But there is no silver lining without a cloud. On 4 August Joe and the Mescaleros had agreed to play as support to his friend Brian Setzer, on whose 1996 album Guitar Slinger Joe had contributed. The show was at the open-air Greek Theater, in the shadow of Griffith Park. Also in LA was Pablo Cook, who had played in the city with Moby the previous night. Attempting to juggle both loyalties, Pablo agreed to play the Greek Theater show with the Mescaleros. Out of the loop since the beginning of the year, he was surprised when he turned up for the sound-check. ‘There’s acoustic guitars everywhere. In my absence there’d been this weird transformation, and one I don’t like: with someone like Joe it’s got to be fucking nailed down and loud. I thought, I don’t quite know what to do here.’ For the show Pablo adapted to the moment. Following the Greek Theater date Joe and the group went along to the bar at the Standard Hotel on Sunset, where Danny Saber had a deejay residency.
‘In those situations,’ said Martin Slattery, ‘he would often have a word with the bar manager and pull rank, and before you knew it he’d have the guy wrapped around his finger and the place would be ours. He had that down. No place would ever close with us in it.’
As they partied into the night, with assorted Mescaleros dancing on tables, Joe advised Martin in a worldly manner that a particular girl was there for the musician’s taking. Information of this nature emanating from Joe would always rather surprise ‘Slatto’: ‘In the same way you don’t see your Dad as a sexual character, I never saw Joe that way either.’ Satisfied he had imparted this knowledge, Joe leant over towards the bar, to support himself on his elbow. But his alcohol-impaired brain misjudged the distance. Like a cartoon character, Joe Strummer, Punk Rock Legend, splattered sideways onto the floor.
After playing with the Mescaleros in Los Angeles, Pablo Cook was uncertain about the group; he realized that Martin and Scott were effectively now running the music, and that they were adamant the previous tour-bus alcohol and drug consumption should cease. ‘It’s bad enough being on a tour bus if you can’t get off your head a bit,’ thought Pablo. When a Mescaleros’ tour was suggested for later in the year he asked Simon Moran for a raise. ‘Joe’s tours tended to be Thursday-Friday-Saturday tours – a man of his age didn’t want to do seven-month stints. I was fine with that, but when you’ve got a home and a family to support, that’s not going to help financially.’ When Joe’s manager wouldn’t up Pablo’s rates, the percussionist decided he had to accept the offer he’d been made by Moby. But he wanted to tell Joe this himself. The next time he saw him was on Wednesday, 26 September, at the launch party for Bob Gruen’s Clash book at the Proud Gallery in Greenland Street in Camden.
Having contributed to the book I went along to this absolutely packed event, filled with journalists and camera crews, but also with the presence of Mick Jones and – far more controversially – Bernie Rhodes. Joe came over and hugged and kissed me. ‘I love the book,’ he said. Not unreasonably I presumed he was talking about the tome we were there to celebrate. ‘No, no,’ he said, almost irritably. ‘I mean your reggae book,’ referring to the also just published Reggae Explosion, which I had put together with the photographer Adrian Boot – I had sent Joe a copy. (Joe was always great about my writing. A year previously I’d published Rude Boy: Once Upon a Time in Jamaica. Joe called me at 3 in the morning to tell me it was ‘a masterpiece’. Lucinda told me that Mick and Keith, my next book, was ‘probably’ the last book Joe read.)
I noticed Joe seemed in a very odd state, half in the midst of events, half hiding in corners of the dark car park; even when he was in the centre of matters he seemed very alone. Pennie Smith said Joe seemed unable to look her in the face that evening. I assumed the evening’s emphasis on the Clash was stirring up all manner of debris within Joe’s mind. But I did not know what had transpired.
Shortly before Joe had arrived at the Proud Gallery Pablo had phoned him. ‘I said, “Listen, I can’t do it any more. Simon ain’t got the price right, and I think the power thing is a bit wrong.” He said, “OK, man. All right.” He sounded a bit angry.’ At the book launch Joe and Pablo still hung out together, putting away a fair amount of booze. When a film crew appeared in front of them, eager to grab a few sound-bites, Pablo stepped away, feeling he should not participate. But Joe grabbed him by the arm and led him into the car park. ‘He just broke down in front of me,’ said Pablo. ‘I’ve never seen Joe cry before, except one time when he took too much of that funny stuff. But this seemed to really break Joe. I said, “Joe, I have to earn money, and I’ve got to get out and I’ve got to graft.” He said, “Yeah, but you can’t do this.” It wasn’t an argument; it was more, “What can we do to resolve it?” I said, “It’s not going to resolve itself. I’ve accepted the tour. I’ve got to earn more money.” “OK, man.” I thought that was the end of it, so for the rest of the evening we proceeded to live out a weird façade. Later in the evening, after more drinking, there was a bit of “you fucker” and some friction, but I thought we got through that.’
To add to his traumas, Joe himself was dragged to one side, along with Mick Jones, by Bernie Rhodes. All evening Bernie had wandered around clutching a sheaf of papers in his hand, a speech he intended to deliver to the assembled multitude. But no one wanted to hear it, so he’d decided to give a personal reading to Joe and Mick. ‘“Oh, go away,”’ we both laughed,’ said Mick. When signing an autograph book, Mick saw Bernie had beaten him to it. ‘I started it all,’ Bernie had appended to his signature. Mick chose the moment to ask Joe what had happened to the songs he had sent him, supposedly for what had become Global a Go-Go. ‘No, they weren’t for that,’ Joe corrected him. ‘They are the next Clash album.’
‘At Bob Gruen’s book-launch,’ said Bernie, ‘Joe started to blank me. But I thought, “I’m a dignified person: I’ll wait.” He got me in a corner and put his head in my lap and started to weep like a baby. He said, “Bernard, you’re the only true one.” I saw that night he was surrounded by insensitive takers, all going, “Alright, Joe!” Joe died of a broken heart. He needed me, to be me.’
As the event at the gallery wound down, a move was made to the Groucho Club. Again, the atmosphere around Joe seemed strained. ‘A few of us were sat round a table,’ said Pablo, ‘and I looked at Joe, and he had his head in his hands, and when I looked again he was crying again. That really, really upset me.’ Also in the bar at the Groucho was Paul Simonon. Joe was reputedly angry with him for not having turned up at the Proud Gallery. ‘Our fans were there,’ he told him. ‘You should have come and given them your time.’ It was said that as a consequence a falling-out took place, and Joe and Paul never saw each other again.
But this was not quite true, and Paul had his own remembrance. ‘I didn’t go to the Bob Gruen thing because I thought he’d got us all to contribute to it but I wasn’t going to go and wave the flag. I saw Joe in the Groucho and we wanted to talk, but he was surrounded by all these drunken blokes who followed him around. We couldn’t talk because of those oafs. So I left – I was a bit pissed off.
‘We saw each other briefly outside the Groucho a month later. I was getting into a taxi with Gaz Mayall. Joe got in with us. Gaz said to him: “You’d better go back to your wife. She’ll wonder where you’ve gone.” He did. After, Joe and I still communicated by fax.’
Fifteen days prior to Bob Gruen’s book-launch in London a pair of hijacked planes had smashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, introducing the planet to the fragmented reality of the twenty-first century. Joe had spent time at Bob Gruen’s evening asking former NME editor Neil Spencer, wearing his cap of astrologer, for his prognosis on coming events in the wake of 9/11.
‘He was absolutely devastated by 9/11,’ said Lucinda. ‘I was in the kitchen and I heard it on the radio – a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I went to put on the telly. So we had it on before the second one hit, and I ran and got Joe up, and funnily enough he was supposed to be having his eyes tested that day. He was finally admitting he
couldn’t read the writing on the CD boxes. He was going to get some glasses so he could read the CD cases. But he sat in his dressing-gown and didn’t move all day. He just sat there, watching it all. It completely devastated him.’
On 3 October Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros were scheduled to be in New York, plugging ‘Johnny Appleseed’ on the Late Night with David Letterman television show, the first salvo of a series of American dates. At first Joe had thought of cancelling the dates: was a Mescaleros tour what the United States needed in the light of 9/11?
‘Everyone was cancelling their tours,’ said Lucinda. ‘He said, “I’m not cancelling.” I really didn’t want him to go. He said, “I’m going to New York and I’m doing it for the firefighters.” Because his great friend Steve Buscemi used to be a firefighter. “I’m doing it for the firemen. If no-one turns up but the firemen, then that’s good.” He insisted on going ahead with the tour. He was devastated by it.’
‘After the Twin Towers incident Joe was very opinionated in an almost shocking way,’ said Dick Rude. ‘I expected this live-and-let-live political point of view. But his response was, “We’ve gotta go in there and take care of this. If they had to kill every person on earth to fulfil their religious dogma, they would gladly do it.” He said, “Look at Hitler. In the beginning he wanted to take over his country, and we in Britain said, ‘Go ahead.’ Then suddenly we were bombed for four years straight. You can’t let these people take an inch, because they will take the whole mile.”’
At the end of the summer Dick Rude had visited Joe in Somerset for a few days. ‘One night we sat around a campfire, just me and him, until 4 in the morning, and practically didn’t say a word to each other. That was unusual. It seemed he wasn’t sure in his own head what was going on with the group. Then he called me up and said, “Hey, come on the road and film us.”’ The resulting documentary was Dick Rude’s critically acclaimed film Let’s Rock Again.
On 6 October the group played at the Trump Marina Hotel in Atlantic City. On a whim and for the benefit of Dick’s camera, Joe wandered out into a shopping-mall, handing out flyers for that night’s show. For the benefit of Dick’s camera, Joe knocked on the door of the largest local radio station: ‘It’s Joe Strummer. I was in a band called the Clash. I’ve got my new record. I wonder if you could play it?’ The Program Director played a song from Global a Go-Go and to Joe’s delight plugged the show. ‘He would do whatever it took,’ said Dick. ‘He had no lack of humility about what he was doing. He was all about turning people on. That was his role.’
The tour headed across the United States, dipping into Canada before the climax: four nights in the last week of October at the Troubador in West Hollywood. When he learnt that Gerry Harrington had bought full-body anti-chemical warfare suits for his children, Joe became nervous of a rumoured pending Al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles. ‘They’re not going to hit here as well,’ Scott Shields told him. ‘What do you know?’ demanded Joe. ‘You’ve only got a dog! We’ve got families!’ The acid test, Joe decided, would be to drive out to LAX airport and see if a disproportionate number of Afghani-looking people were boarding planes to leave the country, as though they had been tipped off. Accordingly, he and Dick Rude went to the airport to scope out the scenario. Not noticing large flocks of men with beards queuing to depart the USA, Joe decided Los Angeles was safe. The Troubadour gigs went ahead triumphantly. ‘Few artists could walk this world music tightrope as effectively as Strummer,’ wrote John Lappen in the Hollywood Reporter. ‘Nothing is forced or seems out of place as Strummer moves easily between these musical cultures; his audio passport allows him certifiable access to wherever he seems to want to go.’
From LA the Mescaleros flew to Japan for five dates before returning to London via the Womad festival on Gran Canaria on 11 November. At Womad a ‘jet-lagged’ Joe, looking ‘pale and tired’, was interviewed for the BBC by Martin Vennard, who noted that he ‘may surprise a few people with his views on the war in Afghanistan. The 49-year-old, who once sang about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas fighting the American-backed enemy, says: “I think you have to grow up and realize that we’re facing religious fanatics who would kill everyone in the world who doesn’t do what they say.”’
Martin Vennard asked Joe about Global a Go-Go. ‘“We got all the influences for it from Willesden High Road,” he says, referring to the multicultural London street where they recorded the album in a studio. “When you go out for milk and cigarettes you go through three countries because all the shops and cafés are playing their own music,” he says. He describes the song-writing process as “like going through hell”.’
But Joe wasn’t too weary to stand up proudly for the future of the Mescaleros: ‘We’d like to be known as one of the good groups from London … I haven’t even started yet.’
The Womad date was like a bridge into the UK and European tour that followed, beginning on 15 November at Brighton Concorde 2, a funky venue on the seashore. Down for the gig was Johnny Green; backstage after the show Johnny detected ‘a certain distance’ between Joe and the group members: ‘It seemed like nervousness on their part.’ He also observed that there was ‘lots of coke around. Also good-looking women of a certain age, dressed like rock’n’roll chicks, with studded belts and leather.’
Tracy Franks, the fan whom Joe had not babysat for, also went along to the show. ‘It turned out to be the last time I saw Joe. But my first thought was, “He’s drinking too much.” He couldn’t look me in the face. I think Joe knew that he wasn’t very well. He was very tired. He was trying: “How you doing, Tracy?” But he wouldn’t look at me, his face almost away from me. I’d never seen Joe like that before.’
The tour cantered through Birmingham, Dublin, Bristol and Brixton (filmed by Don Letts), before crossing the Channel to Paris. Then the group flew to Thessaloniki in northern Greece, the tour winding up at the Sporting Club in Athens on 30 November, the city in which the last line-up of the Clash had played their final date. The night after the Athens show Joe found himself embroiled in a controversial discussion. ‘These guys took us back to their penthouse flat,’ said Martin. ‘As dawn broke over Athens, Joe started berating the Greeks, taking the piss. He said you had to fight, and that he was into Alexander the Great and those kind of conquerors. I’d just seen the film Gandhi, and was saying, “I’m really into pacifists.” The conversation ended with him saying, “Well, if I had my way I’d just nuke the whole fucking planet. But everyone has to have the opportunity of having children. I wouldn’t want to take that away from you.”’
When Joe and the Mescaleros had played at the Troubadour in LA his old friend Kathy Nelson had brought the film director Ridley Scott to the first show. Scott was looking for music to include in his new movie Black Hawk Down, the story of a firefight involving US troops in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Impressed with ‘Minstrel Boy’, the stirring set opener, the director asked Joe to record a version of it that included the lyrics from the original ‘Minstrel Boy’ poem by Thomas Moore, the story of a musician-warrior gone to fight, destined never to return. ‘I’d always wanted to work with Joe,’ said Hans Zimmer, the composer of the soundtrack score, ‘because I think there’s an intelligence to his music. There’s nothing false about it.’ Accordingly, at the beginning of December 2001 Joe, Martin Slattery, Scott Shields and Richard Flack were booked into the Chateau Marmont. In a studio they drew the vocals out of Joe line by line. Although the recording was supposed to take three days, Joe twice postponed their return to London. At the end of a week he was trying to persuade his musicians to spend another day in LA. ‘Don’t you want to stay? What does your Dr Jekyll say and what does your Mr Hyde say?’ Joe was demanding, even as the exhausted musicians were dragging him into the limousine to take them to the airport. As the limo pulled onto Sunset Boulevard, Joe called out: ‘Hey, driver! Stop the car!’ With the limousine stopped in the middle of Sunset, with cars and trucks backing up behind it, Joe endeavoured to open a debate: ‘Don’t you want to st
ay? We could get some bongos and some girls and have a party! Let’s get on the phone and get some drugs.’ Joe climbed out of the vehicle to direct the congested traffic.
Eventually they got Joe onto the plane. He turned to Martin Slattery, seated next to him. ‘He gets something out of his pocket and goes: “There’s two lines left in this. Me and you, in the bog room. I’ll put it out for you – I’ll put a little piece of tissue over it!” We’re just about to get on a plane with a bed and he wants a line. We have a little drink, the plane’s about to take off and I look at Joe and he’s fast asleep, gently snoring. The one and only time I’ve ever seen him wipe himself out.’ The version of ‘Minstrel Boy’ recorded for Black Hawk Down was used to great effect behind the end credits of the hit film, and the fee paid to Joe and the Mescaleros and to Hellcat resulted in Global a Go-Go quickly recouping its costs. It also led to a philosophical shift in Joe’s thinking. ‘Me and Scott had been arguing about something in the studio,’ said Martin, ‘and I was saying, “Look, it’s just a matter of opinion.” Joe came up to me at the airport as we were leaving and said, “It’s just a matter of opinion.” I’ve been thinking about that all week.’ There was a further spin-off from the tune. Early in 2002 the same team flew to New York to Electric Lady studios to record a further version of ‘Minstrel Boy’, in which the group hummed the melody, for use in a television commercial for MCI, the American telecommunications company.
Redemption Song Page 70