Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  28

  BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

  2002

  The impetus from recording the film version of ‘Minstrel Boy’ led to Joe, Martin and Scott deciding to record a new album as soon as possible. In February 2002, along with Simon Stafford, they began working on fresh material at a tiny studio they rented, 2KHZ, on Scrubs Lane in West London. In LA the ‘Minstrel Boy’ vocal had been extracted from Joe with assiduous attention to every syllable, Martin and Scott having consciously set out to stretch Joe’s abilities. ‘We got this incredible vocal from him,’ said Martin. ‘Me and Scott thought he was really into the method of how we did that. We thought we could really get him singing on this next album. We didn’t talk to Joe about it – it just felt like he was into it. Joe would potter about, make himself a little room, get flags up and posters all over the place, and get some lyrics down. The idea was to get a contemporary-sounding album, made together as a band.’

  After half a dozen rough arrangements had been worked out, Joe was brought into the studio to try out vocals on an all-night session. ‘We hammered him, and got too carried away. We’d be literally three or four lines in and we’d go, “Hang on, Joe. Can you go back a line.” He’d go, “OK, OK.” It was tough, man. We did this “London is Burning” song, which has quite a lot of melody for Joe. We definitely over-egged it.’

  Joe did not turn up for the next session. Nor the next one. Nor the one after that. Then they got a phone call: ‘I need to come in and talk to you. I’ve gotta come in. I’m fuckin’ losing my mind.’ The pair of Mescaleros wondered if Joe was having a domestic crisis. But no. ‘This is how I see it, guys,’ said Joe. ‘I love control freaks. I’m one of the few people that has respect for control freaks. It means you’ve got a path. It means you’ve got a vision. But you two do your thing, and you’re so quick and you’re so good at your thing that when you get that done you then want to come and get on my thing. ‘Martin’s great, Scott’s great, but then there’s this other guy called Martin-Scott, and that guy is hard to deal with. When one of their arguments fails the other one steps up and helps him out. It’s really fucking difficult to argue against you guys. It’s really difficult to get my point across.’

  ‘He felt we were a threat to his process,’ said Scott. ‘It was obvious he liked being in control. During the Global a Go-Go thing he was in control because it was out of control and he had made it that way.’

  ‘I straight away realized,’ said Martin, ‘that we’d completely overstepped the mark of what we’d set out to be – a band where each individual does what each individual does and gets respect from the others. Now we’d taken it to this place where we were going, “Joe do this, Joe do that,” and it had blasted his mind. He was really beat up. He didn’t know what to do and he didn’t know how we would take it. He was worried it would split the band up.

  ‘We said, “We’re not trying to fuck with you. We thought after Black Hawk Down that was the way you wanted to go.” It was discussed and sorted, and ended up with a “See you at the next session.” But it was incredible to get so close to everything falling apart. That’s why Streetcore took such a long time.’

  Early in February, Joe, Brian Eno and Andy Kershaw found themselves propping up the bar at the World Music Awards, at Ocean in Hackney; each of them was presenting an award. Andy Kershaw was relating his experiences in Iraq, which he had visited twice the previous year. ‘It was already the phony war. Brian and Joe were asking me what my trips had been like. I was telling them that the Iraqis were wonderful people, brought to their knees by the sanctions. We cooked up this hare-brained idea that Brian and Joe would each get some sort of band together, and I would approach the authorities and see if we could do an open-air gig in Baghdad the next year.’ Lucinda told me that Joe was very committed to this idea – which of course never came off.

  In the middle of March Joe took a sideways step into a different role. Through the auspices of his friend Dave Stewart, who had taken on the interests of the legendary Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff, Joe was selected to sing with Jimmy on his Black Magic album of duets. The idea of doing this excited Joe so much he couldn’t sleep for the week before going into the studio. By the night before the sessions he had become so wound up and anxious that he got drunk and stoned, then became ‘double-happy’, as he put it, that he was going into the studio the next day with Jimmy Cliff. The tune they recorded was ‘Over the Border’, written by Joe. ‘He turned up one day with some lyrics,’ said Jimmy Cliff. ‘He said, “I thought of you, Jimmy, when I wrote these.” I asked him how he wanted to record it, and he said, “I dunno. I just wrote these lyrics.” It was such a great feeling to record that song with him, so spontaneous. He looked so great.’ The great reggae singer found it very rewarding to record with Joe: ‘It was great working with Joe because we have sort of the same outlook – the same rebel stance, revolutionary outlook against the system, so it just flowed.’

  Work at 2KHZ was halted at the end of March. In a similar manner to that in which the four nights at the Troubadour in Los Angeles recalled the residencies around the world that the Clash had begun with their stint at Bond’s, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros had been booked at the beginning of April to play five nights in New York City. This time the dates were not in Manhattan but in now-fashionable Brooklyn, at the 600-capacity St Ann’s Warehouse at 38 Water Street beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, beginning on 1 April and running through to the 6th, with one day off. Lucinda was over for the week, and assorted Mancs were in attendance. Mick Jones came to one of the shows, Steve Buscemi and Jim Jarmusch showed up, and Barry ‘Scratchy’ Myers was on the decks, spinning his habitual superlative sounds. ‘We stayed up partying till dawn each night,’ said Bob Gruen. The entire crew would end up in Rocky Sullivan’s, a bar on Lexington Avenue; Joe was a long-standing friend of the owner Chris Byrne, once a pipe-player. On the final Sunday Joe and Lucinda took part in the Tartan Day parade on Fifth Avenue. Luce noted the sound of the bagpipes made tears roll down Joe’s face.

  ‘We’re fresh out of the airport to tell the truth, but that never stopped us before,’ Joe opened the set on the first night, Monday 1 April, as they moved smoothly into ‘Yalla Yalla’. ‘Lose This Skin’, sung by Tymon Dogg, was recorded ‘in this city’ twenty-two years ago to that very night, declared Joe, a memory of those epic and momentous Sandinista! sessions. But there were only four Clash songs – ‘London’s Burning’, ‘White Man’, ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’ and ‘Bankrobber’ – but a host of Clash covers: ‘Police and Thieves’, ‘Armagideon Time’, ‘Pressure Drop’, ‘Police on My Back’ and ‘I Fought the Law’ as well as Joe’s version of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘The Harder They Come’. The penultimate encore was Joe’s tribute to the deceased Joey Ramone, ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’. Otherwise it was Mescaleros’ tunes. The Five Night Stand, as the dates were billed, was a raging success, cementing Joe and the Mescaleros in the soul of the city, Joe even paying tribute to New York’s underground with his cover of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. Slotted in towards the end of the main set (later it became the first encore) was a new tune, ‘Get Down Moses’, recorded at 2KHZ, very loosely based on the Louis Armstrong song of the same title (one of Joe’s lines ran: ‘Carve the message on the tablets of LSD’), a copy of which Joe and Pockets had found on a cassette in a service station near Taunton. Who was Joe referring to in his lyrics for the song that ran: ‘in the eagle eyrie gotta make a new friend out of old enemies’? Every review of the Brooklyn shows mentioned the extraordinary and sophisticated dexterity of the musicians, how every time you looked up they seemed to be playing a different instrument. More than one drew attention to Joe resembling an old prizefighter who just couldn’t be knocked down.

  After the Five Night Stand, Joe, Lucinda and Eliza flew out to Los Angeles for what had become a habitual Easter-time break on the West Coast. Staying at Gerry Harrington’s house in Bel Air, Joe was soon involved with his old friend Rick Rubin, still touting for songs for Johnny Cash. Getting
one of his songs recorded by Johnny Cash had become a small obsession with Joe Strummer. Written with Smoky Hormel, the hip session guitarist, the song that he came up with, ‘Long Shadow’, was one of the finest, most insightful and most beautiful songs Joe ever wrote: even if you have to crawl up a mountain, Joe says, so long as you finally reach the top, you’ll cast a long shadow.

  Surely Joe is talking about himself? He wrote the lyrics in a sudden spasm of creativity, on a chunk of card torn from a cardboard box found in the garage of Gerry Harrington’s house, where Joe sloped over the table-tennis table with his Sharpie and spun words of such a valedictory nature that they were like his own ‘Redemption Song’, the masterly Bob Marley tune that marked the end of the Jamaican master’s work recorded in his lifetime.

  Yet again Johnny Cash did not click with this tune that Joe brought to him. But the Man in Black did end up at Rick Rubin’s house recording two versions of ‘Redemption Song’ itself, one a solo recording and one a duet with Joe, who also recorded a solo vocal of the tune. Finally, from out on a tangent, Joe had got to fulfil his ambition of working with the great American musical icon.

  Joe had a reason for being in Los Angeles. Kathy Nelson had suggested he might write a song for a new action thriller, Triple X (aka xXx), starring Vin Diesel. Joe immediately enlisted his musical compadre Danny Saber, who had a studio in his house in Laurel Canyon. ‘Joe takes these things really seriously. So I wrote this track and he came over and sang on it.’ But Danny felt that Joe was miscast in trying to write for this explosion-packed film, and the song, ‘All in a Day’ (as well as another tune, ‘Secret Agent Man’), was never used in the movie. Joe had spent a week driving around the more arcane areas of LA, gathering imagery for the lyrics; as he was writing a song for a character whose adventures are set in Prague, this may be why it was never used. ‘The great thing about doing it – and it’s my last memory of being in the studio with Joe – is that his vocal performance is one of the closest things I’ve heard to what I grew up listening to in the Clash. To see him in that state in the studio was incredible. He was bossing me around: “Go back. Do that bit again!” He knew what he wanted to do.’ Had Joe come to appreciate a different way of working during his rigorous time with ‘Martin-Scott’? He was so nervous of introducing ‘All in a Day’ as a tune for the new album that he couldn’t bring himself to play it to Martin-Scott for a month.

  After Joe came back from California there was another stint at 2KHZ. On 8 June Joe and the Mescaleros played at the Fleadh, the annual Irish festival in Finsbury Park in North London. Disappointingly, it was one of the weakest performances from the group, who had not played together for three months. When he missed a cue signalled by Joe from behind his back, Joe flung a microphone at the drummer’s head. Luke Bullen was furious. Following the set, a worried Joe Strummer came and sat beside him. ‘We’re still mates, aren’t we?’ he asked, troubled. Martin strongly disapproved of Joe flinging the microphone. ‘I should have said something to Joe about it, because he could have split his skull open.’

  At Glastonbury that year Joe again was in residence with his campfire. Fuji followed on. Then he was straight to the West Coast of America, where Joe appeared at the eighth annual Hootenany rockabilly festival and car show. That year festival organizer Bill Hardie expanded the California-based Hootenany: in addition to hosting the bash at its long-time home at Irvine Lake, south of Los Angeles deep in the heart of Orange County, he also took the event to San Francisco and San Diego. In 2002 Joe and the Mescaleros headlined each of the three shows after having warmed up with a date on 5 July at the Las Vegas House of Blues. Joe’s old friend Sam Lehmer, who had engineered Walker, came to the Orange County show with Rudy Fernandez. ‘Joe had been sick that day,’ said Sam. ‘The night before he ate something and got food poisoning. He was out of it until the show started. But the band sounded great. Really excellent. Joe saved himself during the day and just put out complete energy.’ ‘Joe always seemed to believe in the romance of the travelling troubadour,’ said Luke Bullen. ‘He turns up to the show and plays the part of Joe Strummer.’ Lola, Joe’s sixteen-year-old daughter, came along with a school friend on that short West Coast tour, and Joe wrote a song about her, ‘Coma Girl’, one of his greatest final songs (‘I was crawling through a festival way out west,’ runs the first line). ‘Lola didn’t play on the fact that she was Joe’s daughter,’ said Martin. ‘She didn’t stomp about, she was totally cool. She’s got Joe’s artistic talent: she drew me a brilliant little cartoon – just like Joe would have done.’ On the final show, during a great version of ‘Yalla Yalla’, Joe began to cry onstage during his performance. ‘He was letting all his emotions out in front of everyone,’ said Martin Slattery.

  Onstage at the final Hootenany show it had been Martin’s turn to feel Joe’s wrath. ‘I was supposed to come down a bit but I held on into it a little bit, and he turned round and went, “Shut the fuck up!” That was the only time he’d been derogatory towards me on stage. It really fucked me off. I would never have gone to him, “You’re singing in the wrong place, you cunt!” I was pissed off and I spoke to him about it afterwards. He was taken aback: he went all humble. “I get really emotional on stage.” He was really apologetic, and he spent the rest of that night coming up to me going, “Sorry, Marty.” I wished I hadn’t said anything.’

  Joe with Rudy Fernandez (left) and Tymon Dogg (right), invaluable friends and supporters. (Rudy Fernandez)

  Back in England Joe and the Mescaleros played a date at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 11 July, before the MOVE festival the next day at Manchester’s Old Trafford Cricket Ground, sharing the bill with Ian Brown and Paul Weller, and one on 13 July, that year’s T in the Park in Kinross in Scotland, playing with Oasis, Badly Drawn Boy and Primal Scream.

  On 3 August Joe and the Mescaleros played the Cambridge Folk Festival, an unusual setting. That day, Martin recalled, Joe seemed ‘quite crazy’, citing a BBC television interview in which his sound-bites seemed especially manic. Before the show Pockets found Joe hiding under the steps to the group’s caravan, smoking a spliff. Perhaps he was only obeying his own edict: after Martin and his wife Kirsty arrived with Isabella, their baby, Joe put up a large cardboard sign announcing: ‘ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING: THIS IS THE CRIB.’

  A backstage guest at Cambridge was Richard ‘Snakehips’ Dudanski, the former drummer with the 101’ers: ‘Joe was great. He was fantastic, very friendly.’ Joe insisted that Richard play with the Mescaleros on the encore, the first time that they had worked together since the Soul Vendors at the Tabernacle on New Year’s Eve, 1980. As the group played in pouring rain, Joe introduced his old musical and squatting partner: ‘Hey, Richard from the 101’ers is in the house!’ Dudanski appeared onstage armed with a tambourine, for Joe almost immediately to bellow at him: ‘PLAY IN TIME, YOU CUNT!’ ‘Having just sold this guy as a soulmate from back in the day,’ reminded Martin. ‘Snakes’ was not phased by this: ‘It was nice we played together after so long.’

  While Joe and Tymon were hanging out at the Cambridge Folk Festival, Joe noticed a BBC mobile broadcast studio. He told Richard, ‘What I want to do is to buy one of those, and drive it down to Mali in West Africa to record there.’ He wanted Richard and Tymon Dogg to come with him. He told Richard about his visit earlier that year to Essaouira in Morocco, raving about it saying he would be going to the town’s legendary Gnawa festival the next year. ‘He said that he’d gone overland with his dad in a car, from Haifa, through Syria, and then through Iraq to Tehran when his father had been stationed there.’

  Had Joe’s thinking been directed by the journey he and Tymon had made to Cambridge? ‘Just me and Joe went on the bus, and I said, “Look, I never joined the band. I was in a relationship with you.” We were questioning how we could do something that was valid, not just how to make another record, but moving on what we were doing as an art form. The art form was vital, and Joe still had that fire about it.’

  Not unusually Joe
had two life situations, ones that were entirely contradictory, but he was managing to make them coexist: he had his global radio DJ world with Tymon and Richard Dudanski and his desire to buy a broadcast truck; and he had the young, thrusting Mescaleros, ambitious to put out a hard rock’n’roll album – which Joe was also up for. Joe wanted both these situations, loved them both.

  However, he had some uncertainties about the group. He had learnt that, without telling him, Martin Slattery and Scott Shields had agreed to spend the summer working on a new album with Paul Heaton, the former singer with the Housemartins and the Beautiful South; they already had worked on a remix of a tune by former Spice Girl Mel C. Following the defection of Pablo Cook the previous year, Joe – whose antennae over such matters were always raised – was not at all pleased; he was questioning where the loyalties of his musicians lay. If he had considered that that loyalty mainly lay with their bank managers, Joe might have gained a different view.

  The conversation with Richard Dudanski at Cambridge Folk Festival was soon taken up again. Eighteen days later was Joe’s fiftieth birthday. As usual Joe spent it in San José, along with Damien and Maia Hirst, Jem and Marcia Finer, and John and Amanda Govett. Richard and his family drove over from Granada, where he now lived. ‘We were in Joe’s bar, run by these biker guys in a place called Escullos, 300 yards from the sea.’

  ‘There was a weird German bloke playing amazing old-fashioned R’n’B all night,’ said Jem Finer. ‘They had this drink there called Toxico, made from tequila and infused with marijuana. “Hola, Joe!” He was knocking back the Toxicos, round after round, all night long. But I wouldn’t say Joe was drinking more than anyone else.’ For Joe’s fiftieth birthday present Jem Finer had made him a potato tortilla: ‘I didn’t expect him to eat it and it was no surprise when Lucinda said it was still in the corner of his garage in Spain, where he just liked to look at it.’