Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘Thank you for coming here and supporting this cause. And we’ll start now,’ confidently pronounced Joe. The group plunged into a slightly hesitant version of ‘Police on My Back’. The choice of material for the opening song set the tone: of the fifteen numbers in the set, seven were tunes that the Clash had played, but six of these were covers – ‘Police and Thieves’, ‘Brand New Cadillac’, ‘Armagideon Time’, ‘I Fought the Law’ and two versions of the set opener. Only ‘London Calling’, the Clash original that Joe had sung with the Pogues, was a Strummer–Jones composition. Joe was at first unable to remember the chords of many of the Clash’s songs, and Zander Schloss, his new guitarist, had to painstakingly teach them to him. Although all the group wanted to play ‘White Riot’, Joe adamantly refused.

  Unsurprisingly, this first public performance by Joe Strummer’s new outfit was pretty rough. At the end of the show Joe admitted that he couldn’t hear anything he had been playing. Of the new Permanent Record songs ‘Nothin’ ’Bout Nothin’’ sounded terrific, as did ‘Trash City’. There was something stubborn about his performance of ‘Love Kills’: ‘You didn’t like this? Fuck you!’ Forty-five minutes after it had begun, the set concluded with – surprisingly – a further rendition of ‘Police on My Back’. Though the performances frequently may have sounded scrappy, Joe had made his public début as a solo artist. Job done; on to the next venue.

  Which was in a much larger setting altogether, an outdoor festival the next day at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes, fifty miles north of London straight up the M1, before an audience of 50,000. Here Joe Strummer and the Latino Rockabilly War, scheduled to play late that Saturday afternoon, were part of a benefit for Amnesty International. Serendipitously, topping the bill was Big Audio Dynamite, who had just released Tighten Up Volume 88, their third album, another of those strokes of poetry that almost visibly hung in the air at any conjunction of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. The previous evening Don Letts had filmed the Tabernacle show.

  How had Joe styled himself for this tour? He wore his hair in an exaggerated rockabilly quiff. (‘It was huge, and disgusting,’ said Zander. ‘He would use the heaviest pomade and wouldn’t wash his hair for weeks – you would see white flakes in it, crap that had gotten in there from the street.’) He seemed fit and in shape; as Gaby said, it was around this stage of his life that Joe’s booze consumption began to show on his body, especially his belly, but he’d made an effort for this tour, getting rid of his slight beer paunch: consciously he moved over to drinking red wine.

  Milton Keynes seemed stressful for Joe, struggling again with a bad sound and largely grim-faced throughout his set, pushing a stone up a hill at the start of his solo career, visibly willing it on. But his mood was hardly assisted by an incident that occurred as the Latino Rockabilly War were about to go onstage. Suddenly Joe had angrily pushed a stranger down the ramp. ‘We are getting ready to go on stage, standing at the side,’ said Zander Schloss. ‘We are all dressed in these rockabilly suits and some guy comes up to us. He looked like bad news. He whispered something in Joe’s ear about Topper Headon.’ The previous year Topper had hit rock-bottom, and was now coming to the end of a fifteen-month prison sentence he had received after returning to his home town of Dover where an acquaintance died from an overdose of heroin the former Clash drummer gave him. The man turned out to be one of Topper’s heroin dealers. Zander said, ‘What the hell was that all about?’ Joe said, ‘Never mind, let’s play.’ ‘I got up there and played, and Mick Jones started running up when we kicked off with “Police on My Back”: he heard the first guitar line, and ran onto the back of the stage thinking he was supposed to go on.’

  Mick and the assorted BAD members stood watching Joe as though they were willing him to succeed. It wasn’t a great show, seeming rushed. But in a backstage portacabin afterwards, jammed with both BAD and his own group, as well as Dammed drummer Rat Scabies and a visiting Joey Ramone and Stiv Bators from the Dead Boys (who would die after being knocked down by a taxi two weeks later), Joe Strummer finally managed to relax; it seemed like a 1977 reunion package, even down to the low clouds of preoccupation that would suddenly seem to encase him, as though a dart of unease had flashed into his brain from the spliff he was smoking, for the post-show depression that Terry Chimes had observed continued to accompany Joe after gigs.

  ‘We would sit around Joe’s kitchen table, drinking and smoking English joints,’ said Zander. ‘Mick Jones and Paul would come over and reminisce about the early days of the Clash, and it would inevitably end up in some violent story: “Do you remember when we were walking down the road, and the coppers came up from behind and hit you on the back of your head with a truncheon and you were bleeding all down your shirt?” And Joe goes, “Good times!”’ Old gunfighters reminiscing like Sam Peckinpah characters – Joe would have loved the very idea of it.

  For the next couple of months Joe and the Latino Rockabilly War were out on the road, all over the British Isles, even taking a foray into Sweden for the Hultsfredsfestivalen on 13 August. As they played on the repertoire expanded. At the Electric Ballroom in London’s Camden Town on 7 July Joe announced that ‘I’d like to dedicate this next one to the guys in Big Audio Dynamite,’ before ‘Sightsee MC’, co-written with Mick for the second BAD album. Half a dozen songs later he declared, ‘I’d like to rip another one off the Big Audio Dynamite catalogue. It’s called “Sodom and Gomorrah/Let the Deejay Play”,’ and with those two lines from the song he dove into ‘V Thirteen’. Joe had bolstered his twenty-three song set with a pair of the best BAD tunes on that superb album. (‘When he was announcing the next song,’ said Gerry Harrington, ‘he wouldn’t say, “This one’s called ‘Trash City’,” he’d give the first line: “In Trash City on Party Avenue I’ve got a girl from Kalamazoo,” or “This one’s called Midnight to Six for the First Time from Jamaica,” and then the band would start into “White Man in Hammersmith Palais”. I said, “Why do you do that?” He said, “Because I’ve got to remember how to start the song.”’)

  Latino Rockabilly War set-list, 1988. What really happened? (Lucinda Mellor)

  There was possibly some prescience in Joe’s unexpected decision to perform the two BAD songs: had he intuited that Mick Jones might shortly need a spiritual leg-up? By early July Mick was in the intensive care unit at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington: after catching chicken pox from his daughter Lauren, the infection had spread to his lungs, putting him into a coma for ten days. ‘Gaby made Joe come to see me,’ Mick told me, ‘and after his mother, going to hospitals was the last thing he wanted to do.’ At the Nottingham Rock City show on 8 August, referring to a news story in that morning’s edition of the Daily Mirror, Joe dedicated ‘Sightsee MC’ to Mick, saying, ‘I think he’s got over the worst.’

  At the Glasgow Barrowlands show on 7 August, ‘This is England’ became, inevitably, ‘This is Scotland’. In March that year Sony had released a twenty-eight-track Clash double compilation album, The Story of the Clash, Volume One, which was a Top Ten hit. When Joe played with the Latino Rockabilly War at Barrowlands he preceded the show with a record signing for it at Virgin Records. Unannounced, Alasdair Gillies, his cousin, who lived in the city, turned up. ‘Alasdair, you must hang out with me,’ Joe said, grabbing his cousin. ‘Although there were queues down Union Street he wasn’t at all sure of his position,’ remembered Alasdair. ‘Don’t press the cousins to come if they don’t want to,’ Joe emphasized to him. ‘As it was during the day I was wearing my suit for work,’ said Alasdair. ‘He was saying, “What’s it like being a lawyer? Isn’t it heavy? I think you should give it up. How much hassle do you get?”’

  After watching Joe carry out his traditional post-show routine of hand-washing his shirt, Alasdair realized something. ‘Everyone was reticent about telling Joe how great his show had been,’ said his cousin. ‘The end result of that was a disaster, really, because he didn’t realize how good he had been or was being.’

  The commercial success of t
he Clash compilation should have helped convince Joe of his worth. Finances were not really a problem, but at this point he could have had a lot more money. Muff Winwood, in charge of A&R, told me there was ‘an enormous amount of money waiting for the Clash from royalties from all the various records. But because they had all been suing each other, and it still seemed unresolved, we didn’t know who to pay it to.’

  In between shows Joe hung around in Notting Hill. One afternoon he and Gaby, along with Jem and Marcia Finer, took their daughters on a cultural expedition to see the grave of Karl Marx in Waterlow Park in Highgate in North London. Although they arrived not long before the gates in the park closed for the evening, there was sufficient time for all concerned. Immediately they left, the gates were locked behind them. ‘We were milling about, waiting for our next move,’ said Marcia, ‘and we saw these young Japanese tourists, a pair of them, who were locked in. Joe immediately went into campaign mode, telling the guy to lift his girlfriend up, so she jumped into Joe’s arms. There was this amazing moment where she looked at Joe, and she nodded at him, like “Yeah.” The boyfriend scrambled up and thanked Joe. The recognition was unspoken, which he particularly liked. Unlike the times when people would come up to him and say, “You changed my life.”’

  At the end of July Joe came with Gaby, Jazz and Lola to the sixth birthday party of my son Alex, in the garden of a restaurant on the Thames in Hammersmith. Daisy, Mick’s wife, was there with Lauren. The kids had a great time and Joe and Gaby seemed happy together, a rock’n’roll nuclear family. ‘I can’t leave Joe alone with the kids too much,’ Gaby grinned. ‘All he’ll feed them is cake.’ Joe’s methods of child-rearing were always unconventional. ‘Leave them alone to get on with it and they’ll figure it out for themselves,’ was his philosophy. Which presumably explained the outrage created in the hotel in which the Pogues were staying in Glasgow for their Christmas shows the previous year: Jazzy and Lola, tiny little girls, danced in the crowded lobby completely naked. ‘When I stayed with him at his house,’ said Dick Rude, ‘Gaby left him in charge of the kids, which she didn’t do very often, and he said, “Come on, let’s go for a walk in Hyde Park. The kids are supposed to be in school, but I’m just going to keep them out and let them eat sweets.” When I saw those kids when they were sixteen and eighteen, and saw how well behaved they were, how grounded and centred, I thought, “What happened? Did his experiment work? Or did Gaby really do a great job?”’

  In Notting Hill I would run into Gaby almost on a daily basis, and couldn’t help noticing the sadness that seemed often to reside in her blue eyes. As the years went on she had more and more reasons to be critical of Joe. Although she felt he was not an especially sharing partner with regard to bringing up the girls, she respected the attitudes with which he imbued them: ‘I loved his spirit towards them. I loved what he did with the girls. He told them they could be whatever they wanted, nobody could stand in their way. There was that inspirational, powerful side to him.’ Although quiet that afternoon at my son’s birthday party, Joe seemed content within himself. In a corner of the garden, over a bottle of pink champagne, always a favourite tipple, he told me that he was about to have a part in another film – Mystery Train – the next work by the increasingly revered Jim Jarmusch. After that, he said, he was going to make an album of his own.

  The friendship between Jim Jarmusch and Joe had grown deeper since they first had met in 1986. When in London Jim continued to stay at Joe’s house. ‘He loved his girls: wonderful. I realized his circle all knew the same people, but we all know each other through Joe, so many people. What a strange character – he’s almost magical. It sounds silly. I don’t know how you could explain that to people, but it’s so evident to me. His imagination, and his love for ideas and expression, was so strong.

  ‘I became close with him during a period when a lot of the time he was really down. It was a hard period for him. He had a dark cloud over him. I used to call him Big Chief Thunder Cloud. But he was still generous and spirited and uplifting to be with. He could be funny, but it was also a depressed period.’

  Budgeted at $2.3 million dollars, Mystery Train is a masterly work. Jim Jarmusch’s script is divided into three different yet parallel and simultaneous stories, taking place over twenty-four hours in Memphis. Each of the three sequences focuses on a different group of people and their relationship to the city that was the home of Elvis Presley. Although he was in Memphis for three of the five weeks of shooting, in the film Joe does not appear until the final tale, entitled ‘Lost in Space’; especially for Joe Jim had written the part of ‘Johnny’ (aka ‘Elvis’), who has lost both his job and his girl. Late in the film he puts a gun to his head before the weapon goes off, wounding his brother-in-law, played by Steve Buscemi. ‘I had no idea suicide had such a personal meaning for him,’ said Steve.

  ‘I wrote that part only for Joe,’ Jim said. ‘I wasn’t going to cast that character. Joe was interested. One of the main things, I think, was that it was set in Memphis. He loved Memphis, and that really sold him on it. When it was time to leave, he cancelled his flight four days in a row, just to stay one more day. He was having a good time. I think he was very happy.

  ‘On the set Steve would be joking around and other actors with more experience would snap right in when it was time to roll. But Joe would stay off the set, off with himself always. He said to me, “I feel like I carry a basket of eggs to the set. I don’t want to drop any on the way. I have to prepare them in the basket, and then just come get me and I’ll bring them over.” That was such a great metaphor for his way of approaching a character. He really worked on getting himself into the right frame of mind to be that guy, accentuating the parts of himself that were Johnny, repressing parts that weren’t. It’s a subtle performance. The other actors, like Steve Buscemi, really respected him. He was very, very focused and took it really seriously. He did a beautiful job.’

  When Jim Jarmusch and Joe Strummer spent time together, one subject inevitably came up: ‘He talked a lot about the bad times that ended the Clash. He seemed to feel guilty. He felt really bad about Cut the Crap, said it was crap. I said, “You only learn from your mistakes. You can’t learn things without fucking up.” We had a lot of discussions about mistakes and accidents, how circumstance and fate affects our lives, how if you want to find your dream lover, you’ll never find it, but as soon as you dismiss the possibility, then it arises again. I was trying to relate that philosophy to him when he was down. I was throwing back his own attitude, because he was very good when people were down – just give them a few little words. He was very good at picking you up again.’

  While they were shooting Mystery Train in Memphis the Australian hard-rock group INXS came through on tour. Joe had met the group; when he learnt they were staying in an adjacent hotel he went over with Jim to say hello. When they found Michael Hutchence, the singer, he was in all his leather-trousered rock-star glory, surrounded by fourteen-year-old girls in mini-skirts. ‘Wow, it must be really strange to be a sex symbol,’ said Joe to him. ‘Well, you’re Joe Strummer,’ replied Hutchence, ‘you should know.’ Joe had the perfect response: ‘No, I was never a sex symbol. I was just a spokesman for a generation.’

  Joe’s character of ‘Johnny’ was riven with angst; his girlfriend had walked out on him. Life at this stage was certainly imitating art. Sara Driver, the director girlfriend of Jim Jarmusch, had had conversations w ith Danielle von Zerneck about her relationship with Joe. ‘She was very important to Joe, but she was never allowed to call him. It was a one-way thing: he would come to town and they would have this very intense, heavy thing, and he would go home and she was cut off again. This went on for two or three years.’

  As often happens in such matters, Danielle’s life eventually took another turn. While Joe had been back in Britain, the Pogues returned to tour the USA again. Danielle met up with James Fearnley, the group’s accordionist; true to his word, James had been writing to her, letters of an unimpeachably pla
tonic nature. On that tour they clicked, and fell in love. ‘I loved Joe,’ said Danielle, ‘but I knew there was no good ending. There was no way I could give up James. Joe was the perfect man for something wonderful and romantic, but not real.

  ‘Joe called me from Memphis when he arrived there for Mystery Train. I said, “I have to tell you that I’m seeing someone.” It was hard to be such a grown-up. Joe said, “Fine. Of course.” Jim told me later that it couldn’t have been better timing, because his character’s girlfriend had just left him. Joe was devastated, but Jim said, “The timing couldn’t be better.”’

  ‘Joe came up to me,’ related Sara Driver, ‘and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” He’d gotten off the phone with Danielle and was clearly upset. I said, “Joe, it was really inevitable this was going to happen. It was too one-sided.” He looked at me and went, “Inevitable. Inevitable.” All night he kept coming up to me: “Inevitable. Inevitable.”’

  ‘Joe called me back in the middle of the night and was crying,’ said Danielle. ‘He said, “This isn’t OK.” I think he was really surprised that I was falling in love with James. I think it was a surprise to both of us. But I had to go back into the real world. I don’t think either of us realized how much we cared until we broke up. We stayed friends and would have dinner together.’

  ‘Fuckin’ bollocks,’ Joe’s first line in Mystery Train, could be seen as a summation of his life perspective at this point. Not that everyone around Joe was similarly affected. Steve Buscemi (‘He used to call me Bushbaby, his nickname for me,’) had long been a fan of the Clash, having seen the memorable Bond’s show at which the audience barracked Grandmaster Flash: ‘Joe reprimanded the crowd: “That’s not cool – give ’em a chance!” I loved that. I loved that he was trying to bridge those two worlds. It really hit me how epic and personal, at the same time, that band was.