Given the fan base built over the long Combat Rock tours, expectations were high. The reengineered Clash aimed to exceed them. While Gavin Martin had scorched the band for its “massed light banks, three-prong guitar chunder and video screen backdrop,” Washington Post rock critic Mark Jenkins had a different take after seeing them in front of a sold-out crowd of five thousand at George Washington University’s Smith Center on April 8.
Jenkins was often hard to please, and had been left dissatisfied by the band’s two previous DC shows: “When I first saw The Clash, they were trying that amazing everything-coming-together-on-the-edge-of-falling-apart sound they had pulled off on their first album—but it didn’t work very well live. They’d be racing around onstage and you’d suddenly think, ‘Where’d the song go?’ It was very entertaining to watch but the music didn’t really come across.”
Jenkins was impressed by the new lineup’s energy and its music: “It was ‘the Joe Strummer show’ for sure, but with two guitar players, he didn’t have to worry about doing anything but calling everyone to war or whatever. The band had their commando ‘state of attack’ theatrics but the musical presentation was far better than the Jones-era Clash, and the new songs fit nicely with the older ones.”
Jenkins sensed an outfit with a future: “The Clash had been a bit like a club band that hadn’t figured out how to play to arena crowds. This was the first time they seemed able to project in the necessary way to be convincing at this level.”
Although two guitars seemed like overkill to some, they did bolster the Clash attack, making the sound savage and direct. Sheppard: “We were playing two Les Pauls, very loud, very punk, you know, very rock and roll—a bit too rock and roll for some people.” The twin guitars not only generated extraordinary sound and fury, but also—as Jenkins witnessed—reproduced the full power of the songs’ original arrangements which had sometimes suffered amid Strummer’s stop-and-start playing and Jones’s overly busy, effects-laden approach.
Strummer’s set list from Smith Center show, Washington, DC, April 8, 1984.
Flyer for the show.
Not all observers were as taken with the new Clash—understandably enough, given how central Jones had been. White had his own criticism of Strummer and a white suit that he sometimes wore onstage. While the Mohark Revenge T-shirt remained, the bulky suit coat suggested a Mohawked lounge singer. The guitarist derided Strummer’s “deep-orange hair and white suit under the spotlight, cabaret entertaining in an Out of Control shirt . . . the solo star. He’d become a bit of a caricature of something.”
To Howard, the singer’s sartorial displays suggested “a banana republic dictator” or “Captain Scarlet meets something out of [the Woody Allen film] Bananas.” The drummer laughs: “Sometimes, honestly, he would walk in the room and me, Nick, and Vince would look at each other: What the hell is he wearing today?”
Strummer offered few apologies. “We need an image,” he insisted. “I’m out there fighting like tigers against all these slinky, funky, junkie mothers. I’m out there in a three-ring circus, I need an image to grab some attention.” He had a point, and White—in the band, but often its biggest critic—allowed, “Despite everything, the shows continued to be good. There was something there. I felt it.”
The band also exercised artistic self-criticism, adjusting both the set lists and the song arrangements. There still was no sign of “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” and “We Are The Clash” and “Glue Zombie” had also disappeared.
While White missed “Zombie,” he was not worried about the absence of the former song. The musician didn’t embrace the song’s punk-socialist message, but his main critique was artistic: “The song just felt lumpen, with a nursery rhyme sing-along chorus . . . I felt stupid singing it.” Echoing this, Sheppard notes, “We tried different approaches with the song, but it had never really come together.”
As the band sought a creative chemistry, the sense of mission remained central, proving infectious. White: “The general consensus seemed to be that the new band had reignited. [This] return to the basic primal sound of The Clash [had] energy and conviction where two years ago there had been boredom.”
Skepticism still remained, especially among more mainstream outlets, which seemed less willing to let the departed Jones go easily. For Boston After Dark’s Doug Simmons, songs like “Sex Mad War”—one of three new ones aired at the Worcester Centrum—struck him as a paler echo of The Clash’s original intensity. He questioned how this revamped band could breach the pop mainstream without sound musical reinforcement: “Without fresh tunes, and for that matter, fresh lyrics, Strummer’s radical message is not going to sink in.”
The negative write-ups often struck Sheppard as reflecting an old-fashioned generation gap: “The decision had been made to go out and be a punk rock band. It doesn’t surprise me that [mainstream] reviewers would find [the new approach] a bit much. Presumably, they’d be older, not able to keep up with it.”
There may have been some truth here, for college papers tended to be more sympathetic to the ferocious new Clash. “Clash Is a Smash,” the Hofstra University Chronicle proclaimed. The reviewer wrote: “Guitarists Nick Sheppard and Vince White and drummer Pete Howard proved the band’s regrouping successful. They performed the . . . songs with excellent showmanship and musicianship.”
Concert review in Hofstra University’s Chronicle, April 1984.
Reviewing the Colgate University gig, Robert Capiello agreed: “Any pretensions of funk, reggae, or pop [are gone, replaced by] power strumming.” Though he wondered how The Clash might convert listeners chiefly concerned with “obtaining a comfortable corporate position and a large record collection,” to him, the band seemed up for the task: “If their new music, particularly a song called ‘This Is England,’ is any indication, a new album will be worth hearing.”
Other observers—especially European ones—criticized The Clash for a US-centric approach, assuming a monetary motivation. This was not entirely wrong. The band had to pay its bills, and the income from tickets and merchandise sales was considerable. While the absence of a new record was felt, the shows generally sold out, mostly in college venues ranging from three thousand to ten thousand in capacity.
Strummer often exhibited a disarming self-deprecation, telling a North Carolina audience, for example, “You’ve probably come to realize you’re not watching a slick operation, selling hot dogs and T-shirts as they go, spreading boredom in their wake! No, indeed, it is real human beings fucking up before your very eyes!”
The singer also offered more lofty aims, however. Challenged by one skeptical interviewer, Strummer sounded a messianic note, evoking Christ’s journeys amid prostitutes and other “disreputables.” Such urgency might seem pretentious; it was also real. The US was not only the world’s biggest music market—it also held the earth’s fate in its hands. What happened here inevitably affected the entire world—and here The Clash must thus take its campaign.
This seemed especially true as the US election drew nearer. Having rebounded from their 1982 doldrums, Reagan and his campaign coterie were sharpening their rhetorical knives for the race. At the same time, the Democrats were in the midst of the contentious process of picking their standard bearer.
Edward Kennedy, the great liberal hope, had declined to run. In his absence, the front-runner was Walter Mondale, a Minnesota Democrat who had been Carter’s vice president. If hardly charismatic, Mondale was a centrist Democrat with a reputation for integrity. A large pack of other candidates had been winnowed down on March 13—dubbed “Super Tuesday” for its concentration of primary contests—leaving Mondale neck-and-neck with a new contender, Gary Hart of Colorado.
Youthful and relatively unknown, Hart styled himself a “New Ideas” candidate, railing against Mondale as a continuation of “failed policies” that had brought Reagan to power. This tact foreshadowed the “Third Way” movement that would bear mostly sour fruit in both the UK and US in the 1990s.
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bsp; On March 17, however, a “dark horse” scored an upset victory in the South Carolina primary. African American minister Jesse Jackson electrified audiences with powerful oratory, resurrecting the hopeful energy of the civil rights and antiwar movements. A former lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson saw himself as the candidate of a “Rainbow Coalition,” a grassroots movement aiming to mobilize an increasingly diverse America to defeat Reagan, remake the Democratic Party, and realize an unfinished American revolution.
Jesse Jackson 1984 campaign button.
Not surprisingly, Jackson found favor with Strummer, and the Clash singer endorsed him in interviews as the “only real opposite to Reagan.” Yet Jackson was a long shot at best, and hurt his cause with anti-Semitic remarks to a Washington Post reporter. Nonetheless, Jackson’s presence helped push an inclusive and progressive agenda, suggesting the kind of vision that might be needed to challenge the Republican president’s crowd-pleasing narrative.
Strummer saw Reagan as less a rousing leader than an undeserving recipient of an accidental gift, tracing his 1980 victory to a sad legacy of the 1960s: “Ronald Reagan is the product of the drug culture. The two are synonymous in my mind. Reagan is there because we didn’t care. We kept goofing up, we copped out, and we let Reagan in. Same with Thatcher in England.”
This argument illuminated Strummer’s words onstage in Florida, making explicit his connection between drug taking and a warmonger in charge of the world’s deadliest arsenal. While this remained arguable, it is true that the sixties countercultural politics—which included a celebration of drugs as liberation—fed a backlash that helped bring elements of the working class to support Reagan.
These so-called Reagan Democrats had voted against their party—and their own economic self-interest—amid post–Vietnam/Watergate ennui, the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, and the sting of “stagflation,” a deadly combo of increasing prices and lagging growth. Reagan’s promise to “make America great again” had convinced enough such voters to send him to the White House.
Would they do so again? Did 1980 herald a historic realignment of the US electorate like FDR’s 1932 election, or was it an aberration? No one yet knew.
Strummer was aware of how Thatcher’s breakthrough victory in 1983 presaged the life-or-death miners’ strike now nearing its third hard-fought week back home. However, under the cloud of possible nuclear war, he saw the stakes as even higher in the US election: “Maybe we have to be burned to learn. Hopefully people will be less apathetic about it now, or nothing will be left.”
While Strummer had no vote in this coming election, he was determined to put his thumb on the scale as much as possible. Over the past months, the singer had often urged his listeners to engage in the electoral process. He had told an Italian crowd, “Please, I ask you to use your vote—use your vote before we die!” Similar statements peppered surprised crowds on this trek across America.
Such public service announcements might seem odd coming from a band that celebrated a “White Riot” and the “Guns of Brixton.” For many on the revolutionary left, voting was often seen as a feeble, even counterproductive endeavor. It also could seem uncool for a radical rock band: “If voting could change things / they’d make it illegal,” sang the Lords of the New Church. “Whoever you vote for, government wins,” warned Crass.
Strummer was aware of the limitations of the ballot box. His new song “The Dictator” lampooned what historian Peter Kuznick termed “death squad democracy” underwritten by the US: “Yes I am the dictator / my name is on your ballot sheet / But until my box has your cross / you know this form is incomplete.”
Strummer was referring in particular to El Salvador. To justify the military aid being sent to turn back a growing guerrilla movement, Reagan had called for elections to shore up his allies. Human rights groups like Americas Watch questioned the validity of voting amid the horrific ongoing violence, the vast majority of it committed by the US-backed government forces.
Reagan nonetheless pushed forward, and the vote duly endorsed the preferred party, enabling military aid to continue. The election, however, was widely criticized. On March 7, 1984, the Christian Science Monitor reported, “Two days before balloting, the [Salvadoran] Electoral Commission estimated 720,000 people would vote. But the official count was 1,551,680—out of a voting population estimated by the US State Department at 1.5 million.”
Reagan shrugged off such inconvenient reports. The pretense of democracy had been preserved, even as death squads roamed freely. This was not surprising, as the US had a long and sordid history in the region. As Martin Luther King Jr. had warned, America had something of a schizophrenic personality: “On one hand we have professed the great principles of democracy. On the other we have practiced the very antithesis of those principles.”
Like King, Strummer was outraged by the hypocrisy, saying, “The Clash believe in freedom—even in Central America,” and noting, “American taxes are supporting quite a few [dictators] right around the world at the moment.”
The singer was scarcely less acidic about his own country’s foreign policy. Describing the UK as “the little island that once crushed the world in its fascist grip,” Strummer explained his anti-imperialist stance: “How do you think I come to write these songs? We [British] are the fucking experts.”
The US and the UK were hardly alone in organizing sham elections or supporting oppressive regimes. Such “realpolitik” was distressingly common, and the Soviet Bloc had regularly rigged polls as a way to justify faux “people’s” governments.
Why then would an aspiring revolutionary like Strummer suggest voting as a way to dislodge Reagan or any other malefactor? Simple political realism, grounded in a sense of the utter urgency of the moment.
The calculation was simple, but compelling. Absent a mass movement like that of the 1960s, the only way to stop Reagan was at the polls. Just as the miners’ victory was essential, so was denying Reagan more time in office to complete his conservative counterrevolution.
Screaming “Revolution now!” was a self-indulgence that the world could not afford, not in this moment of nuclear danger. So, night after night, Strummer would temper his rabble-rousing to advocate the mundane act of voting as an essential way to prevent war and turn the conservative tide.
In this, the band was also acknowledging a hopeful development. Even as the band had been preparing for the US tour, Reagan’s Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger wrote an internal memo about “an important problem we face with our European allies,” warning, “The steady decline of public confidence in US policies is a real concern and one we must all work to correct.”
Nor was it just a European “problem.” Arms Control and Disarmament Agency director Eugene Rostow—a hawk, notwithstanding his title—worried that “there is participation [in the freeze movement] on an increasing scale of three groups whose potential impact should be cause for concern. They are the churches, the ‘loyal opposition,’ and, perhaps most important, the unpoliticized public.”
Nuclear Weapons Freeze buttons. (Courtesy of Mark Andersen.)
The power of the grassroots peace movement was becoming worrisome to Reagan as it spread from the fringes into mainstream America. White House communications director David Gergen later noted, “There was a widespread view in the administration that the nuclear freeze was a dagger pointed at the heart of the administration’s defense program.”
But if the band could sense this shift in popular opinion, and sought to boost it rhetorically, it did not take the next step: inviting voter registration tables to their shows. Only moral support was being given, divorced from practical politics, despite the stakes of the presidential campaign.
The impending election and possible nuclear cataclysm were not the only issues on Strummer’s mind. In Fort Lauderdale, the singer had introduced “This Is England” by saying, “We like to provide you with some information, we like to bring you the news straight from England . . . Her
e it is, England 1984, underneath the worst government we’ve had in living memory!”
While Strummer had a broad range of complaints about Thatcher, the strike now stood at the forefront. Simon Parkes, owner of the Brixton Academy, recalls, “At first things went well for the miners. Much of the country rallied behind them, responding to the message of livelihoods lost and communities destroyed.” But, he continued, “Thatcher’s Conservatives had prepared for this battle. They were not going to fold in the face of industrial action as previous governments had.”
Sheffield and Cortonwood delegations at “Support the Miners” march, 1984. (Photographer unknown.)
A divide in the NUM helped them. While the vast majority of miners were on strike—160,000 strong—most in Nottinghamshire refused to join. The constant official drumbeat against “mob rule” and “violent” picketing encouraged this. Local courts, in turn, limited free speech, even banning picketers from decrying their errant workmates as “scabs,” leading to numerous arrests on dubious grounds.
The mines in the Nottingham region were relatively new and profitable, thus safe from closure. Why then, some asked, should we risk our jobs for the others? In addition, a national strike vote still had not been called. This crack in the miners’ solidarity was a godsend to Thatcher, one upon which she would capitalize.
This was not the main topic of conversation on the Clash tour bus, however. “Being on tour,” Sheppard says, “is like being in your own little world . . . It’s hard to pay attention to anything else.” King agrees: “England was not on my mind much, I remember feeling really cut off. Once you hit the road and start moving, you just get swallowed up, consumed by it all.”
Nonetheless, events in the UK weighed heavily on Strummer. Almost every night, he would preface “This Is England,” “Three Card Trick,” or “In the Pouring Rain” with an explicit nod to the drama. In Atlanta, Strummer took it further, coupling “Rain” with “an old English folk song”—1977’s “Career Opportunities.” This description not only underlined the continued relevance of the Clash catalog, but suggested how it connected to a centuries-long struggle for economic justice.
We Are the Clash Page 15