We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Such terms made war seem inevitable. While nuclear conflict might appear unthinkable, Reagan had argued in 1981 that such a war might be contained to Europe—a grim prospect for those who recalled World War II’s devastation.

  As the stakes were rising on both sides of the Atlantic, The Clash hit the road, doing a series of smaller-scale shows in Texas and Arizona, warming up for the US Festival. The band was rusty, but Howard was proving himself as the new engine of the machine, with the power of Chimes and the finesse of Headon. The Baker: “In a way, Peter was a mix of the two . . . he fit like a glove.” Vinyl: “There were issues, there always are, but it was clear he could do the job.”

  Yet tensions in the band were simmering. As Howard recalls, “I was the new guy, so I wasn’t privy to everything, but I could tell that Mick and Joe seemed hardly on speaking terms.” The choice of “Garageland”—a “we won’t forget where we came from” anthem written in response to signing with CBS—to open the first shows seemed to acknowledge a growing disconnect. Strummer was keen to demonstrate that The Clash remained true to its original mission.

  Playing shows seemed to help ease the strain. The Clash was starting to hit its stride by the final warm-up in Tucson, Arizona. Strummer confronted overly aggressive security from the stage and joked about “the MTV curiosity seekers” in the packed house, but the band was hot and the crowd rapturous.

  With the warm-up shows successfully completed, The Clash was on its way to the festival with spirits high, when reality hit them in the form of a huge Budweiser billboard in the desert promoting the US Festival. Such sponsorship was hardly unknown in rock and was rapidly becoming much more pervasive. Having signed to CBS years before, The Clash was by no means innocent of corporate marketing. Yet the band sought a certain distance to avoid compromising their politics and art.

  The ad showed exactly what the band had signed up for, and The Baker remembers the mood on the bus darkening palpably. Strummer had already been joking about the juxtaposition, taking jabs at the other headliner, heavy metal party band Van Halen—which was getting $1 million to play, twice The Clash’s payment—from the stage at the show in Wichita Falls, Texas.

  Now Rhodes tried to help by going on the attack. The festival’s techno-hippie vibe made it an easy target, and the decision was made to test the organizers’ utopianism. Although Wozniak would end up losing a huge amount of money on the festival, at the time that wasn’t anticipated. Rhodes challenged him to pony up $100,000 for a camp for at-risk youth or The Clash wouldn’t play.

  Wozniak resisted what he saw as blackmail, given that The Clash had already signed a contract to play. At a last-minute press conference, the band pressed its threat not to play unless Wozniak came through with the donation. The audience was left waiting for nearly two hours until a compromise was found: the festival would give a token $10,000 contribution, and the band agreed to go on.

  The band members were scarcely relaxed as they ran onstage, taking places in front of a gigantic banner proclaiming, THE CLASH NOT FOR SALE! If this seemed to protest too much, Strummer nonetheless greeted the massive crowd with a sardonic, “So here we are in the capital of the decadent US of A!” as the band plugged in.

  In an earlier press conference with numerous other performers—where Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth ribbed The Clash for being “too goddamn serious”—Vinyl had declined to comment on the festival itself, while making it clear “from the moment we hit the stage till the moment we leave, we will have something to say.” The band was no more than thirty seconds into the show, but the truth of Vinyl’s statement was apparent.

  Perhaps thinking of his impending fatherhood, Strummer dedicated the Clash set “to making sure that those people in the crowd who have children, there is something left for them later in the century.” Then the band was off, igniting “London Calling,” followed swiftly by a fiery “Radio Clash” and a haunting “Somebody Got Murdered” with Jones on lead vocals. Strummer’s guitar was mixed higher than usual, providing an appealingly abrasive sound, with his ragged chording adding a raw edge to Jones’s more pristine tones.

  Strummer had clearly come onstage intending to challenge the huge crowd as much as the event organizers. As soon as the third song died away, Strummer was back on the offensive: “Well, I know the human race is supposed to get down on its knees in front of all this new technology and kiss the microchip circuits, but it don’t impress me over much . . .” The singer hesitated, then launched another salvo: “There ain’t nothing but ‘you make, you buy, you die’—that’s the motto of America. You get born to buy it . . .” Leaping from critiquing consumerism to racial and economic inequality, Strummer continued: “And I tell you, those people out in East LA ain’t going to stay there forever. And if there is going to be anything in the future, it’s got to be from all parts of everything, not just one white way down the middle of the road!”

  If the words were perhaps a bit incoherent, Strummer’s passion was plain. As the crowd tried to absorb the message, the singer tossed off one last exhortation—“So if anybody out there ever grows up, for fuck sake!”—and the band was off into their hit single “Rock the Casbah,” followed by the hard-hitting numbers “Guns of Brixton,” “Know Your Rights,” “Koka Kola,” and “Hate & War.”

  Slowing the pace, Strummer introduced “Armagideon Time” as “the F-Plan Beverly Hills reggae song,” referring to a fad diet popular at the time. This quip turned serious as Strummer evoked the famine building in the Horn of Africa by extemporizing about “the Ethiopian Diet, lose five hundred pounds, success guaranteed, or your money back—yes, your money back” over a spooky dub groove. As he returned to the “a lot of people won’t get no supper tonight / a lot of people won’t get no justice tonight” refrain, the band—led by Jones—brought the song to an ominous close with splashes of dissonant guitars and drums.

  If the music was strong, the singer found the audience response wanting. As applause washed over the stage, Strummer retorted, “Bollocks, bollocks! Come on, you don’t have to fake. You spent twenty-five dollars to go out there, so do what you like . . .”

  The puzzled crowd responded uncertainly. Strummer upped the ante: “A lot of you seem to have speech operations, can’t talk or shout back or anything.” Balling up his fists, seeming desperate to somehow touch the distant mass, the snarling frontman baited the audience: “Come on, I need some hostility here . . . RRRRAAAWRRR! I need some feeling of some sort!” Then his tone lightened: “As it’s Sunday tomorrow, I hope you will join me . . .” The zinger led into a rollicking version of Sandinista!’s “The Sound of Sinners,” an amiable—but eminently forgettable—bit of gospel rock and roll. Self-deprecation, spoof, and sincerity mixed freely in lines like, “After all this time to believe in Jesus / after all those drugs / I thought I was Him,” before concluding, “I ain’t good enough / I ain’t clean enough / to be Him.”

  It seemed something of an odd choice. Strummer, however, had a spiritual side, with radical bits of Christianity coming in largely through the Rastafari faith that imbued the band’s reggae covers. His past inspiration, Woody Guthrie, sang of Jesus as a revolutionary standing against the powers-that-be: “Jesus said to the rich / give your goods to the poor / so they put Jesus Christ in his grave.”

  This view was backed up by history, and was shared by many believers. Priests and nuns served in the Sandinista government, for example, and had sacrificed their lives in El Salvador, part of a “liberation theology” that reclaimed this radical Jesus. While Thatcher and Reagan wore Christianity on their sleeves, The Clash’s stand with the dispossessed was more consistent with Christ’s life and teachings.

  Unlike “Armagideon Time” or “Police and Thieves,” however, “The Sound of Sinners” did not seem like heavy message music. Yet clearly the song meant much to Strummer, and its comedic disavowal of messianic pretension sparked his most vulnerable appeal of the evening. The singer dismissed rock stars and their glamour, pointedly including hi
mself in that “nowhere” crowd. His anguished outcry aimed to bridge the chasm between The Clash and its audience and, in so doing, perhaps to mend the similar gap widening within the band’s heart.

  Schizophrenia nonetheless remained apparent. After a frantic stretch of blazing rockers—“Police on My Back” (with Jones again on lead vocals), “Brand New Cadillac,” “I Fought the Law,” and “I’m So Bored with the USA,” with Strummer pausing only to spit “Oh so you’re still there?” at the audience—the band segued into the pop love song “Train in Vain,” their first US hit.

  Next the band brought the funk of “Magnificent Seven,” spinning its tale of workaday desperation before downshifting into the brilliantly bleak seven-minute epic “Straight to Hell.” The song gained further poignancy from Strummer’s extended rant against drug-addled rock stars. Such, the singer noted, made enough money to get their blood changed when their lifestyle grew too toxic, caring not a whit that they were leading others down a dead-end path—a clear reference to an apocryphal story then circulating about Keith Richards.

  Strummer brought his improvising to a close with bitter lines like “Hey, man, let’s just party / while our friends are dying / let’s just party / hey, where’s the party at?” before spitting out the song’s aching final verse. Yet, after this sobering, artful challenge, it was back to the lightweight hit “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

  The shifts were jarring—but then it was over. The band went off the stage, returning for a short encore of “Clampdown.” Strummer once again launched into a tirade, blasting complacency about atomic weapons and nuclear power. The song drifted out across the multitude, moving some, no doubt mystifying others.

  The band stepped back, intending to return for a final encore. When organizers moved to preclude that by dismissing the crowd, Vinyl tried to grab the mic. A fracas erupted, with the band in fisticuffs with the festival staff. As this unfolded, an emcee took the microphone and called out derisively, “The Clash has left the building,” echoing the fabled Elvis exit announcement. The show was over.

  Likely the festival’s most dynamic set, it was surely the most unsettling. The Clash had flung itself against the wall of rock-biz hypocrisy and audience expectation, while being sure to showcase all its hit singles. In its inimitable fashion, the band simultaneously played the game and sought to burn it down.

  It was one of their greatest performances. But if The Clash intended a righteous challenge to “business as usual,” it didn’t necessarily come off this way. To many, their behavior was simple rock star ego, self-servingly couched in revolutionary rhetoric. The Clash’s half-million-dollar fee seemed at odds with its concern for the poor. Why didn’t they donate some of their take? And if they didn’t like the festival, why play in the first place? While the band made noises about returning to California to play a free show, this didn’t stem the criticism.

  As The Clash returned home with contradictions worsened and internal divisions unhealed, the crucial UK general election loomed. Thatcher’s popularity had dipped from its post-Falklands high but remained well above where it had been a year earlier. In part, this was due to an economy that was bouncing back in some areas—though not in Britain’s hard-hit north, reeling from industrial closures.

  Meanwhile, the Labour Party had splintered. Dissident elements had formed the Social Democratic Party that allied itself with the middle-of-the-road Liberal Party. Thatcher’s opponents could not have done her a bigger favor.

  Thatcher got a smaller percentage of the vote than in 1979—dropping from 43.9 percent to 42.4 percent—but thanks to the fractures on the left, the Conservatives swept Parliament. This meant Thatcher now had a vast, veto-proof majority—and a free hand to pass right-wing legislation—even though she had won considerably less than half the overall vote. It was an ominous portent, made worse by the news of rebounding popularity for Reagan, readying his own run for reelection.

  Meanwhile, the members of The Clash had gone their separate ways after returning from the US Festival. No one seemed to know what the next step was.

  June and then July passed with no movement. As The Baker remembers, “I started calling everyone in an attempt to find out what the next move was, but it seemed like no one knew or no one was talking. No matter who I called—Kosmo, Bernie, Joe, Paul, or Mick—I was met with a resolute, ‘I don’t know,’ or, ‘I haven’t heard from anyone.’ It seemed insane.” A conspiracy of silence had descended over the band, with clandestine meetings being conducted behind closed doors.

  The Baker finally got a grudging agreement to restart rehearsals—the essential first step toward writing new songs—but with only limited results: “We set up the backline at Rehearsal Rehearsals and put the kettle on just as we did for previous occasions, but it was like flogging a dead horse. One day Paul would turn up, hang around for a while, and go home. The next day Mick would arrive late, miss Joe, and leave again, and so on. Poor Pete Howard was going out of his mind, having succeeded in getting the chance of a lifetime, only to have it turn out like this. I can’t actually remember a complete rehearsal that August.”

  Unbeknown to The Baker, pent-up frustration, stoked by the pressure of mass success, was about to splinter The Clash. Jones was soon to be purged from the band that he, more than anyone save perhaps Rhodes, had built.

  “The day Mick was fired, the air was thick with tension,” The Baker recalls. “Bernie came into the studio early, then left. Then he would call: ‘Anyone there yet?’ ‘No.’ Click.” When Strummer and Simonon turned up, nothing was revealed to them, and they went across the road to the pub with Rhodes.

  The Baker was told to have Jones come straight over on arrival: “Mick arrived suitably late and I told him they were waiting in the pub. He ruffled his feathers and asked me, ‘What are they all doing in the pub?’ I told him I didn’t know.”

  After only about fifteen minutes, Jones came back from the pub and without a word proceeded to put one of his guitars into its case. The Baker: “I was busy doing something on the other side of the room and heard Digby say, ‘Do you want me to take the guitar for you, Mick?’ Then Mick said, ‘They’ve asked me to leave the group!’ Digby interjected, ‘They can’t do that, it’s your group, isn’t it?’ Mick said, ‘They don’t want me in the fucking band anymore!’” Jones then picked up his guitar and left Rehearsal Rehearsals for the last time.

  It had been an excruciating choice, and perhaps it was the right one. But The Baker articulates the first reaction of many observers: “What did I think when Mick was kicked out of the band? I thought The Clash was over and done.”

  Yet how could The Clash end at the height of its popularity, with a battle of historic proportions looming? Was there a way to rebuild, to reinvent, to right the course and get on with its mission? Strummer, Simonon, Rhodes, and Vinyl were determined to find out.

  chapter two

  what is clash?

  Strummer and Simonon return to their punk roots, late 1983. (Photo by Mike Laye.)

  Bernard Rhodes and Kosmo Vinyl, with Peta Buswell, head of the NYC Clash office at center. (Photo by Bob Gruen.)

  We have two choices. We can give in and watch social destruction and repression on a truly horrific scale, or we can fight back . . . Faced with possible parliamentary destruction of all that is good and compassionate in our society, extra-parliamentary action will be the only recourse left for the working class.

  —Arthur Scargill, NUM conference, July 4, 1983

  We’ve been away for two years—and I’ve been trying to come to a decision. I’ve been thinking, What the fuck am I doing living? What am I supposed to do with it? How come you all come see it? Where is it going, what was it going, what is Clash, where is Clash, who is Clash?

  —Joe Strummer, Barrowlands Ballroom, February 10, 1984

  On Saturday, September 10, 1983, readers of New Musical Express (NME) were startled to learn that The Clash—as they had known it—had ceased to exist.

  A band statement r
ead simply, “Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon have decided that Mick Jones should leave the group. It is felt that Jones had drifted away from the original idea of The Clash. In future it will allow Joe and Paul to get on with the job The Clash set out to do in the beginning.”

  Clash biographer Marcus Gray later wrote that the news “hardly came as a surprise,” but it was to at least one person: the author of the NME press release, Kosmo Vinyl. “I was shocked by this,” the Clash spokesperson insisted years later. “I was not part of the process that decided whether or not this was going to happen—or maybe I was, but I wasn’t aware of it.”

  Vinyl was well acquainted with the tensions, but never believed it would come to this. Yet it now fell to him to somehow help reassemble that most alchemical of creations: an ambitious and successful rock band that had ejected the authors of two and a half of its three hit singles in slightly more than a year.

  Vinyl: “In the end, the situation was presented in a certain way: ‘Are you on board with this, or not?’ And I decided to go with that. The band, what it represented—it all was too important for me to stand aside.”

  This was no small decision—and other members of the Clash camp made different ones in the “him or us” atmosphere that developed after the purge of Jones. The Baker recounts, “I decided to wash my hands of the whole situation. I never told Joe or Paul that I quit, but I said goodbye and left. They never called me, and I never called them.”

  Equally committed partisans came to different conclusions. Like Johnny Green, The Baker had been suspicious of the upstart. Vinyl, however, had earned their grudging respect. Now, as Rhodes’s consigliere and a band mouthpiece second only to Strummer, Vinyl was key to meeting the challenges ahead.