We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  This made sense. Yet this stance directly contradicted what Strummer had told another journalist seven months before. Vowing to play seven nights in one city if need be, Strummer had insisted, “We want to be bigger than anyone else but do it in a way that matters.” Both Strummer and Simonon had often talked about the catalytic role of the crowd in fueling their performances. As such, they mourned the loss of intimate connection as their concerts’ scale grew.

  Whatever Strummer’s reasoning, the barrier between artist and audience had been obliterated. Chaos reigned for several minutes as Strummer alternated between exhorting the crowd—“Italy, come on, come on!”—and wrangling with skeptical security. Once the stage was finally full, Strummer led the band back into a reprise of “White Man,” the crowd and band singing and moving together.

  Sheppard: “I thought it was great! We ended up on the drum riser as our stage. We had to leave the stage after one song. When we came back there were no monitors and one microphone!” Nevertheless, the next half hour of the show was a steamroller, going from punk to dub and back again.

  An equipment breakdown stalled “I Fought the Law,” but the band took the opportunity to uncoil an extended dub breakdown leading into “Bank Robber,” followed by “Janie Jones.” The band then kicked off “Tommy Gun”—only to take another left turn as White was unceremoniously pulled into the crowd.

  White: “In ‘Tommy Gun’ I would take a sudden run to the edge of the stage, stop, lean over, and fire an imaginary salvo. It was great fun . . . until some bright spark in the audience grabbed the guitar’s machine head and wouldn’t let go . . . It was either me or the instrument so in I went!”

  Sheppard: “All the crowds on that tour were really wild . . . I remember Vince getting pulled into the crowd and coming out with a shoe missing and his clothes fucked up.”

  When the song ended, a ragged White clubfooted it over to Strummer and asked for the band to go offstage so he could get a new pair of shoes. The singer was not having it. As White later wrote: “Joe glared menacingly at me. I don’t think he saw me, not a bit. It was eerie. Eyes glazed, and like the messiah calling his followers to prayer he stooped low, and pulled the microphone to his lips . . .”

  While the dazed guitarist looked on, Strummer slowly intoned, “ENGLISH . . . CIVIL . . . WAR!” White: “The crowd erupted. I started smashing out tuneless chords in wild abandon. A few people jumped up onstage and started leaping around. I quickly forgot how stupid I looked. Suddenly all the madness made sense.”

  With glorious chaos swirling around them, the band quickly knocked out two more numbers before exiting the stage: “Know Your Rights” and “Magnificent Seven.” At the end of that shimmering punk-funk juggernaut, Strummer screamed, “I . . . WANT . . . MAGNIFICENCE!”

  But what made for a gripping performance didn’t necessarily align with mental health. While the show had been riotous, the after-show drama would be as well. While Sheppard, Howard, and Rhodes shared a meal at a fan’s restaurant—“One of the only times I enjoyed Bernie’s company!” laughs Sheppard—White, Vinyl, and Strummer descended into something close to hell.

  It began as just another night of hard drinking and skirt chasing—but soon took a much darker turn. According to White, after the trio tired of the bar, a wretchedly drunk Strummer suggested that they go in pursuit of prostitutes. “Joe assured me it was great. A real experience. It had to be tried,” White says bitterly.

  When this pursuit was unsuccessful, a new drinking spot was found. Once there, White remembers, Strummer and Vinyl began to badger him about his guitar playing and supposed lack of commitment to The Clash. Startled, White tried to defend himself, only to face more barbed insults.

  When Strummer upped the ante by insinuating that he had slept with White’s girlfriend and then summarily dismissed White from the band, the guitarist lost control and began to slug the singer in the face—but he faced no resistance. Suddenly, Strummer and Vinyl were laughing, claiming it had just been a test.

  White felt sickened—yet this was not the end. The next day, Pearl Harbour got a call from her husband, Paul Simonon. As Harbour later told Chris Salewicz, “Paul says, ‘Last night we all got drunk, and Joe and Kosmo told me that I had to divorce you or quit the band.’ I said, ‘What did you say?’ I was livid. He said, ‘I don’t know what to tell them.’ I said, ‘Fuck you. Divorce me if you want.’”

  While the two eventually sorted out the matter, a furious Harbour took her revenge upon Strummer upon his return to Heathrow Airport, kicking and punching him in public while roasting his hypocrisy. Harbor: “‘You, Joe Strummer, you think it’s not rock and roll for Paul and me to be married, and you walk around London pushing a pram with an orange Mohican. You are a fucking idiot!’”

  The double standard was real. As with White’s attack, Strummer didn’t resist—he just took the blows, as if hoping that the pain would somehow be redemptive.

  While Harbour made enough of a ruckus to attract the attention of nearby police, the two patched it up by—ironically, given the role of alcohol in the initial fiasco—going out drinking the next night. Displaying the scabs on his shins to all who cared to look, Strummer found an unusual way to apologize. Harbour: “Joe took off my high-heeled shoes and poured champagne in them and drank it.”

  But if Strummer’s relationship with Harbour was mended, other wounds were not so easily healed. Nor were the injuries caused to the unity of the band. What is one to make of this ugly series of events? Offering no excuses, but with clear regrets, Vinyl will only note that this period was “the unhappiest time of my adult life.” If anything, Strummer seemed even more lost and forlorn.

  Yet, against all odds, the tour had been a success. Sheppard told Gray, “The shows were really good, and we played really well,” later adding, “The gigs were full of freedom and experimentation musically, and we felt confident as a band. I loved the whole experience—the food, the people, the country.”

  While Sheppard admitted, “I didn’t really pay too much attention as to why Joe was off the rails,” this would become increasingly difficult. Strummer had once said his 1982 disappearance was a way of working himself out of a depression: “I had a personal reason for going . . . I just remembered how it was when I was a bum, how I’d once learned the truth from playing songs on the street corner. If I played good, I’d eat. That direct connection between having something to eat and somewhere to stay and the music I played—I just remembered that.”

  The singer was shrouded in shadows he seemed unable to shake. The dream of a reinvented Clash able to face whatever 1984 had to offer was fading away.

  Soon enough, Joe Strummer would again disappear.

  chapter six

  got to get a witness

  Joe Strummer in Granada, October 1984, wearing an Out of Control hat. (Photo by Juan Jesús Garcia.)

  I’ve often lost myself,

  in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake.

  —Federico García Lorca

  Women began organizing communal kitchens for the striking coal miners and their families driven by desperation and a realization that clubbing together makes food go further and sharing poverty makes it easier to bear. They devised ways to raise money to fund the soup kitchens and soon many became more politically active, joining the picket lines beside their male relations and friends.

  —Alex Callincos and Mike Simons, The Great Strike, 1985

  The man looked a bit rumpled, nursing a drink at a corner table in a bar in Granada, Spain. At first Jesús Arias didn’t recognize him: “The guy was dressed like a lumberjack in a checkered coat and dockworker’s hat. He was unshaven, unwashed . . . He looked like a hippie, really.”

  It was early October 1984, and Arias had come to investigate an unlikely tale. The Spanish punk recalls, “My brother Antonio called me and said, ‘Hey, Jesús, yesterday we met Joe Strummer at Silbar. He is dirty and smelly but he will be there tonight again. Please come, we need someone who speaks E
nglish!’”

  Startled, Arias pressed for more information. If anything, the details seemed even more incredible. “I came in and the bartender said, ‘This foreigner wants to show you his lyrics,’” Antonio told him. Puzzled, the younger Arias had gone over: “It was dark in the bar, I didn’t recognize him, he had a five-day-old beard and is showing me this small notebook with handwriting in English. I told him it was great but I’m really thinking, ‘How can I get away?’” Eventually, Antonio realized it was Strummer.

  The elder Arias wasn’t convinced. Why would the lead singer of The Clash—a certified rock star—be skulking in a bar in Granada all by himself? Jesús explains, “There were rumors that Strummer had been around in the past, that he had a girlfriend from Granada, but no one I knew had ever seen him, and I was always skeptical.” Nevertheless, he went to see for himself.

  Silbar was a hub for the small Granada punk community. Any vaguely avant-garde art had long been repressed in Spain under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, former ally of Hitler and Mussolini. Rock and other progressive scenes had sprouted in the space that developed after Franco’s death in 1975.

  “All our friends, our bands—TNT, KGB, 091—went [to Silbar],” Jesús Arias says. “But Strummer? It didn’t make sense.” The Spaniard steeled himself, walked over to the table, and asked: “Are you Joe Strummer?” The man looked up from his glass and replied simply: “Yeah . . . What do you want to drink?”

  When Arias answered, “Coca-Cola,” Strummer called out to the bartender in his ragged Spanish, “Hey, let me buy a Coca-Cola for this guy!” He turned back to Arias and asked, “Do you speak English?” “I told him, ‘Yes, I do, very badly,’” Arias laughs. “Joe said, ‘Well, that’s good enough for me!’”

  Strummer proved to be an easy conversationalist and a good listener, but Arias could tell that not all was well: “At first, he was really happy and talkative. He liked Silbar and Granada, like it was a little London without all the critics. But soon you could tell he was really down, really sad. He was thinking all the time, crying all the time . . . He was drunk all the time.”

  Strummer had first visited Granada in the 1970s with his longtime girlfriend, Paloma Romero. Better known as Palmolive, drummer for two trailblazing female punk groups, the Slits and the Raincoats, Romero was from nearby Málaga. In addition to being the inspiration for “Spanish Bombs,” she also introduced Strummer to another of his great loves: the art and life of Federico García Lorca.

  Lorca was a leader of the “Generation of 1927,” a loosely aligned group of artists who brought avant-garde ideas into Spanish literature. An outspoken socialist, Lorca was also gay at a time when this was anything but accepted. Even so, his literary voice earned him a fervent following.

  One scholar described the writer’s increasing depression, “a situation exacerbated by Lorca’s anguish over his homosexuality.” Other aspects of the poet’s life seemed familiar to Strummer: “Lorca felt he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured, authentic self, which he could only acknowledge in private.”

  After time in New York City, Lorca returned to Spain amid the growing tension that led to the Spanish Civil War. An attempted military coup against the elected leftist government soon led to civil war between Republicans—government supporters—and Nationalists under Franco’s command.

  Lorca had every reason to fear for his life as summary executions and mass killings became common after war erupted in early 1936. Yet he remained in his home region of Andalusia only to be abducted and murdered by fascist forces on August 19, 1936. Tossed into a mass grave beside other victims of the terror, Lorca’s body was never found.

  Lorca’s mix of politics, art, and anguish resonated with Strummer. At the time, going to Granada was—in the words of Chris Salewicz—“a bit of a pilgrimage . . . [Joe needed] to get away from things, he [needed] a creative place to think. He wanted to visit the grave of Federico García Lorca.”

  Arias happened to be a student of Lorca’s work, and he bonded with Strummer during late-night talks about the martyred poet. Arias knew the area near Viznar—not far from Granada—where Lorca was probably killed, and the two made plans to visit. Before they could do so, however, Strummer disappeared just as suddenly as he had appeared—“like a ghost,” Arias says.

  As this phantom flitted in and out of Granada, the miners’ strike was past the seven-month mark and nearing a turning point. In mid-August, Ian MacGregor sent a letter to the safety inspectors at the country’s coal mines. These “pit deputies” were not part of the NUM, but a smaller union with a long name: the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS). They had not joined the strike, though some refused to cross NUM picket lines.

  That was expected of any union worker. Yet MacGregor found this unacceptable. If some miners themselves were now crossing the lines, why shouldn’t the pit deputies? He ordered all NACODS workers to cross picket lines or be fired.

  This enraged the union. NACODS swiftly voted to go on strike, demanding that MacGregor’s letter be withdrawn, and also insisting that the National Coal Board agree to binding arbitration over any proposed future pit closure.

  This course of action would be devastating to the government’s plans. By law, no mine could operate without safety inspectors; MacGregor’s ultimatum would effectively shut down all of Britain’s coal mines. Moreover, if arbitration became the last word on closures, the still-secret—and often denied—plan for relentless downsizing might well be stymied. Either way, this would hand victory to the battered but unbowed NUM. Feeling the heat, MacGregor scrambled to extricate himself from this self-created disaster by striving to delay the NACODS strike.

  Thatcher once again had to prepare for desperate measures. Years later, the Guardian reported, “The secret list of ‘worst case’ options outlined to Thatcher by [her] most senior officials included power cuts and putting British industry on a ‘three-day week’—a phrase that evoked memories of Edward Heath’s humiliating 1974 defeat by the miners that brought down his government, and which must have sent a chill down Thatcher’s spine when she read it.”

  The prime minister was adamant this must not happen. As a mid-October deadline for the NACODS strike approached, Thatcher applied immense pressure behind the scenes. Partisans in this conflict held their breath.

  * * *

  England in 1984 resembled a battleground. The United States, however, was victorious—at least if an advertisement that debuted in mid-September was to be believed.

  “It’s morning again in America,” a white male voice intoned over soothing orchestral music. Familiar morning scenes of a boy delivering newspapers, a man on the way to work, a farmer on a tractor, slipped from one to another. The warm voice continued: “Today more people will go to work than ever before in our nation’s history, with interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980. Nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married. And with inflation at just one-half of what is was four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future.” As wedding scenes melted into a vista of the US Capitol dome and American flags being raised, the narrator concluded: “It’s morning again in America—and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder, and stronger, and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were only four short years ago?” One final image—a montage of Ronald Reagan and the American flag—remained on screen as the music faded.

  The portrait the ad painted was powerful—but was it true? A tightening of the money supply actually initiated late in the Carter era by his Federal Reserve appointee, Paul Volcker, had led to the brutal recession of 1982. While devastating for many, it had driven down inflation and interest rates.

  Only some reaped the benefits. For unlucky tens of millions, it was anything but morning in America. The ad ignor
ed the ongoing agony of inner cities and Native American reservations, the record bankruptcies of family farms, and the growing ranks of the homeless adrift on American streets amid a widening gap between the rich and the poor. While the morning sunlight shone upon corporations shaking off regulations and taxes, the sun was setting on Rust Belt ghost towns.

  This was reality. But did America actually want truth? Mondale had promised to “tell it like it is”—including that tax increases were inevitable—but had run headlong into the Reagan machine’s public-relations buzz saw.

  The “Morning in America” ads—developed by a Madison Avenue dream team—were the first blow in a one-two punch that staggered Mondale. While Reagan himself stayed above the fray, his surrogates savaged the Democrat as a “tax-and-spend liberal.” “Mr. Mondale calls this promise to raise taxes an act of courage,” Vice President George Bush proclaimed. “But it wasn’t courage, it was just habit, because he is a gold-medal winner when it comes to increasing the tax burden of the American people.”

  This rejoinder neatly evoked the recently concluded, hyperpatriotic Summer Olympics—boycotted by the Soviet Union and its allies amid Cold War tension—in delivering its hammer blow. It also twisted Mondale’s vow to not lie into something like an insatiable hunger to raise taxes. Outrageous, yes—but as the Democrat’s poll numbers dropped, it seemed America might want gauzy self-affirmation more than uncomfortable reality.

  This was just as Reagan’s henchmen hoped. The retired actor was a master showman, and this was his “role of a lifetime,” as biographer Lou Cannon put it. Leslie Janka, Reagan’s deputy press secretary, admitted later, “This was a PR outfit that became president and took over the country. The Constitution forced them to do things like make a budget, run foreign policy, and all that, but their first, last, and overarching activity was public relations.”