by Mick O'Shea
Given that his brush with the law back in December had failed to serve as a wake-up call, it's questionable whether Topper would have been able to shake the monkey from his back without professional help. Mick, it seems, was still willing to allow him the chance, but Joe now saw him as a liability, and within days of the meeting he blithely informed the media that Topper had been sacked because of his heroin addiction.
This would prove a callous act with serious repercussions, because prior to Joe's public denouncement Topper had only chased the dragon. It was only upon realising there would be no reunion waiting at the end of the rehabilitation rainbow that he first began using intravenously.
From there the downward slope became ever more slippery. In 1987 he was jailed for eighteen months for supplying heroin, and upon his release was reduced to driving a mini-cab to feed his own habit. But of course, being the best drummer driving a cab was obviously preferable to being the best drummer in a coffin, which was the fate the judge presiding over his initial court appearance in December 1981 had envisaged unless he mended his ways. Thankfully, the moneys he received from the advance for From Here To Eternity in 1999 would allow Topper to purchase a house in his native Dover where he entered a methadone programme and finally got himself clean.
Whether Bernard played any part in Topper's dismissal is neither here nor there, of course, because no group – let alone an international act like The Clash – can hope to function with a hop-head keeping the beat.
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Within a week of its release Combat Rock emulated the feat of Give 'Em Enough Rope by slamming onto the UK albums chart at number two – being denied the top spot by Paul McCartney's Tug Of War – and with London Calling and Sandinista! having now accrued enough sales to finally balance The Clash's debit sheet at Soho Square, the future looked rosier than it had for quite some time. Of more immediate concern, however, was finding a new drummer. With the opening date of the US tour almost upon them and no time to stage auditions, there was really only one viable option… give Terry Chimes a call.
Though Terry responded to the call, he made it abundantly clear that he was doing so on a temporary basis to enable The Clash to fulfil their touring commitments for the remainder of the year. Even though Terry was available, there was still plenty of hard work to do – especially as Paul had already left for New York to liaise with Alex Michon in designing some new Combat Rock–themed Clash clothing to sell in America.
In the five years or so since his last tour of duty with The Clash, Terry had kept the beat for The Heartbreakers and Generation X, as well as doing session work in the wake of the latter group's demise following Billy Idol's decision to relocate to America to launch his solo career. Terry was accustomed to hitting the ground running and threw himself wholeheartedly into learning the principle songs from Combat Rock, as well those from Give 'Em Enough Rope, London Calling and Sandinista! that made up the forty-song pool from which The Clash would compile their nightly set-lists.
Mick, of course, had made consigning songs from The Clash to history something of a personal crusade of late, but given Terry's obvious familiarity with the first album the American audiences would receive an unexpected bonus.
The first leg of the US tour included five consecutive sell-out shows at the Hollywood Palladium, but Mick's embarrassment at playing 'Career Opportunities' and 'Garageland' in such salubrious surroundings, was assuaged somewhat when Joe held out an olive branch by inviting him to remix 'Rock The Casbah' for US release.
The second leg was initially supposed to reach its Combat Rock climax in Boston on 8 September, but unexpectedly ended up being extended another six weeks owing to The Clash accepting Pete Townshend's offer for them to fill the main support slot on The Who's supposed farewell tour.
Needless to say, the news provoked varying reactions back in the UK for while Townshend's generous gesture could be construed as a symbolic passing of the baton; those dyed-in-the-wool fans that had followed The Clash from their conception viewed it as a betrayal. True, The Who were the backstreet kids of their own g-g-g-generation, which perhaps explains why they had fared better than Elvis, The Beatles, and the Rolling Stones in The Clash's apocalyptic '1977' cull, but they still represented the old order that punk rock had set out to destroy.
Mick, however, saw the clutch of stadium dates – which included two sell-out appearances at the William A. Shea Stadium in Queens, New York – as an opportunity to spread The Clash credo to a larger audience. Indeed, such was the demand for tickets that special seating erected on the New York Mets' hallowed infield for the first time in the stadium's eighteen year history. 'It was a great honour for us to be asked to do it. It was brilliant, actually,' he said. 'We were very excited about it. It helped us immensely.'4
This was evidenced by Mick's remixed version of 'Rock The Casbah' climbing to a staggering number seven on the Billboard 200 following its release towards the end of October. And with Combat Rock still laying siege to the Billboard album chart it really did appear that The Clash were set to reap the rewards from their kow-towing to The Who.
On Saturday, 27 November, The Clash fulfilled the last date in their '82 tour diary by appearing on the bill of the third and final day of the three-day Jamaica World Music Festival – staged at the newly constructed Bob Marley Performing Arts Centre in Montego Bay – alongside Rick James, The English Beat, Jimmy Buffett, and Rita Marley and the Melody Makers.
Owing to poor planning on the part of the organisers The Clash didn't go on stage till 4 a.m., and such was the somnambulistic state of the crowd by this hour that Joe jokingly tried provoking the audience into life by threatening to bring the Grateful Dead on. Bernard had reportedly done some threatening of his own backstage by threatening to withdraw his charges from the festival unless they were paid $200,000.
According to despatches, The Clash opted on a reggae-tinged set to compliment the laid-back attitude of the audience, but a cursory glance at the track-listing on the From London To Jamaica bootleg there's little to differentiate from any other show from 1982. What is noticeable from the recording, however, is how uncomplimentary Mick's BAD-esque guitar sound is to Joe's vocal.
It had proved a frenetic year both on and off stage for The Clash, and on their return to London Mick, Joe, and Paul retreated to their respective bolt-holes to enjoy some much-needed downtime. However, though Mick was barely speaking to Joe and Paul, and vice-versa, the three went into Wessex Studio at the end of December – with Mickey Gallagher and Blockheads' drummer Charley Charles in tow – to record 'House Of The Ju-Ju Queen'; the song Mick and Joe had penned for Janie Jones* to prove they were still in love with the recently-released cabaret singer cum vice queen's world. During the session they also recorded a version of James Brown's 1970 hit 'Sex Machine' for the B-side of the single that would supposedly relaunch Janie's pop career. (The single would eventually be released via the Big Beat label in December the following year).
The 'House Of The Ju-Ju Queen' was a Clash release in all but name, but Mick, Joe, and Paul insisted on giving Janie top billing and mischievously credited themselves as 'The Lash'.
Terry Chimes may have been absent from the Wessex session, but he'd enjoyed playing with The Clash again and may well have accepted the offer to join the group full time had such an offer been forthcoming. Realising that he faced an indeterminate period of inactivity twiddling his drumsticks while waiting to see whether Mick and Joe would act like adults and finally have a 'clear-the-air' discussion for the good of The Clash, he accepted Billy Idol's offer to join him in LA, before subsequently going on to work with Hanoi Rocks.
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1 January 1983 is the day generally credited with being the birth of the 'true internet' following the completion of the migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP, while the recently-released 'New Year's Day' gave The Clash-inspired U2 their first international hit single. The following month saw the Dublin outfit's third album, War; slam straight in at number one on the UK alb
um chart, but as for The Clash themselves, the world heard nothing until April when it was announced they'd been approached by Unison (an acronym for 'Unite Us In Song') the organisers of the second Us Festival in Glen Helen Regional Park, in San Bernardino, California, to headline the opening New Music Day on 28 May.
The overall Memorial Day weekend audience was expected to be in the region of 700,000, while The Clash could expect to play in front of an estimated 150,000, and pick up a whopping $500,000 pay check.
Mick shared Joe and Paul's reservations about whether The Clash should accept the invitation, but his qualms were that the group needed more time away from each other before reconvening to plot a viable strategy for taking The Clash forward, whereas Joe and Paul were more concerned about the potential UK media backlash of them playing what was little more than a corporate sponsorship love-in.
'That was our big problem all the time, really,' Mick explained. 'The bigger we got the worse it seemed to get for us. It is a very strange irony. You'd think we'd be getting on great, but it got scary.
'We were always battling with contradictions, but when we got big, we were faced with big contradictions. It was almost at the point of compromise, and that was a big factor towards breaking up. That, and we never had any time off, and we lived on top of each other for like six or seven years. We got dog tired and fed up. When we were struggling, it definitely held us together. "Come on! Where are we going? We're going to the top!" We had all that drive, and just like anybody we had good intentions. But you get compromised. You can't beat it. We did okay, considering the things we had to contend with.
'Compared to most groups, we did great. But trying to deal with those contradictions was the worst. On the one hand, there was what we were singing about, and then we were becoming more and more, and bigger and bigger. And it's like, what's there? There's more. And then there's more after that. And then it is like, well hold on a minute, don't we have enough? So we were in crisis most of the time. The more we worked, the more screwed we were.' 5
The contradictions Mick spoke about may have been playing havoc internally, but they were at least paying dividends. With the royalties flowing into The Clash coffers from the sales of Combat Rock and 'Rock The Casbah', for the first time since putting pen to paper at Soho Square some six years earlier the group were at long last in a position where they could pick and choose their options.
The Us Festival was far removed from The Clash's mid-Seventies manifesto, but Bernard believed that his warring charges should accept the invitation – if only as a means of getting them functioning as a cohesive unit again.
This, of course, meant finding a new drummer, and with this in mind Bernard placed the following ad in the 23 April issue of Melody Maker: 'YOUNG DRUMMER WANTED: Internationally successful group Recording and concert appearances immediately'.
One of the three hundred or so who responded to the ad, and was deemed worthy of being invited back to play on stage with Joe and Paul (Mick was in New York at the time) was future Stiff Little Fingers drummer, Steve Grantley.
Playing on the same stage with Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon was a dream come true for any wannabe musician and Steve was certainly no different as he'd grown up listening to The Clash. Now, as any SLF fan will happily testify, Steve is one of the best drummers around – and indeed, one of a handful of drummers worthy of polishing Topper's drum stool. Following a run through on stage, Joe and Paul were of a similar opinion and invited Steve back to go head-to-head with another drummer called Pete Howard.
This time, however, Mick would also be on stage, and the fact that Pete got the nod kind of gives the outcome away. 'Playing with Joe and Paul was a doddle,' Steve reflected whilst on tour with SLF in 2002. 'Joe had even given me the nod that I'd impressed them more than Pete, and I thought, "This is it, I'm gonna be in the Clash!" But seeing Mick standing there on stage dressed head to toe in leather and looking cool as fuck, I just went to pieces and missed my timing on "London Calling".
'Joe was great and said we could start again, but I was so overawed that I dropped one of my sticks. It just got worse from there. And all the while I could see Mick glaring at Joe as if to say, "You brought me back from New York for this!" Christ, it was embarrassing.'
Having road-tested Pete Howard with four warm-up shows in Texas and Arizona, The Clash arrived in Los Angeles to hold a press conference to promote the festival. According to Pulse Magazine, former Apple genius Steve Wozniak – the brainchild behind the Us Festivals – reportedly paid $21,000 for a private-hire jet to fly The Clash in from Tucson, Arizona. If that were true, then Wozniak was soon regretting laying on the five-star treatment as not only did they deride the festival for being marketed in the manner of 'cat food', they also engaged Wozniak in a little last-minute horse-trading at the festival itself by refusing to perform unless Wozniak agreed to donate $100,000 to a Southern Californian summer camp for disadvantaged children.
'We're trying to get Mr. Wozniak, who started this whole thing off in the name of money, to put some money back into California,' Bernard told those reporters who'd responded to the emergency press conference he staged some two hours before The Clash were due on stage. 'With a figure of $18 million being spent we figure he could give ten per cent of that towards some organisation.'
Bernard then announced The Clash would be willing to match Wozniak's benevolence by donating ten per cent of the group's earnings to help the poor, but his suggestion that the other acts follow suit was met with disdain – particularly by Van Halen frontman, David Lee Roth, despite the poodle rockers being paid $1 million (plus substantial add-ons) for their troubles.
Unison begrudgingly agreed to donate $32,000, but its enraged president, Dr. Peter Ellis, declared The Clash's demands 'simple extortion'. Bernard, however, has always maintained that it was his stance that night in San Bernardino that laid the foundations for Live Aid two years later.
When The Clash went on stage two hours later than billed, they did so in front of a banner proclaiming 'The Clash Are Not For Sale', yet while their ongoing fight to keep album prices and concert tickets to a minimum went some way to supporting such a declaration, their mere presence at the festival showed they weren't above prostituting themselves for a couple of hours if the price was right.
Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the backstage bartering beforehand made for a highly-charged atmosphere front of house. So much so, that when the DJ at the side of the stage immediately began addressing the 140,000-strong crowd the moment The Clash finished 'Clampdown', the last number of their scheduled twenty-song set, Kosmo took this to mean The Clash weren't going to be allowed an encore and ran across and punched the bemused DJ full in the face.
Kosmo soon found himself under attack from a bevy of security personnel, and to everyone's surprise it was Mick who leapt to his defence. This in turn saw Paul and Joe jump in to save Mick, with Paul getting a sprained thumb for his pains. The fracas was over pretty quickly, but for a few frenetic heartbeats pandemonium reigned as The Clash vented their in-house frustrations on anyone who strayed into range.
Those closest to The Clash would have no doubt taken seeing Paul and Joe rush to Mick's defence as a sign that the brotherly bond that had carried them from the back room at Davis Road to Broadway was stretched to breaking yet still intact.
Little could anyone know, however, that the three Eddie Cochrans would never perform on the same stage together again.
* * *
* The album was released in 1970 as Let It Be. (BACK)
* Argentina invaded the Falklands on 2 April 1982. (BACK)
* Janie – born Marion Mitchell – was jailed in 1973 for seven years (serving three) for 'controlling prostitutes', as well as for her involvement in the BBC Radio One 'sex for airplay' Payola scandal. (BACK)
– CHAPTER THIRTEEN –
WHAT AM I GONNA DO NOW?
'I really think it was musical differences, although there was a set-up to cause musical differences. Bernie's suggestion that
we all try to play New Orleans music could have been setting things up so that he could say it was musical differences…'
– Mick Jones
FOLLOWING THE EXALTED HIGH of playing to 140,000 people, upon their return to London The Clash quickly descended to more runof-the-mill mundanity of everyday life. Said mundanity, of course, only applied to Mick, Joe, and Paul, whereas Pete Howard viewed it as all part of what was already promising to be an incredible journey; or at least it would have been had the 'kick-one-and-we-all-cry' camaraderie evidenced on stage in San Bernardino not evaporated into the ether at Heathrow arrivals.
Now that he'd experienced life on the road with The Clash, Pete no doubt imagined that group rehearsals would consist of their warming up by running through a couple of Clash standards, then working on song ideas before adjourning to the nearest pub where his new bandmates would regale him with stories and anecdotes well into the evening. He soon came to realise, however, that the reality was somewhat different…
With Mick's tardiness when it came to rehearsing being an old and familiar tale Pete quickly became accustomed to Mick showing up as and when he pleased. However, whereas Joe and Paul would have once sat around kicking their heels waiting for Mick to deign them with his presence, they now simply adopted a 'if he comes, he comes' attitude and got on with the job. And on the rare occasions Mick did show his face, Pete couldn't help but notice the difference in ambience than when it was just himself, Joe, and Paul.