Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘Most of Mystery Train was a night shoot. To unwind, everybody would go to the hotel pool. We wrapped at 5, we’d get to the pool by 6, and stay there until 9 or 10 in the morning. It was so funny to see families on vacation, coming down to the pool at 10 in the morning, and seeing us [laughs] with bottles of tequila. They’d turn right around and leave. I went to see live music with Joe. He was so disappointed at the state of the counter-culture at that time. We had fun going out, but our expectations were high.’

  ‘He was a hard worker, really conscientious,’ said Sara Driver. But she remembered an evening when Joe was very much wallowing in darkness, as the legendary Screaming Jay Hawkins – who played a hotel clerk in Mystery Train – was playing ‘Constipation Blues’ on a piano in the middle of their hotel lobby. ‘I asked him if Gaby and the kids were coming out. Joe said, “No, no. How can I concentrate and think with the kids and Gaby around?” But he was very broken up about the Danielle situation. He seemed very lost.’ Over the weeks of the shoot, Sara was increasingly impressed by Joe. ‘He was interested in being an actor. He was a very good actor, and I never understood why more people didn’t put him in things. He had a wonderful presence.’

  22

  ON THE OTHER HAND …

  1988–1989

  In November 1988 Joe moved to Los Angeles with Gaby, and Jazz and Lola. As he had told me in the summer, it was the moment to make a record of his own. He made a three-month block-booking at Baby O Recorders, where he had made the Permanent Record soundtrack. The musicians would be a further version of the Latino Rockabilly War: Zander Schloss on lead guitar and vocals, Lonnie Marshall – a new recruit – on bass and vocals, and Willie MacNeill on drums. It must have been a hard decision for Joe to finally stop putting off the inevitable next step, but it was also a logical one; things had been successfully building ever since the Walker album; there had been Permanent Record, the Pogues’ tour, the Latino Rockabilly War tour, and the small detour into acting in Mystery Train. While making Walker, followed by the spurt of Permanent Record songs, Joe had rediscovered his voice. He had learnt how to write songs on his own, without the musical input of Mick Jones.

  Contrary to what he had vowed in 1986, Joe Strummer’s first solo album would not be called Throwdown and be produced by Mick Jones. It would be entitled Earthquake Weather, with Joe himself at the production helm, though the title, which carried its own inbuilt sense of brooding, dangerous power, was still to come to him. Working in Hollywood on his own record was a move to virgin, frontier territory for Joe. The Clash had never recorded in LA; there were no memories, good or bad. There was a freshness in the step of his broken boot when he was in the city, touched like everyone by its seductive, warm whispers of fecund possibilities.

  Joe and his family rented a small house off Fairfax in the Russian section of West Hollywood. He had decided – for the meantime, at least – he was going to make his home in Los Angeles. (A year later he told Sounds about his experiences of life in LA: ‘There are people that successfully go out there and live, but they always look like an expatriate colony. And there’s always something a bit sad about standing in an English pub on Sunset Strip where everything has been carved deliberately trying to look like a boozer.’)

  While recording, Joe confided to Mark ‘Stebs’ Stebbeds, the engineer, that he was thinking of moving permanently to New Orleans. ‘Gangsterville’, the song that opens the record, contains the line ‘I’m going to New Orleans – gonna buy me a prayer.’ ‘He was still giving himself a raw deal most of the time,’ said Gerry Harrington. ‘We were having breakfast at the Chateau Marmont. I’d bought a copy of Q magazine which had a feature, “The 100 Dumbest Things Ever Done by Musicians”, which included Joe doing a runner from the Clash and going to France. They wrote: “Joe Strummer always spoke in capital letters.” He read that. He goes: “Yes. I DO ALWAYS SPEAK IN CAPITAL LETTERS.”’

  The Clash and its spin-offs were temporarily out of fashion. BAD’s record sales were dwindling, though they would pick up in the next decade. Yet this was the climate in which Joe would release his first solo album. To try and tune him in to contemporary sounds, Gerry Harrington had a tactic: ‘Every time I found a great new record, I’d want Joe to hear it so he could see he could be better himself. When “Fisherman’s Blues” by the Waterboys came out, I thought it was a great song. I played it to him. He said, “The problem is he’s saying what he feels. Bob Dylan doesn’t say, ‘I walked through a door.’ He says, ‘There was smoke in the air.’ He doesn’t say the obvious. This guy’s hitting it on the head. It’s just not interesting.” I’d never thought about it that way. Joe always cut right down to the essence. Except when he didn’t. I also wanted him to hear Lou Reed’s New York album. But he didn’t want to be daunted while recording by a great work that he was going to have to equal. He goes: “Lou Reed? Is it really great?” “It’s fucking great.” He goes: “I don’t want to hear it.” I said: “This guy’s ten years older than you. He’s found a way to write older, more mature rock music and get a lot of people to listen to it. You should check it out.” “I don’t want to hear it, man.”’ It is worth noting that for much of the end of the 1980s Joe’s favourite record was Paul Simon’s Graceland, a clear influence on the way he was to integrate more ethnic sounds into the rock’n’roll structure of the Latino Rockabilly War. Graceland was an interesting choice, for here Joe was taking a politically incorrect line. Simon had gone out on a limb, using South African musicians when there was a ban on working with artists from the Apartheid-riven nation. But Joe felt that through Paul Simon’s record people in the Midwest of America became acquainted with the true art of South Africa, gaining information about the iniquities of Apartheid. (In a more pronounced politically incorrect moment, Joe declared to Stuart Maconie in the NME that a rush of pride secretly ran through him when English football hooligans ran amok in overseas matches; he himself admitted that he had overstepped the mark and contacted Maconie to tell him this.)

  Through an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter, Joe and Gaby found another property more exactly according with an English rock’n’roller’s idealized view of life in Los Angeles: a beautiful wood-framed house with a swimming-pool on Ridgemount Drive off Laurel Canyon, with a fine view of the vast sweep of the southern Californian city. The place belonged to Luke O’Reilly, the English manager of Al Stewart, whose Year of the Cat album had been a big hit in the United States in 1976. Joe bought Gaby a racy 1963 blue Ford Thunderbird, a ‘T-bird’. He passed the test for a California driver’s licence; Joe would take Gaby and the kids on family outings to the desert in the T-bird. Later he and Gaby drove down in it to New Mexico for the Santa Fe film festival, where Mystery Train was being screened, hanging out there with Mo Armstrong, his friend from San Francisco who had moved there.

  The Cadillac was driven down from San Francisco by Rudy Fernandez to the lot at Baby O, where the car sputtered to a halt, its power finally dying. ‘Joe came out and saw the Cadillac and was incredibly happy. The car stayed there the whole time he made that record.’ In the studio Joe arranged a security camera to permanently show a shot of the entire car, parking the Caddy back in the same spot on the few occasions that he ventured out in it onto the roads. When he tired of being in the spliff bunker he had built, Joe would go outside with his guitar and sit for hours in the Cadillac. One night there was a shoot-out in a drugs heist in the parking lot – Baby O was not in the most salubrious part of then extremely sleazy Hollywood – and a bullet went through the door of the Cadillac, leaving a clearly visible hole in its turquoise skin. Joe couldn’t have been happier. ‘It made it even more perfect,’ said Rudy. ‘He loved it even more.’ When the first single – the song ‘Gangsterville’ – was released from the album it was in a sleeve adorned with an image of Joe Strummer’s beloved Cadillac, bullet-hole in clear view. ‘He didn’t want to drive a new car, or a flash car,’ said Dick Rude, who as a native Angeleno came up to the studio most days. ‘He wanted to fix the Caddy
so it would run right, but he didn’t want it to be new. He didn’t want to be above his station. He felt that he was a worker amongst workers. He liked to keep his feet on the ground, he liked to keep a sense of humility about him. It was really key to him not losing his shit. He was very obstinate about one thing: “Gotta get the beat-box message back out on the street.” He meant the stripped-down roots of rock’n’roll. He was really into his past and how the 101’ers had got started: his humble beginnings and where his roots of music came from, and the roots of rock’n’roll – Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent.’

  When the sessions began, much of the material for the record was not written. Joe solved this problem by moving on his own into a small motel, the Sea Tour on Ocean Drive, above the beach in Santa Monica, and writing feverishly. ‘I’d get these calls,’ said Gerry Harrington. ‘“I need you to meet me. You know where Cora’s Coffee Shop is? I need you to come out. I’ll tell you when you get here.” I’d get there and it’d be, “I need a jump-start for the Cadillac.” One of those times he took me into his room at the motel and played me “Leopardskin Limousines” which he’d recorded, hand-miked, playing a child’s toy piano and singing the song. Then we had to jump-start his car and I had to follow him into town in case it broke down again.’

  ‘Leopardskin Limousines’ was a song Joe had written about Danielle von Zerneck, his voice as loving and caressing as a tropical breeze, but as sad and tearful as a fantasy falling to pieces, Joe so evidently talking about himself, Joe who didn’t like what his dreams told him: ‘Found a pint of brandy on top of the fridge / And it’s working like an anti-freeze.’ You were certain that he really had found that pint of brandy.

  Mark Stebbeds had a distinct memory of Danielle’s visits to the studio: ‘I knew he was very fond of her because he was holding her hand very affectionately the few times she came round. I didn’t really think anything of it until one day the phone rang in the control room and someone said, “Danielle’s on line 1 for Joe.” He came back after the call and said, “Please don’t announce it when she phones.”’

  There were other visitors: the Red Hot Chili Peppers came by and Flea played trumpet on a track. Jesse Dylan called over with Sean Penn. Jesse’s dad Bob dropped by, once leaving a tape of a song he thought Joe might like to try out. For his usual complex set of reasons, Joe never listened to it. ‘I think it was Joe not wanting to deal with it,’ said Zander. ‘It stayed in the drawer.’

  Josh Cheuse, an art director and photographer from New York, had become friends with both Mick and Joe, and worked with them. He was staying at the house on Ridgemount Drive, in LA without a car, a problem. Sometimes Joe would drive down to Baby O without telling him he was leaving, ‘almost as though he was saying, “Let’s see how he gets to the studio on his own.” It seemed a bit of a public school thing.’ Joe started renting cars, cool vintage vehicles: one a kind of Batmobile, another a Ford Mustang. Once, leaving the studio in the Mustang, Joe jumped a red light and was immediately signalled to stop by a police car. Instead, he decided – possibly ill-advisedly considering the trigger-happy reputation of the LAPD – to lead the cops on a chase into the Hollywood Hills. ‘We’re going to outrun them,’ he told Josh, who was sliding lower into the shotgun seat. ‘Let’s see if we can outrun the cops in LA.’ ‘What? Suddenly you’re in this film. He thought he knew those winding roads so well, that he was going to lose the cops. We made it to the top of the mountain, but the cop car was already up there. He charmed them. The cop said something like, “Well, I know you got a nice little ride there.” That was a time in LA when you could still charm the police.’

  Joe experienced four earthquake tremors while making the album in LA, once in the Santa Monica motel and three at Baby O. The studio turned out to be built on a fault-line: ‘So I thought I’d call it Earthquake Weather rather than making any heavy comment on the state of the world.’

  An intense routine was established. The only break was for an evening ritual of Italian food, everyone sitting in a circle and eating pasta out of delivery containers. Songs were still being written in Santa Monica, remembered Mark Stebbeds, but soon ‘Joe had pretty much all of them worked out in the crudest form on a cassette. He would strum the melody and a rhythm on a cassette, and it might be incomplete, but he would take this cassette into the bunker, show the guys the song and everybody would try to work up ideas on the spot.’

  Joe’s production method was pretty much the same hands-off approach he had used on the Walker soundtrack. Although he was credited as the producer of the record, the songs were arranged – often in Joe’s absence – by Zander Schloss. ‘Joe was involved with the structure of the songs, but after the basic tracks were cut he left it to the band to finish them,’ said Mark. ‘I think in doing that the guys in the band who weren’t as experienced as Joe, and didn’t have the same history of recording, became a little self-indulgent. Some of the songs were great in the way they came out, but I think other ones took a wrong direction and perhaps could have had a little more Joe Strummer influence. We wouldn’t see him for hours at a time, and he didn’t really know what was on the record until it was time to mix it.’

  Joe’s customary disappearing acts often concerned his need for input for his lyrics. ‘When it was time for him to sing and the lyrics weren’t written,’ recalled Mark Stebbeds, ‘he’d have a favourite cab-driver he would call, and the driver would drive him round the city for a couple of hours. I can’t tell you how the lyrics he wrote related to what he saw out there on the street, but somehow it would obviously stir up his juices. Joe kept a mild state of mellowness going on, smoking English joints, which weren’t heavily laced with pot. He had two kinds of pot: he called them “work pot” and “after pot”. But the stuff in the studio was quite weak. He didn’t drink much. Sometimes he would get some brandy. He was very much into the whole Latino thing, so he would get Mexican brandy, horrible stuff, but he would drink it because the owner of the studio was Mexican and he figured it was the least he could do.’

  A few times Joe slept in the studio, locked into the building, until it was opened up again the next morning. ‘He would take the couch cushions and throw them on the floor and sleep in the studio.’ Life at Baby O was not dissimilar to that at 101 Walterton Road. ‘He had these motorcycle-type boots – the heel was falling off. People would bring him replacement boots: “Here, have a pair that actually work.” But he wouldn’t wear them because they weren’t comfortable.’ Joe’s personal hygiene, recalled Gerry Harrington, also suggested someone still coping with life in a squat. ‘He’d be in the studio all the time, so he’d shower there, and put soap in his hair to slick it back. You’d see coagulated soap in his hair all the time. But he wasn’t neglecting his brain: he was always a great reader, and he had a history of the New York Yankees and then started talking knowledgably about Joe Di Maggio. He was like a little book warehouse.’

  ‘Let’s rock again!’ Joe’s opening words that almost fade you in to Earthquake Weather do not hint at the epic struggle with himself that Joe had had to make the record. The volume of that declamation is at a lower level than ‘Gangsterville’, which bursts open immediately after it, the first song. Are those three words muted and uncertain, as has been suggested? Or do they emerge like an Apache war-cry ringing down from atop an Arizona butte? I know which I think. I never had any problem with the way Joe’s voice is allegedly hidden away in the mix on this record – after a time, and with the aid of the lyric-sheet in the record, all the words were perfectly clear to me. You’ve simply to listen to Joe’s vocals on Earthquake Weather via a slight adjustment in your hearing and thinking, like you would the first time you hear how the words and music are layered around each other on Studio One records. The way Joe Strummer’s voice is mixed down on Earthquake Weather is often taken as proof of his inner doubt about the project, and it could be diagnosed that way. Yet there is a simpler explanation: ‘Joe was not in good voice when we recorded this record,’ recalled Mark Stebbeds. ‘He wasn’
t physically ill but he hadn’t been singing a lot. His voice had largely been sitting idle for several years, so it wasn’t that powerful.’

  ‘One day,’ said Zander Schloss, ‘I was sitting in the control room, and he started barking out his words, and I got so excited. But it turned out his bridge-work had fallen out, and because he’d lost the bridge-work he was over-pronouncing and enunciating. I said, “Let’s keep the track.” But he put his bridge-work in and did it all over again, that same mumbling fashion.

  ‘But there was one time when he was doing things like turning on a transistor radio and recording the static. One day I was in the equipment room and heard this train whistle. I mentioned something about it. Joe said, “So you don’t like my train whistle?” I’m like, “No, I don’t.” He picked up a chair, threw it against the wall and said, “Well, it’s staying.”’

  ‘At the end of the working day Joe and Dick Rude would go out to Dick’s Dodge convertible in the parking lot and play that session’s music on my shitty little car stereo, to hear what people were gonna hear. That was his concern: how will it portray itself in the real world, not in the studio.’

  In Joe’s real world there wasn’t much reality. Things with Gaby were up and down, not assisted by Joe’s tendency to vanish for days. ‘For all his faults he had the most incredible spirit,’ said Gaby. ‘He believed anything was possible. He inspired people to go off on a track with their life, through listening to the Clash. Quite a thing to achieve. He really listened to people. In men that is quite a talent. But everyone wanted him. The kids found that hard. On an emotional level with Joe I’d had enough. As someone said: “Joe was a great person to be friends with, but who would want to be part of his family?” I was fed up with him. On some levels he was brilliant with the kids, but I expected him to muck in a bit more. I stopped giving him attention. I think that was the most hurtful thing I did. I think I was quite blocked and damaged myself. I knew his childhood hurt, how wounded he was, but I didn’t really know him.’