Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Found within one of Joe’s myriad plastic shopping-bags were these lyrics: an early essay at ‘Rock the Casbah’? (Lucinda Mellor)

  ‘A tension had crept in that wasn’t there before, a tension between Mick and Joe,’ said Terry. ‘Joe was always uneasy with our success. We were playing to very much larger audiences, which is what he always wanted, but what do you do with all that money? How do you be a rebel when you’ve all this money coming in? Joe struggled with that. One of the ways he dealt with it was to meet lots of people and sign lots of autographs and hang out with normal people. But when you are on the road with a busy schedule, that wears you out, and you can never get to them all. So I think Joe had put himself in a place where he couldn’t win. He wanted to be successful, sell more records, reach more people with his message, and he wanted to talk to every one of them individually, pat them on the back and say thanks for supporting us.

  ‘Mick seemed to be enjoying the success, and Joe was uncomfortable with anyone in the band enjoying success in that way. There was a tension between Mick being a little bit more pop-star-ish and Joe feeling that the success is poisoning the purity of our mission. If Mick asked for a special meal to be cooked and sent to his room, the hairs would go up on the back of Joe’s neck, and he would think that sounds like someone from Pink Floyd talking. But when you are on the road, and you want some food and you’re hungry, it’s OK, you can do that. But Joe would get upset about that kind of thing. Paul just got on with his job. One got the feeling that Paul was on Joe’s side rather than Mick’s.’

  Joe told me later about this hazard of touring. ‘That scene in Spinal Tap , my favourite film, where he’s complaining about the sandwiches, is serious. We didn’t do anything as stupid as that, but it’s in the ball-park. You become so stressed out. This is why I think rock and opera singers have tantrums: so many things are demanded of you, you’ve got nothing left to give. There’s no stopping the demanding, and you overboil. You start complaining that the smoked salmon doesn’t fit the bread, and throwing a fit about nothing.’

  Joe was simultaneously intimidated and infuriated by Mick’s magnetic drift into a vortex of arcane musical and cultural information with seemingly no limit. ‘Musically he didn’t like Mick making lots of weird noises,’ said Terry. ‘He had these boxes that guitar players have that make funny noises and it always frustrated Joe. He wanted to sound more like Chuck Berry. There was a gig in America when Mick was doing a lot of his funny sounds, more than usual, and Joe ran over and put his hands on the strings to stop the noise. There had always been a bit of tension but he’d never actually physically stopped Mick from doing it. Mick was very unhappy afterwards: “He actually put his hands on the strings to stop them.” I thought, “Oops, that’s a tricky one.” I was acutely aware of the tension between them going up a gear that night.’

  Not that Joe didn’t have trouble with his own instrument. On tour he would always have with him some sort of singers’ snake-oil, usually a blend of honey and lemon, to lubricate his voice. ‘Anyone want to try this?’ he would ask all and sundry. ‘It tastes like old underpants juice.’

  Although Joe’s conscience seemed to Terry as troubled as ever, his sense of humour remained undiminished and was often at its most acute in a public arena. ‘Often I would be on stage, and he would say something to the audience, and it would make me laugh my head off. I remember one gig, a very big hall: off the cuff without any preparation, Joe said, “You there at the back by the door” – and there are dozens of doors – “there’s a light switch. Can you turn the light switch on?” So the guy on the lights puts the house-lights on, ten megatons of house lights come on. Yet everyone’s looking round, like there really is a light switch at the back. Joe has a chat with the audience, then he says, “Turn the switch off again now.” The audience are all looking back, thinking, “Where’s this switch?” as the guy in charge of the house-lights turns them back off. Stuff like that you can’t imagine anyone else doing. Joe always felt very strongly that every concert should be unique. That was why we did different songs every time and he’d get guests coming on stage. He liked that you never knew what was going to happen.’

  The Down the Casbah Club tour rattled around America; heading for the south, they played Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas and Austin. After the Houston show, after much drink had been consumed at a party by the hotel swimming-pool, Kosmo began giving Mohicans to beautiful long-haired girls. As he stood there with one of them, half her head sheared, clippers in his hand, her husband arrived with a gun. In Austin Don Letts filmed a video for the next single, Rock the Casbah. ‘I remember when we were doing the Rock the Casbah video,’ said the director, ‘there was something going on. They’ve all got their urban military-style combats on, and Mick comes out in a pair of red long johns. Mick’s a skinny man; he had on red long johns and Doc Marten boots. He looked like a fucking matchstick. There was some problem between him and the rest of the guys, and Mick was going “Fuck you.” And he looked really stupid. I had to pull him aside and say, “Mick, you might be mad at somebody, but when people see this video they’re not going to know that. What they’re going to say is, ‘How come they’ve got a matchstick man in the band?”’ I eventually convinced him to wear the combat gear, but he was still pissed off, so he wore this mask. Except it turns out that the mask looks quite cool and at the end of the video Joe whips it off him.’ A new cable television channel, MTV, had begun broadcasting: when Rock the Casbah was added to its play-list, the video assisted immeasurably in cementing the position of the group in the United States, and Joe’s image as vocalist/leader. MTV was to fix even more Joe’s position as personification of the group. After Austin the tour headed for the West Coast: starting on 10 June in Los Angeles, they played five nights at the Hollywood Palladium. On opening night, Bob Dylan – always such an influence on the young Woody Mellor – and his family had a section of the balcony set aside for them; and musical progress continued as Bob’s son Jakob was awestruck by the group’s performance. ‘It changed my life. I was twelve and it was the most exciting and ferocious thing I’d ever seen,’ he said later. ‘The combat boots were flying everywhere. I knew, in that moment, that I had to be in a band.’

  Back in Britain there were almost two weeks off before the beginning of the UK leg of the tour. Joe Strummer’s belief in the Year of the Body was undiminished: he insisted that members of the crew join him on daily runs. ‘He decided we were out-of-shape losers,’ said Sean Carasov. ‘He said we’d got to be a lean-mean-fighting-machine. Luckily I’d been on the running team at school. He would stick us all on a minibus at 11.00 a.m. and drag us running around the Serpentine in Hyde Park, coughing and snorting, a bunch of pack-a-day smokers.’ These runs were followed by rehydration sessions in a Notting Hill pub.

  Stripped for action in a militant-style, the Clash’s Combat Rock posture led in the US to the group being mistaken for soldiers heading for the Falkland Island. (UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

  On 10 July the UK leg of the Down the Casbah Club tour kicked off with two nights at the 4,300-capacity Brixton Academy – the Brixton Fair Deal, as it was briefly known at the time. Despite the internal tensions noted by Terry Chimes, the positive energy that was being sent out remained on an unparalleled level, as the group painstakingly but painfully attempted to climb up the evolutionary ladder to enlightenment, concretizing the ineffable. In his review of the July Brixton Combat Rock tour Richard Cook, in a fine piece of writing in the NME, really ‘got’ how extraordinary the Clash had become, and why they were having such an enormous worldwide impact:

  Every one of perhaps twenty songs was dealt out with surly, scorched-earth bravado, spilling accounts of suspicion and untempered wrath; purpose in every turn. It’s all overcome by Strummer’s breathtaking conviction … The most persistent memory is of Strummer, two fingers pressed against his face, eyes half-closed in concentration, taking the hardest course through ‘Armagideon Time’. I say we need this anger, no matter how r
omantic it may be. I say this antidote to romantic despair is necessary. The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World. That doesn’t sit so badly after all …

  Playing in Inverness, only forty miles from the Mellor family home at Bonar Bridge, the Clash made a group outing to the battle site at Culloden, where the English army had massacred the Highland clansmen. ‘The Clash went to Culloden to ask forgiveness for the ancestors’ sins,’ said Jock Scot. When they played Newcastle City Hall on 14 July Mark Cooper was there to write an article for Record Mirror. ‘In the dressing-room there seemed to be the usual arrogant, macho rock’n’roll stuff going on, everyone a bit grumpy,’ he told me. ‘But in the early hours of the morning, alone with Joe in his hotel room doing the interview, he seemed this sad, lonely figure, confused with life, Hank Williams playing on his ghetto-blaster in the background. I felt sorry for him.’ There were dates around the country, from Scotland in the north down to the south coast of England. At the Brighton gig a pair of beautiful models turned up backstage: Daisy Lawrence and Tricia Ronane. Daisy’s entire purpose was to get off with Joe; instead, she found herself going home with Mick Jones – they would be together for the next eight years. This was the first time Paul met Tricia – five years later they started going out, subsequently marrying.

  The Clash played a further date at the Brixton Fair Deal, attended by Mick Jones’s father, the only time he saw his son play with the group. It was a good thing he seized the moment. On 3 August the Clash played the second of two nights at Bristol Locarno, the final night of the UK tour. This was the last time Mick Jones would ever play with the Clash in Britain.

  Six days after that final British date, the Clash were again in the USA, racing through the steamy summer heat of the American rock’n’roll heartland. In late August, just after Joe had turned thirty, they were in Manhattan, playing two nights at Pier 84 on the West Side in pouring rain, before crowds of 8,000. Jamaican reggae star Gregory Isaacs was support on the first of the two nights, but didn’t turn up for the second show. Allen Ginsberg performed again with the Clash, on their second encore ‘Ghetto Defendant’. ‘Mister Allen Ginsberg,’ Joe pointed a finger at him, as he emerged from the wings and went into his section of the lyrics. ‘Feeling completely relaxed in the situation, Allen chanted his own verses in response, as he had done on their Combat Rock album,’ said Allen Ginsberg’s biographer, Barry Miles, whom the Clash had once asked to manage them. Afterwards the group spent the night with the great poet, touring the hottest clubs and bars. With them was Marc Zermati, Paris’s king of punk rock. The vibe, he felt, was ‘good, but not as good as with Topper. There was an argument between Mick and Joe regarding Topper. Topper is the lynch-pin of the Clash, an incredibly talented drummer. But there’s always been a kind of little ego, maybe, in the attitude of Mick. Joe complained to me sometimes about it. I would ignore it because I know Mick from a long time. He was living his dream of being a rock star, so you have to respect that, and Joe did not understand. Joe was going, “Me, I am a poor rocker.”

  ‘How can you do a band without strong ego? That’s like impossible. The band was a complete organic unit: you can’t get people out of it and put them in just like that. I like to be their friend, because for me it was a total rock’n’roll dream, because their attitude was a real rock’n’roll attitude – great attitude with the fans.’

  The Clash’s US tour was scheduled to end in Boston on 8 September, but they were made an offer they couldn’t refuse. At the end of September the Who were to undertake a tour of American stadiums, at the time intended to be their final shows ever. Pete Townshend offered them the support slot on eight of these dates, the opportunity to perform before audiences of 80,000, and vastly expand their own drawing-power, a consciously altruistic act on Townshend’s part. ‘The Who were supposedly retiring at that time,’ said Joe’s old room-mate Kit Buckler, who had once worked as publicist for the Who. ‘Townshend was handing the Clash their mantle. He was deliberately positioning them to take over from the Who.’

  A number of dates were slotted in for the Clash before the first stadium show, on 25 September at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. On before the Clash in Philly was David Johansen, once the singer with the revered New York Dolls, now a terrific solo act. He and Joe seemed cut from similar blocks of stone. ‘When I was a kid, I was a street kid,’ he told me, ‘and I got that same vibe from Joe. We spoke the same language, a certain kind of innate intelligence about the beast, and feeding its face. All those fuckers want to make you a star, but you’re nothing more than a racehorse to them. Joe had an awareness about that corporate structure. Making music and not being co-opted by it is an art form in itself. And Joe had that art. The people who can walk that tightrope are the ones who’re interesting. He did it well.’

  The Clash’s stadium shows with the Who were short sets – forty-five minutes, on-off, all the hits. Mick Jagger was in Philadelphia, allegedly nagged to go by his daughter Jade, a Clash fan. ‘Mick Jagger came in and talked to us,’ remembered Terry Chimes. ‘He said, “Guys, when you’ve done one or two of these it’s just the same as any other gig.” He was absolutely right because when we played Chicago, about three or four gigs later, Joe said to me, “How many people at this gig?” I said, “I think it’s 80,000,” and he went, “That’s nothing!” We both laughed.’

  ‘It felt a bit like miming,’ said Paul, ‘because there were so many people there. The audience wasn’t very close, so you didn’t get the same reaction from them. It was fantastic, but everyone seemed a bit distanced from each other – in clubs the group and audience would feed off each other. You’d get more nervous in a small club because the audience were just there in front of you.’

  In New York City on 9 October the Clash appeared on Saturday Night Live, the legendary networked NBC television show, great for national promotion. The group insisted on using the main entrance to the television studios at 30 Rockefeller Center on West 49th Street and mingling with their fans. As Joe explained, an attempt at punk-rock situationism somewhat backfired: ‘Waiting around at Saturday Night Live, somebody had the idea to stop in the midst of playing “Should I Stay or Should I Go” and hold a ghetto-blaster up to the mike and play “Rock the Casbah”. Remember this is live TV. So the moment comes. I press the play button. Nothing comes out. I fling the blaster through the air – thank God Baker catches it before it brains a hapless audience member. We carry on. Reason for no sound from the blaster? That little piece of see-through leader tape at the front of every cassette reel.’

  On 12 and 13 October the Clash played with the Who at Shea Stadium, memorably recorded by Don Letts for the video of ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, not yet released as a single outside the USA. Don’s footage includes the arrival of the group at the stadium in an open-topped white 1956 Cadillac. By October it was not exactly the weather for travelling in a car with the roof down, especially one without a working heater. ‘I turned round to Joe and said, “It’s freezing!”’ said Terry. ‘He said, “Yeah, but we’re going to look tough – we don’t worry about cold.” We just put this face on for the camera. It was funny.’ Terry was puzzled by Joe’s headgear, a raccoon-skin cap replete with tail, of the sort that was once known as a ‘Davy Crockett hat’ – though Joe decided that his was ‘a Daniel Boone hat’. ‘He looked at me and said, “It’s called style.”’ (Or was it more like cowboys’n’Indians?) Joe also wore an antique fur-coat, of the sort he had worn as a student at Central.

  To the consternation of the Shea Stadium security guards, the Clash insisted that it should be business as usual when it came to fans: Kosmo waved literally hundreds of kids into the private enclosure. But, as the photographer Joe Stevens discovered, life was not so easy for those who had not purchased tickets. ‘Before the show Strummer and I are in the bowels of the stadium, exploring the place. Somewhere beneath home-plate we discover a prison. There were eight cells and there’s a black kid in one of them. They had locked him in for trying to break into the show. Strummer
went and got him water and food. But it really freaked him out – added to his ideas of what the USA was really like.’

  In between further stadium shows – venues in Boulder, Colorado, and Oakland, California – the Clash continued to play dates on their own. At Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh they performed an interweaving of ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘Armagideon Time’, which they continued for the rest of the tour. In Mesa, Arizona, clutching his guitar and microphone, Joe leapt into a water-filled moat that separated the stage from the audience. Amazingly, he was not electrocuted.

  When they supported the Who for the last time, at the 120,000-seater Los Angeles Coliseum, Jakob Dylan again came, his second Clash experience that year. Taken backstage to meet Joe, he was speechless in awe at meeting his hero, only able to mumble, ‘I really like your vest.’ ‘He took it off and gave it to me. I took it home and framed it,’ Jakob told Nigel Williamson.

  On 27 November 1982 the Clash were booked to play the Jamaican World Music Festival in the tourist town of Montego Bay – ensuring an audience of holiday-makers as well as locals – at the grandly titled Bob Marley Centre, a cinder strip of flat land off the main north coast road. Apart from the thrill of playing in their adored Jamaica, they would benefit from a five-day holiday on the island with their girlfriends. Among the other acts scheduled were such locals as Peter Tosh – who complained that the heavy tropical downpours had failed to fall during the set by the Clash, which his followed – and Black Uhuru, as well as, among others, Aretha Franklin, the Grateful Dead (‘By the way, if you don’t like us, I’ve got the Grateful Dead in the wings and I’m going to bring them on. So you’d better shape up – now!’ Joe threatened mid-set) and the Beach Boys, whom Joe had so loved as a teenager. As Bob Gruen wryly noted, Joe was extremely happy while in Jamaica, having swapped an expensive watch for a bag of pot worth about five dollars. Familiar with the island’s top-grade smoking material, Joe and Mick had been delighted to discover another local speciality: psilocybin mushroom tea of an especially cosmic strength, useful for gazing at the sky and studying interplanetary transport networks. ‘The night before I had a wonderful time. We sat out in the audience on mushroom tea,’ said Mick. ‘Daisy and me and Ranking Roger. The Beat were playing as well. We watched all the groups, like Gladys Knight and the Pips. Real groups and total oneness through the mushrooms. Amazing. The great thing about that festival was it went on all day and night. It was fantastic.’