Everybody had a different interpretation of what the Ramones gave the world in 1976, but it's safe to say, for a long time, bands simply co-opted the raw nerve of punk, thumbed their noses at the audience, and pounded at those three chords like no tomorrow. The results were often beautiful, but also implosive.
Tons of punk singles came out of the UK between 1976-1978. Their deliberately disposable, gone-tomorrow qualities were all part of the furious volatility punk was supposed to espouse. You can't blame a lot of the one-or-two-hit wonders of the initial UK punk scene, because their short lifespans went right along with the punk aesthetic, and most of the songs were great. Even the most influential punk album of all time, Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, was by a group that couldn't even stick around for a proper second release.
For a very long time it was hard to associate punk with ambition, because it was very much in the moment. Most punk bands simply dismissed any sense of artistic ambition; they just wanted a faceless riot. Many believed in the messages they sang, but couldn't manage the task of keeping content at a socially committed level. The UK punk scene also gave off the impression of being a mere circle jerk (pun kinda intended).
With the exception of reggae and seminal punk forebearers like the Stooges and Lou Reed, many UK punk bands couldn't even be bothered to listen to other types of music besides the genre they were playing. At times, it seemed they didn't even want to imagine a world outside punk. A recent article in The Stranger proffered that emo music is nothing more than fascism in the ironic disguise of endorsing individuality. The same could be said of punk rock, which could have been straitjacked all to hell if nobody pushed its boundaries.
The Clash rewrote every maxim stated above.
Writing specifically about Joe Strummer, who died on December 22 at the age of 50, is difficult because he, like the other three, vanished into the group identity. In fact, we shouldn't even bother with particulars of Strummer's life until the time comes to wrap this piece up. All apologies to the aggrieved, but be assured: The Clash are unthinkable without Strummer -- and are the entity Strummer undoutbedly wanted us to remember more than himself.
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The Clash were the first group to seize the grass-roots punk aesthetic, dismantle it, and reassemble it with the used parts of pop music that came before. They were able to manage this task fully by the time of their third album, London Calling, one of the five best records ever made.
Other bands accepted the necessary first steps of punk, cynicism (read: romanticism) and nihilism, and simply spun their wheels in those ditches until they tired. The Clash acknowledged those traits, but for them, they weren't enough. There had to be other answers. Like Martin Scorsese did in Taxi Driver (a movie The Clash later cited in "Red Angel Dragnet"), they got behind the identity of characters mainstream society would judge simply on their looks, and tried to unravel what made them how they were.
It's easy to point to London Calling as their big moment, when they proved their versatility, but even the earliest Clash songs pointed towards something more substantial and complex. Few bands had the nerve to release a song like "White Man in Hammersmith Palais" on their one of their very first go-rounds. Strummer sings about the joy of reggae and dub floating from boomboxes, then implores his peers to break out of their own self-imposed limits:
Punk rockers in the UK
They won't notice anyway
They're all too busy fighting
For a good place under the lighting
The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, ha you think it's funny
Turning rebellion into money
Christ, the hand barely started to feed 'em, and they were already nibbling away. In "White Riot" they got sick of the complacency and wondered why punkers, in their egalitarian egotism, didn't have the nerve of the black people who took justice into their own hands. Could you imagine someone like, say, Blink-182 telling all their fans to stop being so shallow and take to the streets?
But the amazing thing about the Clash was that such direct messages to their closest circles were enthusiastically accepted by the fans. And at least for their first few years of existence, the Clash earned their opinions by being pretty damn good role models. Lester Bangs called them the nicest band he ever met (except for Talking Heads), and wrote a beautiful two-part account of his touring with them around the UK. They let fans crash in their hotel rooms, they good-naturedly challenged their admirers into taking action of their own, and revealed a deep love for both the Ramones and the Muppets.
With all the big walls that isolate the performers from their fans, you get to see exactly how the Clash got away with having a higher sense of purpose than pogoing. They sincerely believed their fans were as intelligent as they were.
When the Clash first toured the States in 1979, their opening acts were not the Buzzcocks, the Adverts, Sham 69 or anything remotely like them. Incredibly, they got people like Bo Diddley, Sam & Dave, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Lee Dorsey ("Working in a Coal Mine") to support them on their bills.
Not only did those shows shatter the racism some felt was creeping into punk, they exposed the Clash and their fans to unlikely influences. Suddenly it wasn't just about deliberately bad playing and shouting "Oi!"; punk was about something else, something that had drifted into and under popular music for decades without anybody noticing. But with that tour, it was apparent that punk had retroactively worked its way into Diddley's gunslinging, Sam & Dave's emotional desperation, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins' comic voodoo, almost as easily as it had found its way into Cockney fuck-offs and breakneck guitar strumming.
It's hard to ignore the fact that immediately after that tour the Clash released London Calling.
London Calling was a punk record unlike any before. Musically it's all over the place, but still sounds like the work of one band. It wasn't enough for the Clash to harken back to the most visible "punks" of rock's earliest days, like Eddie Cochrane (Sid Vicious had already done that anyway, in lampooning fashion). There were other forms of music virtually ignored by other punk bands that the Clash were only too happy to investigate.
The title track of London Calling talks about the death of Beatlemania, even as it retains the pop tempo of "Penny Lane." One of their best songs, "Lost in the Supermarket," depicts a lonely person who wills his individualism to convenience, fad and materialism, even as the coda recalls a half-decent disco band. The sad story of a con artist facing his downfall, "The Card Cheat," even recalls the Wall of Sound from Phil Spectors' 60's girl groups. (Donald A. Guarisco of All-Music Guide insightfully nabs the Ronette's "Be My Baby", eventually covered by the Ramones, as the prime influence on that track.)
The Clash were fascinated with the darkness behind the strut of Montgomery Clift ("The Right Profile"), the demons behind small-time crooks ("Jimmy Jazz"), the broken spirits of the young contending with the commonplace mainstream ("Clampdown"), the twisted bitterness of the smack user ("Hateful"). They affronted the ideas that one had to burn out before fading away ("Death or Glory"), that anonymous sex sated everyone's desires ("Lovers Rock"). They paid tribute to the Sex Pistols ("The Four Horsemen") and the roots-reggae music that had galvanized the squatters in the London tenements ("Revolution Rock").
Hell, they even found time to get their hearts broken ("Train in Vain," "Brand New Cadillac").
Maybe enough silly Americans thought London Calling was a popular reconciliation of punk rock, since it was loaded with enough hooks to make it their first American Top 40 album. ("Train in Vain" was the first single by a punk band to crack the U.S. Top 40, although it wasn't a punk song. Not really.)
But that's not really the truth. The Clash didn't go pop with London Calling, because their messages were just as direct as their earliest singles. Instead, London Calling broke the braces of both jackbooted punk and the great popular song. Crossing the bridge between the two was remarkable enough -- crossing it so convincingly, like the Clash did on their third album, was -- well, it just hasn't been repeated.
The Clash's next two albums -- the 3-record set Sandinista! and Combat Rock -- went even further. Both had straightforward punk songs, but also, especially in Sandinista!, expunged any idea that the Clash would isolate themselves from any kind of music whatsoever. Sandinista! is a complete mess, but never sags in its energy or ability to surprise.
The more cohesive Combat Rock was their only Top 10 U.S. album, and featured their two best-known songs, "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go" (whaddaya know, a straightforward punk anthem). But even with Combat Rock, they sounded as restless as ever, and if you really listen to the record from start to finish, you can hear a very subtle madness informing the disc. When you consider that nothing remotely close to "Straight to Hell" or "Know Your Rights" has ever been done -- I can't even explain what styles those songs resemble -- you realize Combat Rock, far from the sell-out some consider it, was simply an abstraction that somehow found a mass audience. It's one of the weirdest Top 10 albums ever, as "Rock the Casbah" was one of the weirdest Top 10 lyrics ever. (A song about a Middle Eastern warlord trying to stamp out pop music with military force? Peaking at #8 on the American charts?).
God, we're lucky this happened.
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I've so far not discussed any of the specific personalities in the Clash. For one, it's debateable whether Joe Strummer was responsible for this glorious irresponsibility, or whether Mick Jones was. Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon
fired Jones for creative differences after Combat Rock; the two of them then released the final Clash album, Cut the Crap, with three unknowns taking the place of Jones and drummer Topper Headon. Cut the Crap was trumpted as a return to the Clash's strict punks roots (was anyone complaining?), which might imply that the Clash's adventurism was really the spark of Mick Jones. But the album is nearly useless, except for the haunting "This is England." The Clash ceased to be, in name or in deed, after Cut the Crap.
Film work occupied most of Strummer's post-Clash career. Strummer worked with filmmaker Alex Cox, whose Sid and Nancy Strummer composed the score for. In 1987 Strummer had the leading role in Cox's hastily-filmed spaghetti western spoof, Straight to Hell, one of the worst movies ever made. A pre-Kurt, pre-Hole, pre-fame Courtney Love played his girfriend. Strummer appeared alongside former touring partner Screamin' Jay Hawkins in Jim Jarmusch's much better Mystery Train. Strummer also scored films like Permanent Record and Grosse Pointe Blank.
Strummer's fine last two albums were recorded with his backup band, the Mescaleros, and released in the United States on Epitaph Records. In autumn of this year, it was announced that the Clash would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the first year of their eligibility, alongside the Police, Elvis Costello and AC/DC.
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros' toured throughout most of 2002, their final North American appearance being in San Diego last July. The UK leg of their tour brought them one night to London's Acton Town Hall. During the encores, for the first time in 20 years, Mick Jones joined Strummer on the stage for performances of three Clash tunes from their first two albums. With the Rock and Roll of Fame induction imminent, it was all but certain the Clash would reform for at least one night in spring of 2003.
This onstage reunion between Strummer and Jones would turn out to be their last. It occurred on November 16, 2002.
Maybe the Clash concealed their clashing egos for all we know, but at least on the surface, Strummer's identity disappeared into the weight of what the Clash did as a group. He was allegedly responsible for the majority of their lyrics, which teem with emotional complexity and devices almost nobody in the punk field can wield. But to write him up as a personality, a pop star, or an icon seems fruitless. And maybe that's just reflective of the kind of modesty nobody has much fun writing about, but admires greatly.
The fact that the Clash is unthinkable without him, though, might send people searching out for his individual details a bit more. But you know what? You're better off listening to London Calling, since it's obvious that, like the best Clash moments, it spits in the cult of personality's drainpipe and threatens to outlive us all. Like the man says, "death and glory are just another story." I'm assuming that's how Strummer still wanted to disappear -- without a trace, without notice.
Sorry, Joe. I'm afraid that's impossible.
