We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Lola Borg’s short, savage review of the fourth Brixton show dismissed The Clash as “mucho butcho as ever” and denigrated the audience for its “total hero worship.” Spending as much time discussing the “classical Greek” interior of the Academy and Strummer’s “hideous demi-mohican” as the music, Borg found little of value. While she professed to be turned off by the band allegedly ignoring brutal bouncers, there is little indication Borg took the night seriously in any way.

  While The Clash had little reason to expect kind—or even fair—treatment by these trend-obsessed rags, this gusher of venom was still a bit shocking. Such critics would hardly have convinced Strummer to rethink his agenda, however, let alone retreat. “The thing that Joe got from seeing the [Sex] Pistols was that you don’t have to go out there and say, ‘Please like us,’” Sheppard says. “You go out and say, ‘This is what we do. If you don’t like it, the door’s at the back.’”

  Likely far more significant to Strummer was the review delivered in person by Johnny Green, his longtime Clash brother. Crucial to the Clash road machine for years, Green had parted ways with the band in 1979, feeling matters were becoming too businesslike. Green didn’t dismiss the possibility that The Clash could continue on in a valid way without Headon or even Jones; however, he simply wasn’t impressed with what he saw onstage in Brixton.

  Green: “I thought it was very sterile, and kind of like a cardboard cutout, really—two guitarists trying to pick up Mick’s pieces. Joe seemed to be diminished. I mean, Joe put his heart and soul into it, of course, but he wasn’t bouncing off the other members of the band. They weren’t playing as a team, you know? It was Joe and—to a lesser extent—Paul, playing with three guys who looked real good, too good, you know? Almost like someone had made ’em up to be in The Clash.”

  Here, Green seems to echo one insight from Borg’s slam: “Joe Strummer is clearly in charge and the band follow his orders.” This was quite a contrast to when Strummer, Jones, and Simonon had dodged and dived with one another out front, presenting a sense of equality and teamwork. Yet to say that something is different is not the same as demonstrating that it is worse. Indeed, the new Clash was slowly finding its own onstage interplay that could prove equally dynamic.

  Another Green critique seems less solid. Green claims that the new Clash “had these wooden springboards that enhance the lift of the athletes put by the side of the drum riser, so the guitarists could jump in the air, like Mick used to do, you know? And I thought, ‘Bloody hell—the lengths that people go to, to reenact something that was entirely natural and spontaneous, once upon a time!’”

  Asked about this, Sheppard bristles: “I respect Johnny Green enough to be surprised that he’d believe a story like that.” It does seem hard to believe, as both Sheppard and White—now that he had found his stage legs—exhibited unaided athleticism night after night while playing the songs.

  Green also seemed to share a Jones complaint: “How can [the new guitarists] play those songs with conviction? They haven’t lived them.” Sheppard’s terse response: “I played those songs with the conviction that I had for them. And I did love those songs. I made no bones about it, I was a big fan of The Clash. There wasn’t a song that I didn’t want to play, you know?” Left unsaid was that, by the end of his tenure, Jones didn’t wish to play quite a number of Clash songs.

  In any case, Green found his way backstage, dodging a disapproving Rhodes and running into Strummer in a hallway. As recounted by Chris Salewicz in his epic Strummer bio, Redemption Song, “Having rid himself of his heroin demons, Johnny had put on a large amount of weight; he hardly fit into the only suit he had to wear. ‘That’s a terrible suit,’ Joe told him. ‘It’s not as bad as your group,’ replied the Clash’s plainspoken former road manager.”

  Salewicz explains, “In the forthrightness of the Clash posse, an extension of punk’s professed honesty, there was sometimes an element of ‘dare,’ incorporating a subtle mind game. But Johnny’s remark cut Joe to the quick. In front of him, in the backstage corridor, Joe burst into tears.”

  Green recalled, “I said to Joe, ‘What are you doing this for, for fuck’s sake?’ He burst into tears, and he said, ‘I don’t know what else to do.’ Bernard came by, and said, ‘Don’t talk to him, Joe, he’s yesterday.’ [Joe] said, ‘Fuck off, Bernard, or I’ll smack you. You don’t understand friendship, you don’t understand loyalty.’” Green soon hustled off, leaving Rhodes in command, but his words still resonated.

  Strummer’s tears were no doubt real—but what did they mean? It could have just been the sign of a man under immense pressure, bone tired. Maybe he was grieving in ways too deep to express, at least for a man raised in stiff-upper-lip England, internalizing the destructive demands of masculinity. Perhaps it meant Strummer feared that what Green said was true, that the new band was not up for the mission, and that he had betrayed a friend to pursue a fool’s errand. Maybe it just meant that Strummer was insecure, even becoming unmoored amid irreconcilable demands . . . or some combination of all of these.

  Despite the apparent wrestling with profound self-doubt, it is hard to find fault with Strummer’s performances at Brixton Academy, or of the band as a whole. If the heavier sound was not for everyone, it was nonetheless powerfully realized. As another longtime ally Julian Balme recalls, “They were fantastic, really, really good . . . All the new songs live sounded brilliant. With two guitarists and Joe, it was like, WOAH! They weren’t pussyfooting around. It wasn’t apologetic; it was turn it up to eleven and right in your face! There was nothing lacking in the live performances at all.”

  Nor should there have been any doubt about the band’s continued relevance, the sniping notwithstanding. Beyond the trenchant outcry of numerous new tunes, several of the older songs seemed so on target they might well have been composed for precisely this moment. Arguably the most powerful was “English Civil War.” While written amid the neo-Nazi scare that Rock Against Racism helped turn back, it also fit the drama unfolding in 1984 like a glove.

  Strummer knew this. In the final encore of the last Brixton show, he chose to dedicate the song to “the cold coal miner out on the picket lines, freezing his bollocks off.” The statement suggested he saw the strike not simply as a fight between the Tories and the miners, but a struggle for the soul of the country. If Thatcher was to be stopped, it had to happen now; it had to happen here.

  At Colston Hall, Strummer had paused to query the crowd before igniting a crushing version of “Clampdown,” another song seemingly tailor-made for this urgent moment: “Does Britain exist? Is Britain a dream or a nightmare?”

  As Thatcher’s clampdown began to descend on William Blake’s “green and pleasant land,” this was an unavoidable question.

  The fight would require much, and victory was not guaranteed. It was unclear how great of an impact a band could possibly have. As the miners stood on picket lines, The Clash was about to take its own war across the ocean for an extended US tour. They would do so carrying news from the UK, while wrestling with peculiarly American challenges as Reagan revved up his 1984 reelection campaign.

  So much was now at stake: for the band certainly, but much more for millions of human beings. The battle was on, and the world seemed about to turn—but in what direction? It was time to find out.

  chapter four

  turning the world

  Strummer perched on TV monitors during US tour. (Photo by Bob Gruen.)

  Ever since the Founding Fathers of our nation dreamed this dream, America has been something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against herself. On one hand we have professed the great principles of democracy. On the other we have practiced the very antithesis of those principles.

  —Martin Luther King Jr., 1964

  Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  The crowd’s applause was deafening, exhilarating. Already drenched in sweat only two songs into the night, Joe Strummer
stepped to the microphone. Smiling, clearly lifted by the power of the people in the room, he shouted one word: “Lights!”

  Instantly, the glow radiating from the stage was swallowed up as powerful house lights revealed a packed audience of nearly four thousand at the Sunrise Musical Theater near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The division between performer and audience dissolved and all stood joined together by the wash of incandescent lighting.

  As the other members of The Clash prepared their next salvo, Strummer spoke: “I’d like to welcome you here tonight. I’d personally like to thank each and every one of you for showing up, proving that maybe the world can be turned!”

  The crowd roared again. After introducing the rest of the band, the ebullient singer quipped: “And, last but not least, my name is Ratso Rizzo!” As this reference to Midnight Cowboy’s doomed antihero seemed to fly over the heads of most of the audience, Strummer gathered himself and chanted a simple mantra: “Take drugs—don’t vote—get ready—for war!”

  Knowing this as the count-off to the next song, the band returned to the fray.

  This was only the third date on a two-month tour, but the new Clash was already hitting its stride. The opening “London Calling” and “Safe European Home” had always been performed fervently, but now they came across with a sort of swing, the clear sign of a band coming into its own.

  Strummer’s curt intro to an equally kinetic “Are You Ready for War?” had outlined the tour’s message—and it was hardly a happy vision. Yet his hopeful energy also resonated, suggesting a rallying cry behind the critique.

  The Clash had left behind a homeland just entering into what would prove to be its biggest conflict since World War II. The huge country they were about to traverse over the next months was itself at a crucial crossroads.

  Reagan had defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter four years before. Now, as the world teetered on the edge of a catastrophic war, poverty in the US was on the rise, racial tension simmered, and desperation festered where once a mighty industrial economy had thrived. As a result, millions loathed Reagan.

  Yet many—even some of those displaced by the economic tides—found pride, even hope, in the unapologetic vision of national renewal put forward by this conservative revolutionary. The question once asked by Reagan hung in the air: Are you better off than you were four years ago? A bitterly divided American public would render its verdict in a little over seven months.

  Beyond the politics, America held a special fascination for Strummer and the rest of The Clash culturally. “I’m So Bored with the USA” notwithstanding, it was—as Vince White noted—“the home of country music and rock and roll!” So much of Strummer’s own inspiration came from there, from Woody Guthrie, the blues, the MC5, even political figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., whose speeches the singer would sometimes listen to in order to get psyched up to perform.

  As such, Strummer brought a conflicted passion to the band’s US tours. “We appreciate lunatics and individuals and madmen,” he told an interviewer after the new Clash’s first show in California. “America had millions of them. All the lunatics and madmen in the entire world came to America at one time!”

  But if this once-upon-a-time USA had been an inspiration, the present was less uplifting. Strummer: “So why have these corporations got in their little boardrooms, and made all these rules and anybody who breaks these rules gets fired? And nobody wants to get fired . . . Where has the pioneering spirit gone?”

  America remained more than cookie-cutter corporate consumerism to Strummer. Onstage at the historic Township Auditorium in Columbia, South Carolina, five days after their blistering Fort Lauderdale show, he paused to pay tribute to “James Brown, Otis Redding, and all the greats” who had performed there.

  While some called the band hypocritical for dismissing the US while so obviously besotted with it, this was not entirely fair. As Strummer would note later, there were at least two Americas: King and Reagan, the dream and the nightmare, freedom and control, pioneering innovators and corporate conformists.

  Ironically, in a way, the musicians were themselves employees of a huge American corporation. Part of their spark came from that dynamic tension, a rub of ideal vs. real, as they walked the fine line separating them from their own critique of corporate power. The Clash waged war from that ambiguous space.

  There was also a commercial angle. The band was venturing back into the vast American market—the biggest in the world, one that made and broke bands.

  Two short years ago The Clash had gone from successful cult band to one of the biggest draws in the world on the Combat Rock tour—a jaunt that almost didn’t happen due to the internal crisis with Headon. Success had nearly swallowed the group; it had also provided muscle to push back against their overlords.

  This tour itself might be seen as an example. The Clash had returned, trawling across this vast country—but in blatant violation of basic rock business mores, and much to the dismay of their label, they had no new record to flog. Asked about this, Strummer responded, “We’re just going out and playing for the hell of it. We all have a common goal now: we want to become a real band.”

  Strummer also felt the moment required The Clash, not as some abstract idea, but as a signal to rally the troops before it was too late. It was no accident that the frontman introduced himself as “Paul Revere” at one of the US dates. “We’ve been elected to do a job here,” Strummer insisted. “It takes commitment.”

  Yet the band was not surrendering its pop ambitions. As Strummer had told Richard Cook, “We want to take rebel rock to Number One!” This was less for the money than for the impact. Calling US underground punk heroes Bad Brains and Black Flag “closet cases” because they were on independent labels and thus might not get heard by most, Strummer wanted to get his message out to all.

  Likewise, Vinyl saw no point in aiming too low. Combat Rock “was just a foot in the door,” the rooster-haired rabble-rouser declared to one interviewer. “What’s the point of getting enthusiastic about selling a million when Michael Jackson’s sold thirty million, and is probably selling another million while we talk?”

  How this was going to work was unclear, and Cook had understandably been left a bit stumped. America had never embraced punk as the UK had done—and even in Britain, it was now often seen as yesterday’s news. The only punk-related acts that had made it big in the US—Blondie, the Police, even The Clash—had done so with songs that were hardly incendiary “rebel rock.”

  While “Rock the Casbah” was far more substantive than any of these, its serious message was masked by its novelty appeal. This was intentional, for Strummer had often decried “preachy” performers, even noting, “I put some jokes in [“Are You Ready for War?”] so it wouldn’t be too depressing!” Flashes of humor added balance and accessibility to hyperserious themes.

  However, none of the band’s relentless new material fit the “Casbah” mold, much less that of the poppy love songs “Train in Vain” or “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” This tour was a leap of faith, continuing the job that The Clash had set out to do. With forty-plus dates packed between March and May, it was also hard work.

  In part, the aim was to build solidarity within the new lineup. The Clash had begun its tour in the South, slowly working down and up the Atlantic seaboard in a no-frills bus. As White recalls, “The whole tour was by Greyhound bus. No flying was allowed. It was structured this way so that we had a down-to-earth real traveling experience. We weren’t allowed to be pampered rock stars.”

  Strummer celebrated the road warrior vibe: “We got a Greyhound bus, without a bunk, without a TV, without a bar . . . We just sit on the bus, we drive fourteen hours straight. We fucking road hog it!” Not everyone was so enthused. “I hated being on that hellish tin can,” Howard says.

  For most, however, there was a “we’re all in it together” spirit as the tour set off. Eddie King—who was doing video for the band—recalled a determined vibe on the bus: “We were listeni
ng to a lot of Bo Diddley, the first Run-DMC album, and a song that used the Malcolm X ‘No Sell Out’ speech in a loop. That was on the tape deck all the time, it became a kind of theme: No Sell Out.”

  “Rebel punk” Paul Simonon on US tour bus. (Photographer unknown.)

  Prototype for Clash dog tags, never produced. (Designed by Eddie King.)

  The spartan approach had an aim—to share hardship and build cohesion, as in an actual military unit. The entire band now wore dog tags, items originally used to identify dead or wounded soldiers. As Sheppard explains, “The dog tags were given to us by some fans that had painted them up before [the three new members] joined . . . beautifully done, with enamel paint. It was all part of the whole Combat Rock image, and the gear that we were wearing.”

  Strummer told one journalist: “In my mind, I liken us to a new platoon and we’re going to go out and crawl right in front of enemy lines, get fired upon, and then look at each other to see how we’re bearing up. Can I rely on this guy when my gun jams? We’re under fire and we’re sharing that experience.”

  If the metaphor was presumptuous, it signaled the band’s serious intent and special challenges. This Clash was a new entity, thrust almost immediately into an extremely demanding position by the band’s popularity. To succeed required intangible but very real glue, what analyst Jennifer Senior has called the “psychologically invaluable sense of community and interdependence” that comes “only during moments of great adversity [where] we come together.”

  For Senior, the experience of combat illustrated this: “War, for all of its brutality and ugliness, satisfies some of our deepest evolutionary yearnings for connectedness. Platoons are like tribes, [giving] soldiers a chance to show their valor and loyalty, to work cooperatively, to demonstrate utter selflessness.”

  Given this, she argues, “Is it any wonder that so many soldiers say they miss the action when they come home?” But if the theory behind Strummer’s “platoon” analogy was sound, it remained to be seen how it would work.