy, but ultimately the overwhelming majority of victims were people of color. The story is artfully told in Luc Sante’s Low Life and portrayed with a sinister sheen by Daniel Day Lewis as “Bill the Butcher” in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York. (The director at the time had hoped to cast Joe Strummer as one of the characters.) “I don’t see no Americans. I see trespassers, Irish harps. Do a job for a nickel what a nigger does for a dime and a white man used to get a quarter for,” Bill explains. “What have they done? Name one thing they’ve contributed.”
These words give timeless expression to the human tendency to seek comfortable, simple explanations for the complex social, political, and historical forces that can throw our lives out of control. The first spark of a mob mentality that sets ablaze campaigns of terror. “A posse is like an animal, moves like one, and thinks like one,” Sterling Hayden says in Nicholas Ray’s western Johnny Guitar, a film that explores the toxic mixture of fear, ignorance, and hate that leads to wanton vigilantism. “They’re men with itchy fingers and a coil of rope around their saddle horns, looking for someone to hang,” Joan Crawford’s character responds. “Either you side with them or us,” a spokesman for the posse answers. The film is played out live and in full color daily. This dialogue is echoed every day by out-of-touch politicians and played back without context or analysis by a compromised media: “They took our jobs.” “They don’t speak our language.” “They hate our freedom.” “They are less than human.” “They get everything for free while we pay for it.” “We’ll make them pay for it.”
In parts of Europe, there has always been a tension between pursuing “racial purity” and the acceptance of cultural diversity, which is harvested mainly through the arts. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco used this backward sensibility of maintaining racial purity as a tool to bludgeon resistance and help keep their hands on the levers of power. During the Nazi reign and its ensuing genocidal campaign, many non-Nazis willingly turned over Gypsies, deeming them “racially inferior.” Some 23,000 Gypsies were deported to Auschwitz, where 19,000 of them were murdered. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports that “of slightly less than one million Roma believed to have been living in Europe before the war, the Germans and their Axis partners killed up to 220,000.” More recent historical examples of ethnic cleansing abound from South Africa to Kyrgyzstan to northern India to Niger, the Sudan, Albania, Rwanda, Chechnya, and Bosnia, where 2.7 million people were displaced.
As people fall under the spell of leaders who encourage them to scapegoat foreigners, they become distracted from the true problems—and from those who are actually responsible for those problems. The problems remain concealed as people focus on fighting the “enemy.” It’s an effective propaganda tool that lulls the masses into submission. Herbert Marcuse brilliantly explored these themes in One-Dimensional Man (1964). “But the struggle for the solution has outgrown the traditional forms,” Marcuse wrote.
The totalitarian tendencies of the one-dimensional society render the traditional ways and means of protest ineffective—perhaps even dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty. This illusion contains some truth: “the people,” previously the ferment of social change, have “moved up” to become the ferment of social cohesion. Here rather than in the redistribution of wealth and equalization of classes is the new stratification characteristic of advanced industrial society.
Yet Marcuse finds hope in fighting back against the w
aves of fascism that ebb and flow throughout history. He looks to art and more specifically creative response as the best way to reveal the truth and see more clearly what we’re up against. Then we can unify our society around ideals based on a shared humanity. “The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real,” Marcuse explained.
“The Roma people are the original global citizens,” Eugene Hütz tells me in my film Let Fury Have the Hour. “Their entire existence was based around traveling to find work mostly as musicians, moving from place to place, season to season. They were the first globetrotters.” Hütz knows something about “globetrotting,” first with his family and then as an international musician. Stigmatizing the Roma people as “thieves” and “subhumans” dates back to feudal times. Hütz is quick to point out that the Roma people were “always peaceful, never violent.” They were feared and loathed for shallow and banal reasons. Hütz shreds this shibboleth in the song “Break the Spell” taking pride in the fact that as a Roma, an original globetrotter, he can easily see through the ignorance that some so willingly wallow in:
You love our music but you hate our guts
And I know you still want me to ride the back of the bus
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Opportunities for me is a red carpet to hell
But I’m a Roma wunderkind I’m gonna break the
Break the spell (break the spell)
I’m gonna break the spell (break the spell)
Hütz was born in Boyarka, near Kiev, to a mother who is half Servo Roma (descendents of blacksmiths, musicians, and horse traders) and a Russian father. Hütz recounts a story from Soviet times when his father clandestinely listened to the BBC, discovering the music of the Doors, the Stones, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash. He wrote down everything he heard and thought in his notebook. Soon the Ukrainian security services were skulking around looking to make trouble for Hütz’s father and his family. “We needed to seek political asylum,” Hütz says. “But our story is nowhere [near] as bad as those of other people then and many people now.” The family was eventually granted U.S. asylum and settled in Vermont. Hütz quickly fell into the culture of creative response—punk and skateboarding—as a way of finding himself in an ever-changing world.
Let Fury Have the Hour Page 23
