They would need that energy. CBS were demanding that the group begin to record their second album, and new songs were required. ‘That was a shock to us,’ Joe told me. ‘We had spent all year working on the songs or the sound for the first record. Once that was done we thought it was quite definitive. I remember we put it down and it was recorded, and, great, well that’s it. And then the company went, “Right, about the second LP.” And we went, “You what? Second LP?”’Cause to us we put it all on one, and really we should have split up there and then and gone like, “Up yours!”’ Moreover, the Clash were adamant that ‘Complete Control’, the latest single, would not be on the long-player. ‘That was in the days before everything was on one LP and they bang everything off it as singles,’ said Joe. ‘It was a deliberate policy on our part to try and give value for money to the fans. The B-sides were good too: “The Prisoner” was quite a good song. And “Jail Guitar Doors” [an old 101’ers song, “Lonely Mother’s Son”, with revised lyrics] and “City of the Dead”.’
On 11 November the Clash played at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. Sebastian Conran told Jeannette Lee that he was riding the 70 miles to the gig on his motorcycle. Did she want to go? ‘I said yes because I’d never been anywhere on a motorbike. It was quite scary, really. We went to see them play, and we all had rooms in the same hotel.’ Following the show most of the group’s entourage had a meal at the hotel. When some of them tried to start a food fight, Jeannette was impressed with the way that Mick Jones reprimanded them: ‘Oi! Stop throwing food around. It’s people like our mums who have to clean it up.’ ‘I thought, “God, that’s so true.”’ Joe started flirting with her; although nothing sexual happened between them that night, she and Joe and others sat up all night talking, until the morning. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said to her. ‘I thought, “What for? How weird.”’ ‘Nothing happened,’ she said, ‘except that it was obvious something was going to happen.’ On her return to London Don Letts sensed that something had occurred between her and Joe; this exacerbated difficulties in their relationship that were already present. ‘Don was not pleased, he didn’t know what about, but he knew that something was going on. As a result of this we ended up having a really big falling out.’ Who was there with a shoulder for Jeannette to lean on? Joe Strummer, of course. ‘Conveniently Joe was there to see me through in my hour of need after I’d broken up with my boyfriend. That was very complicated because the three of us were mates. It caused a lot of ruckus. It wasn’t very nice, to be honest. All I can say is that we were kids. At that age you split up with people and go off with other people.’ ‘When he nicked my girlfriend,’ said Don Letts, ‘we never spoke for a year or so.’
As far as Joe was concerned, however, it was on with the show. The Clash Get Out of Control tour consisted of twenty-two gigs in twenty-five days, extremely hard work. With no time to rest his voice, Joe’s vocal performances were sometimes reduced to a hoarse grunt, which, oddly, audiences seemed to find attractive, as though this was further evidence of Joe’s humanity. The more difficulties Joe was experiencing onstage, the more audiences warmed to him. This was also true during those times onstage when the songs’ tempos would struggle to coalesce, as they frequently did about two-thirds of the way through, before they reached the finale. Especially at this stage in the group’s career the Clash could be really quite rough in live performance, as though held together with cheap glue – although no doubt in Mick Jones’s conceptual subconscious he was appreciating the comparisons with the Rolling Stones (in the days before their slick stadium performances) and the Faces, both of whom had been similarly erratic, shambolic and even useless onstage. That was why each Clash gig was so brilliant, because every show was individual and unique, almost a literal struggle for survival. But within a year the concerts would no longer be so concentrated and the Clash would attempt to never play more than three consecutive nights on the road. From then Joe Strummer would spend much of the day before a performance whispering, or speaking in brief sentences; he would complain about the spliff smoke in the group’s vehicle – though it never stopped him from smoking those joints. When they reached a new town, Joe would disappear on a lengthy walk. ‘You’d be amazed by how many problems you can sort out on a five-mile walk,’ he once said to me. While Joe was touring he would often appear to be extremely reticent, but in fact this was simply self-control – he was ensuring that he would be able to perform that night in his slightly odd but extremely addictive style of shouting-singing.
The celebrated American rock critic Lester Bangs – to whom, at Joe’s instigation, Joe Stevens had personally delivered a copy of the first album at his home in New York – accompanied the group on the road on this tour, writing a three-part article in the NME. Bangs was stymied in his efforts to spend time with Joe, as the singer spent part of the time on the tour suffering from toothache and what seemed like a flu virus, finally diagnosed as glandular fever. But he noted Joe’s ‘pure outside-of-self frenzy’. ‘Serious without being solemn, quiet without being remote or haughty, Strummer offers a distinct contrast to Mick’s voluble wit and twinkle of the eye, and Paul’s loony-toon playfulness. He is almost certainly the group’s soul, and I wish I could say I had gotten to know him better.’ When Lester Bangs told Bernie Rhodes how much he liked Mick Jones, the manager replied, ‘Mick is my biggest problem.’
Although there were further dates in the middle of December, the final show of this section of the tour was on 15 November, at the Elizabethan Ballroom, Belle Vue, in Manchester, which was filmed by Granada TV for its show So It Goes. ‘Here we are, on TV. What does it mean to me? What does it mean to you? FUCK ALL!’ Joe extemporised during ‘What’s My Name’. CBS wanted a hit in the US and a producer who understood the American market, so Joe, when he introduced ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’, dedicated it to ‘Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, Journey, and most of all, Blue Oyster Cult!’. For in the audience was a man who had travelled from New York to Manchester to see them perform – Sandy Pearlman, manager and producer of Blue Oyster Cult and the prospective producer for the Clash’s second album. ‘Once,’ said Joe, ‘I found Bernie listening to Blue Oyster Cult in his car, which in those punk puritan times was a major crime: “Bernie, are you feeling all right? Blue Oyster Cult?” And he said, “I’m checking out Sandy Pearlman.”’
Following this show Joe would have some time for his voice and health to recuperate. In the second half of November Bernie Rhodes dispatched Joe and Mick Jones to Kingston, Jamaica, for ten days. This was no holiday: the pair were intended to write songs for the second album. Paul Simonon, more a fan of Jamaican music than the two songwriters, was furious and upset at not being invited: as consolation, he went to Moscow and Leningrad with Caroline Coon.
In 1977 Jamaica was riven by an undeclared civil war between the socialist People’s National Party of Prime Minister Michael Manley and Edward Seaga’s right-wing Jamaica Labour Party. Joe and Mick were booked into the Pegasus Hotel, in New Kingston, a couple of hundred yards down the road from the Sheraton, the more groovy music-business location. On arrival they tried to contact Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, but failed dismally. Several times they went to the cinema. ‘It was like The Harder They Come not on the screen but in the audience,’ said Joe. ‘I don’t know how we weren’t filleted and served up on a bed of chips. Me and Mick wandered around the harbour; I think they mistook us for sailors, merchant seamen, because we were walking around Kingston dressed up in our full punk regalia – they must have just let us pass because they probably thought we were madmen or something. But me and Mick didn’t have a clue what we were doing there. We didn’t know anybody – we were just wandering around in Kingston like lunatics.’
‘We went for a swim at our hotel,’ said Mick. ‘It started raining, and the two of us were in the pool. It was something we’d never experienced before: it was so hot, and we were swimming, but it was raining. I’ll always remember that. When we were walking through the streets to the movies, Joe told me J
amaica was just like the places he was when he was young. “This is just like it was when I was a kid,” he said. In those days you could still really feel the colonial presence.’
With some difficulty – they were ripped off on their first couple of attempts by the supposed dealers simply running off with their money – they scored a large bag of lamb’s-breath ganja, and retreated to their hotel rooms to write songs, the edgy impressions of their Jamaican trip contained in Joe’s lyrics for one of the Clash’s finest, most rousing songs, ‘Safe European Home’: ‘I went to the place / where every white face / is an invitation to robbery.’ But when he declared his intention to never return, this did cause some confusion. I heard Don Letts – now again speaking to him – pick Joe up on this a year later in the dressing-room at London’s Lyceum, where the Clash had played some Christmas shows. ‘Yeah, but I didn’t mean it,’ said the everpragmatic Joe Strummer. Apart from the lyrics, although certainly not the rhythm, of the great ‘Safe European Home’ – which Joe later said ‘I’d put alongside anything the Clash or anyone else has recorded’ – there was little evidence on the new album of any Jamaican influence (Joe’s lyrics for the song were originally some fifty lines long, shortened to sixteen by the time the song was recorded.)
As though explaining the song, Joe sent a postcard to Jeannette Lee from Jamaica, confessing that he found Kingston frightening. ‘I hope that Jamaica doesn’t get filled with punks going down there, like Morocco was filled with hippies,’ Mick said to me when he returned. Less than three months later I went to Jamaica. When I returned Joe asked me if I’d brought any weed back with me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Chicken!’ Joe jeered. ‘I brought back a compressed ounce in each of my brothel-creepers.’
Back in London the Clash concluded the year with a triumphant return to the Rainbow, where they played a three-night sold-out stint on 13, 14 and 15 December. Joe and Mick went to a Christmas party at the Chelsea home of Francesca Thyssen, the daughter of a multimillionaire German steel baron who had allegedly assisted the economy of the Third Reich. Francesca was living with Philip Rambow; Rambow, a Canadian, was the former singer with the Winkies, a hip pre-punk group Mick Jones had rated. He was starting a solo career, and Mick met his managers, Peter Jenner and Andrew King. That evening Phil Rambow introduced Joe to a girl called Gaby Salter – they spoke briefly, as they did again at a Ramones concert a little later.
Then the Clash concluded 1977 with a live date in Belfast on 20 December. For a group who had not even had a recording deal twelve months previously, it was an extraordinary triumph, a success story unparalleled in British rock’n’roll. Yet it is worth remembering that most music fans and the music business still hated the very notion of the Clash, partly because they were in the slipstream of the flak thrown the way of the Sex Pistols in this year of disloyal cultural insurrection, and also because the Establishment stuck to their guns in insisting that the group ‘couldn’t play’. This last view missed the point: the supposed amateurishness of punk, with all its implied democracy, had been cunningly manipulated by the leading players to their advantage. Within a month the Pistols were no more, imploding on tour in America, leaving Joe Strummer as the unrivalled King of Punk.
13
THE ALL-NIGHT DRUG-PROWLING WOLF
1977–1979
During the time that Joe Strummer and Jeannette Lee were together, he drank plenty of beer, but the only drug that interested him was hash. ‘He smoked all the time,’ she remembered, ‘but he didn’t like cocaine, he didn’t like speed. He said they made him really depressed. Joe was very depressive. He was quite disapproving of people that did cocaine.’ There was an anti-cocaine party line in the Clash, who took a moral high ground about the drug. ‘I think there was a bit of a superior thing going on: “I don’t do that time-wasting rubbish,”’ said Jeannette. Which made it difficult to reconcile with Mick Jones developing a taste for coke. My personal opinion was that Mick – who had always been enamoured with the pop-art aesthetic of the likes of Keith Richards – simply employed the ingestion of cocaine as part of his conceptual trappings of being a rock star: snorting coke was just another part of the uniform. But such an explanation would cut no ice with Joe Strummer. ‘He was really disapproving,’ said Jeannette. ‘I was surprised in the last few years to learn that he was living that kind of lifestyle. But he always drank lots; I always seemed to be sitting in pubs with him and people like Mickey Foote, with Joe holding court, always about this close to being a melancholic, depressive drunk.
‘There was a struggle going on between the pressure of being a great musical artist and doing the right thing according to the code of the Clash philosophy, and his ego. Joe had a much bigger ego than people realized, unless they knew him well. But there was a dark side, involving his depression. I think that was always there.’
Joe’s antidote to what Winston Churchill would refer to as his ‘black dog’ was to keep working. In January the Clash had a visitor to Rehearsals. ‘Sandy [Pearlman] came into our rehearsal to listen to the new tunes we were doing,’ Joe recalled to me. ‘And he said, “You can’t do this! It’s sub-zero temperatures.” And we’re all rehearsing in three overcoats each, and my breath was like a fog of white frost when I was singing, because there wasn’t any heating – it was a large space to heat anyway. It was Sandy who first told me that it was bad for the voice to sing in sub-zero temperatures. We moved to another rehearsal room because it was such a cold winter.’
On 17 February 1978 a new single was released: ‘Clash City Rockers’, with Joe at his most John Lennon-like on vocals. The most self-referential of all the songs by the Clash, it cemented the image of themselves as a leather-jacketed gang, kicking off the mythology that was to come. Except that this was incorrect. ‘I was talking about rockers,’ said Joe, ‘which is a certain reggae rhythm, not about people who are rockers at all. It goes, “I want to move the town to the Clash city rockers,” meaning to the sound of the Clash. It doesn’t make sense if you think it’s about people in leather jackets. It was one of those things where it is obvious to you and you don’t realize it’s not obvious to anyone else.’ Joe’s lyrics are out to motivate anyone ready to listen; he wants to ‘burn down the suburbs with the half-closed eyes / You won’t succeed unless you try’. It was a great record, a follow-up to ‘Complete Control’ that urged you to do it yourself, open your head and listen. Unfortunately when Mick Jones did listen to the group’s new single he detected something awry, something that made a mockery of the missile salvo against CBS on ‘Complete Control’. While Mick and Joe had been in Jamaica, Bernie Rhodes had decided the single was minimally too slow. He had asked Mickey Foote to speed it up by – as Foote put it – ‘about one and a half per cent’. Mick Jones was furious: Mickey Foote never worked for the Clash again in any record-producing function.
Joe, however, was not around to promote the single. He was in hospital. At the end of January, following a low-key gig in Birmingham and at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry – where Sandy Pearlman was punched out by Mick’s close school-friend Robin Crocker when he entered the group’s dressing-room – Joe had been diagnosed as suffering from hepatitis, a serious infection that inflames the liver. ‘He was pretty ill when it started,’ said Jeannette Lee. ‘He was completely yellow: the whites of his eyes were yellow, and it affected his glands – they were swollen. He felt really ill. Because he’d changed colour it was obvious it wasn’t flu. The first I knew was when I got a phone-call from him saying, “I’m in hospital. Can you come and see me, and bring me some things?”’
Joe was in an isolation hospital off North End Road, in Fulham each patient allocated their own glass-walled cubicle. Shortly after Joe was admitted, he was lying in bed when he heard a Clash song sailing through the glass. Investigating, he discovered that a cassette machine was being played in the next room by its occupant, a member of the Adverts, a punk group that had had a couple of hits. When Jeannette arrived to see him, she was accompanied by Rocco, a photographer friend
. ‘Joe said to Rocco,’ remembered Jeannette, ‘“Rocco, go into the kitchen in the basement in Albany Street, and on top of the kitchen cupboard” – he knew every single place: that was the weird thing – “on the left, under the sink on the right, round the corner here and there, there’s bottles of piss.” Everywhere there were bottles of piss. He’d come in really late at night, piss in a milk bottle, and put it up on the top of a cupboard. It was all part of this disrespect for this house they were living in that was obviously very posh. What made me laugh was that he knew where every bottle of piss was. He must have had some conscience about it – it was really infectious. Rocco had to go back to the house, and find all the piss and destroy it.’
Jeannette also debunked the myth of how Joe caught his hepatitis. ‘Let’s put it this way: I don’t think he got it from people spitting in his mouth.’ The stock explanation for Joe’s having caught hepatitis, one that he fostered, was that infected appreciative spit had gone down his throat on the last tour. But Mick Jones told me at the time that Joe had caught the illness by injecting himself with a dirty needle. He told me this not in a gossipy way but because he was pissed off with Joe about it – although Mick didn’t mention this, Joe’s almost metaphysical fall made a mockery of the stones of criticism hurled Mick’s way for having spent some of his publishing advance on cocaine. Jeannette confirmed that Joe had shot up drugs with Keith Levene; whether it was heroin or speed she was not certain, although Mick certainly had implied that it was heroin. Joe’s future girlfriend, Gaby Salter, insisted to me that it was speed. Jeannette emphasized that as far as she understood this was a one-off event for Joe: he did it because he wanted to discover what the experience of injecting himself was like. ‘He had been hanging out with Keith Levene and a bunch of people one night, in a spirit of let’s-try-everything-once. It wasn’t more sinister than that. He was a bit sheepish about it.’
Redemption Song Page 24