Bangs, Lester. "It's Great To Be Back In Your Li'l Ol' Country And I Think Your Punks Are Wonderful." New Musical Express, no. 10 Dec, 1977, pp. 31-34
Six days on the road with the foremost garage band in the land
— Lester Bangs documents six days on tour with The Clash, capturing their explosive live shows and egalitarian ethos during UK dates in Derby, Cardiff, and Bristol
— Contrasts media hysteria about punk violence with the reality of "gentle" fans pogoing to White Riot and Police and Thieves, while criticizing gobbing as "nauseating"
— Praises Joe Strummer's righteous fury despite an abscessed tooth, Mick Jones' Keith Richards-esque charisma, and Paul Simonon's Muppet-like antics offstage
— Highlights the band's revolutionary fan interactions - letting supporters sleep on hotel floors, a stark contrast to rock star excess
— Analyzes The Clash's political authenticity versus Sex Pistols' nihilism, while debating punk's musical limitations at breakneck speeds
— Features Pennie Smith's iconic photos of the band's paramilitary aesthetic and Topper Headon's first NME portrait
— Includes backstage chaos: sandwich fights, hair set aflame by manager Bernie Rhodes, and debates over playing Booker T. funk covers
New Musical Express | December 10, 1977 | Cover & Page 31
New Musical Express 18p
December 10, 1977
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Clash Clash
Lester Bangs falls in love (and sees the Promised Land) Pages 31-34
Pics: Pennie Smith
'It's great to be back in your li'l ol' country and I think your punks are wonderful' says Lester Bangs (among other things).
Six days on the road with the foremost garage band in the land
Fab pix: Pennie Smith
The empire may be terminally stagnant, but every time I come to England it feels like massive changes are underway.
First time was 1972 for Slade, who had the punters hooting, but your music scene in general was in such miserable shape that most of the hits on the radio were resurrected oldies. Second time was for David Essex (haw haw haw) and Mott (sigh) almost exactly two years ago: I didn’t even bother listening to the radio, and though I had a good time the closest thing to a musical highlight of my trip was attending an Edgar Froese (entropy incarnate) press party. I never gave much of a damn about pub rock, which was about the only thing you guys had going at the time, and I had just about written you off for dead when punk rock came along.
So here I am back again through the corporate graces of CBS International to see The Clash, to hear new wave bands on the radio (a treat for American ears) and find the empire jumping again at last.
About time, too. I don’t know about you, but as far as I was concerned things started going downhill for rock around 1968; I'd date it from the ascendance of Cream, who were the first fake superstar band, the first sign of strain in what had crested in 1967. Ever since then things have just gotten worse, through Grand Funk and James Taylor and wonderful years like 1974, when the only thing interesting going on was Roxy Music, finally culminating last year in the ascendance of things like disco and jazz-rock, which are dead enough to suggest the end of popular music as anything more than room spray.
I was thinking of giving up writing about music altogether last year when all of a sudden I started getting phone calls from all these slick magazine journalists who wanted to know about this new phenomenon called “punk rock.” I was a little bit confused at first, because as far as I was concerned punk rock was something which had first raised its grimy snout around 1966 in groups like The Seeds and Count Five, and was dead and buried after The Stooges broke up and The Dictators’ first LP bombed.
I mean, it’s easy to forget that just a little over a year ago there was only one thing: the first Ramones album.
But who could have predicted that that record would have such an impact — all it took was that and the ferocious edge of The Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In The UK”, and suddenly it was as if someone had unleashed the floodgates as ten million little groups all over the world came storming in, mashing up the residents with their guitars and yammering discontented non sequiturs about how bored and fed up they were with everything. I was too, and so were you — that’s why we went out and bought all those shitty singles last spring and summer by the likes of The Users and Cortinas and Slaughter and the Dogs, because better Slaughter and the Dogs at what price wretchedness than one more mewly-mouthed simperwhimper from Linda Ronstadt. Buying records became fun again, and one reason it did was that all these groups embodied the
who-gives-a-damn-let’s-just-slam-it-at-‘em spirit of great rock ’n’ roll. Unfortunately many of these wonderful slices of vinyl didn't possess any of the other components of same, with the result that (for me, round about Live at the Roxy) many people simply got fed up. Meaning that it’s just too goddam easy to slap on a dog collar and black leather jacket and start puking all over the room about how you’re gonna sniff some glue and stab some backs.
Punk had reaped the very attitudes it copped (boredom and indifference), and we were all waiting for a group to come along who at least went through the motions of giving a damn about something. Ergo, The Clash.
You see, dear reader, so much of what’s doled out as punk merely amounts to saying I suck, you suck, the world sucks, and who gives a damn — which is, er, ah, somehow insufficient.
Don’t ask me why. I’m just an observer, really, but any observer could tell that, to put it in terms of Us vs. Them, saying the above is exactly what They want you to do, because it amounts to capitulation. It is unutterably boring and disheartening to try to find some fun or meaning while shoveling through all the shit we’ve been handed the last few years, but merely puking on yourself is not gonna change anything. (I know, ’cause I tried it.) I guess what it all boils down to is:
(a) You can’t like people who don’t like themselves; and
(b) You gotta like somebody who stands up for what they believe in, as long as what they believe in is
(c) Righteous.
A precious and elusive quantity, this righteousness. Needless to say, most punk rock is not exactly OD-ing on it. In fact, most punk rockers probably think it’s the purview of hippies, unless you happen to be black and Rastafarian, in which case righteousness shall cover the land, presumably when punks have attained No Future.
It’s kinda hard to put into mere mortal words, but I guess I should say that being righteous means you’re more or less on the side of the angels, waging Armageddon for the ultimate victory of the forces of Good over the Kingdoms of Death (see how perilously we skirt hippiedom here?), working to enlighten others as to their own possibilities rather than merely sprawling in the muck yodelling about what a drag everything is.
The righteous minstrel may be rife with lamentations and criticisms of the existing order, but even if he doesn't have a coherent program for social change he is informed of hope.
The MC5 were righteous where The Stooges were not. The third and fourth Velvet Underground albums were righteous, the first and second weren't. (Needless to say, Lou Reed is not righteous.) Patti Smith has been righteous. The Stones have flirted with righteousness (e.g., “Salt Of The Earth”), but when they were good The Beatles were all-righteous. The Sex Pistols are not righteous, but, perhaps more than any other new wave band, The Clash are.
The reason they are is that beneath their wired harsh soundscape lurks a persistent humanism. It’s hard to put your finger on in the actual lyrics, which are mostly pretty despairing, but it’s in the kind of thing that could make somebody like Mark P. write that their debut album was his life. To appreciate it in The Clash's music you might have to be the sort of person who could see Joe Strummer crying out for a riot of his own as someone making a positive statement. You perceive that as much as this music seethes with rage and pain, it also champs at the bit of the present system of things, lunging after some glimpse of a new and better world.
I know it’s easy to be cynical about all this; in fact, one of the most uncool things you can do these days is to be committed about anything. The Clash are so committed they’re downright militant. Because of that, they speak to dole-queue British youth today of their immediate concerns with an authority that nobody else has quite mustered. Because they do, I doubt if they will make much sense to most American listeners.
But more about that later. Right now, while we’re on the subject of politics, I would like to make a couple of things perfectly clear:
1. I do not know shit about the English class system.
2. I don’t care shit about the English class system.
I’ve heard about it, understand.
I’ve heard it has something to do with why Rod Stewart now makes music for housewives, and why Townshend is so screwed up. I guess it also has something to do with another NME writer sneering to me “Joe Strummer had a fucking middle class education, man!” I surmise further that this is supposed to indicate that he isn’t worth a shit, and that his songs are all fake street-graffiti. Which is fine by me: Joe Strummer is a fake. That only puts him in there with Dylan and Jagger and Townshend and most of the other great rock songwriters, because almost all of them in one way or another were fakes. Townshend had a middle-class education. Lou Reed went to Syracuse University before matriculating to the sidewalks of New York. Dylan faked his whole career; the only difference was that he used to be good at it and now he sucks.
New Musical Express | December 10, 1977 | Page 32 & Page 33 & Page 34
The point is that, like Richard Hell says, rock 'n' roll is an arena in which you recreate yourself, and all this blathering about authenticity is just a bunch of crap. The Clash are authentic because their music carries such brutal conviction, not because they're Noble Savages.
Here’s a note to CBS International; you can relax because I liked The Clash as people better than any other band I have ever met with the possible exception of Talking Heads, and their music — it goes without saying — is great (I mean you think so, don't you? Good, then release their album in the U.S.
So what if it gets zero radio play; Clive knew how to subsidize the arts.)
Here's a superlative for ads; “Best band in the UK!” — Lester Bangs. Here’s another one: “Thanks for the wonderful vacation!” — Lester Bangs. (You know I love you, Ellie.) Okay, now that all that’s out of the way, here we go . .
I was sitting in the British Airways terminal in New York City on the eve of my departure, reading The War Against The Jews 1913–1945 when I looked up just in time to see a crippled woman in a wheelchair a few feet away from me. My eyes snapped back down to my book in that shameful nervous reflex we know so well, but a moment later she had wheeled over to a couple of feet from where I was sitting, and when I could fight off the awareness of my embarrassment at her presence no longer I looked up again and we said hello to each other.
She was a very small person about 30 years old with a pretty face, blonde hair and blazing blue eyes. She said that she had been on vacation in the States for three months and was now, ever so reluctantly, returning to England.
“I like the people in America so much better,” she said. “Christ, it’s so nice to be someplace where people recognize that you exist. In England, if you’re handicapped no one will look at or speak to you except old people. And they just pat you on the head.”
It is four days later, and I’ve driven from London to Derby with Ellie Smith from CBS and Clash manager Bernard Rhodes for the first of my projected three nights and two days with the band. I am not in the best of shape since I’ve still got jet-lag, have been averaging two to three hours’ sleep a night since I got here, and the previous night was stranded in Aylesbury by the Stiff’s Greatest Hits tour, hitching a ride back to London with a roadie in the course of which we were stopped by provincial police in search of dope and forced to empty all our pockets, something which had not happened to me since the hippie heydaze of 1967.
This morning when I went by Mick Farren’s flat to pick up my bags he had told me “You look like ‘Night Of The Living Dead.’”
Nevertheless, I make sure after checking into the Derby Post House to hit the first night’s gig, whatever my condition, in my most thoughtful camouflage. You see, the kind of
reports we get over in the States about your punk rock scene had led me to expect seething audiences of rabid little miscreants out for blood at all costs, and naturally I figured the chances of getting a great story were better if I happened to get cannibalized. So I took off my black leather jacket and dressed as straight as I possibly could, the coup de grâce (I thought) being a blue promotional sweater that said “Capitol Records” on the chest, by which I fantasized picking up some residual EMI-hostility from battle-feral Pistols fans. I should mention that I also decided not to get a haircut which I desperately needed before leaving the States, on the not-so-off chance of being mistaken for a hippie. When I came out of my room and Ellie and photographer Pennie Smith saw me, they laughed.
When I got to the gig I pushed my way down through the pogoing masses, right into the belly of the beast, and stood there through openers The Ixnis and Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ sets, waiting for the dog soldiers of anarch-apocalypse to slam my skull into my ankles under a new wave riptide.
Need I mention that nothing of the kind transpired?
Listen: if I were you I would take up arms and march on the media centers of Merrie Old, NME included, and trash them beyond recognition. Because what I experienced, this first night and all subsequent on this tour, was so far from what we Americans have read in the papers and seen on TV that it amounts to a mass defamation of character, if not cultural genocide. Nobody gave a damn about my long hair, or could have cared less about some stupid sweater. Sure there was gob and beer cups flung at the bands, and the mob was pushing sideways first right and then left, but I hate to disappoint anybody who hasn't been there but this scene is neither Clockwork Orange nor Lord Of The Flies. When I got tired of the back-and-forth group shove I simply stuck my elbows out and a space formed around me.
I have been at outdoor rock festivals in the hippie era in America where the vibes and violence were ten times worse than at any of the gigs I saw on this Clash tour... I found English punk everywhere to be manifestly gentle people...
What I am saying is that I have been at outdoor rock festivals in the hippie era in America where the vibes and violence were ten times worse than at any of the gigs I saw on this Clash tour, and the bands said later that this Derby engagement was the worst they had seen. What I am saying is that contrary to almost all reports published everywhere, I found British punks everywhere I went to be basically if not manifestly gentle people. They are a bunch of nice boys and girls and don’t let anybody (them included) tell you different.
Yeah, they like to pogo. On the subject of this odd tribal rug-cut, of course the first thing I saw when I entered the hall was a couple of hundred little heads near the lip of the stage all bobbing up and down like anthropomorphized pistons in some Max Fleischer cartoon on the Industrial Revolution.
When I’d heard about pogoing before I thought it was the stupidest thing anybody’d ever told me about, but as soon as I saw it in living sproing it made perfect sense. I mean, it’s obviously no more stupid than the seconal idiot-dance popularized five years ago by Grand Funk audiences. In fact, it’s sheer logic (if not poetry) in motion: when you're packed into a standing sweatshop with ten thousand other little bodies all mashed together, it stands to reason you can’t dance in the traditional manner (i.e. sideways sway).
No, obviously if you wanna do the boogaloo to what the new breed say you gotta, by dint of sheer population explosion, shake your booty and your body in a vertical trajectory. Which won't be strictly rigid anyway since this necessarily involves losing your footing every two seconds; the next step is falling earthward slightly sideways and becoming entangled with your neighbours, which is as good a way as any of making new friends if not copping a graze of tit.
There is, however, one other aspect of audience appreciation which ain’t nearly so cute: gobbing. For some reason this qualifies as news to everybody, so I’m gonna serve notice right here and now: Listen ya little pinheads, it’s nauseating and moronic, and I don’t mean good moronic, I mean jerked off. The bands all hate it (the ones I talked to, anyway) and would all play better and be much happier if
you figured out some more original way of showing your appreciation.
(After the second night I asked Mick Jones about it and he looked like he was going to puke.
“But doesn't it add to the general atmosphere of chaos and anarchy?” I wondered. “No,” he said. “It’s fucking disgusting.”)
End of moral lecture. The Clash were a bit of a disappointment the first night. They played well, everything was in the right place, but the show seemed to lack energy somehow. A colleague
who saw them a year ago had come back to the States telling me that they were the only group he’d ever seen on stage who were truly wired. It was this I was looking for and what I got in its place was mere professionalism, and hell, I could go let The Rolling Stones put me to sleep again if that was all I cared about.
Back up in the dressing room I cracked “Duff gig, eh fellas?” and they laughed, but you could tell they didn’t think it was funny. Later
I found out that Joe Strummer had an abscessed tooth which had turned into glandular fever, and since the rest of the band draw their energy off him they were all suffering. By rights he should have taken a week off and headed straight for the nearest hospital, but he refused to cancel any gigs — no mere gesture of integrity.
A process of escalating admiration for this band had begun for me which was to continue until it broached something like awe. See, because it’s easy to sing about your righteous politics, but as we all know actions speak louder than words, and The Clash are one of the very few examples I’ve seen where they would rather set an example by their personal conduct than talk about it all day.
Case in point. When we got back to their hotel I had a couple of interesting lessons to learn. First thing was they went up to their rooms while Ellie, Pennie, a bunch of fans and me sat in the lobby. I began to make with the grouch squawks because if there’s one thing I have learned to detest over the years it’s sitting around some goddam hotel lobby like a soggy douchebag parasite waiting for some lousy high and mighty rock’n’roll band to maybe deign to put in an imperial appearance.
But then a few minutes later The Clash came down and joined us and I realized that unlike most of the bands I’d ever met they weren't stuck up, weren’t on a star trip, were in fact genuinely interested in meeting and getting acquainted with their fans on a one-to-one, non-condescending level.
Mick Jones was especially sociable, so I moved in on him and commenced my second misinformed balls-up of the evening. A day or two earlier I’d asked Mick Farren what sort of questions he thought might be appropriate for The Clash, and he'd said, “Oh, you might do what you did with Richard Hell and ask ’em just exactly what their political program is, what they intend to do once they get past all the bullshit rhetoric. Mind you, it’s liable to get you thrown off the tour.”
So, vainglorious as ever, I zeroed in on Mick and started drunkenly needling him with what I thought were devastating barbs. He just laughed at me and parried every one with a joke, while the fans chortled at the spectacle of this oafish American with all his dumbass sallies. Finally he looked me right in the eye and said,
In a flash I knew Jones was right. Here was I, a grown man, travelling across the Atlantic Ocean and motoring up to the provinces of England to ask a goddam rock ’n’ roll band for the meaning of life.
“Hey Lester: why are you asking me all these fucking questions?”
In a flash I realized that he was right. Here was I, a grown man, travelling all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and motoring up into the provinces of England, just to ask a goddam rock ’n’ roll band for the meaning of life! Some people never learn. I certainly didn't, because I immediately started in on him with my standard cultural-genocide rap:
“Blah blah blah depersonalization blab blab blab solipsism blah blab yip yap etc . . .”
“What in the fuck are you talking about?”
“Blah blab no one wants to have any emotions any more blab blip human heart an endangered species blah blare cultural fascism blab blurb etc. etc. etc. . . .”
“Well,” says Mick, “don’t look at me. If it bothers you so much why don't you do something about it?” “Yeah,” says one of the fans, a young black punk girl sweet as could be, “you’re depressing us, air.”
Seventeen punk fan spike heads nod in agreement. Mick just keeps laughing at me.
So, having bummed out almost the entire population of one room, I took my show into another: the bar, where I sat down at a table with Ellie and Paul Simonon and started in on them. Paul gets up and walks out. Ellie says, “Lester, you look a little tired. Are you sure you want another lager . . .?”
Later I am out in the lobby with the rest of them again, in a state not far from walking coma, when Mick gestured at a teenage fan sitting there and said “Lester, my room is full tonight; can Adrian stay with you?”
I finally freaked. Here I was, stuck in the middle of a dying nation with all these funny-looking children who didn’t even realize the world was coming to an end, and now on top of everything else they expected me to turn my room into a hippie crash pad!
I surmised through all my confusion that some monstrous joke was being played on me, so I got testy about it. Mick repeated the request and finally I said that Adrian could maybe stay but he would have to go to the house phone, call my hotel and see if there was room. So the poor humiliated kid did just that while an embarrassed if not downright creepy silence fell over the room and Mick stared at me in shock, as if he had never seen this particular species of so-called human before.
Poor Adrian came back saying there was indeed room, so I grudgingly assented, and back to the hotel we went. The next morning, when I was in a more sober if still jetlagged frame of mind, he showed me a copy of his Clash fanzine 48 Thrills which I bought for 20p, and in the course of breakfast conversation I learned that The Clash make a regular practice of inviting their fans back from the gigs with them, and then go so far as to let them sleep on the floors of their rooms.
Now, dear reader, I don’t know how much time you may have actually spent around big-time rock ’n’ roll bands — you may not think so, but the less the luckier you are in most cases — but let me assure you that the way The Clash treat their fans falls so far outside the normal run of these things as to be outright revolutionary. I’m going to say it and I’m going to say it slow: most rock stars are goddamn pigs who have the usual burly corps of hired thugs to keep the fans away from them at all costs, excepting the usual select contingent of lucky (?) nubiles who they’ll maybe deign to allow up to their rooms for the privilege of sucking on their coveted wangers, after which often as not they get pitched out into the streets to find their way home without even cab fare. The whole thing is sick to the marrow, and I simply could not believe that any band, especially one as musically brutal as The Clash, could depart so far from this fetid norm.
I mentioned it to Mick in the van that day en route to Cardiff, also by way of making some kind of amends for my own behaviour: “Listen, man. I’ve just got to say that I really respect you. I mean, I had no idea that any group could be as good to its fans as this ...”
He just laughed. “Oh, so is that gonna be the hook for your story, then?”
The politics of rock'n'roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is for the rest of their lives.
And that for me is the essence of The Clash’s greatness, over and beyond their music, why I fell in love with them, why it wasn’t necessary to do any boring interviews with them about politics or the class system or any of that: because here at last is a band which not only preaches something good but practices it as well, that instead of talking about changes in social behaviour puts the model of a truly egalitarian society into practice in their own conduct.
If rock'n'roll is truly the democratic art form ... the walls between artists and audience have got to come down. The stars have got to be humanized.
The fact that Mick would make a joke out of it only shows how far they’re going towards the realization of all the hopes we ever had about rock ’n’ roll as utopian dream — because if rock ’n’ roll is truly the democratic art form, then the democracy has got to begin at home, that is the everlasting and totally disgusting walls between artists and audience must come down, elitism must perish, the “stars” have got to be humanized, demythologized, and the audience has got to be treated with more respect. Otherwise it’s all a shuck, a rip-off, and the music is as dead as The Stones’ and Led Zep’s has become.
It’s no news by now that the reason most of rock’s establishment have dried up creatively is that they’ve cut themselves off from the real world of everyday experience as exemplified by their fans. The ultimate question is how long a group like The Clash can continue to practice total egalitarianism in the face of mushrooming popularity. Must the walls go up inevitably, eventually, and if so when? Groups like The Grateful Dead have practiced this free-access principle at least in the past, but the Dead never had glamour which, whether they like it or not (and I’d bet money they do) The Clash are saddled with — I mean, not for nothing does Mick Jones resemble a young and already slightly dissipated Keith Richard — besides which the Dead aren’t really a rock ’n’ roll band and The Clash are nothing else but. And just like Mick said to me the first night, don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ’n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society . . .
I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for a prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since. And perhaps that nothing else in the world ever seemed to hold even this much promise.
It may look like I make too much of all this. We could leave all significance at the picture of Mick Jones just a hot guitarist in a white jumpsuit and a rock ’n’ roll kid on the road obviously having the time of his life and all political pretensions be damned, but still there is a mood around The Clash, call it “vibes” or whatever you want, that is positive in a way I’ve never sensed around almost any other band, and I’ve been around most of them. Something unpretentiously moral, and something both self-affirming and life-affirming — as opposed, say, to the simple ruthless hedonism and avarice of so many superstars, or the grim taut-lipped monomaniacal ambition of most of the pretenders to their thrones.
But enough of all that. The highlight of the first day's bus ride occurred when I casually mentioned that I had a tape of the new Ramones album. The whole band practically leaped at my throat: “Why didn’t you say so before? Shit, put it on right now.”
So I did and in a moment they were bouncing all over the van to the strains of “Cretin Hop”. “Rocket To Russia” (Nick Kent = fool) thereafter became the soundtrack to the rest of my leg of the tour.
I am also glad to be able to tell everybody that The Clash are solid Muppets fans. (They even asked me if I had connections to get them on the show.) Their fave rave is Kermit, a pretty conventional choice if y’ask me — I’m a Fozzie Bear man myself.
That night as we were walking into the hall for the gig in Cardiff, Paul said, “Hey Lester, I just figured out why you like Fozzie Bear — the two of you do look a lot alike!” And then he slaps me on the back.
All right, at this point I would like to say a few words about this Simonon fellow. Namely that he looks like a Muppet. I’m not sure which one, some kinda composite, but don’t let that brooding visage in the photos fool you — this guy is a real clown. (Takes one to know one, after all.) He smokes a lot, right, and when he gets really out there on it makes with cartoon non sequiturs that nobody else can fathom (often having to do with manager Bernie), but stoned or not when he’s talking to you and you’re looking in that face you're staring right into a red-spiked big-eyed beaming cartoon, of whom it would probably not be amiss to say he lives for pranks. Onstage he’s different, bouncing in and out of crouch, rarely smiling but in fact brooding over his fretboard ever in ominous motion, he takes on a distinctly simian aspect; the missing link, cro-magnon, Piltdown man, Cardiff giant.
It is undoubtedly this combination of mischievous boychild and paleolithic primate which has sent swoonblips quavering through feminine hearts as disparate as Patti Smith and Caroline Coon — no doubt about it, Paul is the ladies' man of the group without half trying, and I doubt if there are very many gigs where he doesn’t end up pogoing his pronger in some sweet honey's hive. Watch out, though, Paul — remember, clap doth not a Muppet befit.
The gig in Cardiff presents quite a contrast to Derby. It’s at a college, and anybody who has ever served time in one of those dreary institutions of lower pedantry will know what manner of douse that portends. Once again the band delivers maybe 60% of what I know they’re capable of, but with an audience like this there’s no blaming them. I’m not saying that all college students are subhuman — I’m just saying that if you aim to spend a few years mastering the art of pomposity, these are places where you can be taught by undisputed experts.
Like here at Cardiff about five people are pogoing, all male, while the rest of the student bodies stand around looking at them with practiced expressions of aloof amusement plastered on their mugs. After it’s all over some cat goes back to interview Mick, and the most intelligent question he can think of is “What do you think of David Bowie?”
Meanwhile I got acquainted with the lead singer of The Lous, a good all-woman band from Paris. She says that she resents being thought of as a “woman musician,” instead of a musician pure and simple, echoing a sentiment previously voiced to me by Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth. “It’s a lot of bullshit,” she says. I agree; what I don’t say is that I am developing a definite carnal interest which I will be too shy to broach. I invite her back to our hotel; she says yes, then disappears.
When we get there it’s the usual scene in the lobby, except that this time the management has thoughtfully set out sandwiches and beer. The beer goes down our gullets, and I’m just about to start putting the sandwiches to the same purpose when I discover somebody has other ideas: a clot of bread and egg salad goes whizzing to splat right in the back of my head! I look around and confront a solid wall of innocent faces. So I take a bite and wham! — another one.
In a minute sandwiches are flying everywhere, everybody’s getting pelted. I'm wearing a slice of cabbage on my head and have just about accepted this level of chaos when I smell something burning.
“Hey Lester,” somebody says, “you shouldn’t smoke so much!” I reach around to pat the back of my head and — some joker has set my hair on fire! I pivot in my seat and Paul is looking at me giggling. “Simonon you fuckhead —” I begin, only to smell more smoke, look under my chair where there’s a piece of 8 x 10 paper curling up in flames. Cursing at the top of my lungs, I leap up and get a chair on the other side of the table where my back's to no one and I can keep an eye on the red-domed Muppet. Only trouble is that I'll find out a day or so hence that it wasn’t him set the fires at all: it was Bernie, the group’s manager. Eventually the beer runs out, and Mick says he's hungry. Bernie refuses to let him take the van out hunting for open eateries, which we probably wouldn’t be able to find at 4 a.m. in Cardiff anyway, and we all go to bed wearing egg salad.
Next morning sees us driving to Bristol, a large industrial city where we put up in a Holiday Inn, much to everyone’s delight. By this time the mood around this band has combined with my tenacious jet-lag and liberal amounts of alcohol to put me into a kind of ecstasy state the like of which I have never known on the road before.
Past all the glory and the gigs themselves, touring in any form is a pretty drab and tiresome business, but with The Clash I feel that I have re-apprehended that aforementioned glimpse of some Better World of infinite possibilities, and so, inspired and a little delirious, I forego my usual nap between van trip and showtime by which I’d hoped to eventually whip the jet-lag, spending the afternoon drinking cognac and writing.
I have begun to see this trip as somehow a symbolic pilgrimage to that Promised Land that rock'n'roll has cynically sneered at since the collapse of the sixties.
By now I'm ready to go with the flow, with anything, as it has begun to seem to me — delusory or not — that there is some state of grace overlaying this whole project, something right in the soul that makes all the headache-inducing day-to-day pain-in-the-ass practical logistics run as smoothly as the tempers of the people involved, the whole enterprise sailing along in perfect harmony and such dazzling contrast to the brutal logistics of Led Zep-type tours, albeit on a much smaller level. Somehow, whether it really is so or a simple basic healthiness on the part of all involved heightened by my mental state, I have begun to see this trip as somehow a symbolic pilgrimage to that Promised Land that rock ’n' roll has cynically sneered at since the collapse of the sixties.
At this point, in my hotel room in Bristol, if six white horses and a chariot of gold had materialized in the hallway, I would have been no more surprised than at room service, would’ve just climbed right in and settled back for that long-promised ascent to endless astral weeks in the heavenly land.
What I got instead around 6 p.m. was a call from Joe Strummer saying meet him in the lobby in five minutes if I wanted to go to the sound check. So I floated down the elevators and when I got there I saw a sheepish group of little not-quite punks all huddled around one couch. They were dressed in half-committal punk regalia, a safety pin here and there, a couple of little slogans chalked on their school blazers, their hair greased and twisted up into a cosmetic weekend approximation of spikes. “Hey,” I said, “You guys Clash fans?”
“Well,” they mumbled, “sorta . . .”
“Well, whattaya mean? You're punks, aren’t ya?”
“Well, we’d like to be . . . but we’re scared . . .”
When Joe came down I took him aside and, indicating the poor little things, told him what they’d said, also asking if he wanted to get them into the gig with us and thus offer a little encouragement for them to take that next, last, crucial step out into full-fledged punk pariahdom and thus sorely-needed self-respect.
“Forget it,” said Strummer. “If they haven't got the courage to do it on their own, I'm bloody well not gonna lead 'em by the hand.”
“Forget it,” he said. “If they haven't got the courage to do it on their own, I'm bloody well not gonna lead 'em on by the hand.”
On the way to the sound check I mentioned that I thought the band hadn’t been as good as I knew they could be the previous two nights, adding that I hadn’t wanted to say anything about it.
“Why not?” he said.
I realised that I didn't have an answer. I tell this story to point out something about The Clash, and Joe Strummer in particular, that both impressed and showed me up for the sometimes hypocritical “diplomat” I can be. I mean their simple, straightforward honesty, their undogmatic insistence on the truth and why worry about stepping on people’s toes because if we're not straight with each other we’re never going to get anything accomplished anyway.
Actions speak louder than words, and The Clash are one of the very few examples I've seen where they would rather set an example by their personal conduct than talk.
It seems like such a simple thing, and I suppose it is, but it runs contrary to almost everything the music business runs on: the hype, the grease, the glad-handing. And it goes a long way towards creating that aforementioned mood of positive clarity and unpeachy morality. Strummer himself, at once the “leader” of the group (though he'd deny it) and the least voluble (though his sickness might have had a lot to do with it), conveys an immediate physical and personal impact of ground-level directness and honesty, a no-bullshit concern with cutting straight to the heart of the matter in a way that is not brusque or impatient but concise and distinctly non-frivolous.
Serious without being solemn, quiet without being remote or haughty, Strummer offers a distinct contrast to Mick’s voluble wit and twinkle of eye, and Paul’s looney toon playfulness. He is almost certainly the group’s soul, and I wish I could say I had gotten to know him better.
From the instant we hit the hall for the sound check we all sense that tonight's gig is going to be a hot one. The place itself looks like an abandoned meat-packing room — large and empty with cold stone floors and stark white walls. It's plain dire, and in one of the most common of rock 'n' roll ironies the atmosphere is perfect and the acoustics great.
Meanwhile back in the slaughterhouse, another thing occurs to me while The Clash are warming up at their sound check. They play something very funky which I later discover is a Booker T. number, thus implanting an idea in my mind which later grows into a conviction: that in spite of the brilliance manifested in things like “White Riot”, they actually play better and certainly more interestingly when they slow down and get, well, funky. You can hear it in the live if not studio version of “Police and Thieves”, as well as “White Boy In Hammersmith Palais”, probably the best thing they've written yet.
Somewhere in their assimilation of reggae is the closest thing yet to the lost chord, the missing link between black music and white noise rock capable of making a bow to black forms without smearing on the blackface, get me? It’s there in Mick's intro to “Police And Thieves” and unstatedly in the band's whole onstage attitude. I understand why all these groups thought they had to play 120 miles per hour these last couple of years — to get us out of the bog created by everything that preceded them this decade — but the point has been made, and I for one could use a little funk, especially from somebody as good at it as The Clash. Why should any great rock 'n' roll band do what’s expected of 'em anyhow? The Clash are a certain idea in many people’s minds, which is only all the more reason why they should break that idea and broach something else. Just one critic's opinion, y’understand, but that’s what god put us here for.
In any case, tonight is the payload. The band is taut terror from the instant they hit the stage, pure energy, everything they're supposed to be and more. I reflect for the first time that I have never seen a band that moved like this: most of 'em you can see the rock ’n’ roll steps choreographed five minutes in advance, but The Clash hop around each other in all configurations totally non-selfconsciously, galvanised by their music alone, Jones and Simonon changing places at the whims of the whams coming out of their guitars, springs in the soles of their tennies.
Strummer, obviously driven to make up to this audience the loss of energy suffered by the last two nights' crowds, is an angry live wire whipping around the middle of the front stage, divesting himself of guitar to fall on one knee in no Elvis parody but pure outside-of-self frenzy, snarling through his shattered dental bombsite with face screwed up in all the rage you'd ever need to convince you of The Clash's authenticity, a desperation uncontrived, unstaged, a fury unleashed on the stage and writhing in upon itself in real pain that connects with the nerves of the audience like summer lightning, and at this time pogoing reveals itself as such a pitifully insufficient response to a man by all appearances trapped and screaming, and it's not your class system, it’s not Britain-on-the-wane, it's not even glandular fever, it’s the cage of life itself and all the anguish to break through which sometimes translates as flash or something equally petty but in any case is rock 'n' roll’s burning marrow.
It was one of those performances for which all the serviceable critical terms like “electrifying” are so pathetically inadequate, and after it was over I realized the futility of hitting Strummer for that interview I kept putting off on the “politics” of the situation. The politics of rock 'n' roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives, and whether the next day they go back to work in shops or boredom on the dole or American TV doldrums in Mom 'n' Daddy's living room nothing can cancel the reality of that night in the revivifying flames when for once, if only then in your life, you were blasted outside of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time, when you felt supra-alive, when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all.
Nicky Headon finally gets his pic taken.
New Musical Express | December 10, 1977