The Mouth That Roared: The Return of The Clash

John Mendelssohn, The Record, June 1984

Joe Strummer announces the Clash’s comeback in no uncertain terms.

CONVERSATION WITH THE CLASH’S Joe Strummer elicits the simplest, most blindingly self-evident solutions to agonizingly difficult political problems since the non-release of Billy Jack Goes To Washington.

On the subject of terrorism, for instance, the artist concedes, "It’s a dumb move blowing innocent people up – it doesn’t get them anywhere. But I try to understand the feeling behind it. Terrorism only occurs when the people holding power won’t negotiate. After World War II, the super powers divided up the world at the Yalta Conference and thought they’d solved things, but all they did was create long-running problems. What did they think people were going to do? Suppose we were Palestinian – what would we do? I’ll tell you what I’d do – exactly what they’re doing. They can’t get anybody to even sit down at the table, so what else are they going to do, piss off?

"If you had on orange you wanted to sell me, I’m sure we could arrive at a price even if you were a stubborn bastard and we had to sit here all night. But the Western governments just bring in these laws, like you can’t have a lawyer for 92 hours, and never say, ‘Right, let’s sort this one out." It’s always, ‘Let’s get more security. Let’s do this and that,’ when all they really have to do is sort it out somehow.

"I think it’s great," he says of Nicaragua’s immensely impeachable Sandinista regime, "but I’m worried that you lot are going to invade it." When the long-ago campus radical who’s serving as his conversational foil objects to being lumped in with "you lot," the artist sneers, "Every American is responsible for what their government does – if it ain’t being done in your name, then whose name is it being done in? I real all about the Committee on the Present Danger, and I know that they’re the ones calling the shots. Why doesn’t every American know that? Why is everybody on drugs and goofing off?"

Alternately perceived as The Only Rock and Roll Band That Matters and as the most shrilly self-righteous boors in pop history (see above), the Clash visit California as January becomes February to battletest their new Mick Jones-less line-up in Los Angeles, San Diego and a handful of small towns where rock traditionally disdains to tread.

"After the Us Festival last summer, we promised we’d come back to California," explains Kosmo Vinyl, the group’s aide-de-camp/designated talker, whose speaking voice sound like Tony Bennett’s. "And as Joe says, rock’n’roll is best when it’s fought on enemy territory – in the halls that were meant to be cinemas, in basketball pitches, in sports arenas. So we’ll go out this year and play all these little towns – Stockton, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara – instead of sticking to the usual English group thing of just playing the major cities. It isn’t compensation, though, because we don’t have any doubts at all that we did at the US Festival was right."

What they did – besides change their minds (most clamorously) approximately every 45 minutes about whether they would or would not actually perform, besides trying to shame their fellow performers into donating parts of their fees to local charities – was demand that festival bankroller Steve Wozniak donate $100,000 to a Southern California summer camp for disadvantaged youth. Off the top of his head, Vinyl can’t tell you much about the camp, or even its name. "We thought, ‘Why shouldn’t those kids go on holiday? Wozniak’s rich.’ I don’t know how much the guy’s got, but I think it’s in the region of $284 million, and all the hack-type industry people he had working for him were already shaking him like a money tree. In the end he agreed to $32,000. But then he announced that he would have given the money anyway, which was a damned lie. Our lawyer had stood there arguing with him for seven hours!"

After the group’s second performance at Santa Barbara’s cozy Arlington Theatre, Strummer explains why, when the group was apparently so intent on sending disadvantaged young Californians to summer camp, they didn’t simply hand over a hunk of their own $500,000 paycheck. " We needed it for London. We don’t have people in London who what to throw Woodstocks as a tax writeoff. If Wozniak wants to be a sucker and give us half a million dollars, we’ll take it. If we can get it out of Mick Jones’ lawyer’s hands, we can set up a scene in London with it – a club, a bar, an atmosphere, somewhere to hang out. We don’t have that anywhere. It’s all like Studio 54."

What made them so obstreperous at US, they tell you, was Wozniak’s Utopian pretensions. "If he’d just said he was putting on a show to make money," Vinyl claims "we would have gone, ‘All right, Jack.’ But that whole Unuson-us-togetherness community thing! There weren’t no community! It was rubbish."

Strummer’s contribution to the festival’s Woodstockian vibe was to snarl, "Here we are in the capital of the decadent U.S.A." at the tens of thousands who’d waited patiently in the mud for two hours before the group finally took the stage. "I wanted to wind them up," he reveals. "There was too much self-congratulation in the air. I wanted to get a reaction, and I felt that we’d never reach them – it was too vast. When you’re on stage, you forget about those giant TV screens even being there." He’s big enough man to concede that this tactic failed.

When asked why his group agreed to perform for Wozniak in the first place, he zealously asserts, "We had to go there. Otherwise we’d have been condemning rebel rock to the basement. I wasn’t having all that other nonsense up there without some rebel rocks as well – I don’t care if it’s us or somebody else. That was the rock’n’roll event in America that weekend, and I was going to be damned if I’d crawl off to show how pure I am."

"We want to be in the Top 10," Vinyl adds earnestly, "so that young groups will think they have to speak the truth to make it big instead of go to Egypt to make a video."

Between the Us debacle and their California trip, of course, the group expelled guitarist Mick Jones, who ego, to hear Vinyl and Strummer tell it, had run amok. "We’d get some dates together for a tour, right?" asserts Vinyl. "We’d talk to Paul and he’d go, ‘Yeah!’ We’d talk to Paul and he’d go, ‘Yeah! We’d talk to Mick and he’d just shrug."

"Or," snarls Strummer, "say he’d have to talk it over with his lawyer."

"He said if we didn’t produce Combat Rock in New York, he wouldn’t be at the sessions," Vinyl charges, by way of illuminating the departed guitarist’s accelerating insufferability. "So we cart everything to New York and make the record there. One day there’s an argument and that gets brought up and Mick goes, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean it.’ You don’t pull that sort of thing on your friends. Surely you don’t!"

"I could take the moaning and the not wanting to work and the lack of enthusiasm," Strummer claims. "And did until I had all that up to the neck. But what really got me was when he started saying he’d have to check things with his lawyer first. I thought, ‘Since when was lawyers involved in this team?’ We never had a lawyer to begin with. We would have run a mile before we’d have had one in the room with us! What’s a lawyer anyway – an overpaid geezer who’s out of touch with reality, who charges you fifty quid to say good morning and make a telephone call." (Or a guy who badgers someone like Steve Wozniak on your behalf?) "And all that language – that legal mumbo-jumbo. They could make it plains as day. Don’t tell me they couldn’t. They’ve translated the Bible into Scottish, into Greek, into plain English. But no, they won’t allow that because then we’ll do ‘em out of a job, right?

"Another big problem," Vinyl recalls, "was that he thought he should produce, but the rest of us didn’t think he was ready. Maybe you’ve heard rumors about Mick being opposed to the commerciality of Combat Rock. Well, in fact, all that Mick was opposed to was Glyn Johns doing the final mix. Mick liked his own mix, and when everybody else didn’t, he took it really bad. But it’s kind of like if your friend don’t brush his teeth and the girls all go, ‘His breath smells.’ If you’re his friend you’ve got to tell him.

"He felt after Combat Rock that we’d arrived, and started all this my-room’s-too-cold/I-don’t-want-to-ride-in-this-bus stuff – this rock star behavior! But to me and Joe and Paul and Bernie (Rhodes, the group’s manager) Combat Rock was just a foot in the door. What’s the point of getting that enthusiastic about selling a million records when Michael Jackson’s sold 30 million while we talk?"

Strummer chimes in. "I finally said, ‘Go and write songs with your lawyer, and piss off!’"

Replacing the banished Jones, whose lawyer has since had the group’s US Festival paycheck and Combat Rock royalties impounded, required Vinyl and Rhodes to spend three weeks listening to 350 respondents to their anonymous advertisements in the British pop weeklies for a "wild" guitarist. "I wanted someone," says Strummer, "who knew that the guitar is for accompaniment and not for ego-tripping. The ones we chose (Vince White and Nick Sheppard) changed their playing for each of three backing tracks they had to play along with for their final audition. And they were punks – they’d been in the punk rebellion in ’76, been excited by it, swept up in it. So they don’t moan."

The group hired both new boys so that Strummer could concentrate exclusively on singing, but only a few numbers into the new lineup’s first show he discovered that "I missed thrashing myself into a frenzy." One of the least rhythmic rhythm guitarists in pop history – one who rarely strums less than 25 percent faster than anyone else in the band is playing – Strummer gives the impression of having changed his mind primarily so that he can make a big production of angrily yanking his black Telecaster off and flinging it a roadie in the wings every couple of numbers.

"I’m looking for the ultimate wipe-out," Strummer confides, by way of elucidating why he always appears in a rage on stage, "for the ultimate feeling out of every song. It isn’t something you can just do – you have to work yourself up to some elusive pitch. It I look angry, it’s because I’m trying to reach that pitch, to be took away and out of mind." He’s nearly sheepish when he concedes that "sometimes I do turn ‘round and smile at the drummer."

"People think we’re these studios, Deadly Serious (Dig a Hole) people who slave over big thick books in their rooms in the middle of the night and never have fun," says an obviously concerned Vinyl. "We are serious, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like fun, or have a sense of humour. I think we’re really funny. We spend a lot of time laughing. And we appreciate style. We like to see the kids in our audiences dressed great and having a great time. We want to make it so a feller could go, ‘I was checking out Jean-Luc Godard the other night,’ or, ‘I’ve just been reading some Sartre,’ and all the girls would go, ‘Oh, really’."

And just when you think you’ve heard it all, you find out that Joe Strummer refuses to be spat on. Indeed, he urged those members of his Santa Barbara audience who "really support the Clash" to wallop unceremoniously in the kisser anyone they see "gobbing" on him. "you’ll be playing down this end of the neck," he explains, "and somebody’ll gob a great yellow-green goolie that’ll just lie across the fretboard up there, getting cold. The next time you move your hand up there, it winds up in the middle of this freezing cold diseased mess. I went through it in England for years. It wasn’t just a gob here and gob there – it was like a rainstorm that never ended. I ain’t going through it again. If that’s what they want to do, they can find themselves another dummy."

Exhibiting that zany Clash sense of humor, Vinyl cheerfully notes that Strummer "once caught hepatitis when somebody in front of the stage gobbed at him while he was singing and he swallowed it."

It’s the perpetrators of the diseased green goolies, one supposes, who make up most of what Strummer calls "the meathead section" of his group’s audience, and who often make life very miserable for the group’s hand-picked opening acts. "You know what they shouted at me in Long Beach?" Strummer queries, clearly marveling at the fact he’s about to reveal.

"’You nigger music lover!’ But three years after they shouted the same sort of redneck stuff at Grandmaster Flash and threw rubbish at him when he opened for us at Bond’s Casino in New York, I’ll bet they were all rocking out to ‘The Message’ at their discos in Queens and Brooklyn. They help us face reality."

The subject of facing reality gives Strummer second wind. He’s entering the stretch run at full forth. "People in England are asleep," he charges. "They don’t realize what a fascist, racist press and police and government we’ve got. And here too, where MTV won’t play black music because they think their ideal customer is a white middle-class Midwestern racist. They had to be forced to play Michael Jackson. Not that I consider Michael Jackson a black artist. If he is, why did he get a nose job? And why doesn’t he give half the black leadership he should as the biggest superstar in the whole bloody world?"

As suddenly as he’d exploded in vitriol, Strummer turns somber. Leadership, it seems is another sticky subject, especially as it applies to the Clash. "When we said, ‘Let’s have a punk rebellion,’" he explains, "we didn’t mean for everyone to become copies of the clash. For awhile, being a punk group was a good way to get signed and make a few bob. But you don’t discover and participate in the creation of a culture every week. When you abandon your culture, you don’t know what you’ve lost ‘til it’s gone. After a few years, we could see that we’d had a culture, and that we’d abandoned it.

"We thought we could make pop real again," Strummer says, apparently resigned to the Clash’s melancholy lot in life. "We were going to destroy British pop television and rebuild it into something vital. We were going to do all those things. We didn’t realize what a lonely road it was going to be. We didn’t know the punk movement was going to fall apart, that Siouxsie and the Banshees would become like Led Zeppelin, that the Pistols would fall apart so fast, that Rotten would get a Holiday Inn band and the Damned would become comedians. We didn’t have a clue about all pitfalls we were going to stumble on.

"We’ve been through everything in the book. We’ve been through drugs. We’ve been through pretension. We’ve been through studio bullshit. You name it – I bet we’ve been through it.

"But," Strummer announces as he boards the bus heading for the next whistle stop, "I’m still walking around the stage without a crutch."

© John Mendelssohn, 1984