MOJO Magazine, August 1994 - Special Feature on The Clash's journey from Westway to Broadway. 20 pages
The Clash From Westway to Broadway
Contents
The Riot Act
- John Ingham captures punk's chaotic rise in London, 1976.
First We Take Manhattan
- The Clash's mission to conquer America and redefine rock.
The Daily Sketch
- Ray Lowry’s sketches and memories from The Clash’s US tour.
The Clash on Broadway
- Seventeen legendary nights at Bond's in New York, 1981.
Fifteen Years On, Scarred but Still Proud
- Joe Strummer reflects on The Clash’s American journey.
MOJO - AUGUST 1994 £2.25 - The Clash
FROM WESTWAY TO BROADWAY
PHOTO: R.D.
The Clash (from left) Mick Jones, Terry Chimes, Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon – the Royal College A Night Of The Test event, Club Anti-Fascist Festival. "This was the 100 Club, September 1976. There were a lot of people — a mixture of punks, music fans and college students, who tended to be very reactionary. The Clash fed off the tension and were electrifying. Beer glasses were being thrown at the band, and a bearded guy just walked onstage between songs and started mumbling into the microphone, causing Sid Vicious, not yet in the Sex Pistols but enjoying his first five minutes of fame, to climb onstage and start baiting the audience."
The Riot Act
Punk rock madness — baffling, then thrilling — hit the London clubs in the autumn of '76. The scene-stealing weeks that followed were rapidly recorded by the camera of John Ingham.
John Ingham (above) wrote for Sounds in early 1976: "I'd seen a review of the Sex Pistols in the NME and I thought it was a brilliant name. Then Malcolm McLaren called up Sounds, and I grabbed the phone and blagged my way into their next gig, at the El Paradise in Soho, on the same bill as the pop group Arrows. Though there were about 50 people there, mostly regular rock fans, there were about 20 people decked out in Malcolm's stuff from his shop SEX in the King's Road, bright pink and red mohair sweaters. I knew one of them, Caroline Coon, then a journalist on Melody Maker. Onstage, Johnny Rotten was baiting the audience, saying, 'Clap, you fuckers — I'm wasting my time.' The atmosphere was a little subdued, like a cross between a gig and a party — everybody was standing in the shadows and watching. There was no-one paying any attention to the scene pictorially, apart from Ray Stevenson who focussed on the Pistols, so I decided to document events before they hopefully exploded.
"Things moved really fast; it was a 24-hour job. A week was a long time in the New Wave. By June, three months later, kids were coming up to Louise's club on Friday nights from Surrey and Kent, staying overnight in a friend's car or something. By November The Damned, The Clash, Subway Sect, the Buzzcocks and The Jam had appeared and, more importantly, I had seen four or five punks on the street who I didn't know.
"By February 1977, when I stopped snapping, the whole nation was deciding the merits of a safety pin, a bin liner and three chords. Punk started being booked by universities, the most reactionary crowd of all, when the glasses flew and the blood flowed. One way or another, no-one was going to those gigs by accident any more."
PHOTO: Sex Pistols at the Notre Dame Hall, Soho, London, November 15, 1976: "Notre Dame was not really advertised; it was more of a party. You could sense the air of expectation, the feeling of a juggernaut rolling, the record and media machinery focussing on it. People like Rodent, fresh out of jail, turned up and became a Clash roadie. There's Jon Savage wearing a grey beret, Marco Pirroni, then in the Banshees who were still at the idea stage, and Joe Strummer in his Hate And War boiler suit."
PHOTO: Sex Pistols (from left) Glen Matlock, Paul Cook, Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones at the Notre Dame Hall, Soho, London, November 15, 1976: "By then they were a serious professional band, as happens if you play 100 gigs in a row all over the country. They'd just seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre, finally passed by the censors after four years."
PHOTO: Just seen the Subway Sect supporting The Clash at the Lacey Lady, Ilford, November 1976: "That's Subway Sect's singer Vic Godard about to step offstage to watch the band play the solo. Though the punk scene had not quite reached Ilford, it was now becoming normal to see punks on the London streets, perhaps two or three a week."
PHOTO: Janet Street-Porter (below) and the crew of TV's The London Weekend Show with Siouxsie (bottom) at the Sex Pistols' show at the Notre Dame Hall, Soho, London, November 1976: "The media was everywhere. The atmosphere was exciting, highly-charged because we all knew it was about to happen. We regarded the media interest with a mixture of indifference and bemusement, but those who wanted to take advantage did so, like Siouxsie who even then wanted to be a media star. The stage was ringed with photographers, shoving the audience out of the way — they had to get their story. This was a week before the Bill Grundy incident."
PHOTO: The Damned (from left) Captain Sensible and Dave Vanian at the Hope & Anchor, Islington, London: "At first The Damned didn't believe in rehearsing, and their early gigs rapidly separated the men from the boys. At the back, a handful of us stood laughing and cheering at the high-speed shambles, and at the front, 50 dour, paying customers stood silently staring at their pints, wishing they hadn't come in time for the support group."
PHOTO: The Clash playing The Guns Of Brixton at Minneapolis Civic Centre, September 12, 1979 by Ray Lowry. Right: Pennie Smith shot the sheriff, Paul Simonon, backstage at Bond's club, May 1981.
First We Take Manhattan
Take the Fifth Tour
The Clash's American campaign. A mission to save the home of rock'n'roll.
Mark Coleman describes the local reaction, Ray Lowry offers the memoirs of their official war artist, Chris Salewicz highlights the crucial fortnight when New York surrendered. And Joe Strummer relives the Last Gang's finest hour.
The Sex Pistols were confronted by chilly indifference — and outright hostility — on their early 1978 tour. The temperature had barely thawed when The Clash first came over in the winter of '79. Billed as the Pearl Harbour Tour, the group's first swing through took America by surprise — though probably not quite in the way they intended.
Fifteen years ago, The Clash stood at the Gates Of The West. They intended to do what the Sex Pistols couldn't — conquer America, invade the home of rock and roll. British punk's disgusted fascination with the States was magnified and expanded across The Clash's quixotic expatriate career. Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon were men with a mission, which they fulfilled in a roundabout way. In America, The Clash didn't break down any barriers; gradually, they crept in through a side door labelled New Wave.
Punk was an acquired taste here, attracting a rarefied and elitist audience. My college confrères and I anticipated The Clash's debut appearance at Detroit's Masonic Auditorium like the Second Coming, but the vast majority of music fans were quite content with mastodon rock — ego trips, guitar solos and all. Right around the first time I saw The Clash, in that musty old vaudeville theatre, Journey sold out six nights at the massive Cobo Arena sports hall. The status quo remained unchallenged.
Right from the start, The Clash confounded all expectations, even those of the leather-clad cognoscenti at the show I attended. Walking onstage with acoustic guitars and playing reggae rhythms, they forced the rawk & rall Motor City audience to take a leap of faith and meet them on their own terms. Hip pandering or preaching to the converted wasn't The Clash's style, though they certainly could've gotten away with it.
Punk enthusiasts in the States were embattled. They felt persecuted by what they called corporate rock, and then became incredibly possessive about their raw, volatile musical discovery. Understandably so, because it took a lot of doing and digging to actually hear the stuff. The Clash wasn't officially released here until the Pearl Harbour Tour had begun, well after Give 'Em Enough Rope came out in late '78. Tellingly, The Clash sold more copies as an import than in its reconfigured domestic version. Neither album dented the Top 200 album charts.
We anticipated The Clash's debut at Detroit's Masonic Auditorium like the Second Coming.
More focused than the Sex Pistols' inchoate roar, those teeth-gnashing early anti-anthems like I'm So Bored With The USA struck a chord with an influential subset of self-critical American rockers — like nothing since Mott The Hoople's epochal All The Way From Memphis. That spiritual/sonic connection with America in general — and specifically the pre-1977 protopunk scene — would eventually distance The Clash from their Anglocentric peers. But it endeared them to a ready-made cult audience in the United States. Hearing Jail Guitar Doors or Complete Control made alienated hipsters realise that the raggedy rock underground inspired by The Velvet Underground, Stooges, MC5 and New York Dolls had become an international fraternity.
Resequenced with deletions and additions, the US version of The Clash sacrificed some of the original's monolithic oomph in favour of aesthetic balance and musical ambition. The new tracks, mostly taken from the Cost Of Living EP, pointed the way towards the group's future direction. I Fought The Law hot-wired a connection between garageland and the greasy '60s garage band scene, reminding Americans that they invented punk in the first place. (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais displayed their stylistic reach and eclecticism, as well as their overestimation of white rockers' interest in black rhythms during the brutal disco sucks era in American pop culture.
Gates Of The West and Groovy Times were packaged as a bonus single inside the sleeve of The Clash. Much more than the quirky metal appeasement of Give 'Em Enough Rope, these two songs indicated that The Clash could meet their potential audience halfway as well. Groovy Times frames a picture of English middle-class life in a Middle American musical setting — wheezing Dylanish harmonica and a sloooow steady foursquare beat. Gates Of The West is even more radical.
PHOTO: The Clash, 1979, buying the American dream wholesale. Actually taken at Mick's nan's flat, Harrow Road, London.
"Out in the dustbowls, deep in the roulette mine / Or in a ghetto cellar only yesterday / There's a move into the future of the USA." Here Jones and Strummer update the imagery of Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry, supplying a soaraway vocal hook and pumped-up guitar chorus. "I hear them crying / Eastside Jimmy and Southside Sue / Both said they needed something new."
Something new is exactly what the double-album London Calling delivered. Where Blue Öyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman attached leaden bombast to Rope, Guy Stevens brought just the right catch-as-catch-can, let's-try-anything approach to London Calling. Tacked on at the end of the album, Train In Vain fulfilled the melodic promise of Gates Of The West or Rope's Stay Free. It became The Clash's first US Top 40 hit in 1980, catapulting Mick Jones's keening tenor vocals into the mainstream rock consciousness.
The Clash's influence can be gauged in everyone from Axl Rose to Kurt Cobain.
PHOTO: Bo Diddley cadging a lift on the bus. He joined the North American tour of February 1979 as support act.
If you're wondering why I haven't mentioned politics yet, it's because most Americans just don't connect left-wing analysis with day-to-day reality — then or now: Spanish Bombs was an atmospheric rocker with a ferocious beat, period. The Spanish Civil War isn't even a history lesson here, unless you're a serious, specialised student of communism. More primal assaults like Guns Of Brixton or Clampdown got their 'messages' across to resolutely apolitical Yanks through musical arguments rather than verbal ones. Perhaps London Calling ultimately wielded a liberating effect on America by subverting our rock orthodoxy.
Though it's often compared to The Rolling Stones' dissolute masterpiece Exile On Main Street, I humbly suggest that London Calling more closely resembles another classic rock double-album — The Beatles' White Album. Crackpot theory time: I've always thought The Beatles' rambling, unfocused late '60s opus accidentally prefigured a lot of the '70s, from heavy metal (Yer Blues, Helter Skelter) to soft country rock (Rocky Raccoon) to singer/songwriter soul-bearing (Julia) to punk (Why Don't We Do It In The Road) to glittery decadence (Happiness Is A Warm Gun). Similarly, London Calling looks toward much of what happened five years or so following its release, from the ska (Rudie Can't Fail) and rockabilly (Brand New Cadillac) revivals to the post-punk merging of pop and hard rock (Clampdown, Death Or Glory) to the anthemic outreach of U2 (London Calling) and so on.
Well, whatever: London Calling vastly outsold the preceding Clash albums in the States, cracking the Top 30 on the album charts thanks to Train In Vain. Maybe the breakthrough was aided by The Clash's insistence that London Calling be sold at a lower list price than most records, but this move certainly didn't endear the band to its record company. When they followed up with the 1981 triple-album Sandinista! and insisted that it be sold for less than most double albums, Epic recouped the lost profits by taking deductions from the band's royalties and tour support funds. Populism and capitalism make strange bedfellows, to say the least.
Though it's an over-reaching mess most of the time, the best bits on Sandinista! solidified the gains made by London Calling. The Magnificent Seven signalled The Clash's interest in the nascent rap genre; a vocal-less remix titled Magnificent Dance got the syncopated punk rockers added to the playlist of many urban R&B stations. Unfortunately, the US schism between disco and rock extended to hip hop; though Clash fans prided themselves on open-mindedness by definition, the vast majority were seemingly incapable of giving it up to the funk. Still, Sandinista! charted higher than London Calling in the US, and it was the first Clash album to sell more here than in Britain. Clearly, the tide had turned.
The band must've sensed this on some level. While 1982's Combat Rock includes the expected experimental stretches, it also delivers The Clash's most uncomplicated (and successful) uptempo rockers. The straightforward power chords and traditional romantic dilemma of Should I Stay Or Should I Go? are rendered without irony or distance, while the bouncy oil-crisis satire Rock The Casbah gave the group their first Top 10 hit (and gave the nascent MTV network one of its first heavy-rotation videos). The gulf between the beatnik poetry of Ghetto Defendant and those hook-mongering singles may have been too much for the band to handle, even if their audience was willing to deal with it. Though Combat Rock opened a tremendous window of opportunity, Mick Jones's subsequent departure effectively slammed it shut again. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The brief gust of fresh air let in by The Clash stimulated many notable young musical minds in this country; The Clash's influence can be gauged in everyone from Axl Rose to Kurt Cobain. The stridency and raw power of The Clash's pure punk roots certainly left a mark on America, but it's the controversial and 'compromised' eclecticism of their New Wave phase that still rings in our ears.
PHOTO: The 1979 Pearl Harbour Tour to promote Give 'Em Enough Rope. The Clash throw every rock'n'roll shape in the book. The album peaked at Number 128.
Amid the rock'n'roll madness sat a lone figure, brush in hand, inkpot at his side. Artist in residence, Ray Lowry.
I think it was Pete Silverton, writing in Sounds, who dubbed the 1979 trek the 'Everything But The Kitchen Sink' tour. I was the kitchen sink. I was writing and cartooning for NME at the time and, as a Clash fan and sometime drinking buddy of the band's highly-strung road manager Johnny Green (where are you?), the idea was hatched that I should string along, drawing and sketching as I went and sending weekly dispatches in to the NME instead of my usual cartoon.
I'm no Nick Kent, friend of the stars, and I found much of the legendary 'rock and roll lifestyle' tedious in the extreme. A high degree of sycophancy is essential for survival on tour, and I was acutely aware of my essential non-essential status. The band's image was coming along wonderfully, but something was obviously being lost in the sheer grind of getting up onstage night after night. The US audiences were terrific, however, and Joe and the boys still had remnants of that ferocious intensity and tattered integrity they'd embodied a couple of years earlier when they'd bowled me over on the Anarchy Tour. Oh, but Mick, you were a perfect spoiled brat at times!
Most of the time I was at the side of the stage, with a sketchbook and a bottle of ink in one hand and a pen in the other. Sometimes I'd go out into the crowd if I could find somewhere with a bit of light. Of course, people were always coming up and asking what I was doing. I'd do three or four pictures during each set and then go back to my hotel room and do the coloured stuff with little pots of ink I bought on the road.
Highlights through lowlights include:
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Watching them play the Armadillo Club in Austin, Texas — every superannuated old rocker's dream retirement home. Yes, I loved it. Cadillacs parked nose-up to the sidewalk like so many cowboys' horses. Fantastic heat.
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Watching them play the famous Monterey open-air stadium where, it was reverentially pointed out to me, Jimi Hendrix had set fire to his guitar. All these old hippies were still hanging on there in 1979. Wavy Gravy was there, for punk's sake! So was Robert Fripp. Lovely day, anyway.
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Detroit; where I actually saw one of those sidewalk blues singers that I've drawn in so many cartoons over the years.
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The full Route 66 trip on the tour bus — I think the band flew.
It was a liquid tour. We were drunk the whole time. I was with the road crew and they were entirely fuelled by beer, not to mention other substances. The seven weeks passed in a haze. The tour ended in chaos, naturally — Johnny Green, his late wife and I doing a mad runner to the airport in Vancouver in time to catch the scheduled flight home. Everyone was late. The band were reported to be having a bit of a ruck but, naturally, someone would see that they got home safely. No-one was looking after our sad arses. As Doctor Winston O'Boogie has said: "You should have been there." Or perhaps not.
Strummer, Simonon, Jones and keyboard player Mickey Gallagher by Ray Lowry (above).
SKETCH: Strummer, Simonon, Jones, Mickey Gallagher
Chris Salewicz on 17 steamy nights at Bond's club in New York
If there was one pivotal event in the history of The Clash's assault on the USA, it was the season of 17 shows they played at Bond's, a tacky former disco on Broadway and Times Square, New York, New York in May and June 1981.
They had already achieved cult status; the London Calling album had made the US Top 30. But after these extraordinary shows, large-scale American stardom was theirs for the taking. The Top 5 chart placing of Combat Rock the following year can be traced back to this springboard. And therefore, we might say it also marked the beginning of the end — the apex of The Clash, who in Manhattan in the summer of 1981, simply seemed like the most perfect rock and roll group in the world, and these two weeks the perfect rock and roll time.
Above: fans throng outside one of 17 sold-out shows at Bond's on Broadway and Times Square, summer 1981.
Right: Mick with his girlfriend of the time, singer Ellen Foley.
The sexy, sultry weather helped. The temperature never dropped below 90 degrees. Waiting for the group's flight from London on a Monday night at JFK Airport, Kosmo Vinyl's chief cause of concern was that the heat was melting the Dixie Peach pomade on his quiff. It seemed churlish to enquire about the return of Bernie Rhodes, notorious scamster, tireless talker and erstwhile crony of Malcolm McLaren, to the management helm of The Clash.
At the beginning of the year, The Clash had been in disarray. With Kosmo Vinyl, a former punk in his early twenties, as their spokesman and — for want of a better term — creative manager, the group had taken to running itself as a collective, having fallen out with the seasoned management team of Peter Jenner and Andrew King in 1980. Joe Strummer, who'd been playing again with his former group The 101'ers, had run into Bernie Rhodes in a Wimpy Bar and invited him to a band meeting. The deal The Clash subsequently struck with Rhodes permitted him a percentage of the group's net profits, so it was in his interest to make sure The Clash made wads of cash.
He also had to sort out the shaky relationship with their American record company and the problems surrounding Sandinista!. The band had to agree to a punitive financial deal before Epic would release the triple-set at the price of a single album. They'd need to sell 200,000 copies in Britain alone before receiving a penny in royalties — it took years to get there. But after a profitable set of European dates, slotted in when Epic refused to bankroll a scheduled 60-show US tour, the group was back in good financial shape. The New York gigs were regarded as the final leg of the tour, which had tightened up The Clash after a year off the road.
Bond's was chosen after Rhodes and Vinyl visited New York in early spring. They picked the former disco as the venue for a planned eight-night stint in an attempt to replicate the sleazy, intimate, low-life romance of the venues which Rhodes had booked The Clash into early in their career. A lot of New Yorkers were confused by the idea: the now-defunct SoHo News asked me to write a piece investigating why The Clash had turned down Madison Square Garden — where they could have made far more money for far less effort. Find the real story, they said. This was indicative of the cultural abyss between The Clash and the American media. In the frequent words of members of the group: they didn't understand.
But it doesn't mean the media weren't fascinated by The Clash. The band were booked into the Gramercy Park Hotel, located midway between Times Square, Greenwich Village, and SoHo. Popular with musicians, the hotel was playing host to another group at the same time — a fledgling outfit called U2. But, as film crews, graffiti artists and break-dancers swanning through the lobby made clear, the Gramercy Park would, for the time-being, quite definitively become Clash Central.
Suddenly, in a flurry of hair grease, chrome-encrusted ghetto-blasters and dramatic shades of pink, ice blue and black, The Clash and their entourage stepped through the arrivals gate at JFK into the airport concourse. There was a palpable rush of energy. This could be very good for New York, you felt. This could be a lot of fun.
AS THE DIMINUTIVE BERNIE RHODES entered the arrivals lounge, trailing behind the group in a pair of boat-sized, blue suede brothel creepers, it was clear he'd had a facial re-fit. His giant hooter had vanished and contact lenses had replaced his thick-lensed spectacles. Between them, Kosmo Vinyl and the refurbished Rhodes stage-managed the New York visit with an efficiency whose machine-like momentum was cleverly concealed. The group's elite status was manipulated for maximum media coverage — in a quantity completely disproportionate to the amount of records they'd sold. You could even tune into the TV news and there would be The Clash, paying an official visit to some school in Brooklyn, like alternative statesmen.
Half the British punk scene seemed to be on Manhattan island. John Lydon, busy sneering at everyone, was in residence at some midtown hotel, along with Keith Levene and Jeanette Lee of Public Image. The Jam had just left. The Fall — Mark E. Smith even surpassing Lydon for caustic sarcasm — were just about to arrive. At the Peppermint Lounge there was the inevitable benefit for the latest Johnny Thunders bust.
On May 27, two days after The Clash arrived, a press conference was held in the foyer of Bond's. A journalist pointed out that, the previous week, Paul Weller had accused The Clash of selling out. "What constitutes a sell-out to The Clash?" he demanded. Mick Jones took up the gauntlet. "What happens," he deadpanned, "is that all the tickets go on for a concert and people go and buy them, and if as many go and buy them as there are tickets, that constitutes a sell-out." The ladies and gentlemen of the American press thought this was quite witty.
PHOTO: Strummer during the Bond's dates when The Clash were headlining. © Ebet Roberts/Redlems
PHOTO: Another day, another press conference. The Milliner's Bugle was probably agog at this one. Right: longtime Clash spokesman and confidant Kosmo Vinyl, with his girlfriend Yves Stephenson.
Manhattan was a perfect backdrop for a group of former art students in love with the switchblade ethos of Scorsese's Mean Streets. Across the road from Bond's, on 49th Street and Broadway, was a bar where one of the final scenes of Raging Bull had been shot. The joint, whose mythology included a feminist former bank robber as its manager, was soon taken over by The Clash posse. This was the heyday of the New York after-hours bar scene.
Half-dead from lack of sleep, or from whatever you'd ingested, you could slide into yet another downtown sleazehole at eight in the morning and find Strummer and Vinyl there playing pool.
Pearl Harbour, the rockabilly singer, had arrived with Paul Simonon, her boyfriend, to DJ at the shows. Mick Jones threw a birthday party for his current main squeeze, Ellen Foley, at Interferon, the club that a year or so later became Danceteria. Future members of European royalty could be found snorting coke in cubby-holes at Bond's. Graffiti artists Futura 2000 and Fab Five Freddy were also soon part of the Clash camp. Even Allen Ginsberg joined the hangers-on.
THE TEMPERATURE HAD RISEN YET AGAIN, TO JUST OVER 100 DEGREES, on the Thursday night The Clash opened at Bond's. In the street outside, kids from Harlem were breakdancing — an early, riveting sighting of a new phenomenon. Inside the packed hall, though, it was another matter. That night's support act, Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five, were soundly booed — even pelted with garbage — by this audience of out-of-towners. (A freak consequence of sales patterns from the Ticketron computer ticket outlets. The group seemed amused by the idea of fans travelling to see them, rather than the musicians travelling to the fans. "It's the mountain coming to Mohammed," said Strummer.)
Standing halfway down the packed hall was Don Letts, making a film about the visit to New York, with the working title of Clash On Broadway. Letts and I looked at each other in amazement; it seemed proof of everything you had heard about the blinkered bigotry of US 'rock' fans. How on earth, you wondered, will they respond to the T-shirt stall in the lobby, run by the Committee In Solidarity With The People Of El Salvador?
"It's so fucking narrow-minded," Mick Jones said furiously later, underlining that The Clash were always more than just a rock group. They were a musical distillery: dub reggae, rockabilly and the new rap music were hungrily absorbed into their brew. Magnificent Dance, a mix of The Magnificent Seven, was bubbling on WBLS, the most happening black dance station. "I mean, it's an insult to us in a way," Mick continued. "We picked the bands to open for us, so supposedly we liked them. They're too narrow-minded to open up to something new."
But they went crazy for The Clash, in a way I'd never seen a more reserved British audience behave, even truly crackers crowds like those at the Glasgow Apollo. In the tradition of great rock'n'roll groups, like The Faces and even The Rolling Stones, there had often been something ramshackle, unpredictable and occasionally shambolic about The Clash's performances. But that was in the past: this group was a powerhouse — tight, tough and immeasurably confident. They played for a long time: almost two and a half hours. You were struck by their virtuosity, their power and the variety of material. They kicked off, appropriately, with London Calling and then pillaged all four of their albums for the strongest material. High points were Ivan Meets G.I. Joe, Career Opportunities, Brand New Cadillac and new song This Is Radio Clash. But really, it was all great. You had no doubt that The Clash was the best rock'n'roll group there had ever been.
But after the first night's set, the problems started. Someone had called in the Fire Department and the Manhattan Building Inspector. Bond's had been dangerously oversold — if there had been a fire, no more than 900 of the 3,500-strong audience could have escaped; the season looked about to be cancelled. A deal was eventually done. The shows could continue if more fire exits were opened and there was an audience maximum of 1,750. The Clash found themselves agreeing to play 17 dates instead of the eight they'd flown in for. "I'm very worried about Joe's voice. I hope he can hold up," said Mick Jones. Other members of the group were perhaps greater cause for concern than Joe. In an interview sequence filmed by Don Letts, Topper Headon is asked how he feels about having to play 17 shows. He is unshaven, his voice is slurred, and he is not looking in good shape. It is not a problem, he says, but his face tells a different story... By the time The Clash came back on the Combat Rock tour, Topper was no longer in the group.
PHOTO: Poet Allen Ginsberg jumped onstage for an impromptu verse session during the Bond's shows, thus inspiring the track Ghetto Defendant on Combat Rock. He's seen here with Joe during the recordings at Electric Ladyland Studios.
But adversity was turned to advantage. The Friday night show had been cancelled as talks dragged on between Rhodes, the club and various authorities. As a result, there was a virtual riot in Times Square by frustrated ticket-holders. So there was even more TV and press coverage. The additional ten days in New York established the group in the consciousness of the city's cultural underground. Lauded by the likes of Scorsese and De Niro, as well as kids from Queens with spray cans, they became a fixture on the coolest edge of the New York art scene. Even the support acts began to be given an easier time. Lee 'Scratch' Perry, who the week before had repainted an entire corridor of the Fissex House Hotel after redecorating his bedroom, only baffled the audience.
In the group's dressing-room, the giant TV was always on. It never worked, but it was always on — a constant flickering presence. As Scratch painted crosses on one wall, Pearl Harbour negotiated an unsteady path through empty bottles of Rémy Martin and crumpled pink plastic carrier bags from Trash And Vaudeville, the retro clothing store in Manhattan where the group bought much of their stage-wear. She collapsed into a beat-up armchair; her eyeballs appearing to spin, cartoon-like. Someone had spiked her drink with acid. Paul Simonon took her to the nearest hospital. As Pearl was wheeled into casualty, a black hospital orderly walked past them. He took one look at Paul. "Ring, ring, seven am," he rapped with a laugh, hitting them with the first line of The Magnificent Seven.
If anything, that was the moment you knew that The Clash's season at Bond's had worked.
"We went out there with all guns blazing."
Fifteen Years On, Scarred but Still Proud
Road-warrior Joe Strummer talks to Chris Salewicz
When was the first time you toured America?
I think it was in 1978. We went to finish off Give 'Em Enough Rope in San Francisco. So it would have been to tour that. The response was very good. We were playing in dance-halls and clubs. Small places, maybe a thousand capacity. We had quite a buzz off that first album. They'd eventually put it out, after adding all the later singles to it — things like Complete Control and (White Man In) Hammersmith Palais."
Who was your audience then? Presumably it wasn't punks.
It was music fans. Just people who were into music. We just went out there all guns blazing and blew them away with the attack and with the intensity.
Did you have any contact with any American groups when you went there? Did you have any idea what they felt about you?
Not really. You just get on a bus and go from gig to gig. You don't see many other people. I can remember when Ted Nugent wanted to jam with us in Detroit. We said if he got a crew-cut he could do it. He stormed out.
This was pre-MTV, so the only way to do it was Hank Williams-style: just get on a bus and slug it out. London Calling only sold about 300,000 copies in America. Today Pearl Jam sell nine million.
The Bond's dates took place because Epic wouldn't give you any financial support for an American tour. Was this because they were reacting badly to the subject-matter of Sandinista!?
They just gave us no royalties. They wanted to kill it off. It wasn't because of the subject-matter. They were more worried that Bruce Springsteen had caught the same fever — he'd just released The River. They didn't want it to catch on, giving fans three LPs for the price of one. But it was only meant as a fans' record. It was too weighty to be more than a fans' album. I think we knew that it would never sell huge quantities. We were just interested in the music. It just got out of hand when we were making it.
You came to those shows straight from a tour of Europe. Can you remember much about that?
Only the high points. The traditional riot in Hamburg, for example. We're all banned for life from Hamburg. We were never that popular in Germany. But on this occasion, all these snotty, middle-class German kids had become punks — but only purist punk people like Crass. So they tried to attack us on the way into the show. Anyway, I told the promoter to let them in for free.
When we started playing, the stage was only about six inches off the ground. They rushed us, and we slugged it out with them. When you get up on that stage, you just don't care. You're a raging psychotic, you suspend all normal living — you'd grab a rhinoceros by the tusk and swing it around. So we beat them off. The cops dragged me off and breathalysed me. When it was proved I was sober, this huge guy with a fat revolver in his belt looks at me and goes, Pfffff... and threw me out of the station.
So how was morale by the time you hit New York?
Well, we had great morale because we knew we were a great group. We knew we wrote great songs and played great live.
Bernie had this idea to do seven nights in various cities because it enables you to hang out and get in touch with the place. It makes it far more of an event, far more intimate. We did seven nights in Sydney, Tokyo and Paris. I think we did it in London too. It was great, fantastic. Bond's was more controversial, necessitating a 17-night stand.
Various people suggested this was Bernie pulling some kind of scam. But do you know what really happened with the Fire Department?
This is the truth, I think. You can't come into New York and take the club crowd for seven nights. So somebody paid somebody who paid somebody who paid somebody to come in and shut the building down. The Fire Departments are very heavy in America. If it had just been one night it would have been different. And they had oversold it. But instead of running, we stayed and did the 17 nights. There was a riot on Times Square and it made the national TV news.
PHOTO: Field-Marshall Joe Strummer, VC and guitar, veteran of the punk wars.
It's often assumed that the Bond's audience didn't really understand what you were singing about, that to them you were just a hard rock group with short hair.
People always used to ask us if they listened to the lyrics in America. I think it's rash to presume they didn't. I think they knew damn well what was going on. Anyway, maybe the message wasn't in the lyrics. Maybe it was in the energy, the vigour, the drive.
What did you feel about their response to Grandmaster Flash?
We really came up against it there. But you mustn't forget, these were kids from places like New Jersey. Most of them had never encountered anything like that before — just two turntables at the back of the stage. And not long after that they were going out and buying The Message.
The reception for you was extraordinary. It seemed to lift you right up.
It did. But so did the energy in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. It was all One World to us.
Why do you think you succeeded in the USA?
Every time we had a record out, we'd go off and tour everywhere we could. And I think Americans like groups — they've liked groups ever since The Beatles went there in 1964. We were a four-man British group and I think they could really relate to that.
You were also about the only group out there who seemed to still believe you could bring about change through rock'n'roll music.
At that point it was pretty barren. Now it's a bit different: there's the hardcore scene, people like Henry Rollins, hip hop as well, I suppose.
Did the mythology of New York have a particularly poignant effect on you?
Of course. I'd been listening to American blues records since I was at school. America as a whole just seemed amazing and great, as it does to anyone who's interested in music. But New York — hell, New York.
Martin Scorsese shot the group for a scene in The King Of Comedy. Did that come out of the Bond's dates?
We'd met him on the previous visit. He'd been editing Raging Bull in his flat on the hundredth floor of some building, one of those places that's ceiling-to-floor glass. He was with Thelma Schoonmaker, that woman he always edits with. They showed us the first five minutes of the film. He was interested in us doing the music for another film, Kings Of New York, about street gangs in the 1850s. We had a couple of meetings about it: he seemed to just want some wild music. I think it's one of those life project films — he's still talking about doing it.
Then De Niro came to one of the Bond's shows, and Scorsese told us to show up on this street corner for a scene for The King Of Comedy. Me and Paul once took De Niro and Christopher Walken down to Gaz's Rockin' Blues. They loved it. I think it was just what they wanted.
What happened to Don Letts's Clash On Broadway film?
As far as I know, the reels were stored in a rental place in New York. Bernie forgot to pay the rent and the footage was destroyed. The only surviving bit was ten minutes that Don Letts found at the bottom of his wardrobe. Part of a cutting copy, but only about ten minutes of it.
Can you remember the gamut of emotions you went through at Bond's, from when you arrived to the end of the dates?
It sort of took off like a rocket and suddenly exploded. We arrived in the city, the trouble went down, and the whole thing seemed to take off. The Gramercy was overrun with our thing. It was good fun, a real golden time.
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