Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  In addition to the tensions between the key players over the recording, the low-key but ever-present crisis caused by the extra-curricular interests of Topper Headon came to a head. Flying into London at Heathrow airport, Topper was arrested for possession of heroin. On 17 December he appeared at Uxbridge magistrates’ court. After his barrister had said in mitigation that he had recently been voted one of the world’s top five drummers, the magistrate admonished Topper with the words ‘unless you accept treatment, you will be the best drummer in the graveyard’. On the proviso that he would undergo treatment for his drug problems, Topper Headon was fined only £500. Later he told me, ‘My girlfriend Donna had rung me up – she was ill, because there was a drought in London. I said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’ll bring you a bit back.” I was going to fly to London, give her a couple of grammes and fly back. I used it on the plane, and when I got to Heathrow and went to collect my bag, they picked me up straight away. “Who grassed me up?” “You watched your luggage go round three times before you recognized it.”’

  Topper was dispatched by Bernie Rhodes and Kosmo Vinyl to attend addiction therapy as an in-patient at the Priory in Roehampton in south-west London. Not only was Topper’s health in jeopardy, but also an imminent Japanese tour hung in the balance – after Topper’s bust the entire group came within a hair’s breadth of having their work permits rescinded.

  Topper’s drug bust did not prevent him almost immediately returning to New York to work on the new record, and in Manhattan he returned straight away to his druggie ways. But he was in good enough shape on 30 December when work began on a song called ‘Straight to Hell’: this evolved not out of a Joe lyric, but a Mick Jones guitar doodle, to which Topper laid down a bossa nova beat. An epic ballad, ‘Straight to Hell’ would become one of the archetypal Clash tunes – one of the group’s greatest ever songs, in fact – from this last period of Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon working together. ‘Just before the take,’ said Joe, ‘Topper said to me, “I want you to play this,” and he handed me an R White’s lemonade bottle wrapped in a towel. He said, “I want you to beat the front of the bass drum with it.” On the record you hear me standing in front of this bass drum swinging this towel, with this large lemonade bottle in it, whacking the front of the bass drum while the others record the backing track.’

  The group were staying at the Iroquois Hotel, on West 44th Street. It was where James Dean had lived, somewhere on the top two floors: Joe changed rooms every couple of days to ensure he would have slept in the same room as the inspirational Method actor. Back in his room at the hotel after the ‘Straight to Hell’ backing track had been laid down, Joe sat at his typewriter to provide the words for the new songs: ‘It was New Year’s Eve. I’d written the lyric staying up all night at the Iroquois. I went down Electric Lady and I just put the vocal down on tape. We finished at about twenty to midnight. We took the E train from the village up to Times Square, because the Iroquois was off Times Square. I’ll never forget coming out of the Times Square subway exit, just before midnight, into a hundred billion people, and I knew we had just done something really great.’

  For the success of the entire album Topper Headon was able to provide his Clash pièce de resistance at Electric Lady – ‘Rock the Casbah’, for which he wrote the music entirely himself. ‘Whatever my faults, I was always the first at rehearsals,’ Topper said to me. ‘I went to Electric Lady and there was no one there, and I just recorded it onto an old ghetto-blaster. The others turned up and I said, “Listen. I’ve just written this song.” They said, “Leave it as it is.” I said, “We can’t. There’s only two verses and a middle bit – there should be four verses.” So they just spliced the tape and doubled the length of the song. Joe wrote the lyrics and then sang on it. He just went into the toilet or somewhere, lay down, wrote it all out – it only took him about an hour. Joe said later, “That’s when I realized the true genius of Topper Headon.”’

  ‘I saw it with my own eyes – Topper Headon’s great talent,’ Joe told Gavin Martin in 1999. ‘I swear in twenty minutes he’d laid down the whole thing: bass, drums, piano. He laid them all himself. It took other people by surprise. Jonesy really wasn’t into that tune when we released it as a single. We had to persuade him a bit. I think he thought it was a bit comedic.’

  In fact, Joe already had the first line of the song written. ‘We found that whenever we played a tune on the Combat Rock sessions,’ he said, ‘it would be six minutes minimum. After a few days of this, Bernie came down the studio, and I think he heard Sean Flynn and he said, “Does everything have to be as long as a raga?” From then on we called everything we did ragas. I got back to the Iroquois Hotel that night and wrote on the typewriter, “The king told the boogie men you got to let that raga drop.” I looked at it and for some reason I started to think about what someone had told me earlier, that you got lashed for owning a disco album in Iran. So I transferred it from Bernie to these religious leaders who tried to stop people listening to music.’

  In the studio Topper’s hard drug use continued unabated. An occasional visitor to the studio was Jo-Anne Henry, a sixteen-year-old local black schoolgirl. Noticeable at a Bond’s matinée because of the step-stool she had brought with her to get a clear view of the group, she had been led backstage by Raymond Jordan. Joe had been fascinated by her experiences as a black New York girl into the Clash. Hearing that the group were recording at Electric Lady at the end of the year, Jo-Anne came to the studio most days after school and became part of the Clash entourage in New York City. She remembered when Joe and Allen Ginsberg were writing the lyrics to ‘Ghetto Defendant’: ‘Somebody walked in with a tray of coke, with lines on it. Joe looked at the coke and at me, and then at the person who brought it in, and said, “You know, you guys can’t do that in here. You’ve got to take it somewhere else. Do it elsewhere.”’

  (Years later, at his farm in Somerset, Joe and I were talking about the necessity to hide drugs from kids. I said to him, ‘There are people who say you mustn’t be a hypocrite with children about drugs.’ ‘You have to be a hypocrite with kids about drugs,’ he replied. ‘It’s too confusing for them otherwise, to be able to differentiate between the different types.’)

  ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, a song written almost entirely by Mick Jones, assumed to be about his relationship with Ellen Foley, would ultimately become the biggest-selling Clash single ever: an international hit when it was first released off the album in 1982, it sold a further million copies in Britain when re-released in 1991 after it was used in a Levi’s jeans TV advertisement. Loosely based on the melody of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ ‘Little Latin Lupe Lu’, the song naturally can be taken as a measure of prescience about Mick’s future with the group – although that would hardly take into account the original sexy words that ran ‘around the front or on your back’, which were ultimately changed to ‘If you want me off your back’, an attempt to ensure US radio airplay. ‘It wasn’t about anybody specific,’ said Mick, ‘and it wasn’t pre-empting my leaving the Clash. It was just a good rockin’ song, our attempt at writing a classic.’ But Joe certainly read it as a statement of Mick’s potential longevity with the Clash – according to Paul Simonon, the Clash’s principal songwriters were hardly speaking when the tune was recorded. In Joe’s archive was found a satirical version of the lyrics that he had typed out, apparently in the character of Mick: ‘I always whinge, whinge, whinge when the crew go on a binge.’ When these alternative words to the song were mentioned to Mick in 2004, he was highly amused. This customized version shows that even early in 1982 Joe was mulling over a plan to redirect the Clash onto a path he found more palatable. (‘Even back in 1978 when we were going out,’ Jeanette Lee told me, ‘Joe was saying he’d like to get rid of Mick.’)

  By chance Joe Ely ran into Mick and Joe in New York when they were recording ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’. Arbitrarily Joe had decided that his section of the tune should be in Spanis
h. ‘Strummer said, “Hey, help me with my Spanish.” So me and Strummer and the Puerto Rican engineer [Eddie Garcia, who was in fact Ecuadorian] sat down and translated the lyrics into the weirdest Spanish ever.

  ‘When you listen to “Should I Stay or Should I Go” there’s a place in the song where Mick says, “Split,”’ Joe Ely recalled. ‘Me and Strummer had been yelling out the Spanish background lyrics and we had snuck up behind him as he was recording. We were behind a curtain, jumped out at him in the middle of singing, and scared the shit out of him. He looks over and gives us the dirtiest look and says, “Split!” They kept that in the final version.’ The mix of the song featured on the original ‘Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg’ introduced Joe’s Spanish sections early in the song.

  A beautiful protest ballad, ‘Ghetto Defendant’ was Joe’s expression of a commonly voiced conspiracy theory of the time – that heroin was encouraged to flourish in the ghettos as an anaesthetic: ‘It’s heroin pity not tear gas nor baton charge / That stops you taking the city.’ Isn’t it easy to feel that Topper’s plight was not far from Joe’s mind?

  You’re the greatest poet in America, Ginsberg: give me a word. (Bob Gruen)

  At the group’s invitation, Allen Ginsberg flew in from Boulder, Colorado, and joined them in the studio. ‘You’re the greatest poet in America. Can you improve on these lyrics?’ Joe asked him. On the spot Allen Ginsberg wrote some lyrics for himself to recite on the record, including a litany of worldwide trouble-spots: Guatemala, Honduras, Poland, El Salvador, Afghanistan. He also name-checked Arthur Rimbaud, his own favourite poet, a man to whom Joe bore a distinct visual resemblance. ‘Ginsberg wrote his own bit to “Ghetto Defendant”, but he had to ask us what were the names of punk dances,’ remembered Joe, ‘and I said, “Well, you got your slam-dance.” He just did it on the spot. It was good.’

  ‘He wanted to get the Clash to back him on a record he was going to make, but he ended up on our record instead,’ said Kosmo. ‘People have said that he was Joe’s lyric coach on that record, but I think that’s a bit overplayed.’ ‘I asked Ginsberg for a word once,’ said Joe. ‘But it was just one word.’ In fact, Ginsberg remained in the studio for another week, collaborating with Joe not only on further lyrics but also in providing backing vocals as The Voice of God.

  For the third Clash album in a row, Paul Simonon took lead vocals, this time on ‘Red Angel Dragnet’, inspired by a topical local story: on New Year’s Day 1982 Frankie Melvin, one of the redbereted Guardian Angels, a voluntary alternative police force organized by Curtis Sliwa out of his home in the Bronx, had been shot dead by a cop in New Jersey. ‘It was in the papers at the time,’ said Joe. ‘The shooting of Frankie Melvin – it was a big scene. For some reason, back at the hotel I’d run out of writing paper and I only had Iroquois envelopes. I wrote the lyric down the middle of the envelope and it started to flow, so I continued to write the lyric round the edge of the envelope, in a spiral. I ended up writing round the edge of the envelope three times. The next day, I said, “Look, Paul, what do you think of these lyrics?” I remember him moving the envelope around and around, to read the lyrics. He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye, thinking, Has Joe flipped?’ The song makes reference to Travis Bickle, the Robert de Niro character in Taxi Driver ; Kosmo Vinyl delivers the Travis rap, ‘Someday somebody will come and wash away all the scum …’, and at the end of the song also provides Travis’s ‘One of these days I’m gonna get myself organized’ line.

  These were the big set-piece songs for the new record. The other tunes were also strong: ‘Inoculated City’; ‘Atom Tan’; ‘Car Jamming’; ‘Overpowered by Funk’, which featured a rap from Futura 2000 and Tymon Dogg – who was again in New York – playing piano; the wide-screen ‘Death Is a Star’, the final song on the new album, featured the lines ‘Make a grown man cry like a girl / To see the guns dying at sunset.’ (‘It’s about the way we all queue up at the cinema to see someone get killed. These days, the public execution is the celluloid execution. I was examining why I want to go and see these movies, because deep in my heart I want to see a man pull out a machine gun and go blam, blam, blam into somebody’s body,’ Joe explained).

  Topper was amazed at the production line that Strummer–Jones (Why not alphabetical? Mick: ‘It sounds better, Rodgers and Hammerstein is like that.’) became: ‘When you look at all the vinyl we released in five years: an album a year, one a double, one a triple, we didn’t even take Christmas off. Joe said that there were only so many songs he could sing and write. He’d written himself dry. Every time we came up with a song Joe had to write lyrics for it.’

  There were more songs: ‘Cool Confusion’, ‘First Night Back in London’, ‘The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too’, ‘Kill Time’ and ‘Walk Evil Talk’, a spacey piano-based free-jazz mood piece. Mick again wanted to use them all on a two-disc set, but Joe was insistent it be a single album: he had discovered that in New York record stores Sandinista! was essentially unavailable, having gone out on an abortive mission to buy a copy for Eddie Garcia. When Mick Jones presented the group with what he considered to be the final tapes at the end of January, the guitarist’s vision of the fifth Clash studio album ran for sixty-five minutes and contained seventeen songs. Joe refused to accept the record, saying it was a ‘home movie mix’. ‘Mick, I don’t think you can produce,’ he told his songwriting partner. ‘You bastard. I thought you were my friend,’ came the reply, according to Joe.

  Although Don Letts was not present in Electric Lady, his long experience of working with both Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, in film and later in music, gave him a unique insight into the way they interacted creatively: ‘Mick was the sugar on the pill. People don’t like it too hard and direct, they like the pill to be sweetened. Mick contemporized Joe’s eternal message. Mick was the melody man, the music man, and he would keep it contemporary. Joe reminds me of those guys that were on horses when everyone else was still riding around in cars, and I found that an admirable quality, but it was Mick that dragged it forward. The things that Joe says are things that have always needed to be said, but you have to say it in a way that’s going to entertain the people. So I think Mick was a crucial foil to Joe. Because if Joe was doing those lyrics without that music, I think people would have turned off. Mick can come up with a melody faster than anyone I’ve ever seen in my life, but I guess Joe would have been quite instrumental in squashing some of what he later called “Mick’s Radio 2 tendencies” and making them harder.’

  ‘I don’t remember the vibe at Electric Lady being overbearingly intense,’ recalled Kosmo. ‘I really wanted a single record, because I firmly believed that a great group had to be able to do that. Everyone already knew that “Straight to Hell” and “Rock the Casbah” were great. But Joe could always be swayed; he could understand where people were coming from. He never had a problem seeing the other person’s point of view, to his disadvantage sometimes.’

  The new record was still a work-in-progress, and therefore would break the delivery date of the end of January 1982. But there was no time for debate: Joe and Mick had to run from a mixing-session at Electric Lady to a car to take them to a flight to Tokyo for their Far Eastern tour, due to begin in the Japanese capital on 24 January. ‘Me, Mick and Joe went from New York to Japan,’ said Kosmo. ‘We got to JFK fifteen minutes before the flight, getting on the plane as the doors were closing, by the skin of our teeth. They thought it was hilarious.’ The others went on the same flight from London.

  On the way from New York, Mick and Joe took a vow not to behave in Japan in the colonial manner of so many Western music acts – specifically, they would not treat Japanese females as geisha girls. They settled back and enjoyed the long flight, their repose assisted by the relaxing hash-cakes they had ingested as the plane took off. Yet it was a surprise that the reception at Tokyo airport approached Beatlemania, fans thrusting gifts into their hands as they stepped out of the customs hall. ‘We were treated like part-time Western gods. It was a bit f
rightening,’ said Joe.

  RAT PATROL OVER SOUTH-EAST ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA – Joe’s personal map of the 1982 tour. (Lucinda Mellor)

  Mick’s first significant memory of arriving in Tokyo was of himself and Joe standing in the lobby of their hotel, asking their agent for the weed that they had expected on arrival. The agent’s reply was that he didn’t have any, that in the entire country of Japan, with its stringent and punitive drug laws, there was no marijuana to be found. Mick and Joe simultaneously burst into tears in the hotel lobby, prompting the agent to also start crying, in sympathy and shame at his failure to come up with the goods; he volunteered to personally take the next flight to Thailand to score weed for the group. They told him not to bother, and – probably for the first time – became a virtually spliffless operation for the eight days they toured the country. Joe received several letters from Japanese fans, among them one that began: ‘Hello Joe, how are you? I hope you are alright. I was very worried to see you crying in your hotel …’ (Mick and Joe did discover the name of a club where they could buy weed. Having made the connection, doors were locked and they were directed into a minute room, but the entire amount available wasn’t enough to make the tiniest doobie. ‘Is this all you’ve got?’ snapped a frustrated Joe.)

  Aside from the humour of this vignette, the response of the two Clash members to their agent’s bad news tells a more serious story of the extent to which their nervous systems were frazzled by the exhaustion of their work – not only on the new album, but in general. The relentless upward drive of the last five and a half years was catching up with them, with a vengeance. This was a time when it was paramount to stay extremely clear-sighted indeed. But the collective vision was growing increasingly muddy.