Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘Gaby was unhappy during that time, and was confused and despondent about Joe’s behaviour,’ Zander said. ‘It was apparent he had lost any kind of zest for the relationship. He was out of control. I seriously think that Joe had a bit of a sexual addiction. Sitting in an airport once Joe came up with this justification for his need to have sex with lots of different women: he said if John F. Kennedy didn’t have sex every day he got a headache.’

  Gerry Harrington would not agree with Zander’s assessment of Joe’s love life. ‘Musicians check out girls, but Joe was always busy talking about important issues. I never saw Joe looking at a great looking girl unless she was some unfortunate woman he wanted to make feel good. It was more, “Senorita, what a ray of sunshine!” He never seemed terribly driven by libidinous pursuits.’

  In the studio Joe was driven by a blinkered ruthlessness. One night Willie McNeil, the drummer, made a classic error: at 4 in the morning Joe asked him for one more take. He protested he was too tired and would do it the next day. That was it. ‘You’re fired.’

  They were more than halfway through the album; who could they get in as a replacement? Ginger Baker, stalwart former member of supergroup Cream and recently playing with John Lydon, was in Los Angeles, up for a gig. Joe had concerns that, as Ginger was an even more seasoned professional than himself, there might be possibilities of strife – and he’d had enough of that in groups. But there was an even more unlikely candidate: a former drummer with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who had suffered a nervous breakdown after the group’s guitar player, his best friend, had OD’d on heroin that summer. More than anything, Joe was taken by his name: ‘Mr – JACK – IRONS!’ as Joe would introduce him onstage.

  ‘I told Joe I was impressed by Jack Irons,’ said Lonnie Marshall. ‘I had gone to an audition once, and the Chili Peppers were rehearsing there. Jack Irons was rehearsing on his own, playing all the grooves by himself. I thought that was impressive: I’d never seen a drummer practising by himself. I told Joe that. He kept saying, “Jack Irons! What a name for a drummer. Jack-Irons-Jack-Irons.”’

  ‘I got a phone call in hospital from Dick Rude, and he says, “Joe wants you to play with him,”’ said Jack. ‘I said, “I’m not doing too good, but I love Joe and I love the Clash.” So I got a day-pass from the hospital and I got my girlfriend at the time to drive me to Hollywood, to Baby O.’

  Jack’s problems with his own reality seemed even greater than Joe’s. ‘The first time we got together,’ said Zander, ‘Jack’s eyes were rolling back in his head, like he was hearing voices or something. He gets up and says, “I’m going to go in the bathroom and look in the mirror and see if I’m still here!”’

  On his return, Joe said, ‘Let’s try a song.’ ‘Two takes later I cut the song, “Jewellers and Bums”,’ said Jack. ‘Joe said, “You’ve got the job, whenever you’re ready. Whenever you can get out.”’ ‘Jewellers and Bums’ moves along to its own internal rhythms, a very Clash driving rock song, a Death-or-Glory-like insistence, with added melody. Addictive stuff.

  The Earthquake Weather sessions took more than three months, with a brief break for Christmas. How was Joe functioning in the studio? He seemed to see his role more in the tradition of a movie producer than a music producer. ‘He does this great record, in the studio every night for almost four months,’ remembered Gerry Harrington. ‘He’s doing everything from buying guitar strings to taking the petty cash and getting it reimbursed.’

  In The Clash, apart from Combat Rock, Joe had taken a back seat to Mick Jones. Was it harder without Mick? Josh Cheuse believed this to be the case. ‘For Joe it was hard to not have Mick to fight against, I think. When everyone’s deferring to him, it’s a very different situation.’

  As the record neared completion, an official delegation, headed by Muff Winwood, arrived from the record company in London (CBS had become part of the Japanese giant, Sony). How did Joe respond? ‘I couldn’t find Joe anywhere, so I came home,’ said Gerry Harrington. When Gerry arrived at his place, not far from Baby O, he found a sheet of yellow legal paper nailed to the door. ‘Dear Gerry, I’ve gone to the desert. I’ll be back on: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Sorry if I’ve inconvenienced you. Joe.’ Around the Thursday that he had written Joe had drawn a circle. ‘He could have just written: “Gone to the desert – be back Thursday.” He had to write the other six days. That’s why you’ve got Sandinista! being a three-disc set. Joe could not even edit himself.’

  ‘He did run away,’ said Muff Winwood. ‘I’ve had other artists do the same thing – just run away. I understood it.’ But Tricia Ronane, by now living with Paul Simonon and having been given charge of the Clash’s business affairs, felt there was a sub-text: when Joe had declared to Sony his intention to make Earthquake Weather, Muff Winwood immediately had asked to hear demos of the songs Joe intended to record. ‘He was offended,’ said Tricia. ‘Joe’s attitude was that he was one of the songwriters with the Clash who had had a big-selling album with Combat Rock. So why was he being asked to play demos? It had a profound effect on Joe and dented his confidence.’

  When Joe did return from the desert, on the Thursday, for his meeting, it seemed he had never heard of the golden rule: when presenting any idea to ‘suits’, never indicate a single shred of doubt, because if you do that is all they will pick up on. Joe’s deference and humility were not what was required at that point. ‘Here it is. I’m not sure that you’ll really like it,’ he undersold his work to the record company execs, immediately before pressing ‘PLAY’. They said they wanted to hear more Joe guitar on the record. And went back to London.

  Muff Winwood was given a copy of the tape. He listened to it; whatever bothered him about the record, he expressed to Mark Stebbeds. Then he received a letter from Joe: ‘Muff, only you, me and the Stebbeds know this stuff. I’ve been a bit of a hermit of late. Love to the wife. You’re a rock. Down with Bros [Sony’s biggest English act of the time]. Love Joe.’ Then Joe listed the twenty quibbles that Muff had with the record, and rebuffed every one of them. ‘Joe was sensitive about his music,’ said the A & R man. ‘He has no idea what the world is going to think and it’s a frightening experience. In the letter he says to me, “The drummer on the sessions was in and out of a mental hospital. The doctors were experimenting on him: the drumtracks on this album were derived from eight or ten mikes. I can’t help feeling you disrespect me to think I haven’t thought of this.”’

  Whatever the view from Sony, by the middle of February 1989 Earthquake Weather was completed. A rock’n’roll record, it is the work of a basic combo getting as close to the feel of 1948 as possible forty years later, with all that has been learnt since. The lyrical imagery is often very extreme and surreal, a statement of Joe’s mental frame at the time – though his warmth and innocent joy at the world still pour out of it. The album kicks off with ‘Gangsterville’, a complex song ‘about the Mafia electing the President,’ as Joe explained it. ‘Gangsterville’ is both Joe’s world and the world to which he is opposed, one that is very attractive, but also confusing, one that Joe can see both sides of – so, in one of his most deft songwriting moments, Joe turns the song on its head halfway through with a simple phrase at the beginning of a line, ‘On the other hand …’ Let’s look at the other side he’s saying. Another Joe Strummer contender for one of the best and funniest lines in rock’n’roll? It ends with a final-line message from the Luddite in Joe, the man who still wrote on a portable manual typewriter: ‘Stop writing things on screen.’ Also a hit on the album is the thundering ‘Highway One Zero Street’, a sort of West Coast treatment of a Bruce Springsteen song, another of Joe’s best tunes, with a beautifully insidious chorus melody, specifically set in Los Angeles: ‘I can’t believe I’m feeding cockroaches in the biggest jungle known to man / Right where the heart of Chinatown cuts in to old Siam.’ ‘Boogie with Your Children’ is like a musical expression of life at 37 Lancaster Road, one of Joe’s great parties; he loved Jazz a
nd Lola deeply, and wanted to celebrate these feelings for his daughters in this song. It is like a tune that Prince might have recorded; or the Clash, if Mick Jones had had his say. ‘Island Hopping’, a lilting semi-calypso, a paean to the fine art of Caribbeanstyle idling, is a sunny joy, an expression of what part of Joe seems to really want to be doing, taking off all the pressure. And on their affecting version of the Tennors’ rock steady tune ‘Ride Your Donkey’ the Lone Star Rockabilly War show they can acquit themselves well on Jamaican rhythms. Both tunes remind you that Joe is never frightened to be corny, aware of the strength of simplicity. In a similar elegiac vein to the lovely, heartfelt ‘Leopardskin Limousines’ is ‘Sleepwalk’, the album closer, the tune first worked up at the Permanent Record sessions that Gerry Harrington had been instructed by Joe to get to Frank Sinatra. With its first line of ‘Matchbooks of lonely places I’ll never find,’ it reminds me of Joe’s superstition that you must never use the last match in a matchbook: the homes of serious tobacco smokers like Jim Jarmusch had drawerfuls of matchbooks that each contained just one match.

  Over the next few months until the record was released, for most of which Joe remained in Los Angeles, Jim Jarmusch came out to the city. Hanging out with Joe, the grateful film director thanked him for the name-check on the song ‘Shouting Street’, a version of the song Bernie had wanted him to record with Paul for yet another version of the Clash, which had been played live on the Class War tour. ‘I said, “Joe, you name-checked me in the song. I’m honoured.” And he said, “I wouldn’t be too honoured. I couldn’t think of anything else to rhyme with ‘garbage’.”’

  But then Joe made one of his whimsical changes. Gerry Harrington was fired. ‘In LA I kept getting calls from promoters who’d seen the Clash at the Santa Monica Civic, and they all wanted to see Joe again. We’d get offers of $100,000 for three nights at the Universal Amphitheatre. He wouldn’t even think of it: “No man, I’m not ready. You’ve got to understand.”

  ‘He calls me to go to lunch with him at the Café LA, on Sunset Strip. Joe was never on time. I get there five minutes early; he’s already there, mulling something over. There was a mean, threatened sheepishness about him. He starts yelling. He made me the villain before I’d sat down so that he could let himself off the hook for what he was about to do. “You’re not ready for it,” he said. I replied, “Joe, I’m more ready than you are. I’m dealing with people. You’re hiding from them. I’m paving the way for you. You’re running backwards.”

  ‘I was very upset about it, devastated. The good by-product was I didn’t have to be nice to those wanker hanger-ons, guys that would bring out the worst in him because he would have a bunch of losers supposedly as his equals. Which would reduce his self-esteem.’

  What Joe had decided was to take on his landlord, Luke O’Reilly, as his manager. ‘Joe kept experimenting with different people,’ said Gaby. ‘He had taken on Gerry Harrington, and Gerry pissed him off about something. Joe fumbled around for a long time. He might have been having a crisis, age-wise.’

  Luke O’Reilly became involved with Joe’s management for around a year. I remember him backstage at Joe’s show at the Town and Country Club in autumn 1989, seeming confused by Joe’s edict that whoever wanted could come backstage. ‘Luke tried to come on board but it wasn’t successful,’ said Gaby. ‘Joe never gracefully extracted himself from the situation. It was left to a bad conversation between me and Luke.’

  ‘Joe had very silly reasons for incorporating people into his business or his life,’ said Zander Schloss. ‘One time we played in San Francisco. I had a friend who was a pot-dealer up there and had his own group, More Than Beautiful. But another band was supposed to play as support. I said, “Joe, my friend has offered to give us an ounce of the best kind of bud in order that he do the opening slot.” Joe was like, “Really?” He calls the promoter and says, “You know that first band? They’re shit. I want More Than Beautiful to be the openers.” They cancelled the first band and More Than Beautiful got the gig. These guys had only been together a couple of weeks. We got this bag brimful of beautiful crystal buds, and me and Joe split it.’

  Joe needed a video for ‘Gangsterville’, so he formed WFN – We’re Fucking Nuts – Productions, with Josh Cheuse, and the pair shot it themselves in LA, giving Sony two videos for £10,000. ‘The A & R guy was like, “What? You only need ten thousand? I’ll get the cheque right now.”’ The videos cost even less: ‘We made the two videos for almost nothing, so we could pay a Chateau Marmont hotel bill,’ said Josh. When Sony rejected Joe’s collage for the Earthquake Weather cover, Josh Cheuse photographed him, standing at sunset fully clothed on the diving-board of Luke O’Reilly’s house, Telecaster in hand, cigarette in mouth, head held high, an iconic Strummer image ironically much better known than the music inside the record it was intended to herald.

  Earthquake Weather was scheduled for release on 29 September 1989. Everything was put in place to push the record, including live dates on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Earthquake Weather didn’t do a thing,’ remembered Muff Winwood. ‘The tide had gone out for Joe when he did that record. He wasn’t a good self-promoter.’ Such a bad self-promoter in fact, that he kept a BBC film crew waiting for three days before they gave up. ‘We would have loved it to succeed,’ said Muff, ‘but it was such a failure. There was tremendous respect for the guys who’d been in the Clash. No one was thinking: “Those wankers. Let’s drop them.” Mick knew how to deal with problems in the studio. But Joe was more of a poet and artist than a musician. He didn’t really know what to do, and went into panic mode.’

  The critics were not hip to Joe’s trip. Very typical was the sniffy review of Robert Christgau, the self-styled ‘Dean of American Rock Critics’, in his column in New York’s Village Voice, into which he mystifyingly dragged Mick Jones’s ex-girlfriend:

  A man without a context, Joe digs into Americana up to his elbows, up to bebop, up to Marvin Gaye, cramming obsessions and casual interests into songs as wordy and pointless as Ellen Foley’s. Foley’s absence is a relief, but with Joe emulating Gaye and Bird – crooning and murmuring instead of screaming and spitting, cramming in the syllables – not that much of a relief. New guitar sidekick Zander Schloss does what he can to make things worse.

  Christgau gave the record a ‘C’ rating; even worse, he put a ‘Must to Avoid’ symbol next to it. BAD’s fourth album Megatop Phoenix, reviewed in the same column, got one grade better, a C Plus – by the end of the year, however, the original BAD would splinter apart, and Mick Jones would form Big Audio Dynamite 2. In London the NME was up to its usual tricks, Andrew Collins calling Joe’s big shot ‘a minefield of duff moments’, and berating his ‘penchant for weedy Latino tinkling’.

  In an interview published in Sounds on 8 October, Joe said, ‘I’m definitely not someone who’s worth worshipping. We shouldn’t really worship anybody. I mean, everyone’s fucked up … I just say to myself, It’s a good job you’re a rock’n’roller, because people expect you to be nuts and a bit flakey. But if I had to do something really proper, it’d be a disaster. I’m useless for anything except what I do – that’s what I’ve come to realize, which is no bad thing. I don’t want to put across any romantic notion that it’s a gang, or anything like that. We’re just four guys, y’know.’ Another volte-face from this former member of the Last Gang in Town.

  In London to promote Earthquake Weather, Joe would often be at Paul and Tricia’s house at 53 Oxford Gardens, 100 yards from the intersection with Ladbroke Grove. ‘Joe was the sort of person who would go off for a while on a tangent,’ said Tricia, ‘but you knew he would be coming home. The doorbell would ring one day and he’d be there.’ From their mutual friendship Tricia gained valuable insights into the relationship between the two men who had lasted the longest in the Clash. ‘Joe and Paul needed their camaraderie: they were so close because it was like a band of brothers. Joe and Paul found that in each other, that need for a sibling. Paul had a brother but they were
separated when he was ten; Joe had a brother, but they were separated by his death. I think because Mick was an only child and never had a sibling, he didn’t even begin to know about those relationships. Maybe that was something Joe and Paul found in each other, but couldn’t quite find with Mick.’

  One night at Paul and Tricia’s, Joe opened his heart to her. ‘Joe wanted to have a talk and a drink, he said. He did – all night long. We talked about so many things. I didn’t know who Iain Gillies was, who was often at Lancaster Road. I said, “Is he your brother?” He said, “I’ll tell you about my brother, and I’ll tell you this once and never again.” He said, “Look, I became a bully at boarding school. That’s how I survived. My brother wasn’t like that.” He said his brother was too soft, too weak, and that boarding school had got the better of him. Joe explained that by becoming a bully he covered himself up to the extent that no one was going to get to him. A lot of the resentment towards his parents was based on what had happened there. He felt that if his parents hadn’t packed them off to boarding school, his brother wouldn’t have died. Of course, by another extraordinary coincidence, Gaby had a brother who committed suicide. Gaby and Joe were tied in so many ways, and that was significant, I felt. The death of his brother seemed to have formed Joe into what he was, some sort of warrior: everything had to be some sort of fight or mission. He almost admitted that he had become very selfish afterwards. His brother died when Joe was at a really impressionable age, when it’s hard to get over things easily. I don’t think Joe did get over it.’

  I told Tricia of the tension coming off Joe when I had talked to him about the death of his brother; how I would walk into him on the streets and almost bounce back from the static coming off him. ‘Yes, you’d feel that he wanted to hit you. He’d walk around seething. But he was a deep thinker, and he needed his space. Sometimes he was in a chain of thought, and didn’t want to be interrupted. He needed his head-space to think. He liked to be alone. That night he talked late into the night. I was thinking, How am I going to get away from him? I want to go to bed: It’s 4 a.m. I want you to go. Sometimes you couldn’t get rid of him. I loved him, but sometimes you’d want him to leave.’