So isolated was Joe that during the course of their time in Nicaragua Dick Rude would be astonished at his refusal to get in touch with Gaby and the girls in London. ‘It used to blow my mind. I would say, “Did you talk to Gaby?” He’d say, “No.” I’d say, “Why not? Aren’t you interested how your wife and kids are?” He would say, “She’ll call me.” But it was not because he didn’t care. He cared so much it hurt. I’m sure that’s the same as he was towards the Clash. “I can’t talk to you right now. I can’t talk about this. I can’t deal with this. I just need to walk away from it. If it means I have to get drunk off my ass to not think about it, then that’s what it’s going to take.”’
What really had happened in Joe Strummer’s life was something that often comes as a surprise to people when they grow older: he had fallen in love. At a party for Sid and Nancy during the New York Film Festival in October 1986 at the Milk Bar on Houston and Broadway, he had been introduced to a twenty-year-old drama student called Danielle von Zerneck. She had just finished playing the part of Donna, the girlfriend of the singer Ritchie Valens, in the well-received Valens biopic La Bamba. As Gaby was, Danielle was blonde and beautiful. She had grown up in Los Angeles, where her mother owned a bookstore, in which Joe had been known to peruse, while her father was a film producer. The day after the party Danielle met Joe in the same bar, and Joe went home to Danielle’s brownstone apartment on 13th Street in the West Village. ‘We probably both thought it would be a one-night stand, and I don’t know why it wasn’t. I’d go to classes every day, and he’d be there at night when I got back. He stayed there. He’d just dump his clothes on the bed. We’d sometimes be with Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver and Bob Gruen. Joe was polite and gracious and gentlemanly. He enjoyed being like that, displaying what he had learnt in his father’s diplomatic life.’
Joe went back to London and a fortnight later came back to stay with Danielle for another two weeks. ‘I never asked him to leave Gaby, who I subsequently met and think is really great. I was really young and quite comfortable with his situation. I didn’t want to settle down. After those two weeks he went home. He said he’d come back. Then his mother died. Jim and Sara told me how devastated he was. Because of it he decided he must put his life back together with Gaby and the girls. So he never called.’
In the house that he shared with Joe in Granada, Dick Rude inadvertently made a serious faux pas one night, crossing a line with Joe that he hadn’t even realized existed. On his guitar Dick had written a song, which he told Joe he wanted to play to him. ‘I said, “You gotta hear this.” It was called “The Ballad of John Mellor” and it went something like: Once there was a man called John Mellor / Then he changed his name to Joe Strummer.
‘He did not like that song, man. He turned to me and scowled. When he looked at you the wrong way, it was one hundred per cent. He scowled and shot daggers at me, and said, in that voice, “Don’t you ever play that song again!” He meant it. I knew I had pushed a button, and I knew then that he did not want to be reminded of who he was and where he was from, of anything outside of having the experience of being there and acting in this movie.’
Zander Schloss, who was also in the film, noted: ‘When you would see early footage of the Clash, you would see this kind of small man, but his aura was huge. It made him look like a giant. But at the time of Straight to Hell and Walker, it was as if his aura had crumbled in on him, and he was hunched over, and would look up and look back down and was very reserved and controlled about what he would say. There was this bubbling undercurrent that would never really surface.’
Whatever his frame of mind, Joe’s improvisatory skills seemed undiminished, as the director noted. ‘In one scene Joe had to walk past a group of bare-breasted women doing their laundry, and it was Strummer who put in the line, “I think some of us should go in the water and get them.” It was his idea.’
As was often the case with Joe, he had his own agenda: to write the soundtrack music for the film. ‘Joe manipulated that situation in a very nice way,’ said Alex Cox, whose plan was for Joe to work on the soundtrack with Nicaraguan musicians. But Joe said, ‘I’ve been thinking. The music for Sid and Nancy and Straight to Hell is a bit of a mishmash because you’ve got so many bands. It would be better if the music for Walker is all written by one person.’
‘I said only if it was as good as the soundtrack for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. He said, “All right then.” We stayed in Nicaragua for a few weeks. He composed most of the score there. Then we went to San Francisco and recorded the music there and did the mix.’
Before Joe could begin to install himself full time in the recording of the Walker soundtrack, he returned briefly to London to publicize the release of Straight to Hell. The finished film that had emerged out of the four weeks in Almeria was baffling. It held your attention as a cultural curio – appearances of its various musical and cinematic icons ensured that. But it was not a good film, and was critically savaged.
I saw Joe a few times while he was back in London. I interviewed him for the BBC Radio One programme hosted by Andy Kershaw, who had been Leeds University social secretary in 1980. Joe threw in a memorable line, ‘Straight to Hell is like good cheese: it improves with age.’ Then we left. Joe needed to get up to the Dome, a bar in Hampstead where he was to be interviewed for a television programme. He asked me to come along. We bought a couple of cans of beer each and caught a tube. On a packed Northern Line tube train up to Hampstead, both of us standing, swigging on our beers in the rush-hour, Joe seemed to be recognized though not acknowledged. I saw him again the next week, at the launch party for the film, held at a dancehall on Tottenham Court Road. It was 11 June 1987, election day. As though proof of that old adage that the better the party, the worse the film, the Straight to Hell launch was fantastic: every groover in London had been invited and there was endless free drink. Joe was there with Gaby. At one moment, quite late, I saw him and Mick Jones deep in conversation, their mouths turning down in disdain at something. ‘What’s up?’ I asked. ‘The election results have started to come in,’ said Joe. ‘We’ve lost,’ grimaced Mick decisively, as we braced ourselves for another term of Conservative Party rule under Margaret Thatcher. I saw Joe with Frank Murray, manager of the Pogues: ‘Frank really wanted to manage Joe,’ Gaby explained, ‘but Joe wouldn’t go for it.’ Eventually we all staggered off to a bar, ending up back at Joe’s house, eating toast, smoking spliffs and drinking even more as the sound of people going to work sailed into the house from the street. As photographer Bob Gruen would say: ‘When you go out with Joe for the evening, make sure you take your sunglasses. Because you’ll need them when the sun comes up.’
Then Joe Strummer went to San Francisco, continuing his battle to save his soul through his own creativity.
The film production company had booked time for Joe at Russian Hill Recordings, high above San Francisco. At Russian Hill Sam Lehmer was the resident engineer; Sam’s introduction to Joe Strummer was not the most conventional. ‘Joe came by the first day. He had been out drinking with Alex the night before. He was completely wasted. He brought in a boom-box, sat it down on the recording consul and said: “Right, listen to this. This is what we’re going to do today.” On the b-box were strummed sketches of a song. “Right, let’s try to do this. You guys try to work something up. I’ll be back in an hour or two.” He went off to get some breakfast at 3 in the afternoon.’
Sam Lehmer remembered how Joe got back on course during the recording. ‘He got completely back to normal. He had something to focus on. It was productive. Joe was a pretty private guy. He was hard to read; he didn’t share a lot of what was going on inside. He liked to fool people. He liked to keep you off balance and not know whether he was telling you the straight story or not. You had to guess.’
Joe’s disappearing for breakfast on the first day marked the almost Warhol-like way in which he approached the entire record, leaving the musicians and studio staff to work on ideas he had given them before
returning to hear the results. His vision was that the soundtrack would incorporate native Nicaraguan sounds along with American hillbilly music of the 1850s. Despite his hangover, he had been on time for his meeting on the first day, as he would be every day for the five weeks it took to make the record, when there was a 10 a.m. start. ‘Joe knew what he wanted. There was no doubt about that,’ said Sam Lehmer, who quickly empathized with his client and became part of the Joe Strummer West Coast posse. Joe needed all the allies he could get; working on his own was frightening. As he admitted to Melody Maker the next year, ‘I was a bundle of nerves when Walker was recorded. I thought it would be a fucking disaster. I tell you, I’ve only realized now what pressure I was under.’
At Sam’s suggestion they brought in Dick Bright, the leader of the house band at San Francisco’s Vermont Hotel, with access to the kind of seasoned popular orchestral musicians who could match Joe’s perception of the Walker music; and he could write the musical charts from which they would play.
It was as though the ideas Joe had been mulling over for an acoustic-based group in Almeria with Frank Murray a year ago had now come together. Yet he was recording far more music than was needed. ‘We did all these Latin tracks,’ said Sam, ‘and we kept saying, “Joe, we only need so much for the picture.” Joe kept saying, “Yes, but we’re making a soundtrack album. They can just cut it up and use it in the movie.” So we would make various versions of all the songs. He didn’t really feel Latin music because it wasn’t his roots, but Joe would let the guys experiment and see what came together.’
Joe had immediately built a spliff bunker in the drum-booth at Russian Hill. ‘Joe got Malcolm, our runner, to go and get all the empty two inch-tape boxes and pile them up so he could go in there and make it his office. This was a great idea because people were constantly coming to see Joe and Joe didn’t want people hanging out where the work was going on. They would sit there and smoke “English”, as he called those half-tobacco and half-pot joints. When there weren’t visitors, Joe would be there drawing a lot of cartoons.’ The spliff bunker: you don’t exactly have to be Einstein to perceive its various resonances, the primal nature of the child’s den, and its secure back-to-the-womb element.
Frequently in the studio, offering moral support, was Rudy Fernandez, who had driven the Clash through the Monterey Festival gates. Once Joe asked Rudy to go around the local Mexican restaurants, where they ate, to find a Mariachi band that employed a guitarron, a fretless Mexican six-string bass guitar, to use on a song. But Rudy also experienced the idiosyncrasies of Joe’s needs. Despite his hangover, Joe called him on his first day there, ‘Rudy, I want to get a Cadillac. I’ve been singing about these cars for years. I want one of my own.’ What Joe was looking for was a mid-1950s’ Cadillac Seville, a beautiful classic of the marque, the image of the Brand New Cadillac. After spending Joe’s first weekend in California looking for one, the pair gave up and went back to Rudy’s home in San Carlos. Walking out to the local liquor store, ‘there it was, a 1955 turquoise Cadillac,’ said Rudy. ‘It had been sitting there for years in this guy’s driveway and it looked like the “For Sale” sign had been there for years too. It was $5,000. We drove around for a while. He didn’t have a licence, but it didn’t matter to him. People would stop in the street, and kids would point at us: “Look at that car!”’ Rudy then learnt what was at the back of Joe’s mind: this was to be his car for Californian visits. ‘I can take the kids to the zoo in it in LA. Oh, Rudy, I couldn’t keep it in your garage, could I?’
Zander Schloss received a call from Joe, asking him to come to Russian Hill, ‘and bring your Spanish guitar’. Joe was well on his way to finishing the ‘Nicaraguan’ side of the album; Zander added overdubs and textures. ‘When it came to the second side of the album, which was a little bit more organic and folky, we started to build the tracks from the ground up.’ On three of the tunes, the only ones featuring singing, Joe took the vocal lead; following straight on from the beautiful melody of the instrumental ‘Latin Romance’ comes ‘The Unknown Immortal’ (there seems an especial poignancy in Joe’s line ‘I was once an immortal’); he also sings on ‘Tennessee Rain’ and ‘Tropic of No Return’. ‘When Joe wasn’t feeling good about himself,’ said Alex Cox, ‘he would mix his vocals right down, so you could hardly hear them. But on those three songs his voice is clear and strong. He was enjoying what he was doing.’
Alex Cox was working on the edit at the ranch complex in Napa Valley of Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Joe drove the fifty miles in the Cadillac. ‘It takes hours to get there,’ said Rudy, ‘because Joe’s so slow – he’s loving every minute of it. It’s just like in a movie. We’re going through the dirt roads, kind of like in East of Eden, driving through the fields. We get to Coppola’s place, and no one knew we were coming. The assistants thought we were migrant farm workers. “What are you guys doing here?” The Cadillac didn’t have any window-wipers. It started sprinkling. Joe was driving, and I was cleaning the windscreen with my hand.
‘Coppola was real nice to Joe, so was Sofia Coppola, his daughter, a young girl then. She knew who Joe was, and she would hang out with us, riding in the Cadillac.’
Joe Strummer’s soundtrack for Walker was artistically a great success. It proved to him that he could do something on his own in his own way, revitalized him, bolstered his spirits, got him great reviews. Had he been restored by Walker? asked the Melody Maker. ‘Yeah, though I do have a manic depressive side that I’ve only just been able to conquer. You know, I spent the last four years not doing anything, just sitting at home trying to understand what I’d done or perhaps what I should do. And it was a very depressing four years.’ When he saw the completed Walker film, however, the movie was a great disappointment. ‘What am I going to say to Alex?’ Joe asked Gerry Harrington, his new agent, as they exited a screening in Los Angeles. ‘What do we do? Please, you’ve got to help me, Gerry.’ ‘Tell him,’ said Gerry, ‘it’s going to scare the shit out of them. Let’s see how the establishment handle that.’ ‘Yes,’ said Joe, ‘that’s why you’re my agent. You know what to say.’ This was exactly what Joe told Alex Cox. Gerry Harrington was Joe’s new Hollywood agent; after running into Eric Fellner at a Hollywood screening of the John Hughes’s teen film Pretty in Pink he had learnt that Joe was working in San Francisco and had tracked him down, giving him his pitch. Joe went for it, appreciating Gerry’s earnestness and innocence, and they now began working together. Quickly Gerry realized that Joe ‘gave himself such a raw deal most of the time, then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy’.
Briefly Joe went back to London; Gaby had visited him in San Francisco, but now he returned to 37 Lancaster Road to be with her and the girls. Some four weeks later, at around midnight, Rudy Fernandez heard a knocking on his front door. To his amazement he saw Joe standing there. ‘I gotta get to LA. Give me the keys to the Cadillac.’ Joe had flown to California for a meeting the next day in Los Angeles with Virgin Records, who were releasing the Walker soundtrack, but he had decided to come to San Francisco to pick up the Cadillac and drive overnight the 800 miles to LA. Rudy pointed out that they were in the middle of a storm and the Cadillac had no windscreen wipers; to drive that distance would be suicidal. ‘Joe goes, “I don’t care! I don’t care! I’ve gotta get down there.” He was freaking out. Eventually I say, “I’ll drive you down there. We’ll take my car.”’
After a frantic eight-hour dash through the rainy night the pair arrived in Los Angeles, making it to the Virgin Beverly Hills headquarters and squealing into the parking lot. ‘Park there,’ said Joe, pointing out an empty space. As they did so, another car aimed at it, Rudy beating him. The reserved space belonged to the company’s president, and it was he they were pushing out of his place. But when a red-eyed Joe emerged from Rudy’s car, due deference was shown by the record company boss. The meeting, about Joe’s part in promoting the Walker soundtrack record, ran smoothly, though not as much as Joe had hoped.
He had wanted to use the record’s release on Virgin to somehow lever him out of his Sony deal, but found he was strapped in too tight by all that small print in the ten-year-old Clash contract.
Since last seeing Joe Strummer at the end of 1986 Danielle von Zerneck had got on with her life. She’d acted in a pair of ‘terrible’ movies, had a couple more boyfriends, and stayed friends with Bob Gruen, Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver. ‘OK, that was great!’ were her only thoughts about the romance with Joe. She heard Joe was in Los Angeles, staying at the Sunset Marquis, and called, left a message, and then went out. ‘When I came back I had a message from Joe on my machine, singing the song “Donna”. It was one of the most romantic things. He’d gone into the bathroom to make the call so Rudy wouldn’t hear. We talked. It was nice.’ Then she went to bed.
At 7 a.m. the door buzzer rang at Sara’s New York apartment. ‘I go downstairs and Joe is standing there with a bouquet of flowers. It was so lovely. It started up all over again. He’d got off the phone and caught the red-eye. He stayed with me for about a week. I was now in LA quite a bit. Back and forth. He was too. When we started seeing each other again that September, it was much more serious.
‘When we were together he was not depressed. Later I broke up with him and he was depressed in front of me. Mine is a very odd perspective – his relationship with me was like how going on holiday will kick people out of depression. It was like a holiday romance. We enjoyed eating in restaurants in malls because no one eats there who might know us. In New York David Johansen was developing his Buster Poindexter set at the Bottom Line and Joe took me along.’
In Los Angeles Joe linked up with a film music supervisor called Kathy Nelson, whom he had briefly met during Sid and Nancy post-production. One day she drove him to LAX airport to catch a flight to London. Arriving back at her one-bedroom house off Laurel Canyon, having made some stops on the way, Kathy was surprised to find Joe sitting on her doorstep.
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