Although Strummer was generally skilled at balancing the “edutainment” equation, not everyone in The Clash was happy. White recalls, “Joe was pushing the political thing really hard,” adding, “I didn’t give a shit, I just wanted to play music.” If this suggested growing alienation from the band’s agenda, it also carried truth. Like any band, the new unit would rise or fall on its musical power.
For Strummer, it was a delicate balance: “We’re not being really preachy. First I want to rock and roll, to hell with the lyrics! But if the words come in handy, if they are topical, if they mean something to real life, that’s extra.” At a Worcester show, Strummer lambasted the likes of Culture Club and Wham!, shouting, “Music can do something more than put a poster on a thirteen-year-old girl’s bedroom wall!”
But what was that “something”? As The Clash took on a journey that sought—in Strummer’s mind—to help “turn the world,” it seemed likely that music’s power would prove insufficient to the task.
Such ambition was not new, however. It had helped win The Clash its famously fervent following. A Clash not straining toward “death or glory” wouldn’t be the genuine article. But a stretch of such magnitude was likely to fall short. It also might come at some real human cost.
For now, there were more mundane challenges—getting to the next show on time or keeping bandmates on good terms. Shadowing them all was a simple fact: The Clash soon needed to make a new record—a great one. As Cook had pointed out in NME, only this could solidify, define, and justify the new Clash: “They have to wipe the slate of years of their own torpor. They have to make astounding rock and roll records, iron-hard music.”
This was exactly what Strummer had in mind. Taking his moody guitarist aside, Strummer told White the US tour’s deeper purpose: to help finance the recording of a new album, while building the unit’s cohesion and shaping the songs. “We’ve gotta get into the studio as soon as possible and bang it out raw,” Strummer explained. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes we made in the past.”
Once again, the skeptical White was swept up in the force field of Strummer’s passion, envisioning a “brilliant, raw, exciting album like the first.” Despite legal challenges presented by Jones’s blizzard of injunctions, this was the goal toward which all the exertion was aimed. “We’re gonna get this album out by the end of the year,” Strummer told White. “We’ve got to.”
Strummer would relate the same ambition to whoever would listen. All the struggle and stress of the road, the building of this new platoon under fire was “what is going to make our [new] record great!” Strummer told Creem’s Bill Holdship after the Detroit show.
Holdship was a hard sell, as was his publication. For those in the know, Creem was “America’s only rock roll magazine.” It had been home to trailblazing critics like Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh. In a 1971 issue, Marsh coined a new phrase to describe a raw garage-band sound: punk rock.
As rock aficionados, The Clash loved Creem, but they had a stormy relationship with it. Holdship was also skeptical of them. Once “an idealistic college kid who believed rock and roll could ‘save’ the world,” now he had adopted the “meet the new boss / same as the old boss” credo of the Who’s “Won’t be Fooled Again.”
Bill Holdship article from Creem magazine, October 1984. (Photos by Bob Gruen.)
Holdship spoke for a lot of older rockers who now questioned activism’s value, especially related to music. First critiquing The Clash as “armchair activists” who should emulate Ernest Hemingway—or George Orwell—in the Spanish Civil War by donning actual military uniforms to fight for their Central American causes, Holdship then flipped to embrace resignation: “As I grow older, I’m beginning to believe that there simply are no political solutions . . . Things rarely change.”
Holdship’s fatalism echoed UK writers like Martin and Barber whose “I’m older and wiser now” stance came off more as self-serving cynicism rather than insight. One can almost hear them straining to vanquish their younger, more idealistic selves.
Martin mourned the “seven long years since I first ripped that T-shirt, scowled that scowl, and danced that dance.” Barber evoked “the good old days“ when “we could actually believe that The Clash were some sort of radical force,” claiming Strummer “still seems to think he can shoot Margaret Thatcher dead by commanding one of his guitarists to thrum an E chord like a machine gun in the direction of the House of Parliament.”
Their dismissals seemed aimed as much at reassuring themselves over convenient choices made and dreams abandoned as assessing the band’s performance. Nonetheless, Holdship’s “million-dollar question” for Strummer hit home: “What does an orange Mohawk have to do with changing the political structure in the 1980s?” Holdship suggested that symbolic actions were not enough. In this, he—as well as Martin and Baker—surely had a point.
“Music isn’t a threat, but the action that music inspires can be,” argued Chumbawamba, a group of Crass devotees then building its own underground following.
As any self-aware punk might agree, 1984 was no time for anyone to expect a band to fight your battles for you. Strummer told Holdship he wanted fans to “get out from under our shadow, be your own person. I’m proud to inspire people, and from then on, they should take it from there.” This, of course, could be a cop-out. What exactly was The Clash doing to aid its fans in making this crucial next step?
Yet Strummer’s patience with tough questions won Holdship over, as did the passion of the band’s performance. While the writer wasn’t impressed by many of the new songs, he allowed “the new band sounds tighter and better than the old lineup.” Holdship grudgingly granted, “Maybe Joe Strummer was right. Maybe we do need The Clash . . . A little optimism ain’t a bad thing.”
One of the themes Strummer hammered with Holdship was the band’s antidrug stance, as he did consistently on the rest of the tour: “We’re not born again or anything like that. All we want to do is think clearly, and you can’t think clearly on any drug. And I’ve found that my life is much better.”
There were broad implications here. After the rousing DC show, Strummer had once again linked drugs to Reagan’s ascent, while paying tribute to a punk antidrug movement inspired by the DC hardcore band Minor Threat: “I’m pleased to see there is a straight edge scene . . . It is something separate from us, yet we happen to be traveling on parallel paths. It reinforces my belief that it is right.”
Ironically, at that moment, another antidrug movement—one far less grassroots in conception—was taking shape within a building less than a mile away at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. After a visit to a Brooklyn drug rehabilitation facility during the 1980 campaign, Nancy Reagan had made fighting drug abuse her central cause as America’s first lady.
“Just Say No” was about to become her mantra. Legend suggested Reagan came up with it spontaneously in response to a child’s question. According to The Yale Book of Quotations, however, the slogan “closely identified with Nancy Reagan” was “originated by the advertising agency Needham, Harper & Steers.”
Agency representative Carolyn Roughsedge told the New York Times in 2016: “Bob Cox and David Cantor came up with ‘just say no’ because that’s what a little kid would say.” When Mrs. Reagan visited the agency in October 1983, “they presented it . . . and she absolutely loved it,” Roughsedge said.
The Just Say No campaign would be announced later in 1984, and clubs touting the slogan would soon sprout at hundreds of schools around the country. Nancy Reagan’s initiative was surely well intended and driven by genuine concern about a very real problem. Meanwhile, however, her husband moved forward on a more ominous tack.
In October 1982 Ronald Reagan had revived the “War on Drugs,” an initiative first launched by the Nixon administration for reasons that went far beyond concern for public health. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy c
hief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum in 1994. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and by criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
This initiative had more than symbolic consequences, Ehrlichman made clear: “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”
By the time these quotes surfaced in 2016, Ehrlichman was dead, and his family disavowed his words. In any case, the “War on Drugs” revived by Reagan would have a far more dramatic effect than “Just Say No”—one not so far from what Ehrlichman suggested.
This was not the only disturbing twist in this particular tale. As Reagan denounced drugs, some of his contra allies—with US support cut off by a disapproving Congress—were using cocaine sales to help finance their attacks on the Sandinistas.
Some of these drugs made their way to American streets as something new called “crack”: cocaine cooked solid then chipped into rocks meant to be smoked, not sniffed. Crack would soon generate panicked headlines as a cheap, highly addictive drug spreading violence and community disintegration.
While crack’s carnage was very real, the most destructive drugs in American society remained far more mundane: alcohol and tobacco. The Reagans were painted as hypocrites by some observers for opposing drugs, yet indulging in martinis and the like. The Clash shared this contradiction. Strummer’s love for alcohol and tobacco was well known. He saw nicotine as a spark for creativity and alcohol as a “revolutionary drug” because it got people talking.
Clash biographer Salewicz even suggests that as Strummer’s pot use dropped in 1984, his alcohol consumption went up—and he was not alone in this excess. While the band limited alcohol before a show, afterward copious amounts of it helped them wind down, often in bars where they encountered their fans.
For Strummer, this was part of his punk ethic. He liked being accessible to his audience, often listening more than talking. Yet the toll of such heavy drinking was significant. White’s girlfriend would josh him at the end of the US tour about the belly he had developed despite the almost daily shows. The abuse of bodies with alcohol, lack of sleep, bad food, the grind of constant traveling . . . it was bound to take its toll. This was especially so for Strummer, still harboring the grief over his father’s death as well as aching over the distance from his wife and child.
Perhaps having a young daughter was making Strummer more sensitive to other issues, as suggested by “Sex Mad War.” Like many of the best Clash songs, the tune was a bit of glorious jumble: whip-sharp punkabilly with a blistering feminist message that Strummer underlined nightly with stinging onstage commentary.
Aware that The Clash was seen as a “lad’s band” with a mostly male following, the Clash frontman began to talk about a “new man”—or “a new human being’’—who was “antiracist and antisexist.” Strummer encouraged female involvement, pausing to honor “some brave girls down here” in front of the stage in Eugene, Oregon.
That night Strummer also expressed his hope “that some men here will realize that pornography is rape, which the women already realize . . . and they can’t walk [safely] in the dark!” He was echoing feminist activists such as Robin Morgan who asserted, “Pornography is the theory and rape is the practice,” and Andrea Dworkin who saw it as part of what she would later describe as a “war on women.” This line of argument could be disputed—and was, even by other feminists—but regardless, “Sex Mad War” was not your average rocker.
The song also resonated in a moment where concerns about sexual violence were rising on college campuses, the main venues for the Clash tour. Strummer had even rewritten the opening lines—“Going to the party / never made it to the party / she’s gone”—making the song even more relevant to college communities where “Take Back the Night” marches were becoming more widespread. If the musical vehicle was hardly groundbreaking, the message was—at least for a popular all-male rock group—and the song evoked an eerie atmosphere of violent foreboding with jagged stop-and-start guitar, bass, and drums.
At least some Clash members, however, felt a twinge of conscience about the tune. Sheppard: “We didn’t treat women that well, did we?”—a sentiment sadly seconded by White. If The Clash rhetorically was miles away from rockers such as Mötley Crüe—who Creem’s Holdship scorched as “morons” yelling out witticisms like “We love fucking the girls in Detroit because their pussies taste so good!” from stage—it was not entirely divorced from the groupie scene.
White had started out keeping to himself, excited by touring. He soon grew wary: “The great United States of America—miles and miles of synchronized bland nothingness. For me, it got essentially boring pretty quick.” White also bristled at controlling behavior like the enforced regimen of certain music and artists on the tour bus.
Playful high jinks could help ease the tension. For example, the Mohawk imagery that dominated on the tour’s T-shirts, posters, and handbills took on a life of its own. In Hartford, the band started up a good-natured debate with its Texan road crew. “One of the guys had really long, luxurious black hair,” Sheppard recalls. “We started kidding him in the bar: ‘You should have a Mohawk.’ So he said, ‘Well, hell, if you give me a thousand dollars, I will.’ In five minutes, there was a thousand dollars on the bar—and he crapped out. He wouldn’t do it.”
Just then, however, one of the truck drivers agreed—if the money could go to his favorite charity, “which was homeless [children], or something like that,” Sheppard continues. “So we all trooped off to this local bar that had a stage, set up a chair, and starting giving Mohawks to all and sundry.”
The same had happened a couple nights earlier, before the band’s April 22 show at the Philadelphia Spectrum. The band found themselves sharing the same hotel as the Grateful Dead, whose own hair could stand a bit of shearing—or so ran the thinking in the Clash camp. Sheppard laughs: “Kosmo went on a Mohawk spree that night. By the next day, he had a bagful of hippie hair that he’d cut.” But the Dead’s locks were not among the trophies.
Not all diversions were as benign, however. As tedium set in, and alienation from the rest of the band grew, White began embracing casual sex with the band’s followers. Egged on by twin groupies, White even indulged in that most clichéd of rock star antics, trashing his hotel room and hurling a TV out the window. He had to pay for the damage, getting a Vinyl tongue-lashing to boot.
White had taken matters to an extreme, but he was hardly alone in acting out. Given that hedonism had long been one of rock’s core pursuits, this was hardly headline news. Still, a banner of “If it feels good, do it” hung uneasily on a band touting “a new antisexist man”—and Sheppard and White knew it.
One man stood at the center of the operation, carrying immense weight. How was Joe Strummer doing? It was hard to tell, as he tended to keep his deepest thoughts and feelings to himself. The singer may have been taking his own measure as much as the band’s in telling one reporter, “Yeah, let’s go for the top, let’s take it all on at once—that’s always been our speciality!”
Occasionally, telling bits would slip out. Coming offstage after a frenetic, soul-drenched New Jersey show in late April, a momentarily unguarded Strummer told someone close to the band, “You know, sometimes I almost believe in this!” The self-doubt exposed by Johnny Green had clearly not disappeared.
Salewicz reports that after the Long Island show Strummer shared his darker side with longtime friend Jo-Anne Henry: “The death of his father was still in his thoughts, and now Joe was beating himself up for being away while Jazz was a baby. ‘I could be any bloke going off and leaving her,’ he said,” Henry recalled. “Jazz being born brought up tons of stuff about his childhood . . . Deep down he seemed to be in a really awful state. There was this anger that he was not able to let come out, the swirling emotions inside
him that he couldn’t admit to.”
As with the others, touring wearied Strummer. He had to summon enormous amounts of energy and passion every night. In one TV interview in late April, Strummer was asked how he felt about the new band. Flanked by the other members, Strummer responded: “Great!” Then, as if to underline his point, he leaned forward and repeated even more loudly: “GREAT!” His defiant response seemed intended to convince himself more than anyone else.
Behind this shout, Howard suspected, was a person struggling to deal with a growing array of demons—personal, social, and professional—that the relentless tour schedule wouldn’t allow a chance to address. “He was getting quite mental, quite desperate, and he was drinking an awful lot,” Howard says.
Yet the near-nightly shows seemed to help Strummer focus. Whatever his private qualms, the singer didn’t let them show onstage. Even critics rarely found Strummer’s performances anything but convincing.
Changing things up helped with this. Three weeks into the tour, another song disappeared from the set: “In the Pouring Rain.” A live version from the April 14 show at New York’s Hofstra University suggests why. While featuring powerful lyrics and music that blasted off after the chorus, the song was hamstrung by a clunky beginning. Other bands, notably Gang of Four, had overlaid dark social observations atop dance beats—a sound that some writers took to calling “plague disco.” But the chunky, repetitive funk riff chosen to drive home “Rain’s” message actually served to undercut its intense lyrical bent. The result seemed a bit herky-jerky and off balance, having never fully blossomed from its original demo.
We Are the Clash Page 16