Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  We start by talking about the band’s apparent position as de facto leaders of punk. Strummer stares into his muddy tea, uninterested in the idea of conversation, and lets Simonon take the questions. Probably the roughest-looking member of the group, with his skeletal face and disheveled hair, Simonon is disarmingly guileless and amiable. “Just because I’m up onstage,” he says in rubbery English, “doesn’t mean that I’m entitled to a different lifestyle than anyone else. I used to think so. I’d stay up all night, get pissed, party all the time. But you get cut off from the workaday people that way. I like to get up early, paint me flat, practice me bass. I see these geezers going off to work and I feel more like one of them.”

  But, I note, most of those same people wouldn’t accept him. They’re incensed and frightened by bands like the Clash.

  Strummer stops stirring his tea and glowers around. “Good,” he grunts. “I’m pleased.”

  This seems a fair time to raise the question of the band’s recent bout with the British rock press. After Give ’Em Enough Rope, some of the band’s staunchest defenders shifted gears, saying that the Clash’s militancy is little more than a fashionable stance, and that their attitude toward terrorist violence is dangerously ambiguous. “One is never entirely sure just which side [the Clash] is supposed to be taking,” wrote Nick Kent in New Musical Express. “The Clash use incidents . . . as fodder for songs without caring.”

  Strummer squints at me for a moment, his thoughtful mouth hemming his craggy teeth. “We’re against fascism and racism,” he says. “I figure that goes without saying. I’d like to think that we’re subtle; that’s what greatness is, innit? I can’t stand all these people preaching, like Tom Robinson. He’s just too direct.”

  But that ambiguity can be construed as encouraging violence.

  “Our music’s violent,” says Strummer. “We’re not. If anything, songs like ’Guns on the Roof’ and ’Last Gang in Town’ are supposed to take the piss out of violence. It’s just that sometimes you have to put yourself in the place of the guy with the machine gun. I couldn’t go to his extreme, but at the same time it’s no good ignoring what he’s doing. We sing about the world that affects us. We’re not just another wank rock group like Boston or Aerosmith. What fucking shit.”

  Yet, I ask, is having a record contract with one of the world’s biggest companies compatible with radicalism?

  “We’ve got loads of contradictions for you,” says Strummer, shaking off his doldrums with a smirk. “We’re trying to do something new; we’re trying to be the greatest group in the world, and that also means the biggest. At the same time, we’re trying to be radical—I mean, we never want to be really respectable—and maybe the two can’t coexist, but we’ll try. You know what helps us? We’re totally suspicious of anyone who comes in contact with us. Totally. We aim to keep punk alive.”

  The conversation turns to the Clash’s impending tour of America. “England’s becoming claustrophobic for us,” says Strummer. “Everything we do is scrutinized. I think touring America could be a new lease on life.”

  But the American rock scene—and especially radio—seems far removed from the world in flames that the Clash sing about. (While the Clash may top the English charts, they have yet to dent Billboard’s Top 200. “We admit we aren’t likely to get a hit single this time around,” says Bruce Harris of Epic’s A & R department. “But Give ’Em Enough Rope has sold forty thousand copies and that’s better than sixty percent of most new acts.”) I ask if a failure to win Yankee hearts would set them back.

  “Nah,” says Strummer. “We’ve always got here. We haven’t been to Europe much, and we haven’t been to Japan or Australia, and we want to go behind the iron curtain.” He pauses and shrugs his face in a taut grin. “There are a lot of other places where we could lose our lives.”

  THE NEXT TIME I meet the Clash, over three years later, is in fact in America—in the city of Los Angeles.

  By way of greeting me, Joe Strummer points at the roughhewn crop of Mohawk hair that flares from the top of his head, his thumb cocked back like a pistol. “You know why I did this, don’t you?” he asks, leaning forward, a conspiratorial smile shaping his lips. We’re seated in a dressing room backstage at the Hollywood Palladium, where the Clash are midway through a five-date engagement—their first appearances in the area since the group’s 1980 London Calling tour. Strummer and his bandmates—guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon, and drummer Terry Chimes (the latter, newly returned to the Clash’s fold)—are about to hit the stage for the afternoon’s peremptory soundcheck, but first Joe wants to share a little revelation about his newly acquired headdress.

  “I did it,” he says, “to try to force some confrontation this time around. I wanted people to react to it, to ask me just what the hell I’m on about. I thought it might stir up a little friendly conversation, if you know what I mean.”

  And has it? I ask.

  Joe gets a look that’s part disappointment, part bafflement. “No, not much. Maybe people find it a little too scary, you know, too serious. Over here, you Americans never seem to know how to take matters of style. It’s like you view it as a threat, as rebellion. In England, style signifies, um . . . like identity. I would never equate something as simple as a radical haircut with a true act of rebellion.”

  “So, Joe, then what is true rebellion? Because cultural revolt seems to be the signal thing the Clash stand for in a lot of people’s minds.”

  Strummer regards the question in silence for a few moments, then fixes me with a level stare. “Cultural revolt . . . I’m not sure that’s it exactly. But I’ll tell you what I’ve come to think real rebellion is: It’s something more personal than that—it’s not giving up. Rebellion is deciding to push ahead with it all for one more day. That’s the toughest test of revolt—keeping yourself alive, as well as the cause.”

  PERSEVERANCE as revolt: The notion may seem a far cry from the brand of immediate, imperative, insurgent passion that made Joe Strummer’s early exclamations seem so fearsome and world-wrecking—the youth-prole sentiments, stricken terrorist manifestos and iconoclast allegations that stoked incendiary rally calls like “1977,” “Guns on the Roof,” “White Riot,” and “Safe European Home”—but at the same time, no other band in recent history has made stamina stand for as much as has the Clash.

  Indeed, over the lightning distance of six years, four U.S. tours (and at least twice as many U.K. treks), and five album sets (comprised of eight LPs and a hundred songs), the Clash have managed to stake a larger claim on questions of cultural, political, and moral effect—place greater weight and liability on the purposes of rock & roll—than any other band since the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or the Who. Probably the only other band that compares with them in terms of social and aesthetic force these last ten years is the Sex Pistols—and their design, it seems, was simply not just to raze popular culture, but also to level the world around it, themselves included. The Sex Pistols could never have made a second album, and chances are they always knew it—but then making records wasn’t their long suit. For the Clash, making music is a way of making further possibilities of life, a way of withstanding inevitable defeats—a way of “not giving up.”

  Yet trying to live out revolt as daily ethos can be a steep act; for one thing, it means no doubling back. Since 1977, each new Clash release has sought to outdistance its predecessors in bold and irrevocable ways. Give ’Em Enough Rope (1978) magnified the band’s musical force, while also broadening their sociopolitical focus, from the narrow obsessions of U.K. punk sedition to the fiery reality of the world outside—a world mired in tyranny and aflame in blood and mutiny. London Calling, at the close of the following year, carried revolt over to the means of style and the object of history—resulting in the band’s most sharply crafted, popularly accessible effort to date. It also resulted in a resounding statement on how to live heroically and honorably in a world where such notions spell certain disillusionment and probable subjecti
on (“Clampdown,” “Death or Glory”). And then, in 1980, the group issued their uncompromising, bulky masterwork, Sandinista!—an opus that tried to expand the vernacular and sensibility of popular music by melding rock’s form with remote cultural idioms—like reggae, gospel, Euro-pop, American funk, and rap—and unflinching social realities; in other words, by mixing dread with innovation, for matchless effect. Overall, what has emerged is a body of work that has upped the ante on punk—forced it to reach outward, to risk compromise, to embrace conflict, even if it means conflict with punk’s own narrow presentiments.

  What also results, though, is a kind of self-imposed state of contradiction that can, on occasion, seem to undermine the group’s grandest designs. After all, it’s one thing to start out to upend rock convention, and quite another to end up proclaimed as “The World’s New Greatest Rock & Roll Band.” Yet the physical impact of the Clash’s live shows, and the stimulative force of London Calling—incorporating, as it did, British symbols and symptoms as text, and American rock & roll as context—had just that effect: It made the Clash appear as the last great hope, if not preservers, of the very tradition they had set out to thwart.

  Yet the Clash have also tainted some of their best gestures with a maddening flair for miscalculation and self-importance. Sandinista! falls under that charge for many critics and fans (“Imagine,” one writer friend told me, “the audacity, the waste behind believing that everything you record deserves to be heard: who do these guys think they are—the Keith Jarretts of punk?”), though for my taste, it’s the Clash’s strongest, best enduring work, an unrepressed paradigm of creativity.

  Less successful, I think, was the previous year’s late spring series of concert events at Bond’s Casino in New York (eighteen shows in fifteen days), that seemed to indicate on one level the Clash’s startling naiveté about audience prejudices and business concerns, and on another, their inability to adopt Sandinista!’s range and depth to a live format. (In true scrupulous fashion, the Clash, along with friend and filmmaker Don Letts, documented the whole debacle in movie form: The Clash on Broadway, though it never received wide release.) More recently, there are the problems of Combat Rock—a heavy-handed, strident, guileful, muddled album about artistic despair and personal dissolution that derives from those conditions rather than aims to illuminate them—and, of course, Joe Strummer’s widely reported defection—or “hiatus,” as the group calls it—in the early part of 1982.

  Not surprisingly, the Clash worked those setbacks to their favor. Strummer returned to the group after a month-long sabbatical in Paris (though by that time, virtually their entire U.K. tour had been blown out of the water), appearing stronger and more resolved than ever before. What’s more, Combat Rock proved to be the band’s most critically and commercially successful record in England since 1978’s Give ’Em Enough Rope (not bad work for a band that had grown painfully, almost fatally, unfashionable in their own homeland).

  Not even the loss of Topper Headon—the prodigious drummer who had reportedly held great influence on the band’s recent musical progressivism, only to bail out five days before their current American tour for reasons that may never be publicly explained—not even that could disarm the Clash’s resurging spirit. Manager Bernard Rhodes (also newly returned to the fold) and road organizer Kosmo Vinyl simply recruited original drummer Terry Chimes on a work-for-hire basis, and sequestered him, along with the group, for three days of relentless rehearsals. Forty-eight hours later, the Clash, the very same Clash that had recorded the group’s resplendent 1977 debut album, were on tour once again in America—a bit battle-scarred, more than a little uncertain at moments, but playing with more mastery, unity, and momentum than they ever had before.

  In fact, oddly enough, it’s the hardcore potency of their current shows that may be the only thing to fault the Clash for this time around. From the opening edict of “London Calling” to the closing salvos of “Complete Control,” “Clash City Rockers,” and “Garageland,” these are urgent, clamorous, throat-throttling shows—as if the band had just jumped out of Black Market Clash and onto a stage, replete with ferment and sweat. But in that, they’re also surprisingly prudent affairs. Missing are all the adventurous touchstones from Sandinista!, or even the off-center filler pieces from Combat Rock. The lamentable “Know Your Rights” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” were the staples here, with occasional game stabs at “Rock the Casbah,” “Car Jamming,” or the beautiful, mournful “Straight to Hell.”

  And yet . . . and yet, though this is the Clash’s unabashed greatest-hits concessional tour, these were also the most moving, powerful and meaningful shows I’ve ever seen from this band. To watch the Clash in their early English jaunts or their first couple of U.S. tours—with the group issuing “Safe European Home” and “Guns on the Roof” as life-threatening and world-saving calls to truth—was to watch a rock & roll band (the strongest since the Who; the most vaulting since the Rolling Stones) stake a larger claim on terror, revolution, and deliverance than any pop culture force before it (the Sex Pistols fell just short of the deliverance part—that is unless you equate deliverance with self-dissolution). But to watch the Clash in 1982—as they mount the pace of “Somebody Got Murdered,” or seize the pulse of “Clampdown”—is to watch a band that has learned how costly it can be to try to live those claims, a band that’s learned that to redefine the intent and weight of pop culture isn’t enough: You have to make a new definition with every new gesture; you have to keep the designs behind those gestures sharp and unsparing; and you have to be willing to risk the refusal or flattening of those gestures, if not your own failure. Above all, it’s to watch a band that’s learned that they will probably lose far more than they’ll ever win, that someday, if they really care enough, they’ll probably lose it all.

  “I’LL TELL YOU what makes these shows so strong,” says Mick Jones, one late afternoon, over eggs and hash-browns at a popular Santa Monica Boulevard diner. “It’s a celebration: We’re out there celebrating that we exist—we made it this far, we made it another night.”

  Jones pauses for a few moments and pokes idly at his still unexplored breakfast. “Still, I wonder,” he says. “Don’t you think people just like it because they think they’re getting the old Clash this time around—the Clash the way it should be? I bet that’s what it is.”

  No, I answer, I think they like it because it seems like an explosive, unyielding show. Also, to be frank, because the band’s never sounded more confident or better unified.

  Mick ponders that for a moment as he watches the flutter and traffic of the boulevard. “I think we are playing pretty good . . . I feel all right about the shows, but I don’t feel it’s as much fun as it used to be somehow. We used to kind of explode. We play better now but for me personally . . .

  “I’m in a place now where I’m working onstage in accompaniment to what Joe’s doing with the words. My part of it is to hold it all together, help keep the rhythm section locked. Joe stops playing the guitar a lot, you know, and those are moments where the instrumentation could use a bit of embellishment, so me hands are going all the time. But also, I’m just not going over the top as much these days, leaping about and all that. I’m trying to control myself a bit more.”

  Yet, I point out, Jones has some of the most commanding rock & roll moments of the show—in particular, his galvanizing performance of “Somebody Got Murdered.” Every time they perform that song, a large segment of the audience shouts along on the line: “I’ve been very hungry/But not enough to kill.”

  “The important thing about that song,” says Jones, “is that it isn’t any particular person who gets killed—it’s just anybody. It’s funny, in some places we play, where people live in extreme poverty—like northern England—the audience seems to understand the line about not killing better. But in richer places, people understand the other part better, the part about ’Somebody’s dead forever.’ I think it’s their way of saying that, even though they mig
ht have money, they understand they can still lose it all—not just the money, but their lives. But the audiences are more mixed here in L.A., aren’t they?”

  Jones starts to pick gradually at his breakfast, now that it’s good and cold. “America,” he says, a thin tone of distaste in his voice. “The people here never really took punk of our kind seriously—always treated it like some sort of bloody joke. It’s a shame that a group like the Sex Pistols had to come out here to the land of promise just to burn out. Come out here and act out their gross end—that Sid and Nancy play. America screwed them up. That’s what we’ve tried not to have happen to us, going the way of the Sex Pistols—getting swallowed up by America.”

  It’s interesting, I note, that almost all of the Clash’s music since the first album has moved more and more away from strictly English topic matter and styles. Sandinista! seemed like a rampart of Third World concerns.

  “Yeah, well it was,” says Mick, “and that didn’t particularly win a lot of hearts and minds at the record company. We knew it was going to be difficult, because we kept meeting resistance with the idea, but we were very stubborn and went straight ahead. Sandinista! is quite special to me. It wasn’t, as some critics say, a conscious effort to do ourselves in. Originally we’d wanted to do a single a month, then put out a double album at the end of the year, like London Calling. But CBS wouldn’t have that, so we thought, All right, three albums for the price of two it is. We probably could’ve gone without releasing another record for a year or so. I think people would’ve still been listening to it—there’s enough there.

  “Combat Rock is like the best of Sandinista!—a concise statement, even though it contains just as much diversification. There’s an art to making one album as well as three, you know.”

  Yet Combat Rock, I tell Jones, seems shot through with the idea that death is an ever-present possibility. In fact, it almost seems a death-obsessed album, what with tracks like “Death Is a Star,” “Ghetto Defendant,” “Sean Flynn,” “Straight to Hell”. . . .