We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  To Strummer, punk was a spirit, an approach to life, not a set of clothes, a haircut, or even a style of music. This was possibly convenient for the band’s commercial aims, but his critique rang true. Soon many of The Clash’s hard-core underground punk critics would find themselves striving to transcend self-made straitjackets.

  With London Calling—released only six months after Thatcher’s election—The Clash began to stake its claim on the broader arena of mainstream rock and roll. The musicians abandoned their early disavowal of prepunk sounds for a fervent embrace of the many forms and faces of rebel music. Spurred on by a catchy but lyrically lightweight hit single, “Train in Vain,” the album rose almost into the American Top 20, an unprecedented level of success for a left-wing punk band.

  The band’s ambitious vision was made even clearer by the following triple-album set, Sandinista! It sought to articulate—with wildly varying degrees of success—a world music that spanned jazz, salsa, reggae, funk, rap, folk, steel drum, disco, and rock, united only by a common grassroots focus and radical politics.

  The latter was announced by the album’s title, an approving nod to Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). Popularly known as the Sandinistas, they were Marxist revolutionaries who had overthrown a US-backed military dictatorship in a popular insurrection in 1979.

  Strummer first learned about the Sandinistas from an old friend, Vietnam veteran/activist Moe Armstrong. Later he recalled, “Moe [gave us] info that was quite hard to find out. A bunch of teenage Marxists oust your favorite dictator? The establishment don’t want to know!” Impressed by the quasi-punk spirit of the youthful revolutionaries, as well as initiatives like a mass literacy campaign and health care advances, Strummer and the band took up their cause.

  The song “Washington Bullets” provided the album’s title, rebuking the US—as well as the UK—for supporting dictatorships. It was no simple anti-American screed, for it also celebrated Jimmy Carter’s commitment to human rights that had led the US not to intervene to stop the Sandinistas’ victory. Articulating a consistent anti-imperialist stance, Strummer also skewered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chinese occupation of Tibet over a bubbling salsa beat.

  Augusto César Sandino, who fought against the US occupation of Nicaragua, 1927–33.

  Massive crowd in the main square of Managua, Nicaragua, after the Sandinista victory, July 20, 1979.

  By the time Sandinista! was released in the US in January 1981, however, the Carter administration and its human rights policy were on its way out. In its place was the newly elected Reagan administration, whose more muscular approach was driven by a rabid anticommunism that viewed conflicts around the world through the prism of superpower competition with the Soviet Union.

  “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” an essay by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat turned neoconservative hawk, informed Reagan’s Central American policy. Kirkpatrick argued that Carter’s human rights emphasis was fatally misguided. By abandoning authoritarian allies like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua or the shah of Iran, the US was naively opening the way for the expansion of Soviet-backed totalitarianism, and thus not only injuring our strategic interests but also, ultimately, the cause of human rights and democracy.

  Reagan’s decision to make Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations—an institution that she largely held in contempt—sent a clear message that human rights was no longer a priority for US foreign policy.

  While the Sandinistas had ample reason to worry about this shift, an ugly preview of bloodbaths to come first materialized in neighboring El Salvador. Kirkpatrick had already identified that country—which bordered Nicaragua, and was in the throes of its own nascent civil war, with Marxist-led guerrilla groups fighting a military-backed regime—as the next battlefront in a global war against Soviet communism. With Reagan’s 1980 victory, his spokespeople made it clear that there would be no hands-off approach in El Salvador as with Carter in Nicaragua.

  According to Robert White, Carter’s ambassador in El Salvador, Salvadoran elites took Reagan’s victory as a green light for a murder spree shocking even for a country where Archbishop Oscar Romero had been assassinated only eight months before. In swift succession, the leadership of the peaceful opposition was abducted, tortured, and killed, followed by rape and murder of four North American churchwomen, and, finally, the execution of the head of the Salvadoran land reform agency and two US advisers in the lobby of the Sheraton hotel.

  When White spoke out against these horrors and subsequent efforts to cover up the role of the Salvadoran military, he was summarily dismissed. Reagan swiftly put forward a request for millions of dollars of military aid for the government. The conflict intensified and the body count mounted, rising quickly into the thousands.

  The Reagan administration’s savage debut could hardly be expected to pass unnoticed in the Clash camp. A response would be forthcoming, but the band was then preoccupied with other matters.

  The Clash had created headaches for its corporate sponsors as early as 1977 with “Complete Control,” which lambasted company machinations in brutally direct terms. Likewise, the band won few friends at CBS with its insistence on first putting out the double-LP London Calling for the price of a single album, then upping the wager with the three-for-the-price-of-one Sandinista!

  CBS had grudgingly agreed. But Sandinista! held no breakthrough singles on any of its six sides, had received mixed reviews, and sold no better than London Calling. The band had foregone royalties in order to get its bargain price. Now debts to the record company were mounting.

  As pressure built, a management shake-up pushed by Strummer and Simonon brought Bernard Rhodes back in early 1981. It would prove to be a fateful shift.

  Rhodes was hardly a typical rock impresario, and his approach was anything but diplomatic. According to Clash insider The Baker, “The fundamental mistake everyone makes is in viewing Bernie as just the manager. But it was Bernie’s vision that inspired the entire concept of The Clash. He crafted them, fathered them, pulling them one by one from their respective situations and putting them together like ingredients in a grand recipe. Their early political ideologies, fashion concepts, and total image were a statement of Bernie’s thought processes.”

  If Rhodes was central to The Clash, his roughshod manner had alienated most of the band—especially Jones—and led to his firing. The Clash flourished artistically and commercially during his exile, with first Coon and then sixties holdover Blackhill Enterprises in the managerial role. Yet the growing tension between radical intent and commercial ambition left Strummer in particular feeling uneasy.

  In Rhodes’s absence, Jones had assumed control in the band. Strummer felt sidelined and—after the critical savaging of Sandinista!—concerned for the band’s direction. As The Baker recalls, “The excesses of Mick’s musical domination resulted in angst-ridden turmoil within Joe. Certain that The Clash had deviated badly from their intended goals, he turned to the only person that he felt was still championing those original political and cultural ideologies: Bernie Rhodes!”

  At the same time, band mouthpiece Kosmo Vinyl argues simply, “Bernie was brought back to break The Clash in America, and I worked with him to make that happen.” However counterintuitive this may seem, The Baker agrees: “Bernie was given a mandate: make the band huge, sell as many records as possible, get the message out to as many people around the world as possible—but do that without having the band’s message watered down to puerile pop nonsense.”

  This seems an unlikely role for the abrasive radical. But Strummer believed Rhodes could accomplish this breakthrough while somehow keeping the band true in a revolutionary sense more than could the “professionals” at Blackhill.

  In 1982, Strummer would explain to journalist Lisa Robinson, “It’s like having a split personality. I want The Clash to get bigger because you want people to hear your songs, you want to be successful . . . But on the other hand, I’m prett
y wary of that, of having it get too big to handle. You always think you can handle it, but you never know.”

  The Baker elaborates: “Joe wanted The Clash to reach the top, and yet not become part of the industry that they so despised. It was a tall order, and a very noble cause. Elvis, Beatles, and the Rolling Stones—they all became product, packaged and sold. Could it be avoided? Joe wanted to try.”

  In The Clash’s 1978 anthem “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” Strummer had written about other punk bands “turning rebellion into money.” If The Clash did break through, how could it evade that trap? Strummer wasn’t sure—but regarding Rhodes not only as a political catalyst but as a surrogate father, he trusted him to navigate the treacherous straits.

  Jones was not as hopeful that Rhodes would bring commercial success, but he also was not as nervous about the idea of rock stardom. Indeed, he had groomed himself for just such a role, as a kid from a broken home, living with his grandmother in a tower block. Vinyl—who had been with Blackhill, but who continued on with The Clash after the return of Rhodes—explains, “Mick was one of those kids who locked himself in a room, listening to the Stones, Mott the Hoople, whomever, practicing his guitar, dreaming of living that rock star life.”

  The Baker agrees: “Joe was from the squat scene, Woody Guthrie and all that, but Mick came from an old-school rock background, openly idolized bands like Mott the Hoople and the Stones.” When asked why “1977” declared, “No Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones,” by a fanzine writer in October of that year, Jones grinned and replied, “Well, you gotta say all that stuff, ain’t ya?”

  Both Vinyl and The Baker hasten to add that this did not mean Jones was not committed to the Clash political vision, only that his attitude toward the fruits of success was much less fraught than that of Strummer or Simonon. Such differences meant little when the band was an underground punk phenomenon, but would become a flash point as its popularity grew.

  * * *

  As The Clash considered its next steps, Thatcher was recovering from a bruising year where her popularity had dropped to historic lows amid a deep recession. The contraction had been caused largely by her monetarist economic policies, bitter medicine intended to cure a rising cost of living.

  Beyond inflation, Thatcher had ripped Labour for the high rate of unemployment. Yet joblessness had been rising ever since her election. It neared three million by 1981’s end. Her critics were hardly surprised when urban riots broke out in Brixton and other low-income areas. Yet Thatcher was undeterred, asserting, “The lady’s not for turning,” despite pressure from within her own Tory ranks.

  The pain was immense and undeniable: over two million jobs were lost in 1979–81. Particularly hard-hit was British Steel, the government-owned enterprise headed by Thatcher-appointee Ian MacGregor. He had returned after decades of living in the US to serve in this moment of “creative destruction” with downsizing, privatization, and closures high on his agenda.

  MacGregor had presided over similar wrenching cutbacks in places like Youngstown, Ohio. As factories were shuttered, only to reopen with cheaper labor overseas, this US region gained a new nickname: the Rust Belt.

  Thatcher was determined to “privatize” industries such as steel that had been nationalized after World War II as part of building a socialist state that sought to protect citizens from the cradle to the grave. Seeing only inefficiency and waste in this method, Thatcher valued MacGregor’s hard-nosed approach to labor relations and improving profitability, and brought him on the team to do this specific job. But dismal poll numbers suggested that she risked being not only the least popular prime minister in UK history, but also a short-lived one.

  Thatcher promised “a short, sharp shock” as her policies went into effect, with renewed growth and vitality to come. Many were not convinced.

  As disaffection and upheaval in Great Britain were building, the Rhodes-led Clash had become the toast of New York City and Paris, turning residencies at the Bonds nightclub and Theatre Mogador into artistic and publicity triumphs. The Clash was especially captivated by New York, and had begun work on a new album.

  Vinyl recalls the recording sessions themselves going smoothly—but not so the efforts at mixing or finalizing the record. Jones was even more dominant in the sessions than usual. He presented a finished double album tentatively called Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg that Strummer, Simonon, and Rhodes considered lightweight and too long. So producer Glyn Johns, renowned for work with the Who, the Stones, and other big names, was brought in on a rescue mission.

  An impressed Johns later recalled to Tape Op magazine, “Joe let me rip it to pieces!” The result was a stripped-back single album that left Jones angry and aghast. Strummer was unapologetic: “I brought in Glyn Johns and I think . . . well, it isn’t all good but he shook some real rock and roll out of that record.”

  If the musical disagreements were ominous, a more urgent crisis was the growing drug dependency of drummer Topper Headon. Drug addiction was a rock and roll cliché by now, and one The Clash had blasted with some regularity, despite the band’s obvious affection not only for alcohol but also marijuana—a predilection made public in a 1979 feature in pot bible High Times.

  In that article, Strummer identified heroin as a bane to the counterculture, echoing the longstanding Yippie distinction between “life” drugs like pot and psychedelics and “death” drugs like speed, cocaine, and, above all, heroin. Clash antiheroin commentary dated back to “Deny” on the first album through “Hateful” on London Calling and “Junkie Slip” on Sandinista! as well as a new track, “Ghetto Defendant.” Yet Headon fell prey precisely to this drug.

  On an early 1982 tour of the Far East, Strummer confronted Headon: “How can I be singing all these antidrug songs with you stoned out of your head behind me?” Headon was unmoved, and the issue remained unresolved after the band’s return, through the drama over the new album’s length and production.

  Then on April 21, 1982—three weeks before the new record was to be released and only days before a UK tour was to commence—Strummer disappeared.

  Much has been written about the time the singer was missing in action. The disappearance had its genesis in a stunt suggested by Rhodes, apparently worried about weak advance ticket sales on the UK tour. But it turned into a genuine reflection of Strummer’s desperation over pressures from the band’s growing popularity, the deepening tension with Jones, and Headon’s addiction.

  Although Vinyl was able to locate Strummer in Paris after three weeks and convince him to return to do a lengthy US tour, the price was Headon’s ejection. Original Clash drummer Terry Chimes stepped in with five days’ notice before the two-month tour began on May 29, 1982, in New Jersey.

  It was a challenging development, most of all for Headon, who felt betrayed and abandoned. Vinyl recalls, “Topper was the best drummer of his generation, but he had no interest in giving up drugs. We had no choice.” The Baker disputes this, but admits, “The band couldn’t just wait for Topper . . . things were moving so fast.”

  Strummer would later bitterly regret his decision, and date the demise of The Clash to this moment. Yet it’s hard to see what else could have been done—not if the band intended to preserve its credibility.

  * * *

  By the time this drama had played out within The Clash, the political ground had shifted—starting when Argentine military forces invaded and occupied the Falklands Islands on April 2, 1982. The Falklands were a somewhat embarrassing vestige of the faded British Empire. They were situated just off the coast of Argentina, which claimed them as “Las Malvinas.” While this Argentine assertion had history and geography on its side, the Falklands had been a British colony since 1841, and were largely populated by descendants of British settlers.

  A series of errors had sparked the war. Budget cuts pushed by Thatcher led to British ships being removed from the South Atlantic, sending a signal that the Falklands were no longer a priority. Reagan emissary Vernon Walters subsequ
ently assured the leadership of the Argentinian military dictatorship that in case of an invasion, “The British will huff, puff, protest, and do nothing.” And the Argentinian dictatorship apparently felt that reclaiming the Falklands/Malvinas would distract attention from economic troubles and political repression at home.

  In the last instance, the junta was proved correct, at least at first. Argentinian nationalism was sparked by the bold act, and approval of the government soared. But the first two assumptions would prove less sound.

  Given that Thatcher’s decisions had helped precipitate the Falklands conflict, the war could have dealt a deathblow to her unpopular regime. Thatcher’s risky decision to dispatch a naval task force on April 5 to retake the islands raised the stakes even further. But this gamble would be her political salvation.

  As British troops went into combat, nationalist fervor built in the UK, especially as the war went well for the home team. A popular tabloid newspaper, the Sun—mouthpiece for right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch—offered a simple huge “GOTCHA” as a headline in response to the sinking of the Argentinian ship General Belgrano, at the cost of 368 lives. The Sun adjusted the headline after the immensity of the death count became known, but the paper—like most of the British press—continued its gung ho war coverage.

  Vinyl saw this war fever engulf a pub that the band had long frequented: “It was really ugly. We had been drinking beside these guys for months, and felt they were alright geezers. All of a sudden they were cheering Thatcher, cheering for the deaths of hundreds of human beings, all because they were ‘the enemy.’ It was a bit sick, really, and we decided to take our business elsewhere.”