Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Almost immediately Alex discovered Joe was a very enigmatic man. ‘He was a man of mystery. He would appear and disappear like a character in a spaghetti Western. He’d be there and then he’d be gone. Because this guy had been in the Clash, and had gone through experiences I couldn’t possibly imagine, to be not really weird was impressive. A lot of rock’n’roll people act as though they are encased in a strange glass bubble of celebrity and protectiveness. He didn’t feel like that: he seemed a really vulnerable person, a tough person, but a person who wasn’t immune to what was around him. He was very empathetic.

  ‘He was like a boxer who’d been smashed back onto the ropes. He was trying to stake out a new part of the arena. I think movies were great for him in that way. You sign on and put in a period of time. You go to some very exotic locations. There’s camaraderie. There are opportunities for amour. I think he wanted to sign on for somebody else’s trip, as opposed to having to create another, even more sensational version of himself.’

  Being around Alex Cox also meant being around his producer, Eric Fellner, who had a heroin habit. ‘Joe was the first dissenting voice towards me about that,’ said Eric. ‘He was the guy who said: “Don’t do that stuff. Have a smoke but don’t use that shit. Stay off it.” He always gave me shit about it.’

  ‘This was a pivotal time for Joe,’ said Alex. ‘Big Audio Dynamite were kicking off and he was frustrated, not in a great state. Very fragile. He seemed idiosyncratic and brilliant. He always had an opinion about everything, and would try and weave this opinion into what you were saying, in quite a forceful but always jokey way, and was very funny about it. Even if you thought he was talking complete shit, you couldn’t really go up against it because it was such fun hearing what he had to say.’

  During post-production Joe Strummer met a friend of Alex Cox from Los Angeles. ‘The first thing he said when he heard my name was, “Dick Rude? That’s great!”’ As with many punk sobriquets, Dick Rude’s nickname was singularly inapposite for this polite, well-man-nered fellow. ‘We’ve met before,’ Dick said to Joe on that first meeting. ‘I saw the Clash show at Santa Monica Civic. You spat on me the whole night long. I think you owe me an apology.’

  ‘He got red-faced and embarrassed,’ Dick Rude explained to me in his apartment in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. ‘But that started our friendship. I wasn’t afraid to be outspoken, and had a sense of humour about it. So right away we bonded.’

  Contrary to popular myth, and perfect as the poetry would have been, Mick Jones did not produce ‘Love Kills’ and its B-side ‘Dum Dum Club’ – a simple glance at the single shows that production is credited to Joe Strummer. These two songs, the first Joe had worked on in a studio since any form of the Clash, were recorded at Regent Park Recordings in Primrose Hill in North London. Mick did turn up to the sessions, adding guitar parts to both of them, a big-hearted gesture on his part. When remix wizard Eric ‘ET’ Thorngrun added his efforts he mixed out virtually all of Mick’s playing. For Mick this must have seemed like a reprise of his last studio work with Joe, Glyn Johns’s mixing sessions on Combat Rock, when so many of his ideas were jettisoned. ‘It seemed ridiculous, this vintage moment of the two of them back playing together, and it ends up unused,’ said Chris Musto, present at the sessions as both drummer and general brethren to Joe. But he noted, ‘The vibe was fine. It was really easy as soon as Mick arrived.’ He could perceive Joe’s synergy with Mick, and what Joe brought to the session: ‘What he managed to do was energize it to the point where you couldn’t play badly. He was so up, incredibly up.’ In 1977, like most drummers in London, Chris had tried out for the gig with the Clash at Rehearsal Rehearsals, being asked back for a second audition. Drumming with former Clash roadie Welsh Ray Jones on ‘some boisterous country tunes’ in a Brixton studio in the autumn of 1985, Chris Musto had been surprised when Joe turned up to produce Ray’s music. Joe told Chris he loved his drumming. ‘Which was great. I’d waited a long time to prove a point to him.’ As soon as ‘Love Kills’ had received a green light, Joe asked Chris to work with him. The other tunes Joe wrote were recorded for the album at a small studio – ‘a closet’, according to Dick Rude – off Kilburn High Road; among others, there was a reggae dub tune, credited to the Dynamiters, a blues tune with Joe trying to impersonate Howlin’ Wolf to disguise his voice, and ‘2 Bullets’, a country song sung by Pearl Harbor.

  There had been some old-timer punk controversy over Joe recording ‘Love Kills’; Glen Matlock, who had been hired by Alex Cox as the film’s music supervisor, had also written a song entitled ‘Love Kills’, and was reportedly miffed that Joe won out. Perhaps with justification, for ‘Love Kills’ is a hesitant, plodding song, with a sense of A.N. Other Joe Strummer Track about it; it feels like early steps; but from ET’s sessions an excellent dub version emerged. The B-side, the driving ‘Dum Dum Club’, is a great tune, much more powerful, used to terrific effect in a scene where Sid crashes through a plate glass window. Although ‘Love Kills’ is stylistically fairly ordinary, its blues feel was the direction in which Joe felt he should be going. He and Chris Musto would take long drives around West London in Chris’s tiny Fiat 500 – with which Joe was very taken – or in Joe’s Morris Minor. Joe would talk endlessly about the blues, and his love of artists like Bukka White and Sun House, and how he wanted to get a three-piece blues group together. ‘His vision was that the blues was the future,’ remembered Chris. ‘From what he was saying he wanted to do really dirty, grungy stuff – years before people were doing that.’

  Before Joe Strummer could put his dreams about blues bands into practice, there was more work on the current project. A video had to be shot for ‘Love Kills’, and Joe persuaded Alex Cox, the director, that it should be filmed in the stretch of country north of Almeria in southern Spain where so many spaghetti Westerns had been made; no difficulty in persuading him to do this, as Alex Cox was an expert on the genre. What Joe didn’t know was that his favourite film, Lawrence of Arabia, had had its desert scenes shot in the wild natural film set of the region; he was knocked out when he learnt that the camels used in the video had a direct lineage back to the animals used in David Lean’s great film. A specialist was brought in to construct flies for a scene in which Joe sits at a desk, interminably swatting at them: the flies were made out of strawberries; as Joe swatted away at them everything turned red. As Joe had a live chicken on his desk, a chicken-trainer was brought in to hypnotize the bird.

  Joe came up with the promo-clip’s story-line: ‘He decided the song was about what would have happened if Sid Vicious had escaped,’ Alex Cox said. ‘He hadn’t stuck around to get arrested, but took off to Mexico. Joe says, “We’ll do it as Sid Vicious goes down on the Mexican bus, goes to a saloon, meets a young girl. But this young girl’s boyfriend is the local cop, so he gets in trouble and thrown in jail.” Joe plays the cop, and Gary Oldman plays Sid Vicious. That night the Mexican girl comes to see Sid, and then in the morning, invigorated by her, he dresses up as Sid Vicious, puts on all his rock-’n’roll gear, kicks the door of his cell down, liberates the prisoners, and they all run off into the desert. That was Joe’s script.’

  When the single was released in late July, the record made only 69 in the charts, and the video was hardly shown. Changing the name of the film to Sid and Nancy hadn’t helped. ‘I spent days trying to get the words to fit in properly with the song,’ Joe laughed to me, ‘and then they changed the title to Sid and Nancy.’

  But the trip to southern Spain had set an idea gestating within Alex Cox, one that would soon come to fruition. Dick Rude remembered what happened. ‘I was going back to LA, and Alex said, “Fuck it, come to Cannes, let’s go to the film festival.”’ In May 1986 Alex Cox, Joe Strummer and Dick Rude convened at the annual Cannes film festival, having convinced themselves they were needed to promote Sid and Nancy, all sleeping in the one room Alex Cox had been allocated in a small hotel back from the seafront. They attended the official screening of the film. ‘The
re were some guys from Duran Duran there, as well as Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture,’ recalled the director. ‘The lights go down and the film starts. Then when Gary Oldman appears one of these pop guys calls out, “Johnny Thunders!” Strummer just stands up: “Shut the fuck up!” That was very funny. Cannes seemed like mindless bullshit to me. I imagine he thought it was bullshit too.’ The assembled troupe only went to two of the festival’s films, Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law and new director Spike Lee’s first feature She’s Gotta Have It, a pair of movies that between them established a new genre of New York independent cinema.

  The morning after the Sid and Nancy screening, the trio staggered down to sit in the shade by the poolside, nursing their hangovers. Hunkered down by the water they dimly recalled the scam they had drunkenly hatched the previous night: a spoof thriller, the exploits of three hapless deadly killers, shot as a modern spaghetti Western. ‘I had to go off to a Sid and Nancy promotional event,’ said Alex Cox. ‘I came back, and outside the hotel in the bright sunlight, still in their evening wear, black suits, white shirts, black dickey-bows were my room-mates, like characters in a film, sweating, drinking coffee, trying to get over their hangovers. That was the origin of Straight to Hell. We were full of the energy of the video in Almeria, and really wanted to go back.’

  There had been a plan for Joe Strummer, the Pogues and Elvis Costello to tour Nicaragua in the late summer of that year. Alex Cox would have filmed it for a documentary, but the scheme, a trial run for a feature Alex wanted to shoot in Nicaragua, fell apart. Eric Fellner was convinced such a collection of names, with the addition of further stellar billing, was an easy-to-sell package for a movie. He approached Chris Blackwell, Guy Stevens’s mentor at Island Records, who came up with £900,000 for Straight to Hell, the feature that had been drunkenly mooted at Cannes – named, of course, after one of Joe’s greatest songs. The film, it was decided, should be made at the same urgent pace at which it was conceived; the cast and crew agreed to work for next to nothing, with a profit-participation plan. Shooting was scheduled to begin in the middle of August, again on one of the spaghetti Western film sets.

  When things are not going well, the only thing you can almost guarantee is that they will get worse. As though externalizing his time of inner crisis, Joe Strummer had a run-in with the forces of law and order. He had finally taken and passed his driving test – which suggests that when he was driving around Spain he was not legally entitled to be behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. Six weeks after obtaining a driving licence he spent the evening with Elvis Costello at the latter’s home on the edge of Holland Park. When he left, he jumped into his Morris Minor hotrod and hurtled down Kensington Park Road. The extraordinary racket from his car’s big-bore exhaust caused Joe to be pulled over by the police as the car reached the junction with Westbourne Park Road; he was breathalysed and found over the alcohol limit. He was banned from driving for eighteen months. He had failed to pay heed to the warning provided by the vanishing ‘Spanish-American car’.

  From now on – in England, anyway – Gaby did all the driving; although the noisy Morris Minor hotrod was parked on Lancaster Road, and she would occasionally drive it, it was supplemented by a distinctly non-punk but eco-friendly Renault people-carrier. (When Joe had been stopped on his way back from Costello’s place, the police had immediately recognized him, referring to him throughout his time at the police station simply as ‘Joe’. This would also be their greeting when they would stop and search him on the street – ‘Come on, Joe. Turn out your pockets’ – as they regularly did. Joe’s home so close to All Saints Road, with its regular army of street drug-dealers, brought with it both an up and a down side.)

  After the ‘Love Kills’ sessions, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones had continued to see each other. Paul Simonon, who was starting to reimmerse himself in the painting in which he had trained, also returned to the fold. At the video shoot for the third BAD single, ‘Medicine Show’, in a Thames-side studio in Battersea near the ‘London Calling’ location, both made cameo appearances as Southern cops, Joe – his mouth stuffed with cotton wool – like Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night. This was the first creative work between the three since Mick had left the Clash. But there was another, darker side of Joe that carried the taint of walking disaster; at the final edit, at a facilities house in Covent Garden, I found Joe shuffling around, swallowing the dregs from abandoned cans of beer, like a park bench wino. Was he so knocked sideways by the internal tensions created in him by the situation he found himself in that he was desperately trying to anaesthetize himself? In the mid-1980s tales of Joe Strummer’s alcohol consumption were legion: once when he paid one of his regular visits to Mark ‘Stan’ Eden, who specialized in late 1950s’ rock’n’roll haircuts at the hip hairdressers Smile at World’s End, Joe arrived with a magnum bottle of red wine, which he polished off during his haircut, before disappearing up the pub with a gaggle of cute junior cutters.

  John Lydon and Don Letts with Joe and Paul at the BAD ‘Medicine Show’ video-shoot. (UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

  At lunchtime on 26 June 1986, Mick Jones’s thirty-first birthday, Joe ran into Don Letts in Wardour Street in Soho; Don was on his way to Trident Studios, where BAD were making their second album. On a nearby wall was a poster for BAD. As though Don was a total stranger, Joe grabbed passers-by, pointing at him. ‘Look! It’s the man in the poster!’ Stricken with embarrassment, Don fled into a nearby tobacconist’s. Joe followed him in, continuing his rant. Together they turned up at Trident, where the sessions were into their third week. Joe never left, taking on the role of co-producer and helping out on lyrics. ‘We need some rock’n’roll,’ he told me at Trident. Suddenly Joe looked an integrated, whole human being as opposed to the man torn apart by internal crises that he had been a few months previously. Having told me a few weeks earlier that he had given up smoking joints, he now had a large chunk of hash in his pocket and was rolling up continually. ‘There’s some link between working long stretches in studios and smoking big amounts of hash,’ he said. ‘They just fit together.’ In the studio itself, beneath a grand piano, he had built a Spliff Bunker out of the usual assortment of metal flight cases, where he often slept. Joe approached his task with the obsessive, loving dedication of old, working thirty-six-hour stretches – as Mick Jones was – and sleeping on the floor under the piano. ‘Once the rest of BAD realized that I don’t get involved in anything unless I do it to the max, it worked out fine,’ he said. The rest of BAD were concerned. Were Mick and Joe getting back together? About the Clash, and its main players in their subsequent incarnations, there was often an intense sense of unexpected drama and poetry, a romantic, mystical quality worthy of a South American novel.

  The situation was mutually advantageous: Strummer’s creative block vanished, and songs started to pour out of him, in his delightful phrase, ‘like spunk in a whorehouse. Ever since I hit that BAD studio I just started to go. It’s got to be truly bad, this record,’ he insisted. ‘Hard. You know,’ he joked, ‘I’ve figured out why all the BAD songs are a minute too long: because so many of the parts are programmed onto tape, and no one remembers to stop them. I’m getting them to roughen up the sound and lose that Radio 2 tendency Mick has. Mick isn’t going to know what happened when this record gets going in the mix.’

  For BAD’s second album, Joe came on board as co-producer, once again writing songs with Mick Jones. (UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

  The mix was done in New York. Afterwards Mick said this had been ‘Joe’s revenge’ for his own insistence on recording Combat Rock in Manhattan: using the expensive Hit Factory, No. 10 Upping Street – as Joe decided the record should be named, a play on 10 Downing Street, the residence of the Prime Minister – cost a small fortune, the most expensive record Mick ever made. ‘We flew in,’ said Joe. ‘Got a cab. Hit the hotel. Threw our stuff in the room. Walked seven blocks to the studio. I was in there for twenty days and nights before I went to a bar. We did it in New York because
we wanted it to be like good vegetables – fresh.’

  ‘Everything’s gone as it should have done,’ Mick told me two days before the record was completed. ‘It went even greater once Joe was on board. I always felt great about this LP, right from the very start. I can’t remember a time when I felt so over-awed, or was so happy with what I was doing.’ No. 10 Upping Street is a magnificent and underrated piece of work, probably BAD’s best record, with a tough, contemporary production. With Mick Joe co-wrote five songs: ‘Beyond the Pale’, a beautiful, melodic tune with an epic sweep that talks about the immigrant mix (‘Immigration built the nation’ runs a key line) that has built Britain – one of the best ever songs involving the Strummer–Jones combination; ‘Limbo the Law’, a story of Latino gangsters; ‘ V. Thirteen’, a view of a dystopian future; ‘Ticket’, on which the lead vocals are taken by Don Letts and bass-player Leo Williams; and the superb ‘Sightsee MC’, a thundering tune in the style of contemporary New York rap with lyrics specifically about London.

  What was Joe’s purpose in this work? Unquestionably he was guided into it by the magical meeting with Don Letts, and he went with the flow; he didn’t have another agenda. But when you looked at him in the studio, there was still that great hurt in his eyes: it seemed like he might burst into tears sometimes. Working with Mick Jones and his simpatico posse was reminding Joe how great it could be, what a fantastic team had been ruptured. At this time he really wanted to get the Clash back together, even though he knew it was impossible. He admitted to me later that he invested a large amount of ‘psychic energy’ in that direction, trying to will it to happen, for a substantial time.

  On 5 August 1986 Joe flew back to London from the New York Upping Street mix, and the next evening he travelled on to Almeria in southern Spain for the beginning of the Straight to Hell shoot. Eleven days later, at 3 in the morning Spanish time, he called me. He was standing looking at Africa eighty miles away, he said. No, he insisted adamantly, he had not joined BAD, as the rumours insisted. ‘Are you kidding? The BAD LP’s brilliant, because me and Mick were involved. But I’m going to make a record of my own when I’ve got something really good.