Mick Jones: Stayin' In Tune - The Unauthorised Biography

by Mick O'Shea

  The initial reaction wasn't as they'd hoped, however, as when Mick first played the song to Paul on acoustic guitar he'd thought it a terrible idea. Thankfully, he underwent a change of heart once Mick plugged in his Les Paul and Topper jumped behind the kit.

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  A warm-up show had been booked at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on 31 January. Steve Jones had no doubt regaled The Clash with harrowing tales of the harsh treatment Noel Monk's team of Vietnam vets had meted out when he or any of the other Sex Pistols dared step too far out of line on their ill-fated inaugural US tour some twelve months earlier, The Clash thought it prudent to stick with the mischievous devils they knew and trusted.

  Coming to America under the 'Pearl Harbor '79 banner undoubtedly put a few corporate noses out of joint, but contrary to what their stateside detractors were saying The Clash weren't coming to America to bury rock 'n' roll, but rather to reclaim it; evidence of which came with the no-expense-spared hiring of pioneering rhythm and blues legend Bo Diddley as support. The idea being, that having Bo open proceedings would not only serve as a reference point for The Clash's own fusion of R&B, punk and reggae, but would also familiarise America's youth with its own forgotten culture.

  The idea was hardly innovative, given that the Rolling Stones – having achieved their initial flush of success on the back of the 'Bo Diddley Beat' – had invited Bo to accompany them on several of their US tours, but Mick and Joe were at least being mindful to pay their own dues. Once Caroline had dutifully tracked the guitar legend down in Australia, they gave her full remit to have the Oz promoter offer Bo whatever it would take to get him on an aeroplane – the inducement being a reported $20,000.

  'In America, the record company said we could have anybody we wanted to support us,' Mick explained. 'We said, "Can we have Bo Diddley?" They said, "Ooh, we don't know about that." He was fantastic! We had Lee Dorsey as well. And Screamin' Jay Hawkins— he came out of a coffin every night.'1

  Epic had been worried that Diddley would be bottled off the stage owing to the colour of his skin, but in Vancouver it was the headliners who suddenly found themselves under fire from a barrage of cans, bottles, and other projectiles when they tried to leave the stage – despite having played three encores.

  The Clash had hired a luxury touring bus hired from country singer Waylon Jennings, but rather than make a straight run for California they stopped off in Seattle to enjoy a good night's rest in a bed that didn't move before continuing onto San Francisco. Whenever The Clash were out on the road Johnny would arrange for an early morning call. The call which roused him from his slumber the following morning wasn't from the concierge, however; but rather Bob Gruen informing him Sid Vicious was dead. The mood was understandably sombre for the rest of the day.

  The Berkeley College Campus was famous for its student riots of a decade earlier, but the show at the campus' community theatre proved a rather tepid affair with Joe – in his garbled tour diary for the NME – going so far as to liken the audience's reciprocation to the onstage antics never getting beyond their politely 'tapping their biology books in time to the tunes.' Even opening with 'I'm So Bored With The USA' failed to elicit much of a response.

  With the audience appearing to be as equally bored with The Clash, Joe had enquired of Johnny Green who was responsible for 'putting us here with these dozeys'. When Johnny pointedly jabbed a finger at his backstage pass which read: 'Bill Graham Presents', Joe had then turned his attention to Caroline to ask why she'd booked the Berkeley show through Graham, and was told in return that those bands who don't cosy up with Graham didn't get to play California, let alone San Francisco.

  Joe was still absorbing this information, Johnny relented to the repeated pestering of a 'mixed bag of people in tie-dyed sarongs and saris, and bizarre baseball caps with and animals and propellers on top, and allowed them backstage to meet and greet The Clash in return for their bizarre headgear.

  On overhearing Joe grumbling about Graham's domination of the local scene, the interlopers told him that if The Clash wanted to play to a real audience they were staging a benefit show at the Geary Temple for an organisation intent on breaking Graham's monopoly.

  The Clash were expected in Los Angeles in two days time, and the American road crew weren't overly keen at the idea of remaining in San Francisco to play a benefit show – especially seeing as Graham would get to hear about their wilfully biting the hand that would be feeding them this particular evening. After all, The Clash could split up and never return to California, whereas they would all still need to make a living.

  Johnny Green remembers the Geary Theatre show as being a 'storming gig from the second the band ran on to the disintegrating stage,' but The Clash couldn't hang around to rejoice in stealing some of Graham's thunder owing to their having a four-hundred-mile drive to Los Angeles to navigate. 'The drive takes all night an' we test out the bunks which are like comfy shelves,' Joe reported in his NME tour diary. 'We hit LA in the morning and we gotta play the Santa Monica Centre the same night. Me an' Mick try to get a look at Hollywood but we collapse instead. Later, Mick tells me his hotel bed just kept moving all the time, just like mine, and we work out it's because we were on the bus all night.'

  The Clash managed to arrive at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium by the skin of their teeth, but the truck ferrying their gear was less fortunate and with the clock ticking Johnny Green was forced to reach for the phone book. The replacement PA was set up on stage ready to go when the missing truck finally pulled up outside the venue. The road crew were happy to leave the group's gear where it was, but Mick was having none of it and insisted they make the changeover.

  It was at the Santa Monica show that the group came face-to-face with their employers. Several Epic execs had flown in from New York with no other agenda than to pose for a photograph with The Clash before sloping off for a night on the company credit card. The Clash, however, had no intention of allowing themselves to be seen as label puppets, and just as the photographer had been about to snap the shutter they'd walked out of the room leaving the dumbstruck executives catching flies – much to Caroline's chagrin. 'All the top record company people came to that gig, the very people I'd had to get the money from to make the tour possible,' she explained. 'I really wanted the band to meet with them and say thank you, but The Clash were determined to be as rude as possible.'3

  Epic's red-faced press officer, Susan Blond, who'd painstakingly arranged the sycophantic suits into a neatly defined group, had pleaded with Caroline to get them to come back into the room, but in Elvis parlance, The Clash had already left the building.

  The next scheduled pit-stop was Cleveland, Ohio, where The Clash were set to appear at the Agora Ballroom on 13 February. Joe's old Newport buddy Allan Jones was covering the tour for Melody Maker, but arrived in town only to discover the group had disappeared from the radar somewhere near the Oklahoma State line owing to the fierce snowstorms that had brought the Midwest to a standstill. The Welshman was slightly anxious as to how The Clash would greet him when they did arrive as he'd yet to pen a favourable review.

  The Agora Ballroom date was a designated benefit show in aid of a local US Army veteran called Larry McIntyre who'd lost both his legs in Vietnam. McIntyre had apparently incurred the displeasure of his neighbours after having had the audacity to go swimming in the pool at the complex where he was living. It would seem losing one's body parts for Uncle Sam is acceptable practice as long as one keeps the scars under wraps. Swimming was one of the few recreations left to him, and McIntyre was suing his not-so-amiable neighbours.

  The benefit was to raise funds for McIntyre's legal fees and The Clash were to have been introduced to the beneficiary after the show, but the double amputee gave back-word after hearing Joe forget his name in the heat of the moment thanking the crowd for being 'so free with your money for this guy what's got no legs'.4

  The following morning The Clash awoke to discover they were the ones in need of a benefit
as there wasn't enough in the kitty to cover the hotel bill. Caroline had been on the phone to Epic all morning trying to speak with the person who could authorise the payment who, like their opposite number at Soho Square, was tied up in a meeting. With no show until the following night in Washington D.C., there was no immediate hurry, but unless someone at Epic came through and settled the bill, there was every chance that the tour party would have to do a runner. 'I told Epic that they could meet us at the state border,' Caroline dead-panned. 'We'd be the bus with the Highway patrol chasing it…'5

  To add to the irony of the situation, Topper caught a feature on the previous night's show on the local TV station, Channel 8 (Owned by CBS). According to the feature, it was Bo Diddley who'd headlined the show and The Clash didn't get so much as a mention.

  Despite their having endured a ten-hour drive to Washington D.C., in one of those 'we're-here-so-we-might-as-well-go-see-it' moments, the tour party decided to drive over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the early hours of the morning to see the White House. Joe's immediate reaction on seeing America's most famous residence was to rue not having a bazooka close to hand.

  At the show itself Mick could have been forgiven for thinking he was under attack as he kept getting electric shocks from his Les Paul copy. His frustration finally spilled over during 'London's Burning', and he unslung the offending Gibson and smashed the neck against the stage. 'I thought it was a good gig,' he reflected. 'I thought it was alright in the end; smashed the neck right off my fuckin' guitar, though. Funny, I used to hate groups that smashed their instruments.'6

  Following the penultimate show at the Harvard Square Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the 1800 capacity venue had sold out in under an hour despite The Clash only receiving airplay on one Boston radio station, the tour wended its way down the eastern seaboard to New York.

  The Big Apple was already abuzz about The Clash when the group arrived in town, but those lucky 3,800 ticket-holders crammed into the former cinema on West 14th Street were in for a night they would never forget. The group was well aware that this was the night that would go a long way to breaking them in America. Aside from the leading lights of New York's glitterati, including Andy Warhol, Robert De Niro, and Carrie Fisher wandering around backstage, the cream of America's rock cognoscenti were also in attendance; and the enigmatic Lester Bangs went so far as to cite the Palladium show as one of the best rock 'n' roll shows he'd ever witnessed.

  The day after the Palladium triumph Mick took time out to speak with Ira Robbins from the underground newspaper, Trouser Press. The interview starts off well enough with Mick chatting about his personal musical heroes including Mott The Hoople. Indeed, it's only when Robbins alludes to the accusatory fingers pointed at The Clash by certain sections of the British music weeklies in that they'd suffered from 'Mott The Hoople Syndrome' whilst penning Give 'Em Enough Rope that the temperature drops dramatically.

  'I was very fond of Mott,' Mick responded testily. 'No, we didn't name "All the Young Punks" for him [Ian Hunter] — that was something else. It was nothing to do with "Dudes". And the whole "New Boots" thing was a joke with Ian Dury — that was a mistake as well. You can call that number anything; it's kind of a statement like "Garageland" was on the first album. It's our message of what's happening with us.

  'But it's important that people don't see it as a kind of corny biopic,' he continued. 'Some do see it as a system of living. That's not all it is, we're more than that. It's all for them as well as us; it's for their imaginations. We're raising consciousness. It's the only thing that young people can do for other young people that's worth doing.'

  One song on the album which clearly proved a hit with Robbins was 'Stay Free', which Mick had playfully introduced from the Palladium stage as their 'wimpoid ballad'. 'Even the skinheads cry over it,' Mick chuckled. 'It really moves them. It's very difficult to do it every night; we certainly don't always do it. When we do it, it changes the whole tone of the set.'

  Bringing the interview to a close, Robbins asked Mick if he and the rest of The Clash had been wary of coming to the US and the tour ending up a failure. Mick responded by saying – albeit tongue-incheek – that 'it would just have meant we wouldn't come back.'

  When Robbins says that Mick had looked like he was enjoying himself on the Palladium's stage, Mick replied: 'It was real nice. We had a big stage to fill and we wanted everyone to feel a part of it which is really difficult. You couldn't do it if the audience was any larger. That is the most you can do it to and still communicate effectively.'

  Having confessed to an aversion to The Clash ever playing Wembley Stadium, and citing the 'Rock Against Racism' show at London's Victoria Park the previous April as being their biggest outdoor crowd, Mick candidly admitted that The Clash's live show was more effective at indoor venues such as the Palladium. 'We've worked those bigger places, but bigger shows aren't communication shows,' he explained. 'I can't see it working. The last time they asked us to headline the Reading Festival we told them to stick it, so they got Tom Robinson or somebody like that.'

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  The simmering unrest between The Clash and those operating within Epic's corridors of power, which the group had wilfully exacerbated by refusing to pose for the obligatory 'meet and greet' photo backstage at the Santa Monica Civic Centre, was alleviated somewhat when both parties came together to work a happy compromise over Epic's decision to belatedly release an amended version of The Clash in America. The 100,000+ import sales of the original album suggested that Epic's decision would be handsomely remunerated and the group reluctantly agreed to the label dropping several songs from the UK track-listing and replacing them with non-album UK singles as yet previously unreleased in the US, coupled with a promotional single: 'I Fought The Law' and '(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais'.

  As both of these tracks featured on the revised album, Epic complied with the group's demand that a freebie forty-five featuring 'Groovy Times' and 'Gates Of The West' to be included with the album.

  CBS' then Head of A&R, Muff Winwood (renamed 'Duff Windbag' by The Clash), believes the majority of The Clash's internecine struggles with Epic around this time were the result of the label's strategy on how best to market the group in America. 'In Britain, they [The Clash] could use the media, and do the bizarre things that British groups have always done with the media because the country's small enough to be able to do it, but in America it's much more difficult,' Muff explained. 'You just can't replicate how you do things in England. You have to do it in a different way. You need big business to flow things through.'7

  Muff then goes on to reveal that he and the rest of CBS UK team who were working for the greater good of The Clash experienced a more uneasy relationship with Caroline than they ever did with Bernard.

  Having said that, however, he was keen to stress that whereas Bernard had been his own man, Caroline had the distinct disadvantage of trying to operate within the strict 'dos and don'ts' mandate that The Clash had given her. One of the do's was to keep the record company at arm's length, but in order to maintain a steady cash flow so that The Clash could function like any other group Caroline was forced into holding regular consultations with CBS UK regarding their plans.

  Owing to the slipshod care and attention paid to the small print in their recording contract before putting pen to paper, The Clash were expected to deliver a new album each year. This wasn't per calendar year, as the eighteen-month gap between The Clash and Give 'Em Enough Rope demonstrates, but the group would have to deliver new product before the end of the year.

  Upon the group's return to London Caroline had drawn up a fourpronged plan for The Clash. While plotting a return to the US was part of her strategy, delivering a new album as per contractual obligations took priority. However, if The Clash were to deliver a new album by the year's end they would need time to write new songs, and in order to be in any fit state to pen new material they needed some downtime to recharge the batteries.

  Get
ting The Clash to drop down a couple of gears was no easy thing, but Caroline was determined that with royalties coming in from the records, Joe, Mick, and Paul – being the group's three main shareholders so to speak – put at least some of their hard-gotten gains into bricks and mortar. Paul was the only one to follow Caroline's advice – possibly because he'd come to trust her business acumen more than the others – by putting a mortgage down on a basement flat in Oxford Gardens.

  Mick had been forced to retreat to his old bedroom at Wilmcote House after returning from America to find thieves had ransacked the flat at Pembridge Villas and made off with his guitars and video-recording machine, and was therefore delighted when Caroline secured a lease on small mews house on Simon Close, just off Portobello Road. Joe typically chose to ignore Caroline's advice and continued his transient existence living out of a suitcase at his girlfriend mother's World's End council flat. Topper, who wasn't yet officially considered a full equal member of The Clash, had little option but to continue renting.

  The next item on Caroline's four-prong agenda came in finding The Clash a more permanent replacement to Rehearsals where they could concentrate on writing in a relaxed atmosphere free from the worry of having to pack their gear away at the end of each day as they'd had to do at Nomis, Black Hole, and several other pay-per-hour rehearsal spaces of varying refinement in and around London. Johnny Green remembers that it was he and Baker who made the pilgrimage to Pimlico after coming across Vanilla's 'studio-to-let' amongst the Melody Maker classifieds, but it was undoubtedly Caroline who arranged for the funding through Peter Quinnell, the accountant she'd brought in to help sort out the group's finances in the wake of Bernard's departure.