Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  In early autumn of 1989, and despite the iffy Earthquake Weather reviews (he’d had those before), Joe was justifiably in good spirits. His imminent tour was getting good previews. ‘Judging by his floorshaking gigs last year on the ill-starred Rock Against the Rich tour and his new LP – the best Strummer work since ’82’s classic Combat Rock – these gigs should be fuckin’ memorable,’ said Sounds. ‘With a band who brilliantly realize the multi-cultural rock’n’roll the Clash ached to achieve, and a canon of songs (both his own and others) that’s vast, well-aged and still relevant, Strummer’s a modern electric folk-singer par excellence. His hand is still welded to the old Telecaster and he’s got as much hog-wild, brandy-fuelled energy as any young upstart, and then some. Bollocks to the rest of them – Strummer is the only name left from the punk era with more than a light and less than a tedious career.’ Now it was on with the shows, beginning at Barrowlands in Glasgow on 6 October 1989. Before ‘Island Hopping’, four songs from the end, Joe gave a plug for ‘Simmo’s’ new group, Havana 3 A.M., arriving in Glasgow a couple of days later. The set was a real move forward. Thirteen of the twenty-three songs had been written since the end of the Clash.

  The relatively brief UK tour – only ten dates – hit London six days later, for two nights at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town, opening the shows with theme music from Walker. The Clash would step onstage to music from Ennio Morricone, but now Joe and his group were walking out to his own music – a subtle but significant advance. I went to the second London show, and they were a real driving group. I preferred them to the previous year’s version; some of the crowd were confused by the Latino Rockabilly War’s changed line-up – but at least that indicated they had registered them the first time round. After the show Joe seemed exaggeratedly businesslike, a bit tense, but he invited me back to Lancaster Road and he relaxed, sitting at the round kitchen table, with Gaby and some bottles of wine. He did complain that the tour was costing him a small fortune; he would discover his personal shortfall on the dates was £24,000.

  In an interview with Carol Clerk for Melody Maker of 30 September Joe claimed to be cutting back on booze, something that was rather a regular rap. ‘Who wants to be fat and wrinkled apart from a Spud-U-Like. I still get drunk if it’s someone’s wedding, or those days when you just have to go on a binge, which I think is quite therapeutic. But you see a lot of casualties around, I suppose, and that’s the biggest way to warn anyone off.’ Carol Clerk commented that she’d give Joe the benefit of the doubt over the large amounts of red wine he consumed during their talk. When Carol asked Joe how he would like to improve his life, the man who played everything so close to his chest did utterly the reverse; it all came out, in the confessional with a female priest: ‘I’d like to be able to not take things so seriously that I get frantic. I’ve had times in these past ten years where I’ve been really unhappy, really at the end of my tether, and when I get into that I’m just awful. Moody, sullen, aggressive. I like to smash things, but I don’t think it gets you anywhere.’ He described to her how he had whirled a chair over his head and smashed it into a floorboard while talking to his manager at the other end of a phone line. (Rock’n’roll tantrums become very tedious. It is a surprise that Joe Strummer had not figured this out.)

  As a non-drinker, Lonnie Marshall watched Joe from a different angle. ‘The shows were getting great responses. Joe was really up. He was excited. The whole experience was incredibly entertaining. He was just real playful and curious. He related to people: he’d meet somebody one second and next thing you know he’d be off on some philosophical conversation.’ Lonnie learnt to follow Joe’s every move closely: ‘If we were playing too fast or too slow we would watch his foot, and that would show us where the beat was. Or if there was a change, he would maybe give us a nod for the change part. On the sections where we were vamping out and grooving, we were all together. I’m an improvisational player, so I loved that excitement of not really knowing what to expect.’

  ‘His boot would lead the way,’ confirmed Mr Jack Irons. ‘Sometimes you couldn’t even hear where he was going to start. He’d be talking to the audience, and we’d be watching his boot. You’d keep an eye on that boot, because sometimes he would change things. He would go in different directions, and you’d have to really follow. He’d always signal a change with a wave behind his back if something different was coming – if he wanted to rap to the audience and had something he wanted to say. He wasn’t too anal about it having to sound perfect. He was just, “Let’s do it. Let’s rock.” He really was into communicating. He’d talk and rattle the audience a bit.

  ‘He burned the candle at both ends. I remember thinking, “God! Take it easy. Get some sleep.” I don’t know how he kept it up, because Joe did the roll call at 8 or 9 in the morning, and he wouldn’t have got to bed until 6 or 7. You’d just avoid it when he was hung over and grumpy. If he was like that, he’d apologize.’ When they hit San Francisco Jack met the woman he would make his wife. At the San Diego show he encountered and became friends with a guy working with the crew called Eddie Vedder; by 1994 Jack Irons was the drummer with Pearl Jam, one of the biggest groups in the United States, with whom Vedder was singer.

  Following dates in Paris and Italy, a brief American tour began at the Palladium in New York City on 11 November. It was here that Joe later maintained he made a major decision. A fan told him that at Tower Records on Fourth and Broadway, in the middle of the allegedly hip Village, they didn’t have Earthquake Weather. ‘I just realized that if I couldn’t get my record into Tower Records in Greenwich Village the very night the tour hit New York – never mind Poughkeepsie or Oswego – I thought, “Well, you better retire yourself, boy!”’

  You can feel in those words the withdrawal from emotion, the setting in of a freeze of the soul. When you live in a habitual state of depression, fighting to keep above it, fragile from its ceaseless presence, the smallest thing can send you slithering all the way down the snake. A healthy mind’s response to habitual record company incompetence might have been to laugh about it, or even be driven by fury, and go out and make another record and then another, and prove a point. A little like Mick Jones had done, in response to Joe’s actions. But small things could knock Joe off-kilter – it had been such a struggle to get even to this seemingly pointless point. Now again it seemed hopeless. Everything did.

  The tour had been a success, but no one bought the record. Worldwide, Earthquake Weather sold only just over 7,000 copies, less than half the 15,000 that Walker had shifted, a paltry figure blamed on its being merely a film soundtrack. The excoriatingly disappointing Earthquake Weather sales figures were a staggering blow to Joe, supposedly setting off on his solo career. He took it personally, thought it was a judgement on his own work. He didn’t appreciate that it was simply not his time, and that the solution would have been to make another record and keep playing live. But Joe, disillusioned, dissolved the group. ‘They were great,’ Joe said of the Latino Rockabilly War to the actor Keith Allen, his friend. ‘It was fun. They were all good players. But I understood at the back of my mind that we weren’t doing anything new. So I let it drop. Thankfully, I think.’ If Joe had kept going in this vein until March 1991, when – thanks to its use in a Levi’s commercial – ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ became the Clash’s first number 1 hit in Britain, he might have been in a position to capitalize on a new wave of credibility that swept upwards the reputation of the group and its members. But he didn’t do that. The state of mind didn’t help. ‘This decade has pissed me off,’ Joe confided to Carol Clerk in that Melody Maker interview in September. ‘It’s been a waste of fucking time, apart from the kids. Music’s got shit, Thatcher became God, ninety per cent of the papers are right-wing and brown-nosing.’

  But would Joe Strummer find the next decade to be much better?

  23

  THE RECKLESS ALTERNATIVE

  1990–1991

  As a matter of fact, the eighties wound up far f
iner for Joe than he might have expected. Out of the blue, in November 1989 Rolling Stone voted London Calling ‘Album of the Decade’, which immensely raised the stature and position of the Clash; although London Calling had been released in Britain in the middle of December 1979, in the USA the official release date was 15 January 1980. Joe told me about this award in December 1989, standing on the pavement outside his house where I’d bumped into him. He was very excited, animatedly positive, spluttering with laughter at the confused release date. The Rolling Stone acclaim was a story picked up internationally, and the immense influence and inspiration of the Clash was carved into the rock. Almost inevitably there was also a downside: the same edition of Rolling Stone that lavished such praise upon the Clash carried a postage-stamp-sized, lukewarm review of Earthquake Weather. The acclaim for London Calling failed to translate into increased sales for Joe’s first solo album. But the next month, January 1990, brought more good news: Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train was released to great acclaim, an arthouse hit movie.

  But Joe wasn’t capitalizing on this new status of the Clash. He wasn’t really doing anything at all. Mostly he was going to the pub. There was another problem: despite his position as front-man for the Clash, rallying the faithful to the barricades, Joe was not the most logical person for such a role. ‘Even though he’d been the lead singer in the Clash, Joe wasn’t a leader,’ said Tricia Ronane. ‘He was so passionate about everything, but I could talk to Joe about work and his mind would be changed by the next person he met. On the other hand, both he and Mick had this incredibly seductive manner of draining and taking everything from a situation.’ It had been his front-man role that had tipped the balance in Joe’s relationship with Mick Jones, when the confusion engendered by Bernie Rhodes’s return meant Joe started imagining he was in charge. But Joe had come to mistrust that side of himself. So in his productions of Walker and Earthquake Weather he had merely issued his instructions and disappeared. Such apparent ordaining from on high was probably all that Joe could manage at the time, as he grappled with who he was and where he stood, psyching himself into a new career of some sort. If Earthquake Weather had been a success, Joe might have persevered. ‘I spoke to Paul Simon about this,’ he told me the next year, ‘and he said, “Hey man, before Graceland I was dead in the water. Nobody was checking my stuff.” So he’s a realist. He had some barren years after stuff like One-Trick Pony, and out of the hat he pulled Graceland. So life is interesting: anything can happen. But you’ve got to be tough enough to take a spell in the wilderness, instead of hoping to be in the spotlight the whole fucking time. People get sick to death of you.’

  On 6 April 1990, Good Friday, I saw Joe at the Harrow Road Crematorium, at the funeral of Sean Oliver, the stylish bass-player with beatnik group Rip Rig and Panic and a pioneer of warehouse parties, who had died from sickle-cell anaemia. A lovely, great looking guy, Sean was the father of Slits bassist Tessa Pollitt’s daughter Phoebe, and there was a big turn-out for his funeral. In his black leather jacket and tight white pants Joe Strummer that day had a clean, just-washed look about him; he seemed both slight and sprightly, almost elfin; but simultaneously the diminution of his size was like that of someone vanishing into the ether. It was odd that you could still feel his energy as strongly as ever: angry, powerful, a raging whitewater current beneath apparently stoic rocks. You had to hold your ground sometimes: the stuff coming off Joe could be so potent it could literally knock you off your stride.

  Around lunchtime we left the crematorium together, walked along Harrow Road and down Ladbroke Grove, in that sad shock that characterizes departures from funerals. When we reached my place, close to the tube station, he came in for a cup of tea. I played him a couple of ‘cumbia’ tunes I had picked up on my visit to a festival on the Colombian north coast. Joe also had discovered the joy of cumbia, rhythm-drenched Latin music. Jason Mayall had made up a tape of its pulsating sounds for him – Joe rarely took it out of his ghetto-blaster, he loved this stuff. My IBM computer stood in pieces on my workdesk. The hard disk had died and this expensive investment was now useless. Joe was adamant I should not buy a replacement computer. ‘Get a typewriter,’ he insisted. ‘It’s more economical for your writing. You’ll edit yourself in your brain before you type it down.’

  Perhaps because he wasn’t doing anything else that month, in May 1990 Joe went on holiday with Gaby and the kids to St Tropez in the South of France. They were joined by their friends John and Amanda Govett and young son Will. Back in London within a matter of days Joe had a small film part, in I Hired a Contract Killer, by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, a man with a reputation for alcohol consumption that would have impressed Joe Strummer. His role was so brief it was only a one-day job; Joe strums onstage with a percussion player in a corner of a pub. Nicky Tesco, formerly of the Members, had written music for Kaurismaki. Now he had a part in the film, in the same scene as Joe. Nicky had lived for seven years with Annie Day, Joe’s old friend from school. ‘Because of that he was always a bit wary of me. He was very protective of Annie.’ On the day of filming, all suspicion on the part of Joe Strummer towards the Members’ front-man had evaporated. ‘Bright and early at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning Joe turned up and passed me a huge joint and we spoke properly for the first time. Aki recognized him as a guy with a lot of integrity. They liked each other a lot.’

  Joe was also to record a pair of songs for the soundtrack of I Hired a Contract Killer, ‘Burning Lights’ and ‘Afro Cuban BeBop’, the latter a reflection of Joe’s recent musical interests. Both tunes were credited to Joe Strummer and the Astro Physicians, although they only featured Joe and a bongo-player. He opted to slip in the recording at the end of a lengthy set of sessions he was about to undergo. At the instigation of Frank Murray, Joe had agreed to produce the next album by the Pogues, a record that would be called Hell’s Ditch.

  Working with the Pogues would entail a different production route. Far from adopting the hands-off approach of Walker and Earthquake Weather, this time Joe would prove himself extremely hands-on. Shane MacGowan, who had recently discovered a fondness for LSD, and had returned from a visit to Thailand, declared he was not ‘in the mood’ to write Irish-sounding material. Joe encouraged him to come up with more traditionally rock-sounding songs with a Latin tang. All the tunes were written and there had been lengthy pre-production prior to heading down the M4 from London to Rockfield residential studio in Wales, near the market town of Monmouth in the beautiful Wye valley, a gorgeous part of Britain. Joe drove down in his Morris Minor hotrod; as he did with most of his friends, he had given the vehicle a pet name, the ‘Moggie’ Minor.

  ‘At the end the recording got quite messy,’ remembered Jem Finer. ‘When you’re making a record and there’s eight people in a band, they’ve all got ideas. And Frank was saying, “You don’t want to put that track on. You want to put Terry’s track on.” There were all these politics going on. That happens in bands, but with eight people in the Pogues there would be more politics than there were group members. To deal with this, Joe’d become quite psychotic, destructive and obsessive. He’d smash things, not a lot, but more than necessary. In the context of the record he didn’t have to go into that persona every night, but something gradually overtook him during the process. I saw this interesting, weird split going on within Joe. That said,’ added Jem, ‘I was impressed by how hard-working he was, how meticulous. He worked his arse off. He kept us all on our toes.’

  Recording took place during the three-week run of the 1990 Football World Cup in Italy. Many involved, including Joe, took time off from recording to watch the matches. Throughout the sessions, vibing himself into his role, Joe Strummer wore a straw Stetson he had brought back from Nicaragua; it was his turn to be handed a pet moniker, the Pogues dubbing him ‘Strumboli’. Joe would pace himself during work-time, small amounts of hash in his joints, no excessive boozing. During the mixing of the record he moved into his own established pace, working half the night. After work Jo
e would head out into the summer dawn mist to drink brandy and Coke and watch foxes chasing mice on the hills through binoculars. Somewhere around 9 in the morning he’d fall into bed. For a couple of weeks Josh Cheuse, then a partner-in-crime when it came to consumption, was at Rockfield, designing the cover for Hell’s Ditch: ‘During the actual session, the spliff bunker was always a good way of keeping people out of the control room. Once the actual recording was finished and the mixing had started, we built a kind of art studio in the recording studio, and then we built a bar, using tape to make a beaded curtain. That created a place where everyone hung out and talked and got drunk and didn’t interfere in the control room during the mixing.’ ‘We set up the Hell’s Ditch lounge, and made good music,’ Joe told me. ‘Me and Josh are very good at creating scenes to hang in. You must have a place for humans to relate. That’s what these scenes are about: a cool-out place. Then you eventually talk about your ideas, when you’re ready to.’

  What Josh found was that in this atmosphere he could readily participate. ‘For example, when they were doing that one track on the album about Lorca, ‘Lorca’s Novena’, we’d been listening to these cassettes of mad flamenco singers, and we were worried about copyright. So I said, “Let’s play it backwards.” So they did it: it’s on the record, this backwards flamenco thing that sounds great.’ As he had with the train noises for Earthquake Weather, Joe sought out appropriate found sounds: howling dogs were recorded, as well as the sound of the ‘Moggie’ Minor revving up.