LET FURY HAVE THE HOUR

ALSO BY ANTONINO D’AMBROSIO

Books

A Heartbeat and a Guitar:

Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears

Mayday: The Art of Shepard Fairey

(with Shepard Fairey and Jeffrey Deitch)

Screenplays

Let Fury Have the Hour

No Free Lunch

La Terra Promessa: In Sun & Shadow (Part I)

and Diamanti nel di Massima (Part II)

Films (Directed and Produced)

Let Fury Have the Hour

No Free Lunch

La Terra Promessa: In Sun & Shadow (Part I)

and Diamanti nel di Massima (Part II)

Contributor

Democracy in Print: The Best of the

Progressive Magazine, 1909–2009

LET FURY

HAVE the HOUR

Joe Strummer, Punk,

and the

Movement That

Shook the World

ESSAYS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND EDITED BY

Antonino D’Ambrosio

Copyright © 2012 by Antonino D’Ambrosio

Published by Nation Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Nation Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Books published by Nation Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810–4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Let fury have the hour: Joe Strummer, punk, and the movement that shook the word / [edited by] Antonino D’Ambrosio.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-56858-720-2 (e-book) 1. Strummer, Joe—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Clash (Musical group) 3. Punk rock music—Political aspects. 4. Punk rock music—History and criticism. I. D’Ambrosio, Antonino.

ML420.S918L48 2012

782.42166092—dc23

[B]

2012001087

For Yrthya and Amara

Everything, Always

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

—FLANNERY O’CONNOR

My grandfather made bricks

My father made bricks

I make bricks, too,

but where’s my house?

—OLD BRICK MAKER,

FEDERICO FELLINI’S Amarcord

Even if it’s a bad idea, it’s still an idea, that brings us to another idea, which may be less bad or even better. Who knows?

—JACQUES RIVETTE’S

Around a Small Mountain

CONTENTS

Introduction to the First Edition:

The Future Is Unwritten

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Opening 1: Artists As First Responders,

By Wayne Kramer with Margaret Saadi Kramer

Opening 2: For, Not Against,

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Act I

MOVING OUT LOUD

Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Introduction to “The Very Angry Clash”

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

The Very Angry Clash

By Steve Walsh

Greatness from Garageland

By Peter Silverton

The Clash: Anger on the Left As

Punk Leaders Set Sights on America

By Mikal Gilmore

The Clash in America

By Sylvie Simmons

The Last Broadcast

By Greil Marcus

Act II

FIGHTING THROUGH THE NIGHT

The Rebel Way: Alex Cox, Jim Jarmusch, and

Dick Rude on the Filmwork of Joe Strummer

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Be Bop a Lula Here’s Joe Strummer

By Ann Scanlon

Clash and Burn: The Politics of Punk’s Permanent Revolution

By Dennis Broe

A Brother in Revolution: Women in Punk Discuss Joe Strummer’s Influence

By Amy Phillips

Always Paying Attention: Joe Strummer’s Life and Legacy

By Charlie Bertsch

White Riot or Right Riot: A Look Back at Punk Rock and Antiracism

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Act III

WALKING THROUGH THE CROWD

You Can’t Have a Revolution Without Songs:

The Legacy of Víctor Jara and the Political Folk Music

of Caetano Veloso, Silvio Rodríguez, and Joe Strummer

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Clash of the Titan

By Joel Schalit

A Man That Mattered

By Kristine McKenna

When the Two Sevens Clashed

By Carter Van Pelt

Whatever It Takes

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

The Clash Legacy: Speech to Induct the Clash

into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2003

By Tom Morello

Act IV

BETTER GET YOUR WEAPON READY

The World Is Worth Fighting For: Two Creative Activists, Michael

Franti and Tim Robbins, Continue Joe Strummer’s Legacy

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Culture Clash: From Brixton to El Barrio NYC

By Not4Prophet

Strange Bedfellows: How the Clash Inspired Public Enemy

By Chuck D

The Joe I Knew

By Billy Bragg

Gettin’ Back to the Bad Seeds: The Legend of the “Long Shadow”

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Act V

TRANSCONTINENTAL HUSTLE

All essays by Antonino D’Ambrosio

Global Citizens, Dangerous Creators: Eugene Hütz

Joe Strummer, Terrorist?

Global Citizens, Dangerous Creators: Edwidge Danticat

“The Only Band that Mattered” . . . Still Does:

The Story of the Clash as Told by the Clash

Evolutionary Street Poetry

Bend the Notes: A Creative Response Initiation

Acknowledgments

Notes

Future Listening, Watching, Reading, and Seeing

The Author

The Contributors

Permissions

Index

INTRODUCTION TO

THE FIRST EDITION:

THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

“I think people ought to know that we’re antifascist, we’re antiviolence, we’re antiracist and we’re procreative. We’re against ignorance.”

—JOE STRUMMER, 1976

“We’re all going to have to learn to live together and develop a greater tolerance and get rid of whatever our fathers gave us in the way of hatred between nations.”

—JOE STRUMMER, 2000

On the day Joe Strummer died, December 22, 2002, US forces began dropping leaflets and making radio broadcasts over Iraq urging Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration stated that the war to overthrow Saddam’s regime would start with US bombing followed by a popular Iraqi insurgent uprising that would gain control of the streets. President George W. Bush declared that this was going to be a battle between good and evil. It was a strange, jarring day. As the United States seemed poised to embark on the latest “war on terror,” the Clash antiwar song “The Call-Up” came to mind: “It’s up to you not to heed the call-up/I don’t wanna die!/It’s up to you not to hear the call-up/I don’t wanna kill!” As Strummer remarked when the song was first recorded, “The song is a statement against the buildup to war and the potential it creates for bringing catastrophe.” Nearly ten years after Strummer’s death, with the “liberation of Iraq” supposedly now completed, and more than two decades after Strummer wrote this song, these words certainly seem prophetic.

Antonino D’Ambrosio’s press pass from his meeting with Joe Strummer during the musician’s series of performances at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, April 5,2001. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Let Fury Have the Hour has been more than twenty-five years in the making. It began for me in 1983 when, for the first time, I heard the Clash blaring at me from those huge 1970s-style speakers in my cousin’s house on Lawndale Street in northeast Philadelphia. Of course, I had heard the Clash before then. It was impossible not to. They were the biggest band in the world at the time. They had a huge worldwide hit with “Rock the Casbah” and a video in heavy rotation on the fledgling video network MTV. But we did not have MTV and even though I secretly loved “Rock the Casbah,” it seemed to be a radio-friendly pop song. When I heard, really heard, the Clash’s music for the first time, it came by way of the song “Clampdown.” I related to it because it seemed written for me. It became more than a song—“Clampdown” was my own personal anthem. The Clash promised rebellion. And I was certain that they could deliver it and liberate me from a sense of hopelessness and a life of “wearing blue and brown.”

When punk first became a social and cultural phenomenon in 1976–77, I was five years old and too young to be part of the scene or understand the music that would become an important part of my life only a few years later. Even so, music was already a central part of my life. My parents, immigrants from Italy, possessed a deep love of music. My mother was drawn to rock ’n’ roll—the Beatles and Elvis. She liked John not Paul; he was the one who always had something important to say. Lennon was her working-class hero and I would find mine in Joe Strummer. My father loved country music, especially Willie Nelson. Also not a bad choice as music rebels go. All the same, they always returned to the traditional music of their homeland, spending hours listening to La Banda di Duronia and the beautifully melodic tarantellas of Molise.

Watching my mother dance and sing along to the music she loved taught me that melodies possess something more powerful than film or painting, or any other art form I had encountered up to that point. It grabs hold of you in a place you never knew existed, shakes you to your core, and shatters everything you hold as true. It is transcendent. Illuminating. Empowering. Emancipating. I’m not talking about bubblegum pop and sticky sweet love songs that are a safe standard of mainstream radio. What we all need to help us cope with a world that is anything but comfortable is the kind of music that intoxicates with crushing hooks that open the mind wide with lyrics that make you think. “Clampdown” did that for me. The Clash did that. Joe Strummer did that.

Joe Strummer performing with the Mescaleros at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, April 5, 2001. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Strummer forged a pact with his audience, guaranteed for a lifetime. You could be a part of something positive. Change could happen if you were willing to change yourself. I was fortunate to discover this music when I did. I looked at the Clash not as a band or as music of the moment but as a harbinger of the future. I rejected the affected nihilism of the Sex Pistols, considered the definitive punk band. They were about negating; the Clash was about producing positive action. Other groups were fun to listen to and some, like the compelling Crass, even had important things to say, but only the Clash made me believe.[1] Each song became an edict delivering me from anguish, teaching me not to waste a moment of my life. The world was not ending. It was just beginning. This is a truth I learn every time I listen to Strummer launch into “London’s Burning” and begin that thrilling ride all over again.

Strummer gave me the strength to have faith that the people’s movements that had scored some big democratic victories in the 1960s could happen again. The Lettrists. The Situationists. May ’68. Grosvenor Square. Allende’s Chile. The hot summer of Italy. It was happening again, you could hear it in his voice and in the music. Forget about waiting on the side of the road for someone to come along and pick you up. It was all about DIY. Do it yourself—not for yourself but for each other. Bonded together in what matters, forsaking intolerance, embracing justice. And this is one of the unique gifts Strummer possessed: he made everyone feel like a member of the team, not a consumer of anything trivial. One way to do this is through music.

Politics and art do mix and if done right can change your life. Reggae. Skanking. Dub. Rap. R&B. Soul. Honky-tonk. Samba. Cumbia. It doesn’t matter what the music is or where it came from—only that it brings you to your feet, makes you listen with your heart, and opens your mind. I applied this to my life and discovered the music of Steel Pulse, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Junior Murvin, Mikey Dread, the Skatalites, the Equals, Public Enemy, and countless more. Strummer opened my ears so I would be able to hear when the music called, promising me salvation and a better day.

Seeming fit and vibrant just a few weeks before he died, Strummer had performed a blistering set at a benefit show for the Acton Fire Brigade at Acton Town Hall where Mick Jones briefly joined him on stage.[2] His death at the age of fifty, on December 22, 2002, of a rare heart condition, was sudden and shocking. He left behind an extraordinary career that will affect generations. Still, this does not lessen the sting of his loss because an important voice was silenced, one that used music as a platform to cut a path for something better, at least for a moment. He now sits in the pantheon of artists like Bob Marley, Kirsty MacColl, Robert Johnson, Buddy Holly, and Victor Jara, who left this world in their prime and before their time.

Yet, unlike these musicians, some believed that Strummer was past his prime, his best years already behind him. Characteristic of Strummer’s “rebel way” he fooled all who dismissed him. While everyone was waiting for the Clash to get back together, Strummer quietly attained a level of creativity and originality with his albums Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, Global A Go-Go, and Streetcore. The newness of his music was a revelation. The growth and breadth of his worldview was inspirational and timely. The potential of the work to come, we are left to imagine, was boundless. As Strummer himself said, “The best moments of any career are those that are unexpected.”

Strummer’s moment, for many, had come and gone in the late 1970s after the release of London Calling[3] and a few years later the departure of Mick Jones from the band. Things would never be the same. Strummer, Jones, Simonon, and Headon had raised the bar and then were expected to go higher. Instead, they wanted to go deeper. As a member of the Clash, Strummer cut a cool, brash pop cultural figure with his improvised guttural Cockney-accented voice, electric guitar leg, and upturned upper lip. The group, with Strummer out in front, personified rebellion rock and took the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought the Law” and made it into an enduring protest anthem all their own.[4] Strummer embodied the soul of punk rock and the potential it possessed as both a social movement and political vehicle. It went beyond a pop cultural moment or reactionary pose and became a principle that guided his life until the end.

In the final decade of his life, Strummer dedicated himself to important political causes by opposing globalization, advocating climate control with his work for Future Forests, and spreading a message of unity by embracing multiculturalism.[5] Before there was even a category for world music in record stores, Strummer was infusing his music with global sounds. In the 1990s, he had hosted a radio show on the BBC World Service titled “Joe Strummer’s London Calling” and had filmed the pilot for a television show called Global Boom Box that focused on world music.[6]

For Strummer, music and politics went hand-in-hand. The present volume is a reflection of his ongoing influence upon them. The essay that opens the book, “Let Fury Have the Hour,” was written for an audience that never heard of the Clash or punk rock. For this reason, I placed it as an introductory piece to frame the book. The essays that follow in the first section capture the exciting moments of a major musician at the start of his career.

In the second section, “The Rebel Way” explores the period in which Strummer described himself as going from “hero to zero” after his departure from the Clash. During this period he acted in films from Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell to Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, and composed soundtracks, most notably for Cox’s Walker. As Charlie Bertsch writes, “Even at his most combative, he was more interested in building up a community of rebels than in tearing down those who failed to make the grade.”

In the third section, in “You Can’t Have a Revolution Without Songs,” I place Strummer in the canon of great political folk musicians and discuss his recent work in relation to the astounding music of Caetano Veloso, Silvio Rodríguez, Víctor Jara, and Mercedes Sosa. Strummer always referred to himself as a folk musician at heart. He mentioned that he loved Woody Guthrie’s “Buffalo Skinners,” a song where the working man gets the better of his corrupt employer. Strummer had more than a bit of the “Buffalo Skinner” in him, and after years of battling Epic Records, he was free to make the music he wanted, in the way he wanted.

As Michael Franti of Spearhead tells us in the first essay in the fourth section, “The World Is Worth Fighting For,” “The underlying message that you get from Strummer’s music is the world can be a terrible, scary place but it is worth fighting for.” Strummer continued the fight even when his music was no longer played on the radio. This section gives Strummer’s contemporaries—Tim Robbins, Chuck D, Billy Bragg, Michael Franti—an opportunity to discuss the indelible mark he left on their lives as artists, activists, and human beings.

A final note on the contributors and contributions that make this book come alive. When approached to put this book together, I decided to include a mix of essays from the past (Greil Marcus, Sylvie Simmons) as well as new pieces (Dennis Broe, Charlie Bertsch). Even more, it was important to speak with a wide range of musicians, directors, actors, writers, and everyone in between whom Strummer influenced spiritually, creatively, and politically. In some cases, these individuals contributed their own work to the book, such as Billy Bragg, who continues to be an important musical and political voice, and was the very first to contribute to this volume with “The Joe I Knew,” a passionate eulogy.

Joe Strummer mural on the wall of musician Jesse Malin’s Lower East Side, New York City, bar, Niagara. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Perhaps the greatest testament to Strummer was the generosity and support of everyone I spoke with. Many, including Kristine McKenna, Billy Bragg, and Carter Van Pelt, donated their work in tribute to Strummer to be part of this important project. Michael Franti and Chuck D took time out of their hectic touring schedules to speak with me. Then there are those who could not contribute material to the book but offered wonderful support like Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Tony Kushner who told me he “loved, loved, loved Joe Strummer” as his work served as a model for him throughout his life and continues to do so.

Let Fury Have the Hour is not only a testament to a profound creative activist but also serves as a historical record to motivate, encourage, and inspire others to take the difficult yet rewarding path of thinking for others instead of merely for themselves. Strummer was always most interested in getting his new music out to as many people as possible who would truly listen—a tougher task than one would think for someone like Strummer. He remained undaunted even when his new music was not selling well and when, sometimes, people even said, “Joe who? You used to be in what band?”

The excitement he displayed at sharing his new music or his love of new artists like Manu Chao was as infectious as when he first plugged in his old Telecaster guitar and cranked out “London’s Burning” on that wondrous blur of a night long ago in 1976. By the end of his life, Strummer was making music for “people who are beyond the parameters of the demographic fascists who decide what sells and what gets advertised and what gets on playlists.”[7]

This book was written during a period I consider one of the darkest and most distressing in our history. In the months that led up to the book, the American occupying force in Iraq massacred civilians in Fallujah and were exposed for participating in torture and sexual abuse at the Abu Ghraib detention facility. America’s credibility abroad has been badly damaged, while domestically unemployment has skyrocketed alongside tax cuts for the wealthy. Money that should be going into health care, public education, and the environment continued to be siphoned off to further fund the military. As Strummer asked over a quarter of a century ago, “Are you going backwards?/Or are you going forwards?”

As I wrote the essays and edited the work for Let Fury Have the Hour, the process became a wholly invigorating and necessary one. It became a labor of hope sustained by the belief that I was putting something out to the world that could, in some way, move us forward. One of the last things Strummer told me in our April 2002 meeting in Brooklyn was that the goal all along was to keep things hopeful and remain optimistic. “We must be positive and know that truth is on our side,” he said. “Music can turn people on to the beauty of a life still to be lived . . . we choose to not sit idly by and not be miserable.” He left this world having achieved much more than he realized; he was a person who changed countless lives by becoming the unofficial leader of a people’s movement. Echoing a favorite statement of his, the future is indeed unwritten—how we write it and what we do offers us all a grand hope and a compelling opportunity.

—ANTONINO D’AMBROSIO

New York City, May 2004

OPENING 1:

ARTISTS AS FIRST RESPONDERS

By Wayne Kramer with Margaret Saadi Kramer

People are storytellers. Through stories we learn who we are and where we have come from. This artistic process, this means of communication, helps us understand where we may be heading collectively. Throughout my life art has assured me that I am not alone. And that’s what I strive to express in every melody, every lyric, every arrangement.

I’ve heard it throughout my life: freedom isn’t free. Decades ago, as a teenage bandleader, I somehow understood the concept of participatory democracy and I thought that my music could change the world. Furious is what I was (and perhaps naive), but I certainly understood at least that democracy is not just some theory. It’s something to do and as artists, we are its first responders. We create something in the world that wasn’t there before. We tell stories of the events around us and then project these stories back into the world in music, film, books, dance, theater, sculpture, painting, video games, graffiti, and myriad other forms of art that are still emerging. We are striving to explain what it feels like to be alive today. We are marking out history to see where we got it right and, maybe more importantly, where we fell short of the mark.

There is a tradition of activism in art built on the principles of America’s founding documents that are being fulfilled in Let Fury Have the Hour. If fury is the emotion, then the hour is now. So when Joe Strummer or Billy Bragg or Tom Morello or Saul Williams or Chuck D or Jill Sobule sing songs about the injustice they see with their own eyes, and speak with their own hearts, then filmmakers like John Sayles and Michael Moore and Antonino D’Ambrosio and Adam McKay make movies exposing the contradictions of a nation divided, I am encouraged and I am inspired. And then what happens? I make more art and it starts all over again.

Wayne Kramer performs in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, November 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Antonino’s work in film and literature is hammering home the inexorable truth that change is the one and only thing we can count on. Fury is a visual essay about what is happening—today—in the real and wide world. The entire world, actually. The United Kingdom, Europe, and America are joined by all the other developed and emerging nations of the world in a new global consciousness. The Arab Spring has inspired the Wall Street Occupiers who have, in turn, inspired a worldwide “Occupation” movement. The cell phone and mobile applications have transformed politics in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and hopefully Syria and Iran soon. All the while occurring in real time to soundtracks from Rage Against the Machine and the MC5 to Khaled and Public Enemy and Ramy Essam. Art and music are the universal language of all freedom-loving people on earth today and it connects us with one another instantly. It is an exciting time to be alive. Dangerous and romantic, too. That sometimes makes for better art. It seems to me that the best art is dangerous art.

Let Fury Have the Hour is a look under the hood at how artists are facing and exposing the forces of repression and corruption. With international economic and political elites enjoying absolute freedom from accountability, heaven knows we need the voices and visions of our artists more now than ever before. The work of artists—along with a handful of journalists who are committed to holding the feet of the rich and powerful to the fire of legal and public scrutiny—is all we have today.

Wayne Kramer performs in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, November 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

In America, we have become a nation that accepts rampant criminality by the political class. From Gerald Ford’s pardon of “law and order” president Richard Nixon (as a result of multiple felonies he committed in office) to Iran-Contra and the Bush era’s warrantless wiretaps of millions of Americans’ phones and emails, and the pardon of “Scooter” Libby right up to today’s congressional representatives extolling the virtue of unlimited wealth as birthright while we incarcerate millions of the least powerful for petty crimes in numbers never before realized in history and mandating longer and more severe sentences than any country on earth, something is out of line here. Seriously out of line.

The founders had no illusions about the potential emergence of a powerful political class that would make the corruption of the monarchy pale in comparison. They constantly wrote about such a danger. They warned us repeatedly. They understood human nature. They built as many safeguards as they could come up with into the structure of government. They were sending us a message and the message is clear: Tell the truth. Honor your fellow man as yourself. Hold public officials accountable to the rule of law. If something is wrong, then change it. If we don’t answer the call by speaking truth to power, then we jeopardize what we cherish in democracy as a way of life. If the rule of law means one thing for people of color and limited economic means but something entirely different for political and economic elites, then we have betrayed their vision. We ignore these fundamental rights and responsibilities at our own peril. We need artists and art built on the principles of human rights and equality for all. We demand art built on passion and a commitment to greatness and to the highest aspirations of the people, not the greatest profit.

Real art makes you think, ask questions. Art that doesn’t challenge tired old ways of thinking and offer a new perspective only serves to amuse and distract people from the reality of who and what is really controlling their lives and futures. Picasso’s Guernica shows the tragedy of war and the suffering it inflicts on individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work is revered because it is a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war. It has become an antiwar symbol and an embodiment of peace. Such fury must always be encouraged.

Without the fury of discontent, fury of injustice, fury in opposition of mediocrity, we fail as a civilization. The greatest building blocks of civilization are the aspirations of humankind: the rule of law applied fairly to all people, the right to a good job, to a quality education, to health care, to be secure in our persons and homes, and to justice for all.

So sing on, sister, and play on, brother. Cherish your rabble-rousers and brutal truth-tellers. And goddamn right, let fury have its hour.

OPENING 2:

FOR, NOT AGAINST

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

A moment. November 4, 1980. Trouble. Ronald Reagan is now the fortieth president of the United States, to the tune of “Happy Days are Here Again.” But Reagan was careful not to let anyone see beyond the greatest acting job since his one brief moment in The Killers. “Well, I could change that in a hurry,” Reagan says just before slapping Angie Dickinson hard across the face as John Cassavetes looks on through eyes filled with rage. Foreshadowing? Happy days! While everyone was laughing at Jimmy Carter—a decent man held face down, drowning in an indecent situation—they were checking the box for Reagan. Happy days for me! Reagan promised greatness for all. A shining city on a hill illuminated by camera lights. A staged production: the evil empire trumped by the real empire. Nearly 44 million votes, many from people who never voted that way. Happy days are here again. But someone forgot to ask, Happy days for whom?

One thing about that night remains buried in my brain: my bricklayer father staring silently at the television, lost in his thoughts or perhaps wrestling with his grave concern for the uncertainty that lay ahead. I later learned that Bruce Springsteen was sitting watching the election results unfold just like my father. Silent. Confused. Angry. The next night, Springsteen anxiously climbed on to the stage before a sold-out crowd in Tempe, Arizona. The moment was a strange one for the rock musician who found stardom in the 1970s greeting us from Asbury Park and then letting loose with “Born to Run.” As Springsteen grabbed the microphone, almost without thinking and with his heart racing, he shouted, “I don’t know what you thought about what happened last night but I thought it was pretty terrifying.” Swinging down his right arm hard on his guitar, Springsteen didn’t wait for the crowd to roar back its approval or rejection. Instantly, with the E Street Band backing him, the venue was boiling hot with “Badlands”: “Baby I got my facts learned real good right now/You better get it straight darling/Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings/And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.”

Joe Strummer’s Telecaster guitar before his performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, April 5, 2001. Still from the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Springsteen offered a prophetic proclamation that night. Soon Reagan swept aside one culture while dumping a new, bogus Americana on top of the country. Smothering us with evasion and superficiality. A linguistic attack: stand in front of the flag, right hand over your heart, smile wide, and mouth the words. A wink and a nod, here’s the Reagan revolution. No need to defend his agenda as the right course of action; just declare that there is no alternative, no other approach to consider. No need to convince anyone of anything: it’s morning in America again. A sleight of hand and a shift of dialogue: states’ rights versus human rights. Get in the General Lee with the Confederate flag proudly displayed on the roof and ride roughshod over this land straight to reelection in 1984. A hit reality television show broadcast around the world from the Oval Office with Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” brazenly used as the soundtrack. “This was when Republicans mastered the art of coopting anything and everything that seemed fundamentally American,” Springsteen explained. “If you were on the other side, you were somehow unpatriotic. You see in the Reagan election ads on TV, you know, ‘It’s morning in America.’ Well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh.” At one point Reagan left a wreath at a German cemetery that included SS graves: “Thanks for your efforts.” Were our brains hanging upside down? The Ramones thought so: “Bonzo goes to bitburg then goes out for a cup of tea/as I watch it on tv somehow it really bothered me/drank in all the bars in town for an extended foreign policy.” Reagan was not for but rather against democracy. Terrifying.

A moment. October 27, 1964. First strike. Reagan appears on national television. Sponsored by Goldwater-Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater for President, Reagan opens in a prerecorded speech: “I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used ‘We’ve never had it so good.’ Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we are always ‘against’ things, never ‘for’ anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” Reagan planted the seeds of his revolution, which took root sixteen years later and now have blossomed into an overgrown forest, dense and foreboding. A revolution not just against the Great Society but against society. Marlon Brando saw it from the first moment. “Reagan was a hack to Brando,” David Thomson writes. “An actor and politician who does not bother to care . . . he steps out of one fake light into another, and seems able to call them both sunshine.” “You may be a one-eyed jack around here,” Brando says in the great western he directed. “But I’ve seen the other side of your face.” Brando knew Reagan was always against.

“Mourning in America” from artist Shepard Fairey ‘s Reagan & Friends mural series inspired by Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Courtesy Shepard Fairey.)

A moment. May 4, 1979. Retrograde. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister of England. Her first remarks are borrowed from the prayer of Saint Francis: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Thatcher’s decade in office was a consistent contradiction of this initial statement. A truer story is told by flipping each sentence: Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despair. “Society doesn’t exist,” Thatcher said. There are only individuals. We are unequal and we all have the right to be unequal. “Thank heavens,” Thatcher exhaled in relief. Against.

“Top-Elite Faschions for Sale” from artist Shepard Fairey s Reagan & Friends mural series inspired by Antonino D’Ambrosio’ film let Fury Have the Hour. (Courtesy Shepard Fairey.)

A moment. Two record releases. Strike back. December 14, 1979. CBS Records releases London Calling in the U.K., composed with the specter of Thatcher looming just outside the studio door: “Now that war is declared—and battle come down.” January 1980 and Epic Records releases London Calling in the U.S., where it soars to the top of the charts despite the lead weight of Reagan pulling it down. “From every dingy basement on every dingy street/ Every dragging handclap over every dragging beat/That’s just the beat of time—the beat that must go on.” The album recorded with—to borrow the words of Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney—“hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.” Their solidarity and ranging interest in the human condition is on full display right from the title tune inspired by the scary Three Mile Island core meltdown just outside my Philadelphia front door. The Clash was all the way in: for. The music was a balm, rubbed on to counteract the cultural rash, the political inflammation shaping history breaking out against. The album borrowed the typography from Elvis Presley’s first album but breaks clear with an emotional image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass on the New York City Palladium stage. Less an iconic image of rock star egomania and more a warning shot blasting out a generation’s frustration: “But I know there’ll be some way/When I can swing everything back my way/Like skyscrapers rising up/Floor by floor, I’m not giving up.” In between the notes, underneath the chords, in the breaths separating the words it was all there: the world is worth fighting for!

A moment. The 1980s. Theft. Two detached leaders pushing the harshest of agendas, forging a partnership like a two-headed hydra that declared compassion a mortal weakness, a silly contrivance that goes against our human nature to get everything we can only for ourselves. If society doesn’t exist, then your community, your neighborhood, is a figment of the do-gooders’ imagination, people who really just want attention for themselves. Thinking for and about others is the very definition of selfishness. Thinking of only you is true selflessness. But didn’t they say the family was central? Family values? Last time I checked the family is the most basic form of social organization, the foundation of a society, the core group in a democracy bound together by sharing. The poor didn’t exist. AIDS didn’t exist. Civil rights didn’t exist. It’s so funny it makes you cry, the twisted logic of it all.

Reagan’s master plan sought to roll back the gains of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Trickle down economics, an absurdist con trick that even the cleverest Dada prankster artist could never hope to pull off. Reagan and his clan pulled it off, shoved it down our throats, and patted each other on the back. Job well done. Trickle down on the many from the geyser flooding the bank accounts of the few. Thatcher’s cabinet memo consisted of one large bullet point: dismantle the social democratic state. One for one and all for none. The free ride was over. Public education. Health care. Good jobs. Pensions. Opportunities. Exhaled out like a puff of smoke. Gone. “It was the era of R&B—Reagan to Bush—that motivated me to do something about it,” Chuck D says in my film Let Fury Have the Hour. “And then do a lot about it.” “Indeed, Margaret Thatcher was my greatest influence,” Billy Bragg says. Reagan, Bush, and Thatcher too. They were united around one clear principle: against.

“Corporate Violence for Sale” from Artist Shepard Fairey ‘s Reagan & Friends mural series inspired by Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Courtesy Shepard Fairey.)

All these moments strung together established a politics and a culture that remain mean and nasty. Tug on those bootstraps even though your feet are bare. It’s your fault you failed. You’re a fool to be compassionate, to be a citizen, to take active participation in making the world around you work just a little bit better for everyone: all just a vainglorious attempt at getting attention. Wow! They couldn’t be serious, could they? No one would fall for this, would they? The answer is stuck in my throat. Morning in America again was more like mourning in America. Reagan and Thatcher were like a well-orchestrated three act theater piece reminiscent of an Oscar Wilde high farce minus the witty dialogue, taking everything to a new level of spellbinding unreality. Act I: wear the mask of populism. Act II: remove the mask, reveal the true face. Act III: erase and rewrite history. Done.

Thirty years later we’re still grieving over what could have been, what should have been, what might still be possible. Springsteen’s Telecaster-soaked declaration is a piercing feedback echoed by a June 1, 2009, New York Times headline: “Reagan Did It.” The article traced the root cause of the current economic meltdown straight back to “Reaganomics,” which relied heavily on deregulating financial markets. The outcome: the rise of “casino capitalism,” allowing private investors a free hand to gamble with tax dollars and loot the system. Now we find ourselves at a disquieting moment in history. Democracy is besieged, not rising. The current political movements and their leaders seem unable to comprehend the enormity of the global challenges that stare out at us to the vanishing point. The disintegrating markets are just a precursor to the real havoc under way around the world. With America currently caught in a tug-of-war between cultural clashes and dystopian debates, we linger oblivious to the fact that there is a remarkable geopolitical shift unfolding that requires creative response, not reactionary rancorousness. “Our problems are also all of our assets,” said Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, currently under house arrest. “Understanding this promising paradox helped us not to lose hope, and to be able to go on since we believe wherever in the world that we live, we are going to face problems, big or small. But it is our duty not to be defeated and to find solutions.” Instead, current political leaders choose to engage not with facts and consensus but via a “win at all costs” strategy, which is wildly out of step with what the historical moment demands. By rousing people with fear, flouting of the rule of law, and creating an illusory society via spectacle and outright lies, America finds itself a confused and misled country. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us and Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Both are proven right in today’s political culture.

On the surface, the original edition of this book seemed to be about an individual, a musician who was part of a group that was more like a gang and defined one generation, inspiring another and dreaming the next. But it wasn’t and still isn’t.

It’s about seeing the world as interconnected and interdependent, an urban territory inhabited by us all. My essays from the original book inspired the feature length film of the same name and along with my new essays in this new edition makes up the frame whose walls and roof are hammered into place by the imagination of those who read these words. It’s about constructing a counternarrative founded in the reality of being alive and not the falsely conceived reality show packaged and sold to us like our daily bread. “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career,” Lloyd Dobler declares in Say Anything. “I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.” Lloyd, played by Strummer fan and friend John Cusack, proudly wears a Clash T-shirt during this soliloquy.

Artist Shepard Fairey’s Reagan & Friends mural series inspired by Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. Placed on wall in downtown IA by Shepard Fairey and OBEY Giant Team. (Courtesy Shepard Fairey.)

Following the first edition of this book, I came to work with many of the creative activists the book aimed to uplift: Chuck D, Billy Bragg, Wayne Kramer, Ian MacKaye, Edwidge Danticat, John Sayles, Hari Kunzru, Shepard Fairey, Eugene Hütz, Lewis Black, and more. And each, incomparably, stakes a claim in my film. Likewise, my work since has taken me around the world bringing into sharp focus something the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once told me: “This is where, more than ever, I was able to confirm that a book can have fingers that touch those who read it because the process of writing . . . opened my eyes to the many undiscovered roads that exist.” These experiences also reaffirmed my deeply held belief in the profound power we share in our common humanity. “I felt a growing desire to reach out and touch my fellow creatures throughout the world. Perhaps evil forces dominate the course of events, but I sense in the hearts of men, if not a sense of fraternity, but at least one of inquiry. This curiosity is still on the surface but it is better than nothing.” That’s Jean Renoir discussing his 1951 film The River. Nothing could be better and that’s the spirit embedded in the new edition as well as the film Let Fury Have the Hour.

In the beginning, the Clash tapped on my window, waving me to come outside and see that there was something more. Life as a series of moments tied together, at once long and hard but also swift and beautiful. Not static but fluid and freely moving. The past, the present, and the future vividly on display with a kaleidoscopic sound that burst out from Brixton and Brooklyn. It was my town, your block, our world represented in a sonic documentary, recalibrating the historical moment, slipping into the gaps between the shallow and narrow-minded who never cease in trying to take control of the world. The Clash announced: “Are you taking over/or are you taking orders?/Are you going backwards/or are you going forwards?” Am I? Are you? These were not questions. This was the eternal challenge that art has always posed: what kind of world do you want to live in?

Call it rebel music, protest songs, the hymn of the disenfranchised and dispossessed, crying out not from the record store bin but from the center of history. Anthems like no other for the people who wear “blue” and “brown.” People like my bricklayer father and uncles, like all the people I knew. It takes a nation of millions to kick out the jams, wait for the great leap forward, come rougher every time, and create dangerously. Stereoscopic CPR for me, painfully being left behind in the new world America was helping to transform. Ours was a generation shut out. Up until then, I floated through an old world my immigrant family existed in and a new world taking shape. One was slowly disappearing as the other erected barricades denying us entry. The light always flashing red: “Stay out! Your kind not welcome!” We were a generation given one choice: conform, hand in your citizenship, sit back, relax, consume. You can purchase your status and become somebody, anybody except yourself. If you can’t purchase your status, then you’re a nobody. A rigid era of reactionary politics and a culture defined by cynicism arose from the ashes of a society that once hoped to be great but instead wanted to dominate. The era of R&B plus T wanted to make cynics of us all. “What’s good for me and what can I get out of it” is all that matters, not what works well for everyone. Be skeptical, suspicious of anything not intended to make a profit. Trust only the freedom gained from the free market. They made everyone believe that what they were doing was natural and opposing it was some kind of slight against the divine order of things.

Grab the future by the face, the Clash said, and then I turned and the MC5 yelled in my ear, “Forget their logical desperation/utilize your imagination.” Contact. Connection. Music. Art. Life. Breath. Everything was bright and real for the first time. Everything was possible. My mind and heart could feel and see a world far beyond my lonely block. Forget about being nice and civil. Life was messy and hard and that was okay, actually a good thing. Don’t give in to what is easy and comfortable because in the course of one’s life that choice becomes difficult, a burden so emotionally heavy to maintain that it slowly saps your will to live. It’s a trap, caging our human spirit and preventing us from pushing forward to find the best of ourselves. Democracy is hard, but giving in, giving up was harder, much harder. The words reverberate, “Are you going backwards/or are you going forwards?” The answers are many and take different shapes but all point toward one thing: for, not against.

There was a huge world at the end of that block and the Clash was my initial navigator, but the journey never ends with new conductors and passengers jumping on and off for the ride. Time to sign up, become part of the gang, roll up our sleeves, and build. It’s not up to them, you, or me. It’s us. No in-between. No gray area. Hop on and join the movement of world citizenship. Reject cynicism and instead uplift creative response. Art can’t change things in and of itself, but it may just bring us together to communicate, harmonize, and create. Possibility. Reward. This isn’t a new discovery, a new revelation—but a timeless truth brought forward to the present in a way that makes anything possible. It’s easier than we’re conditioned to believe; we just have to dream. “The dream that we dream together is reality,” John Lennon once said. All good art comes from something ancient at its core, responding to and representing the quiet revolution of the human spirit, marching forward regardless of any obstacles in its path. “Art is the lie that tells the truth,” Picasso reminds us.

“Legislative Influence for Sale” from Shepard Fairey’s Reagan & Friends mural series inspired by Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Courtesy Shepard Fairey.)

These tensions are still white hot. They’re always walking alongside human history in the shadows, maybe even in our shadows. They just fade in and fade out. Much has happened in the time that’s passed since the first edition of this book was published. Wars started, seemingly lost, but without an end. Democracy spreading across South America. Maybe. The Arab Spring. Hurricanes, earthquakes, oil spills, nuclear meltdowns points west and east. The ghost of Tom Joad stirs as bank foreclosures reach historic levels. Austerity in Europe. Who are the cops and who are the robbers? They are one. “Police and thieves in the street (oh yeah)/Fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition,” Junior Murvin told us. The banks now rob us and the new robber barons, with leveraged buyouts and Ponzi schemes, rob everybody. “Police and thieves in the street (oh yeah)/Scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition,” the Clash reminded us. A onetime Chinese empire collapsed because it locked itself away from the rest of the world. A new one emerges with a neon sign flashing “open for business,” producing and selling anything to anyone, anywhere: a plastic trinket as disposable as the debt swallowing the world whole. Ai Weiwei knows the truth, deeming it all a “fake smile,” the words not even out of his mouth and then “bang, bang go the boots on the floor/clang clang go the Jail Guitar Doors.” Old political leaders are gone, new ones replace them. Was it change? The silence indicts us. Not handsome like the Seven Days of May’s sinister General Scott (played by Burt Lancaster) bent on taking over the government, the screams of protest come from a time-warped few stuck in a deluded, illusory loop of resurrecting a country that never died because it never lived. These aliens don’t require the dark sunglasses used in They Live! to see their true face. If they live, who dies?

Let Fury Have the Hour, the book and film, is a call to celebrate the art of living, of being for, not against. The Clash is our starting point, but they weren’t the first and certainly aren’t the last. They saw their role as storytellers, a new type of folk singer chronicling the demise of one revolution (industrial) and rise of another further alienating upheaval (technocratic). They drew a straight line back to those who went before (Erik Satie, Bartók, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Nina Simone, the MC5) as well as those who followed (Public Enemy, Manu Chao, Fugazi, Le Tigre, Gogol Bordello, Sleater-Kinney, the Kominas). They belonged to a community of rebels, cultural activists who understand that as human beings we share, despite unique personal details, a universal outline of living in this world. The effect is an opportunity to authentically and sincerely create a new narrative, one that transcends deluded politics and the artificial borders that split us apart. Stand for, not against.

Music (as well as art of any kind) is most powerful when it illuminates the connections that should be clear but because of forces that conspire to separate and divide are now blurred, leading to a belief that these connections don’t exist. If no one knows they exist, they disappear, and all that’s left are the differences, manufactured and manipulated to continue splitting the world apart. Music counters this by serving as an antidote, injecting a luminosity of spirit that inspires a new generation to aspire to something more. By placing ourselves—this new “we”—on the historical continuum of creative responders—world citizens—who see their work as something more. It’s the mirror that returns not a reflection of who we are on the surface but a truer portrait of the essence of our humanity. It’s a challenge, a responsibility to go farther. An urgent plea that’s impossible to ignore: For.

Artist Shepard Fairey’s “Enjoy Small Privileges. Ignore Large Transgressions.” (Courtesy Shepard Fairey.)

The Clash—and more powerfully listening (music), moving (skateboarding), writing (graffiti), watching (film), and learning (literature)—allowed me to lay claim to the world that at one time felt foreign. I could reimagine what kind of world I wanted to live in but also imagine being a key player in shaping history. I could invent alternatives and then apply them in a way that I could do something to breakdown the illusion of separation. It awakened in me the connection we share with all people, engaging me to understand that I could speak the way I breathe. It gave me life as a participant. I knew that I could dream, awake in the moment, as each epoch imagines the one to follow. What emanated from the vinyl grooves spinning on the turntable while Reagan and Thatcher reduced and then eroded democracy was much more than music; it was an injection of courage and a rejection of fear, a creative birth that remains liberating. It broadcasts that the true war is between being for and being against. It still asks, Which side are you on?

Act I

MOVING OUT LOUD

Joe Strummer during the musician’s series of performances at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, April 5, 2001. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

LET FURY HAVE THE HOUR

The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Pioneering punk rock musician Joe Strummer, former front man of the Clash and political activist, died of a rare heart condition at his home in Somerset, Broomfield, England, at the age of fifty on December 22, 2002. Barely twenty-five years earlier the Clash had burst onto the London music scene to become one of the great rebel rock bands of all time. Fusing a mélange of musical styles with riotous live performances and left-wing political activism, it inspires many to this day.

By the mid-1970s, England’s postwar prosperity was melting away into rising unemployment, shrinking social service programs, and increasing poverty. The wrecked economy fueled an incendiary social situation as racism, xenophobia, and police brutality became the order of the day. Mounting feelings of anger and frustration, fused with a deepening sense of isolation, left much of English youth feeling hopeless. Trying to make sense of this mess, many found a means of expression in punk rock. More than just hard driving rock ’n’ roll, punk rock was heralded by many as a counterculture movement, a philosophy, and a way of life. Punk stood in direct opposition, aesthetically and politically, to the reigning rock establishment—then dominated by a style called “glam rock”—and it attacked conventional society. Glam was pretentious, overproduced, slick, and bourgeois. Punk rock, in stark contrast, was angry, loud, aggressive, and rooted in working-class alienation. With its four chords, simple melodies, fast tempo, and ironic lyrics, it proved irresistible.

Strummer told me the Clash was inspired by groups like the MC5 of Detroit, a cultural organ of the White Panthers. “We wanted to be more like them, using our music as a loud voice of protest . . . punk rock, at the heart of it, should be protest music.” While most bands spiraled into ridiculous caricatures of themselves, the Clash, under Strummer’s influence, became the definitive punk rock band. They drew a line in the sand and dared all to cross it and join them. While the Sex Pistols spent their time being reactionary, tawdry, and snide, the Clash were active, thoughtful, and serious.

Throughout his twenty-five years in music, Strummer touched millions. Billy Bragg, a fellow English musician and activist inspired by Strummer’s socially conscious music, said it best, describing Strummer as unwavering in “his commitment to making political pop culture.” Living true to his words, Strummer held on to his political ideals throughout his life in spite of intense media rancor and the demanding expectations of fans, who clung to his every word as if it were scripture. The pressure would have crushed a lesser talent.

Like many others growing up during the Reagan era, I discovered the Clash and had my worldview transformed. It was nothing like I had ever heard before. The music’s energy, spirit, and searing lyrics gave voice to feelings of alienation and hopelessness, as well as anger and defiance, that I had not yet articulated.

Through his songwriting Strummer consistently critiqued capitalism, advocated racial justice, and opposed imperialism. He showed young people alternatives to the complacency, opportunism, and political ambivalence that dominate popular culture. Strummer’s music remains an enduring legacy of radicalism, defiance, and resistance.

CREATIVE RESISTANCE

In April 2002, I had the good fortune to meet with Joe Strummer and discuss a wide range of issues. One theme emerged repeatedly in these conversations—using the past to better understand the present and shape the future. This outlook was fundamental to Strummer’s creative activism. The events of May 1968 in Paris, the student and labor movements of Italy’s hot autumn, and the election and overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile were key events that Strummer cited to explain his politicization. Punk rock, and Strummer in particular, would borrow heavily from these movements—not just ideologically but aesthetically as well. “Punk rock for me was a social movement,” he states. “We tried to do the things politically we thought were important to our generation and hopefully would inspire another generation to go even further.”

As a musician, Strummer redefined music and reaffirmed the principles of committed and intelligent opposition. He became involved in many different movements and supported many causes before they were fashionable. The Clash were at the forefront of the Rock Against Racism movement founded in the 1970s to combat the rise of the far-right National Front. Never afraid of controversy, Strummer pushed the Clash to support publicly the H-Block protests in Northern Ireland, which began in 1976 when the British took away the political status of IRA “prisoners.” He performed for the last time on November 15, 2002, at a benefit for striking London firefighters. For someone who used his music to galvanize and promote progressive action, this final performance was most fitting.

Strummer’s unique partnership with Mick Jones, his main collaborator and lead guitarist in the Clash, brought a revolutionary sense of excitement to modern music. Strummer and Jones quickly recognized the power of rap music that was just emerging from New York City’s underground in the late 1970s. “When we came to the U.S., Mick stumbled upon a music shop in Brooklyn that carried the music of Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, the Sugar Hill Gang . . . these groups were radically changing music and they changed everything for us.”

With typical Clash inventiveness, they became one of the first white groups to incorporate rap into their music. As a tribute to the pathbreaking Sugar Hill Gang, the Clash recorded “The Magnificent Seven,” one of their best-known and most important singles. Exemplifying the Clash’s commitment to challenging social conventions, they enlisted several New York City rap groups to join their huge Clash on Broadway tour. This was extremely controversial at the time, since combining the two disparate audiences and musical genres was widely predicted to result in racial mayhem.

Reflecting on the group’s influence, I suggested to Strummer that hip-hop has replaced punk rock as the dominant political pop cultural force in spirit, vitality, and creativity. He responded, “No doubt about it, particularly in respect to addressing the ills of capitalism and providing a smart class analysis, underground hip-hop, not the pop-culture stuff, picked up where punk left off and ran full steam ahead.”

THE GREATEST REBEL ROCK BAND OF ALL TIME

On New Year’s Eve 1976, the Clash opened for the top-billed Sex Pistols. Impressed, the Sex Pistols asked the Clash to join them on the infamous 1977 Anarchy in the UK tour. The wild antics by some of the bands drew intense media scrutiny and caused punk rock to be labeled public enemy number one. While parents, police, and politicians sounded the alarm, young people were hooked.

Strummer, a former busker and squatter, characterized the early days as filled with hope and frustration. “Many in the punk scene were confused, mixing various political ideologies.” The effect was that punk rock musicians were easy targets for ridicule and attack by the monarchy, media, Parliament, and the police. According to Strummer, the objective was to present a clearer, unified stance with a more thoughtful and relevant political message. It was obvious to Strummer early on that punk rock was vulnerable to cooptation by the music industry with the eager assistance of opportunistic musicians. He issued an indictment in a song, “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”:

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, hah you think it’s funny

Turning rebellion into money

All over people changing their votes

Along with their overcoats

If Adolf Hitler flew in today

They’d send a limousine anyway

Strummer blamed many of the bands of the time for allowing punk rock to degenerate into a “shameful product hawked by the record companies” and “used to promote right wing ideals.” He refused to join the effort to dilute the creative and social aspects of the punk rock philosophy. The Clash’s eponymous first studio album clearly marked where they stood on things.

The album addressed social issues, including classism, racism, and police and state-sanctioned brutality. By bringing together a broad range of musical influences that had previously been segregated by music industry marketing strategies, it significantly changed modern music. There were brilliant covers of old rock classics, infusions of R&B, fractured pop, a well-balanced mix of ska, dub, and reggae, and of course what became the signature sound of the Clash: thought provoking lyrics sung in Strummer’s unique cockney accent, a blistering and angry style layered over aggressive compositions.

The Clash’s music, coupled with its explosive live performances, let people know that they had something important to say on the state of things. Although produced for next to nothing, the Clash’s first album became the largest selling American import in music history. Americans loved the Clash’s music and message, and the record companies took note.

“The same issues we were struggling against then are even more important now like British and U.S. imperialism.” Strummer continues, “when we wrote ‘I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.,’ it touched a nerve for young people on both sides of the Atlantic.” The lyrics are sharp and compelling:

Yankee dollar talk

To the dictators of the world

In fact it’s giving orders

An’ they can’t afford to miss a word

Other songs addressed the growing disaffection young people felt as they faced the harsh realities of the job market in 1976. “Career Opportunities” became a classic protest song for many:

They offered me the office, offered me the shop

They said I’d better take anything they’d got

Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?

Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock . . .

Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock

Career opportunity, the ones that never knock

“Industrial society offered nothing really, and as we moved to this more fragmented society with more emphasis on technology the state was looking for us to work according to our class . . . it all seemed about controlling class, particularly the lower classes.”

CLASHING WITH AMERICA

In 1979, the Clash headed to America. In between this tour and the first album the Clash had conquered the UK and Europe. They released another album, Give ’Em Enough Rope, and were in the process of putting together the Clash “masterpiece,” London Calling. “Two devastating things happened at this time,” Strummer recalls. “Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of England and Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S. . . . it was hard to tell who would be worse but we knew that a tremendous struggle was ahead . . . their tendencies leaned to the far-right if not fascism.”

The Clash always drew inspiration from, and paid homage to, other rebel musicians, especially black musicians from the United States and the Caribbean. But collaborating with these musicians brought them face-to-face with the racism of the music industry and some of their fans. While touring the United States, the Clash featured pioneering American rock ’n’ roll artist Bo Diddley as their opening act. Diddley was a hero to Strummer. The Clash were excited that the tour would help them connect with their American audience. However, they were shocked by the intense racism that Diddley’s presence elicited in the South. “The record label was unsupportive from the word go because Give ’Em [Enough Rope] did not sell like our first album, they hated our choice of Bo Diddley and we refused to pick a different support act and resisted their attempt to repackage us as new wave.” Strummer and his band mates were determined to resist pressure from industry bosses to refashion punk rock into the more commercial, less political, and more docile new wave mold.

The lack of support from the record label was just the start. Strummer recalled the bad press that greeted the Clash in the United States labeling them “evil punk rockers” looking to “spread communism to American youth.” The short eight-date tour further politicized Strummer. It opened his eyes to the “commodification of music” and “exposed the terrible resistance and hatred of anything that attempts to grow outside the dominant economic and social structure.” On the other hand, shows like the legendary performance at New York’s Palladium taught Strummer an important lesson. “We must use negative situations,” Strummer said, “to refocus and redirect anger and frustration and fashion music that is powerful to all who listen, always upsetting the status quo.”

LONDON CALLS AND SO DO THE SANDINISTAS

Following the American tour, the Clash began their next album, London Calling. It showed maturity and growth in many areas. Musically it incorporated roots music, folk, New Orleans R&B, reggae, pop, lounge jazz, ska, hard rock, and punk. Recorded in New York City, the landmark album remains influential. I related to Strummer my own experience of hearing the album for the first time. The themes, music, and attitude sharply mirrored my own reality as a kid in an immigrant family growing up in an industrial park in the mid-1980s.

The song “Clampdown” affected me deeply. It is a stark account of work in a Darwinian capitalist society. At its core, the song presents the contradictions which lead us to believe that if we work hard, don’t complain, and don’t rock the boat, we can get ahead. Step on anybody, it doesn’t matter; just look out for number one.

The song expresses the anxieties of working-class youth who are restricted to menial jobs, positions in the state’s repressive apparatus, or membership in racist right-wing movements.

You grow up and you calm down

You’re working for the clampdown

You start wearing the blue and brown

You’re working for the clampdown

So you got someone to boss around

It makes you feel big now

You drift until you brutalize

You made your first kill now

The same song advocates an alternative, a common Strummer theme, the need for working-class rebellion:

The judge said five to ten—but I say double that again

I’m not working for the clampdown

No man born with a living soul

Can be working for the clampdown

Kick over the wall, cause governments to fall

How can you refuse it?

Let fury have the hour, anger can be power

D’you know that you can use it?

“Yeah” Strummer begins, “this song and our overall message was to wake-up, pay attention to what really is going on around you, politically, socially all of it . . . before you know it you have become what you despise.” The album catapulted the Clash into the international spotlight. They played and the world listened. Being the biggest rock band on the planet at the time brought the inevitable harsh criticism, particularly in regard to the group’s politics.

The red baiting and right-wing attacks increased tenfold when the Clash publicly supported the Sandinista revolution. “Our support of the Sandinistas was the worst thing in the world we could do, according to our record label,” Strummer recalled. “The label heads said our music would not sell—too political—especially in America where the Reagan administration was conspiring to destroy the Sandinistas.” Strummer wrote “Washington Bullets” criticizing U.S. involvement in Central and South America, while noting Jimmy Carter’s last-minute withdrawal of aid to the Somoza regime:

As every cell in Chile will tell

The cries of the tortured men

Remember Allende, and the days before,

Before the army came

Please remember Victor Jara,

In the Santiago Stadium,

Es verdad—those Washington bullets again

For the very first time ever,

When they had a revolution in Nicaragua,

There was no interference from America

Human rights in America

Well the people fought the leader,

And up he flew,

With no Washington bullets what else could he do?

In 1980, the Clash released the triple album Sandinista! Their long simmering dispute with their label, Epic, became a pitched battle when the band demanded that the album be priced affordably as the usual price of one album. Epic finally relented, but only after the Clash agreed to cover the difference out of their pockets. “Political decisions never balance out well with business unless of course they’re capitalist-based political decisions . . . if we did an album in support of the Contras it would have been different,” Strummer joked. Whether due to Epic’s resistance, the political controversy, or to fans put off by the group’s constant musical experimentation, Sandinista! sales were disappointing compared to London Calling. Nonetheless, the Clash inspired a lively following.

A BIG HIT AND THEN A CRASH

Combat Rock, released in 1982, again highlighted the social consciousness and leftist politics that forever distinguish the band and Strummer. With the release of the single “Rock the Casbah,” the Clash had a huge hit on their hands. The song had been written as an exuberant response to an Islamic cleric’s ban on rock music. In an ironic twist, imperialists have appropriated the song to their own ends. “You know the U.S. military played this song in the first Gulf War to the troops and now are using it again as they prepare for war,” Strummer shared. “This is just typical and despicable.”

At Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, in 1982, the Clash played a series of sold-out shows reminiscent of the Beatles performance there many years before. These were the last shows with Mick Jones, who was forced out of the band by Strummer and the band’s manager. Strummer confided, “I committed one of the greatest mistakes of my life with the sacking of Mick.” After releasing an atrocious album in 1985, the Clash broke up for good. Sadly, Strummer and Jones did not share a stage again until the benefit concert that would be Strummer’s final public performance.

“I’M GONNA KEEP FIGHTIN’ FOR WHAT I BELIEVE IS RIGHT”

Strummer’s originality characterizes the man and the musician. With the backing band Mescaleros, Strummer was reborn. Remarkably, his new music displays a steadfast work ethic both creatively and politically. Irrespective of what he had accomplished up to this point in his career, he seemed to believe that his best work lay ahead.

Strummer and the Mescaleros recorded two highly innovative studio albums, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style in 1999, and Global A Go-Go in 2001. The music Strummer recorded with the Mescaleros is as culturally diverse a sound as I’ve heard. There are the familiar influences of rockabilly, traditional rock ’n’ roll, and R&B, but added to the mix are new sounds. Strummer brought together music from Africa, Latin America, and the West Indies as well as heavy doses of hip-hop style beats.

The albums showcase a renewed, vibrant Joe Strummer producing music that is remarkably different from his previous work. I mentioned that I watched a taped interview in which he cautioned young people not to buy his new music if all they wanted was a replay of “Rock the Casbah.” I ask him to elaborate. “Simple,” he said. “New bands are going around saying we love the Clash but they have no sense or understanding of history” neither culturally nor politically. He added that they “pick up the new stuff and expect to hear songs like ‘Rock the Casbah,’ which is not at all what I am doing now and furthermore ‘Casbah’ is easy.” The word “easy” was a serious putdown from an artist who always worked to be challenging.

Like his work with the Clash, the new music with the Mescaleros is original and political, but more insightful and mature. With the musical growth there is a deepening of political consciousness reflected in stunning compositions and poetic, freely associative lyrics concerning a host of global subjects. Both albums focus on many social issues, but most poignantly Global A Go-Go captures Strummer’s take on how war, poverty, and intolerance are ripping the world apart. Songs like “Johnny Appleseed” chart the impact of globalization and “Bhindi Bhagee” discusses the need for ethnic tolerance. The songs are intelligent Woody Guthrie–like meditations but with a multicultural internationalist awareness that stands against global capitalism. “Shaktar Donetsk” laments the fate of illegal refugees seeking haven in England, who suffocated in a smuggler’s truck:

Welcome to Britain! In the Third Millennium

This is the diary of a Macedonian

He went to Britain in the back of lorry

Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t hurry

Said the man with a plan

He said, if you really wanna go

You’ll get there in the end

If you really wanna go

Alive or dead my friend

Well you can levitate you know

Long as the money’s good you’re in

Strummer left much unfinished. With Bono of U2 and Dave Stewart formerly of the Eurythmics, he was working on a song in tribute to Nelson Mandela titled “48864,” after Mandela’s prison number. They were going to perform it together at the end of the Mandela SOS AIDS benefit concert for Africa on Robben Island on February 2. The Clash had planned a one-night-only reunion at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in March 2003.

Speaking on the day of Strummer’s death, Billy Bragg found the right words once again: “Joe was always breaking new ground musically and politically . . . he is one of the last artists who was not afraid to be on the left politically, a thorn in the side of capitalism.” Chuck D, path-breaking rap artist and founding member of Public Enemy, credited Strummer and groups like the Clash with “showing me that music can be a powerful social force and it must be used to challenge the system.”

At the end of each show, Strummer and the Mescaleros performed a cover of the classic resistance song “The Harder They Come, the Harder They Fall” by reggae great Jimmy Cliff. As usual, Strummer put his indelible mark and unique spin on the song. Playing the same Telecaster guitar he started out with over twenty-five years before and using his cutting, brash voice with uncompromising bluster, he let us know:

And I keep on fighting for the things I want

Though I know that when you’re dead you can’t

But I’d rather be a free man in my grave

Than living as a puppet or a slave . . .

_____________________

Originally published in Monthly Review, June 2003.

INTRODUCTION TO

“THE VERY ANGRY CLASH”

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

The year punk broke in England has been immortalized as “year zero.” Everything that came before 1976 never existed; punk promised something completely new and above all better. It was a movement away from bloated rock stars and overproduced music. Bank clerk Mark Perry was among the hordes of youth who were transfixed and transformed by the new punk scene. Perry found himself in the middle of “something big” and he wanted to be a part of it. His involvement would take the form of the first comprehensive punk zine, Sniffin’ Glue and Other Rock ’n’ Roll Habits. More than just a fanzine, it was a magnificent music sheet that translated punk’s DIY ethic, compelling visceral style, and strident social power into an accessible document for all to read. Perry named the zine after the Ramones’ “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” because, as he explained in Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory, “I thought that if anything summed up the basic approach to the new music, it was the lowest form of drug taking.”

The Rock On record stall in Chinatown’s Newport Court in London was the first to sell Sniffin’ Glue. The first issue, which appropriately featured the Ramones, sold very quickly. In that issue, Perry described the Ramones as giving him “power and freedom and that’s what I want.” Just as punk music was straightforward all-systems-go, there was a hunger for the type of music journalism that told the reader directly what was happening in the new music scene that seemed poised to take over England. Shunning a glitz or glam approach, Perry filled the gap between the music and the audience with witty, well-informed, timely writings that contrasted sharply with the lackluster media attention, which was mostly negative or derisive, enveloping punk at the time. Even more, Sniffin’ Glue served as a counterpoint to the slickly produced magazines that were stuck reporting on the arena rock stars and glam bands that dominated the early part of the 1970s.

The articles went right from the typewriter to the Xerox machine. Titles were handwritten. No fancy graphic design and layout here. Illustrations were limited to a few simple drawings, and it wasn’t until the third issue, featuring Brian James of the Damned on the cover, that pictures found their way into Sniffin’ Glue. The first time Joe Strummer’s music was discussed in Sniffin’ Glue, he was not yet a member of the Clash but was still with the 101ers. In the first issue, Perry reviewed the 101ers’ single “Keys to Your Heart,” describing it as “a really great song by a really great band.” In issue 3½, the Clash would make the first of several appearances in the magazine with Perry branding the group as the “most powerful band on scene” in his review of the 100 Club Punk Festival.

It was no surprise when Sniffin’ Glue provided the first good interview and glimpse into the world of the Clash, “The Very Angry Clash,” written by Steve Walsh. Perry and Walsh had managed to arrange an interview with the Clash at their rehearsal studios near the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm (Camden, London). According to Perry, meeting the Clash was like going to “a secret training camp for urban guerrillas.” Perry added that the time with the Clash “proved the band were totally committed to their music and they understood that the best way to avoid being misrepresented in the press was to put on a united front.” He concluded by describing the Clash “as the most important band to emerge” up to that point; “if anyone was going to win the revolution I felt it was going to be the Clash.”

As Strummer points out in the documentary Westway to the World (2000), Sniffin’ Glue offered the first true punk rock criticism and analysis. The magazine would be instrumental in getting the music and message of punk out to many who otherwise might not have been exposed to the scene. Perry boldly achieved one of the promises of punk: if you do it yourself, you will find yourself. When he found his voice, Sniffin’ Glue became a vital part of the punk rock moment. Perry and his contributors covered the punk scene for just one year, producing twelve issues. Nearly three decades after they banged out the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue, it remains an important commentary on a music scene that quickly faded away.

THE VERY ANGRY CLASH

By Steve Walsh

All the power’s in the hands,

Of people rich enough to buy it,

While we walk the streets

Too chicken to even try it.

And everybody does what they’re told to,

And everybody eats supermarket soul-food,

White riot!

—“WHITE RIOT,” THE CLASH

The Clash rehearsal studios are situated somewhere between Dingwalls and the Roundhouse. Inside it has been decorated—pink and black color scheme—by the band. The downstairs studio, where the band rehearses, is equipped with a jukebox; pink drapes hang from the ceiling—very tasteful. I talked to three of the band (Mick Jones—guitar, Paul Simonon—bass, and Joe Strummer—guitar) in the upstairs office.

Mick tells me that he and Paul have been together for about six months and with Joe since the 101ers broke up. They told me boredom inspires their songs. “It’s just that I can’t stand not doing anything,” Joe explained.

Steve Walsh: What’s the name about, why call yourselves Clash?

Paul Simonon: Well, it’s a clash against things that are going on . . . the music scene, and all that we’re hoping to change quite a lot.

Steve Walsh: Does this mean you’re political?

Mick Jones: Yes, we’re definitely political!

Joe Strummer: We wanna be the apathy party of Great Britain, so that all the people who don’t vote go out and don’t vote for us!

Mick Jones: We’re really into encouraging creativity. . . . We ain’t a bunch of raving fascists!

Steve Walsh: Are you a bunch of raving anarchists?

Joe Strummer: I don’t believe in all that anarchy bollocks!

Mick Jones: Yeah, anarchists believe in lawlessness. . . . Look, the important thing is to encourage people to do things for themselves, think for themselves, and stand up for what their rights are.

Steve Walsh: You hate apathy?

Mick Jones: Oh, I fuckin’ hate apathy but I hate ignorance more than anything.

Steve Walsh: Do you try to put this over in your songs?

Mick Jones: All our songs are about being honest, right? The situation as we see it, right?

Steve Walsh: Right! So the songs relate directly to you and your environment?

Mick Jones: Right, otherwise we’d be writing bullshit!

Steve Walsh: So, what do you want to happen today?

Joe Strummer: What I’m most aware of at the moment, is that most people in London are going out every night to see groups or something and they’re making do with rubbish and because everything else around is rubbish, it’s not immediately apparent that it’s rubbish. People are prepared to accept rubbish, anything that’s going. I mean, every single LP anybody plays me in any flat I go to and they say, “this is good” . . . it’s rubbish and they have got nuthin’ else to play . . . the thing is they’ve got to think it’s good, otherwise they go insane . . . .

Mick Jones: . . . And it’s all shit!

Steve Walsh: What’s shit?

Mick Jones: All them records, right . . . you know, you can’t go out and buy a record ’cause you know it’s just, like, fuckin’ bollocks . . . just a load of shit!

Joe Strummer: The only good one is that Ramones one.

Mick Jones: Yes, the Ramones record is good. [Doorbell rings—in strolls Mark P. to spoil my fun.]

HERITAGE

Joe Strummer: It’s our heritage. . . . What are we livin’ for, two-room apartment on the second floor. That’s English, not what’s goin’ on now.

Mick Jones: They’re the most important English band. Like Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter always spoke to the kids straight and even when they went to the States and they were getting a bit flash and a bit dopey he still used to sing about the dole and he had to translate for the Americans and say, “Look, this is really the welfare.” They don’t know what the fuckin’ dole is, where as we’re all down the dole anyway, coppin’ our money off Rod Stewart’s taxes!

In 1977 I hope I go to heaven,

’Cos I been too long on the dole,

And I can’t work at all.

Danger, stranger! You better paint your face,

No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones, in 1977!

—“1977,” BY THE CLASH

Steve Walsh: What do you think is wrong with people today?

Mick Jones: They’re apathetic . . . boring . . . boring music bores me! Boring ’cause it’s not new, boring ’cause it’s not . . .

Joe Strummer: It’s a lie . . .

Mick Jones: . . . They ain’t pushin’ themselves nowhere; they ain’t being creative.

Joe Strummer: Where’s that picture of the George Hatcher Band?

Paul Simonon: Oh yeah, that’s a real joke, that is . . .

Joe Strummer: We found this to be . . .

Mick Jones: Hilarious, have you seen it? [They hold up an advertisement for the George Hatcher Band showing two members in typical stage pose.]

Joe Strummer: I mean, the whole thing is a lie, it means nothing.

Mick Jones: Except that they’re on tour with Dr. Feelgood.

Joe Strummer: All this crap like, oh yeah, they’ve got long hair and he’s got his arm up here and look at his cowboy shirt and the trousers.

Steve Walsh: What have clothes got to do with it?

Mick Jones: Well, this is what rock ’n’ roll’s supposed to look like . . .

Joe Strummer: It’s a state of mind.

Mick Jones: What’s the difference between this ad and the cover of last week’s NME? It’s the same pose, ain’t it? I think that’s the same pair of trousers, from “Jean Machine.” [Mick is referring to the previous week’s cover pic of the Rod’s Dave Higgs.]

Mark P.: But they’re a pair of trousers!

Joe Strummer: No, you can’t say that’s clothes and this is music; it’s a state of mind, a complete thing. If anything was going on in that bloke’s head he would do something about it.

Mick Jones: To show he was a person, he would’ve done something to himself. Now, he’s just showing that he’s one of the many—a consumer, i.e., I eat shit all the time!

Steve Walsh: Everyone’s a consumer. I mean, if you go down to Sex and buy a pair of leather trousers you’re still a consumer. That’s the odd thing about the ’70s, in order to change society you must first consume it. [You can tell he’s been to art school—Ed.]

Mick Jones: Yeah, but if it comes out of creativity. Some people change and some people stay as they are, bozos, and they don’t try to change themselves in any way.

Joe Strummer: We deal in junk, you know, I just realized that the other day. We deal in junk. We deal in, like, the rubbish bin. What we’ve got is what other people have put in the rubbish bin. Like Mick’s shirt was gonna be put in the bin until he paid 10p for it. I mean, you ain’t gonna go down to Sex with yer ten quid stuffed in yer pocket and buy some stupid . . . er . . . I dunno, I’ve never even been down there.

Mick Jones: I think it’s a bit easy to go down there and look great. I mean, their stuff’s pretty good. Looks good to me, but I think the way we do it is much more accessible to kids ’cause anyone, at very little price and it encourages ’em to do something for themselves. It’s to do with personal freedom . . . I don’t think it’s just the trousers though, I mean, the trousers reflect the mind.

Joe Strummer: Like trousers, like brain!

White riot, I wanna riot!

White riot, a riot of my own!

Steve Walsh: Would you say your image is violent or suggestive of violence?

Mick Jones: It reflects our “no-nonsense” attitude, an attitude of not takin’ too much shit. I don’t like violence though.

Steve Walsh: What do you think of the aura of violence that surrounds the Pistols? I mean, it can easily get out of hand.

Joe Strummer: I think it’s a healthy sign that people aren’t going to sleep in the back row.

Mick Jones: I think people have got to find out where their direction lies and channel their violence into music or something creative.

Steve Walsh: Thing is, you talk about being creative but say the thing got so popular that we had all those fuckin’ footballs and discos and all that lot coming down to see Pistols gigs. They’d take the violence at face value and go fuckin’ crazy!

Mick Jones: So you think it can get out of hand?

Steve Walsh: You bet it can . . .

Mick Jones: It got out of hand on Tuesday [100 Club fest glass-throwing incident].

Steve Walsh: I reckon it could get worse.

Mick Jones: I definitely think it could escalate but the alternative is for people to vent their frustrations through music, or be a painter or a poet or whatever you wanna be. Vent your frustrations; otherwise it’s just like clocking in and clocking out . . . clock in at the 100 Club, every one comes in, everyone clocks out. It ain’t no different.

Steve Walsh: How much change do you want? D’you want a revolution?

Joe Strummer: Well . . . yeah!

Steve Walsh: A bloodless one or do you want just total chaos?

Joe Strummer: No, I’m just not into chaos, and I don’t believe it when people say they are ’cause you’ve got to be a special type . . .

Steve Walsh: Of maniac?

Joe Strummer: Well, a Frenchman about 100 years ago could be into chaos ’cause it was possible then, but nowadays, this is like sleepy town. So, when someone tells me they’re into chaos I don’t believe it. What I would like to see happen is, very much . . . I realize a lot of people are quite happy, you know, at that market down the road from here. All them people, they’re as ’appy as sand boys and I’d just like to make loads of people realize what’s goin’ on. Like, all those secrets in the government and all that money changing hands and every now and then it comes to light and someone gets sacked and someone else comes in the backdoor, know what I mean? I’d like to get all that out in the open and just see what’s goin’ on. I just feel like no one’s telling me anything, even if I read every paper, watch TV, and listen to the radio!

RADIO

Steve Walsh: What was that with the radio at the 100 Club gig?

Joe Strummer: Well, all that was . . . I’d been lucky and bought a cheap transistor in a junk shop for ten bob and it worked quite well. I’d been goin’ around with it on my ear for a few days just to see what it was like. When someone broke a string I got it out and it just happened to be something about Northern Ireland.

Mick Jones: A state of emergency . . .

Steve Walsh: Yeah, bombs . . . I thought it was interesting; I thought maybe it was part of the way you approach your audience.

Mick Jones: That was part of it, but we’ve tried other things since then, like at the Roundhouse . . . er . . . we “talked” to the audience . . .

Joe Strummer: But they were half asleep . . .

Mick Jones: The ones who were awake were pretty clever.

Joe Strummer: I didn’t think so, I mean you could hear them, I couldn’t. How can I answer smartass jibes when I can’t hear ’em? All I could hear was some girl sayin’, “nyah, nyah, nyah!” and then everyone goes, “aha, ha, ha.” [Bursts out laughing.] If you can’t hear what they’re saying, then you can’t really get out your great wit!

Mick Jones: Well, I’m sure they were funny ’cause everyone was laughing at ’em but when Joe said something like, you know, “Fuck off, fatso!” there was just complete silence! [More laughter.]

Steve Walsh: So, what do you wanna do to your audience?

Joe Strummer: Well, there’s two ways; there’s that confronting thing, right! No . . . three ways. Make ’em feel a bit . . . threaten ’em, startle ’em and second—I know it’s hard when you see rock ’n’ roll bands, to hear what the lyrics are but we’re workin’ on getting the words out and makin’ ’em mean something and the third thing is rhythm. Rhythm is the thing ’cause if it ain’t got rhythm then you can just sling it in the dustbin!

He’s in love with rock ’n’ roll, wooaghhh!

He’s in love with getting stoned, woooagh!

He’s in love with Janie Jones, wooagggh!

But he don’t like his boring job, no—oo!

—“JANIE JONES,” BY THE CLASH

ANY INFLUENCE?

Joe Strummer: That’s a tricky question . . . Paul’s are the Ethiopians, and what’s that other band?

Paul Simonon: The Rulers.

Joe Strummer: I’ve never heard of ’em!

Mick Jones: Up until now, I thought everything was the cat’s knickers and every group was great. I used to go to all the concerts all the time and that’s all I did. Until, somehow, I stopped believing in it all, I just couldn’t face it. I s’pose the main influences are Mott the Hoople, the Kings, the Stones, but I just stopped believing. Now, what’s out there (points out the window)—that’s my influence!

Steve Walsh: What changed your way of looking at things?

Mick Jones: I just found out it weren’t true. I stopped reading all the music papers ’cause I used to believe every word. If they told me to go out and buy this record and that, then, I’d just go out and do it. You know, save up me paper round and go out and buy shit and now I’m in a position where I’m selling the records ’cause I don’t have much money and they’re showing me how much shit’s worth! ’Cause I paid two quid for them albums and they give me ten pence down at the record shop, that’s how much they think you’re worth!

MICK

Mick Jones: I’ve played with so many arse ’oles and my whole career has been one long audition. Like, I was the last kid on my block to pick up a guitar ’cause all the others were repressing me and saying, “No, you don’t want to do that, you’re too ugly, too spotty, you stink!” . . . and I believed ’em. I was probably very gullible and then I realized that they weren’t doing too well and I said, ah fuck, I can do just as well!

London’s burning with boredom,

London’s burning, dial 999!

Steve Walsh: What do you think of the scene so far?

Mick Jones: Well, it’s coming from us, the Pistols, Subway Sect, and maybe the Buzzcocks. That’s it, there are no other bands!

Mark P.: What do you think of bands that just go out and enjoy themselves?

Mick Jones: You know what I think? I think they’re a bunch of ostriches; they’re sticking their heads in the fuckin’ sand! They’re enjoying themselves at the audience’s expense. They’re takin’ their audience for a ride, feeding the audience shit!

Mark P.: What if the audience say they’re enjoying themselves?

Joe Strummer: Look, the situation is far too serious for enjoyment, man. Maybe when we’re fifty-five we can play tubas in the sun, that’s alright then to enjoy yourselves, but now!

Mick Jones: I think if you wanna fuckin’ enjoy yourselves you sit in an armchair and watch TV, but if you wanna get actively involved, ’cause rock ’n’ roll’s about rebellion. Look, I had this out with Bryan James of the Damned and we were screamin’ at each other for about three hours ’cause he stands for enjoying himself and I stand for change and creativity.

Joe Strummer: I’d rather play to an audience and them not enjoy it, if we were doin’ what we thought was honest. Rather than us go up and sing, “Get outta Denver, baby,” and do what we didn’t think was honest.

Mick Jones: If they enjoy us then they come with us. If you ask me what I think of groups like the Hot Rods, I think they’re a load of bozos and they’re not telling the audience to do anything other than stay as they are. They’re playing old stuff and I don’t think much of their originals. The situation is where the Hod Rod’s audience are bozos and it’s easy to identify with a bozo. I mean, obviously they’re goin’ down. . . . like, people queuing outside the Marquee, they’ve got a great thing goin’ for themselves, but it’s not to do with change, it’s just keeping people as they are!

Steve Walsh: What do you think the scene needs now?

Mick Jones: Ten more honest bands!

Joe Strummer: More venues . . .

Mick Jones: More events!

Joe Strummer: . . . Just more people who care; if we could get our hands on the money and get something together . . . immediately. None of the promoters running any of the venues in London care. Ron Watts, the 100 Club bloke, has done something but no one else really cares. They don’t give a shit about the music, not one shit!

Originally appeared in Sniffin’ Glue and Other Rock ’n’ Roll Habits, September 1976.

GREATNESS FROM GARAGELAND

By Peter Silverton

Unannounced, to say the least, a kid in boots, suspenders, and short-cropped hair clambers through the photographers’ pit and up onto the stage of London’s Rainbow Theatre. Benignly ignored by band, stage crew, and security alike, he wanders around the stage a little drunkenly, uncertain quite what to do now that he’s made it up onto the hallowed, sacrosanct boards and is not making quite the impression he thought. Decision flickers across his face, lit by the giant spots, and he grabs hold of the singer’s mike and prepares to join in on the harmonies. When the singer wants his mike back, the kid’s frozen to the stand in fear-drenched exhilaration so the singer has to shout the lines over the kid’s shoulder while the kid pumps in the response lines on perfect cue.

The encore over, the band leaves the stage and the kid’s stuck there in front of two and a half thousand people and unsure what to do next. With the merest jerk of his head the bass player motions the kid to join the band backstage and everyone goes home happy.

Sounds like some fantasy of what rock ’n’ roll should be about or at least a case of a cunning audience plant, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. It was the Clash. And it happened just that way at the first of their three nights at the Rainbow in December.

That’s the thing about the Clash: they can break rules you didn’t know existed till they trashed ’em. That’s why, in a year, without any kind of Springsteen-like hype—except from zealot journalists like myself—they’ve gone from empty college and club halls to three nights at a major London venue. Like the Pistols, they’re so special that they’ve created not only their own style but also their own rule structure. Only the most carping would say that the Clash are like anybody or anything else.

Because of events like the one just described, the Clash command an awesome respect, even adulatory deification from their fans. Some of them really do expect the Clash to slip ’em the meaning life in a three minute rock ’n’ roll song. Mind you, full-grown rock writers have been known to make the same mistake. And to think, all that achieved with only two national tours of Britain and but one album and three singles (in total seventeen songs, nineteen tracks) in general circulation.

And I still don’t think the Clash realize themselves what kind of position they’re in. It’s as if they’re (very understandably) scared of facing up to the fact of that worship and its implications.

Here’s another little scene which might help explain what I’m getting at. A few days before I sat down to tap this through my crappy little Smith-Corona portable I found myself at a gig, competing with Clash meistersinger Joe Strummer for the bartender’s attention. (Incidentally, I won.)

Having known Strummer for almost two years, I wasn’t too surprised when, after exchanging the usual pleasantries, he turned on me a little drunkenly and demanded to know who my favorite English band was. More than a little embarrassed, I told him: “Your lot.”

“Nah, come on,” he replied. “Tell me who you really think’s the best.”

“The Clash,” my voice getting louder. “Honest!”

Joe didn’t believe. “I bet you’ll tell the Hot Rods the same thing tomorrow.”

So, here in cold type, let’s set the matter straight with an open letter.

Dear Joe,

The Clash are not only the best band in Britain. They’re the best band in the world. (I think that for a magnitude of reasons I’ll explain in good time.) For me, you’re the latest in a straight three-act lineage: Chuck Berry, the Stones, the Clash. No one else comes near. The Beatles may have written better songs but. . . . The Pistols may have been a bigger force of change but . . . Fercrissakes, if I didn’t believe all this stuff, you don’t think you’d catch me spieling out all these cascades of yeeugh-making praise, do you now? There’s a whole lot more becoming things for an adult to do, you know.

Yours,

Pete

P.S. But I still don’t believe that you’re the saint, let alone godhead that some of your more impressionable fans crack you up to be. I know you’re just as big a head-case as the rest of us.

Good. That out of the way, I can move on to telling you good and patient—you must be if you’ve got this far—readers just how and why the Clash have come to occupy such a prominent place in my—and a lot of other people’s—affections.

The Clash at core are three people. Mick Jones on lead guitar, vocals, and Keef lookalike. He was in the London SS, about whom the myths outweigh the facts at least tenfold. Paul Simonon plays bass, smiles a lot, lopes around like a grossly underfed gorilla on a vitamin B-and-methedrine cure for malnutrition and catches the fancy of more women than the rest of the band put together—Patti Smith, for example. Joe Strummer sings in a manner that some find so unmusical as to be repulsive (you find those kind of philistines everywhere) and others reckon is compulsive and entrancing. Joe was the leading light in the “world-famed” 101ers and still plays the same tortured, demonic rhythm guitar that was the highlight of that band.

And then there’s the fourth man, Nicky “Topper” Headon, the drummer. He gets left out of the central three because he’s the last in a long line of skin beaters with the Clash—Terry Chimes (a.k.a. Tory Crimes) plays on the album—and, although Nicky’s occupied the stool longer and deservedly so than anyone else, he’s still relatively unimportant in the overall image of the band. But who knows, a year from now, he might be as important as Ringo was to the Fabs.

How did they come together? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, the line they usually hand out to gullible journalists is a heap of shit. They claim that Paul and Mick were trotting down Portobello Road one balmy Saturday, already intent on forming their own band, when they chanced upon Joe Strummer and, knowing him from the still-in-existence-at-this-point 101ers, asked him to be their lead singer. After a couple of days to think it over, he junked the 101ers and threw in his lot with Mick and Paul. That’s the fantasy. The reality, as usual, is both more complex and much less romantic.

To explain for the benefit of future historians of the social mores of the seventies, I must backtrack to the first time I encountered Mr. Strummer.

I’d been writing for this rag for a bit and I’d decided I wanted to do a short piece on what it was really like for a struggling band in London, supposed Mecca of rock ’n’ roll. On the recommendation of a friend who’d known Joe since schooldays, I went down to a truly scummy college benefit to check out the 101ers.

At this point (two years ago) I was just emerging from a five-year period where I was so disgusted by the rock ’n’ roll scene that I spent all day in bed listening to Chuck Berry and reading Trotsky. I’d come to like quite a few of the current pub rock bands but however much I enjoyed them, I knew in my heart of hearts, there was something lacking. And, although, if pressed, I’d say it had something to do with lack of stage presence, it wasn’t till I saw Joe that night that I realized just what was lacking—full-blooded desperation to become a star and communicate with your audience and the sense to realize that not only is that a far from easy task but that, if you don’t find your own way of doing it, you might as well junk the idea right there and then.

The 101ers were an immensely lovable but generally pretty ramshackle bunch who’d rip through Chuck Berry and R&B numbers with not a trace of genuflection at the altar of the greats. What they—or rather what Joe took—was theirs/his.

I became so enamored with the 101ers that what had started out as a short article ended up as a veritable thesis which Trouser Press has on file (and I hope they don’t dig it out, even if it is the definitive work on the subject). The day I mailed the piece, the band broke up. The rest of the 101ers dropped into the limbo of obscurity but Joe, with much flourish, hair cutting and clothes altering, hooked up with Paul and Mick.

That something of the kind had been in the offing I’d suspected since I’d been with Joe watching the Pistols (who were at this time supporting the 101ers). As someone else put it, he saw the light and the Sex Pistols simultaneously.

Meanwhile Mick Jones, Brian James (later of the Damned), and Tony James (now in Generation X) had been sorting out their chops in a basement under the name of the London SS and the tutelage of future Clash manager Bernard Rhodes, a close pal of Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren. The London SS, unable to locate a suitable drummer, never actually played a gig but, according to the few who’ve heard them, their tapes were very impressive.

When Brian James walked off/was pushed off to form the Damned, the rest of London SS faced up to facts, chucked in the towel, and went their separate ways.

This is when Mick joined forces with Paul—who’d never even touched a bass before (“I used to be an art designer till I discovered the Clash”)—and Keith Levine, who only stayed long enough to do a few early gigs and cop a co-credit for “What’s My Name” on the album. He was a great guitarist but . . . well, just check out “Deny.”

Masterminded by their hustler-manager with tertiary verbal diarrhea, Bernard Rhodes, the three of them persuaded Strummer over a period of time that he was exactly the vocalist they needed. When Joe was finally convinced, the four of them moved into an enormous (but very cheap) rehearsal studio of their own and began to audition drummers. Getting the name was easy enough. After an initial flirtation with Weak Heart Drops (after a Big Youth song), they plumped for the challenge of the Clash. But getting a drummer wasn’t so easy.

They searched with an unusual but understandable and probably correct attitude toward drummers. To wit, drummers can’t drum because they all suffer from a Billy Cobham complex and want to play as much as an egocentric lead guitarist. Therefore drummers have to be taught to drum. And drummers, being by and large nutters, don’t take too kindly to such condescension. Also, at this time, while the rest of the band were outwardly convinced they’d be an unqualified success, under the surface they were stone scared that they couldn’t live up to even their own belief in themselves. The tensions in the Clash camp (late summer ’76) were running so high that just sitting around the rehearsal studio could be an exceedingly uncomfortable experience.

But after rejecting various drummers who were more in tune with the band’s commitment but couldn’t really hack out the relentless trip-trap bottom line, they settled on Terry Chimes, who didn’t give a flying one about the politics (in the widest sense) of the Clash but made up for it by being one of the best drummers this side of Jerry Nolan.

Anyway, that’s how they’d shaped up to the point of their early gigs, so that’s enough of this hagiography. That’s not nearly as important as why the Clash are the CLASH.

SCENE ONE

Bernie Rhodes holds a Clash preview for the press in the studio, subtly paralleling Paris Schmutter previews. Giovanni Dadomo of Sounds is suitably impressed and reports that the Clash are the first band to come along that look like they could really scare the Pistols.

SCENE TWO

The reaction sets in. When the Clash support the Pistols at a London cinema gig, Charles Shaar Murray says that they’re a garage band who ought to get back in the garage and leave the car motor running. (This prompts them to write “Garageland.”)

SCENE THREE

The sides settled, every Clash gig becomes an event. When Patti Smith comes over, she sees the Clash at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and is so knocked out with them that she jumps up and “jams.” And some kid in the audience does a mockup of biting off someone’s ear (with the aid of a tomato ketchup capsule) and the picture gets in the weekly music press. By the time they play the Royal College of Art (Arty lot, aren’t they? Still, what do you expect? They all went to art college and wear some of the flashiest clothes imaginable), emotions are running way too high. They play a set under the rubric “A Night of Treason.” (It was November 5, the night that honors the burning of Guy Fawkes, the bloke who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.) Some of the audience, when not lobbing fireworks around, take an extreme dislike to the Clash and start bunging bottles at the stage. The rest of the audience is split between Clash fans who already think their band can do no wrong and the uncommitted whose prevailing attitude is “Well, they are playing violent music and if you play violent, well you know what they say about what you sow . . . ”

The band are certain how they feel about playing in a rain of bottles. Strummer lurches off stage and tries to sort out those responsible . . . personally.

The Clash style has been set. It’s a straight case of being ruthlessly certain about how you feel and what you want to do and making sure that no one gets in your way. Like the man said, “We ain’t looking for trouble but if someone starts it, it ain’t gonna be us that’s gonna be on the losing side.”

Remember, this is back in ’76 when punk was still seen overwhelmingly as being political. More than anyone else it was the Clash that everyone held responsible for putting down a party line. Now they’re all pretty much retreated from that position (except the Clash, they just smile Highway 61 smiles) and say aw, we’re really only into having fun, ma-a-an. But then, you’ve no idea what a relief it was to have songs about something else other than falling in love with some acne-infested adolescent or what a drag it is to be slogging our guts out “on the road” and staying in all these faceless hotels (when most kids in England have never even stayed in a hotel) or pathetic dirges about let’s have a little more rock ’n’ roll.

I know rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be about the banalities of the pubescent dream, but it had pretty much got to the stage where the average rock ’n’ roll song was indistinguishable from moon/June bilge. If the Clash have done nothing else, they’ve given a big help to kicking out all that garbage (of course, many others have been working to the same end).

Strummer certainly didn’t come from any poverty-stricken background (on the other hand, he never really pretended to), but his songs were like a well-aimed boot plonked straight into the guts of an overfed and complacent music business.

And Mick Jones was no slouch either. “Career Opportunities” for example:

They offered me the office, offered me the shop

They said I’d better take anything they’d got

Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?

Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock . . .

Every job they offer you’s to keep you out the dock

Career opportunities, the ones that never knock.

Okay, so it ain’t gonna cop him a poetry prize (who wants one?), but it displays both a savage understanding of the demands for immediacy in a rock ’n’ roll song and a large helping of witty comment on what it’s like to be given the choice of one shitty job or another shitty job. Of course, the Clash never thought they could really change things. They’re only (only!) a rock ’n’ roll band, not a political party. But if you’re gonna sing about something, you might as well sing about something that doesn’t usually make it onto pop singles. Unfortunately, while they handled it, lesser talents came along and decided that they’d have to write “political” songs and mostly came up with insulting simplicities like Chelsea’s “Right to Work.”

And then, of course, there was the music. Even early on (and especially after Small Faces addict Glen Matlock got the boot) the Pistols were very fond of heavy metal drones. I don’t think the Clash even listened to HM. Joe only cared for ’50s rockers (especially bluesman Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, believe it or not) and reggae. Jones was deeply into Mott, which shows in the Clash’s attitude toward their fans both in their songs and in their stage demeanor. And Paul Simonon was into football (listen to the chant on “Janie Jones”) and painting (look at the clothes, stage backdrops, and all their visual presentation).

By the time they’d done the Anarchy Tour with the Pistols, the Clash were in an unrivaled second position. They began to get the kind of press eulogies and fan worship that’d turn anybody’s head. How could music fans fail to react to them?

Onstage, Strummer is so obviously a natural star, forcing his body and Telecaster to ever greater heights of pain/pleasure, grabbing the mike and screaming lines like he really does care.

Mick Jones bopping around like a younger Keef (yeah, that comparison again) doing a military two-step and sending out shards of steely guitar licks.

And Paul lumbering around looking looser and more relaxed but thumping his bass while indulging in perverse, arcane calisthenics.

And the paramilitary-style clothes—zips and slogans featured very heavily. But whoever heard of an army splashing paint all over their tunics?

All this combines to make sure the Clash, even at their worst, are never mere music. I am absolutely convinced that I’m not the only one who feels that they’re the ’70s answer to the Stones. If asked, Clash fans will say they love ’em so much because “They’re good to dance to” or “I fancy Mick Jones” or “I just like ’em, that’s all.” If that is all, why do they shout out for “White Riot” all the time at gigs? It’s not one of the Clash’s best songs, but it is the one that most represents where they’re coming from, what they stand for, and what particular fantasy they’re enacting for their audience. If the kids just wanted to dance or screw, they could go to a disco or go home to bed. They want and get more but their lack of articulateness prevents them explaining what. Success and even the music are subordinate to the stance—they’re saying not we play rock ’n’ roll but we are rock ’n’ roll. If Chuck Berry represents for me an idealized adolescence I never had, and the Stones were an adolescence that I lived through once removed because, like so many kids, I was too busy studying, the Clash are as good an excuse as any for me to live out a perfect adolescence ten years late. Hell, why else be a rock ’n’ roll writer—there’s more to it than just freebie albums.

Which is also why the Clash will fire imaginations, but they’ll never become a grandiosely successful band. Some reckon they won’t make it in the States at all. I don’t agree with that. Judging by the recent Rainbow shows, they’ve got enough classic big stage rock ’n’ roll choreography worked out to handle any auditorium. And their newer songs, like “City of the Dead” and the as yet unissued “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” are played at a pace that even ears used to the Eagles can handle. Also, by slowing matters down a trifle, they seem to have upped the energy level—too much speed becomes nothing but a fast train blur. They learned their lesson on the first English tour. The set started out at forty-five minutes. By the end of the tour it was down to twenty-nine minutes and that included all the album plus “1977,” “Capital Radio” (only available on a limited edition giveaway—which is a pity because it’s one of their best songs), their truly awful version of Toots and the Maytals’ sublime “Pressure Drop,” and “London’s Burning” twice. It gave their roadies something to boast about but if you wanted to keep up with it, you had to snort at least two grams of amphetamine.

This falling tempo and rising intensity is obviously a result of smoking a lot of dope and listening to a lot of very spliffed-out rasta roots reggae. They realized you ain’t gotta run at full throttle to give out the necessary power.

Nonetheless, the Clash have come in for a lot of criticism. Ignoring the early jeers about unmusicality, the most hurtful has been that they’re a kind of punk Bay City Rollers, programmed to do whatever their manager tells them to do. Quite simply, that’s like saying the Stones were Oldham’s puppets. Of course, Bernie being some kind of weird conceptual artist accounts for a fair share of the ideas, but at the last resort it’s Mick, Paul, Joe, and Topper who cut the cake on stage and record.

Anyway, all that carping is just more proof of the Clash’s importance. Nobody gets into the same kind of polarizations about, say, Slaughter and the Dogs or 999. People only get into heavy-duty arguments about bands that really matter.

Look. If you already like the Clash, you’ll like ’em even more live (if they play a good show—which admittedly, they don’t do as often as they should). If you hate the Clash, you’ll either learn the error of your ways when you realize what great little pop songs they write or continue to hate ’em. The choice is yours.

All I can say is that any band that can bring a relatively cynical scribbler like myself to gush like a besotted fan, has got to be one of the most special things to have ever happened.

_____________________

Originally appeared in Trouser Press, February 1978.

THE CLASH

Anger on the Left As Punk Leaders Set Sights on America

By Mikal Gilmore

“Never mind that shit,” says Joe Strummer, the thuggish-looking lead singer of the Clash, addressing the exultant kids yelling “Happy New Year” at him from the teeming floor of the Lyceum. “You’ve got your future at stake. Face front! Take it!”

In a sleepy London town, during a murky Christmas week, rock ’n’ roll is being presented as a war of class and aesthetics. At the crux of that battle is a volcanic series of four Clash concerts—including a benefit for Sid Vicious—coming swiftly on the heels of the group’s second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope, which entered the British charts at number two. Together with the Sex Pistols, the Clash helped spearhead the punk movement in Britain, becoming known as the most intellectual and political new wave band. When the Pistols disbanded, the rock press and punks alike looked to the Clash as the movement’s central symbol and hope.

Yet beyond the hyperbole and wrangle that helped create their radical myth, the Clash brandish a hearty reputation as a rock ’n’ roll band that, like the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, must be seen to be believed. Certainly no other band communicates kinetic, imperative anger as potently as the Clash. When Nicky “Topper” Headon’s single-shot snare report opens “Safe European Home” (a song about Strummer and lead guitarist Mick Jones’s ill-fated attempt to rub elbows with Rastafarians in the Jamaicans’ backyard), all hell breaks loose, both on the Lyceum stage and floor.

Like the Sex Pistols, the Clash’s live sound hinges on a massive orchestral drum framework that buttresses the blustery guitar work of Jones, who with his tireless two-step knee kicks looks just like a Rockettes’ version of Keith Richards. Shards of Mott the Hoople and the Who cut through the tumult, while Strummer’s rhythm guitar and Paul Simonon’s bass gnash at the beat underneath. And Strummer’s vocals sound as dangerous as he looks. Screwing his face up into a broken-tooth yowl, he gleefully bludgeons words, then caresses them with a touching, R&B-inflected passion.

Maybe it’s the gestalt of the event, or maybe it’s just the sweaty leather-bound mass throbbing around me, but I think it’s the most persuasive rock ’n’ roll show I’ve seen since I watched Graham Parker rip the roof off a San Francisco nightclub almost two and a half years ago.

I try to say as much to a reticent Joe Strummer after the show as we stand in a dingy backstage dressing room brimming with a sweltering mix of fans, press, and roadies. Strummer, wearing smoky sunglasses and a nut-brown porkpie hat, resembles a roughhewn version of Michael Corleone. Measuring me with his wary, testy eyes, he mumbles an inaudible reply.

Across the room, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon have taken refuge in a corner, sharing a spliff. “You a Yank?” Jones asks me in a surprisingly delicate, lilting voice. “From ’ollywood? Evil place, innit? All laid back.” According to the myth encasing this band, Jones (who writes nearly all of the Clash’s music) is the band’s real focal nerve, even though the austere Strummer writes the bulk of the lyrics. In the best Keith Richards tradition, fans see Mick as a sensitive and vulnerable street waif, prone to dissipation as much as to idealism. Indeed, he looks as bemusedly wasted as anyone I’ve ever met. He’s also among the gentler, more considerate people I’ve ever spent time with.

But the same evening, sitting in the same spot, Mick declines to be interviewed. “Lately, interviews make me feel ’orrible. It seems all I do is spend my time answering everyone’s charges—charges that shouldn’t have to be answered.”

The Clash have been hit recently with a wide volley of charges, ranging from an English rock-press backlash aimed at what the critics see as reckless politics, to criminal charges against Headon and Simonon (for shooting racing pigeons) and Jones (for alleged cocaine possession). But probably the most damaging salvo has come from their former manager, Bernard Rhodes, who, after he was fired, accused the band of betraying its punk ideals and slapped them with a potentially crippling lawsuit. In a recent interview, Jones railed back. “We’re still the only ones true to the original aims of punk,” he said. “Those other bands should be destroyed.”

The Clash formed as a result of Joe Strummer’s frustration and Mick Jones’s rock ideals. Both had been abandoned at early ages by their parents, and while Strummer (the son of a British diplomat) took to singing Chuck Berry songs in London’s subways for spare change during his late teens, Jones retreated into reading and playing records by Mott the Hoople, Dylan, the Kinks, and the Who. In 1975, he left the art school he was attending and formed London SS, a band that, in its attempt to meld a raving blend of the New York Dolls, the Stooges, and Mott, became a legendary forerunner of the English punk scene.

Then, in early 1976, shortly after the Sex Pistols assailed London, Mick Jones ran into Strummer, who had been singing in a pub circuit R&B band called the 101ers. “I don’t like your band,” Jones said, “but I like the way you sing.” Strummer, anxious to join the punk brigade, cut his hair, quit the 101ers, and joined Jones, Simonon (also a member of London SS), guitarist Keith Levine (now a member of Public Image Ltd), and drummer Terry Chimes to form the Clash in June 1976. Eight months later, under the tutelage of Bernard Rhodes, the Clash signed with CBS Records for a reported $200,000.

Their first album, The Clash (unreleased in America; Epic, the group’s label stateside, deems it “too crude”), was archetypal, resplendent punk. While the Sex Pistols proffered a nihilistic image, the Clash took a militant stance that, in an eloquent, guttural way, vindicated punk’s negativism. Harrowed rhythms and coarse vocals propelled a foray of songs aimed at the bleak political realities and social ennui of English life, making social realism—and unbridled disgust—key elements in punk aesthetics.

But even before the first album was released, the punk scene had dealt the Clash some unforeseen blows. The punks, egged on by a hysterical English press, began turning on each other. Weary of ducking bottles, spit, and the band’s politics, Drummer Chimes quit. Months passed before the group settled on Nicky Headon (also a member of Mick Jones’s London SS) as a replacement and returned to performing. By that time, their reputation had swelled to near-messianic proportions.

When it was time for a new album, CBS asked Blue Oyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman to check out the Clash’s shows. “By a miracle of God,” says Pearlman, “they looked like they believed in what they were doing. They were playing for the thrill of affecting their audience’s consciousness, both musically and politically. Rock ’n’ roll shouldn’t be cute and adorable; it should be violent and anarchic. Based on that, I think they’re the greatest rock ’n’ roll group around.” Mick Jones initially balked at the idea of Pearlman as their producer, but Strummer’s interest prevailed. It took six months to complete Give ’Em Enough Rope, and it was a stormy period for all concerned. (“We knew we had to watch Pearlman,” says Nicky Headon. “He gets too good a sound.”)

But nowhere near as stormy as the album. Give ’Em Enough Rope is rock ’n’ roll’s Stage of Siege—with a dash of Duck Soup for comic relief. Instead of reworking the tried themes of bored youth and repressive society, Strummer and Jones tapped some of the deadliest currents around, from creeping fascism at home to Palestinian terrorism. The album surges with visions of civil strife, gunplay, backbiting, and lyrics that might’ve been spirited from the streets of Italy and Iran: “A system built by the sweat of the many/Creates assassins to kill off the few/Take any place and call it a courthouse/This is a place where no judge can stand.” And the music—a whirl of typhonic guitars and drums—frames those conflicts grandly.

The day after the Clash’s last Lyceum show, I meet Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon at the Tate Gallery. Simonon leads us on a knowledgeable tour of the gallery’s treasures until we settle in a dim corner of the downstairs café for an interview.

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

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

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

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

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

But that ambiguity can be construed as encouraging violence.

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

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

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

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

But the American rock scene—and especially radio—seems far removed from the world in flames that the Clash sing about. (While the Clash may top the English charts, they have yet to dent Billboard’s Top 200. “We admit we aren’t likely to get a hit single this time around,” says Bruce Harris of Epic’s A&R department. “But Give ’Em Enough Rope has sold 40,000 copies and that’s better than sixty percent of most new acts.”) I ask if a failure to win Yankee hearts would set them back.

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

Those may seem like boastful words, but I doubt that’s how Strummer means them. Few bands have fought more battles on more fronts than the Clash, and maybe none with better instincts. Of course, it’s doubtful that the American and British underclass—or the teenage middle class for that matter—are any more willing than the music industry to be shaken up as much as the Clash would like.

As producer Sandy Pearlman says: “No one’s really very scared of punk, especially the record companies. They’ve sublimated tendencies this art is based on. The Clash see the merit in reaching a wider audience, but they also like the idea of grand suicidal gestures. We need more bands like this as models for tomorrow’s parties.”

_____________________

Originally appeared in Rolling Stone, March 8, 1979.

THE CLASH IN AMERICA

By Sylvie Simmons

So you think we lost the battle—then go home and weep about it. Sometimes you’ve got to wake up in the morning and think, “Fuck it you’re going to win the battle.”

—JOE STRUMMER

There were no riots, no outraged citizens, no glaring headlines when Pearl Harbour ’79 came to an old elegant building in downtown Vancouver last week. The only report in the newspaper’s music section was that the local symphony orchestra had gone on strike. The Clash’s first American tour is being felt by the press as the stimulating aftershock of the Pistols’ U.S. invasion a year ago or not at all.

The Pearl Harbor ’79 tour posters depict the Statue of Liberty bundled up in rope. A more illuminating picture, I think, could have been taken outside the Berkeley Community Theatre in San Francisco a few days and a long bus ride later. An hour before the doors were due to open a line of people stretched quietly from the front steps in a perfect shape of a walking stick, where two young security guards shone torches on the few rebels who wanted to hang out rather than wait in the queue for their numbered seat. There was something numbing about that picture. U.S. rock on Quaaludes.

Maybe these were the Bo Diddley fans. The middle-aged usher who showed me to my seat felt the need to tell me who he was. He stood up there with his square guitar and growled, “This feels like 1965 all over again.” Almost everyone cheered and gave him standing ovations.

The difference between a living legend and a living band, I thought to myself when Diddley left the stage, and the hired DJ brought over for the tour playing Buzzcocks and Sid’s “My Way” is between standing up and shouting because you feel you ought to—and standing up and shouting because you simply have to. There’s simply nowhere else for all that passion to go. The best rock music someone once said is like a good whore: it’s both aggressive and relieving. I didn’t get any of that from Bo Diddley’s macho strutting. The Clash supplied an overdose.

The audience was divided into factions: the delirious converts who made the most of the Clash’s rule that the bouncers weren’t to force people into their seats, flooded the front section and pogoed madly.

Towards the back the typical U.S. rock fans observed the action at a distance through binoculars (imagine the only place you’d ever seen your favourite band play is half a mile from the stage in a place like Earls Court—out here it’s as inevitable in rock as death and taxes are in life) and an even more staid bunch sat in the balcony. I suspect they were the ones queuing quietly outside to guarantee a safe spot for their voyeurism.

There were a number of old style bondage and safety pin punks—remember nothing has happened on this scale since the Pistols’ gig at Winterland at the end of ’77. Now the Pistols are dead, Sid’s dead, Winterland’s dead, and San Francisco is still the Grateful Dead. The Clash have got a lot of reviving to do.

There were a lot more Ramones lookalikes, storm troopers in sneakers with elaborate punk badges, a couple of miniature Sun front page headlines “I want justice for my Sid” and a large crowd of U.S. music press analyzing the action like it was the interval of a Bernard Shaw play complaining that they couldn’t make out the words when Joe Stummer called from the stage, “If you can’t understand the words, don’t worry, you’re not alone.”

We were thanked for bothering to come tonight. Bothering? It was magnificent. Though I could see little more than the flag used a backdrop and Jones’ and Simonon’s electrocuted leaps about head level, all other rock ’n’ roll senses were gratified. Contact with hot pogoing bodies, smell of overheated energy (something you forget is sanitized for your protection in sports arena rock gigs), and the sound; a brain battering “Tommy Gun,” an exhilarating “Stay Free,” a scorching “Guns on the Roof,” “I Fought the Law,” “Cell Block No. 9,” and the hardest, fastest, most powerful encore in rock with “White Riot.”

As for the audience reaction, some seemed to feel uncomfortable but more felt salvation. I can’t remember having seen a performance so shot with adrenalin, outdone though it would be by the next night’s show.

Backstage there wasn’t much talking. In the five days the band spent in San Francisco they must have talked to just about everyone who wanted to listen. A press conference on Monday with a barrage of dumb questions led the band to turn it into their own personal comedy show; record store appearances, radio interviews, and private viewing with anything from Time to Cashbox.

In the dressing room someone asked Mick if he liked the jam (to a suitably non-committal answer) and someone else warily suggested that Clash had some sort of pact going with Elvis Costello (whose tour bus was parked in Japan town near the next night’s gig) who was going to have old rocker Carl Perkins on his tour (Perkins in fact backed out a while ago), only to be told politely that if anyone was doing the copying it was Elvis, who doesn’t seem that popular with the Clash. Mick and I swapped notes on what a strange place this is.

Tomorrow night’s gig hasn’t exactly left their record company brimming with philanthropic joy. It’s a benefit concert for New Youth, a fledging organization aiming to keep ticket prices down, get larger percentages for the bands, and a place for new wave acts to play.

Besides not being part of the official tour and bound to upset the promoters (the slyest get round any legal points by advertising “White Riot in the Fillmore with the best band ever direct from England.” No names mentioned), the tickets are half the price of the Berkeley gig, the venue seatless and flooded with atmosphere. Of the eight dates on this mini-tour (the band intends to return in June and fill in the gaps) only one failed to sell out—the Berkeley one. A good sign considering the size of the venue (the only time the Pistols played to anything in the few-thousand seat mark over here was at Winterland).

The following afternoon I head for the Villa Roma bar to find Ace, the tour manager, locked in a verbal battle with the red-faced vein-popping motel manager. A misunderstanding over a phone bill that would have evoked polite discussion at the most with the average guest. “The man’s an arsehole,” Mick told me by way of explanation. The manager had parked his little Pinto station wagon (one of the smallest American cars) in front of the tour bus to stop it leaving, and was threatening to call the police.

Ace was trying valiantly to keep his temper—not easy when a middle-aged man screams “You bums are freaks” to your face. The band left and the manager swaggered over to the bar, loosened his collar, and had the barmaid get him a double, boasting how he “wasn’t going to be taken for a ride by the like of those freaks” and how “I blocked the bus with my little Pinto wagon—it couldn’t move.” A hero for a day.

The benefit concert was at a moth-eaten synagogue in San Francisco next door to Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, tacky but majestic, and a great venue. The punters were generally shit-stoned, dribbling in, falling over, dancing with strangers, and having fun. There was a strong wired sexual sort of atmosphere here, an intangible kind of craziness. The thing that attracted you to rock ’n’ roll in the first place.

There was some trouble in the line, a few bottles broken, but that’s all, mostly brought on by the slowness with which they were let in. This was New Youth’s first gig and they hadn’t quite got it together. They only opened one cash register until Clash’s manager threatened to open the doors and let everyone in free and tills appeared like magic.

The Clash were electrifying. Like a bloody great headline, commanding attention and belief. They opened with “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” and the punters went as wild as I’ve ever seen them go. No time to take notes—there were more important things to do. For the first time in the U.S. I could see the relevance of pogoing. When there’s no seats and everyone’s crushing your ribs to powder down the front and you want to dance, there’s nowhere to go but up. It’s also a pretty efficient way of meeting people when you fall on top of them. One girl danced from someone’s head onto the stage and dived off headfirst into the solid mass of people. That must be just about the ultimate rock fan experience.

America was getting off on the Clash and New Youth was getting a good down payment for their organization. Some hope yet. But the battle’s not won. Johnnie Walker the DJ was there. He’s just been fired by a San Francisco radio station for playing punk records.

On the bus after the show, Jones, Strummer, and Simonon are conducting a private post mortem on the tour in the back. Verdict: Vancouver pretty good, Berkeley OK, the benefit in ’Frisco, the best so far. Topper and a friend and the rest of us are down the front watching Heaven Can Wait on the video machine while fans mill around outside.

Just before the gig started, Topper was sitting on the bus watching Star Wars when a guy came inside and struck up a conversation and took a lot of persuading to leave. He came back a few minutes later with a bottle of champagne, shook the drummer’s hand, and left. The champagne was consumed on the 400-mile trip to LA. Everyone is half-dead by the time the bus reaches Santa Monica.

While Ace is sorting out a beachfront hotel, an old man wanders up and asks if he can look around the bus. He thinks we’re a troop of wandering Bohemians until the driver tells him it’s a rock band that’s playing the Civic tonight. Undeterred, the seventy-year-old announces that he and his wife go disco dancing every fourth night. The bus breaks out in smiles. “All you’ve got to do is get in there and do your own thing, feel the beat,” he tells this knackered-looking bunch of youngsters. No one offers him tickets for tonight’s gig.

Los Angeles is less Bohemian than San Francisco. LA is big streets, big cars, big billboards, and big money. In LA anything that doesn’t make a big profit is considered neither art nor desirable. Little bands are pretty much banging heads against the brick wall. The so-called “new wave” scene is barely holding its own. That the Clash sold out the 3,000 capacity Santa Monica Civic is a good sign, even if the numbers were padded out by press and poseurs and probably members of every quasi-punk band in town.

It was a good show, but not a great one. Though that’s not to say that this wasn’t one of the best evenings I’ve spent in this venue. As always here the sound was flat, but the spirit and strength of the music and the wildly vibrating floor from the frantic pogoing as good as compensated. The crowd was pretty manic tonight.

Kamikaze punks made exultant swallow dives into the audience from the stage and the editor of Slash fanzine leaped up to join Strummer in an unofficial duet before being dragged off and, according to him, roughed up by the bouncers who seemed for the most part very easygoing for the States.

As Mick said: “We do as we can, we try to say to the guys, let them stand up, don’t bash them, and if we’re the headliners they’ve got to take some notice of us.” So they’ve brought quite a big crew with them but they don’t know all the security guards, Joe said, and was pretty pissed off when the guy from Slash kept on whining about his battle scars.

“We never said it was a utopia. Rock ’n’ roll is played on enemy ground. We never promised you when you were a baby that it was going to be roses all the way. But we stopped more than you can imagine. You can go on about getting the shit kicked out of you and you can go on about that guy being murdered by bouncers in London, you can go on as much as you like and I’ll just sit here and listen and I’ll be thinking of the times I’ve stopped the blood when I had the chance to.”

There was a press conference at midnight after the show, rather a depressed concert as Mick described it. The band were in a lousy mood. No explanation. Mick told me it has just been a “strange day.” They seemed pissed off with the way the record company was handling them, especially with the Statue of Liberty posters.

“If they’re going to have ads and buy big space and show how flashy we are,” said Joe, “we’re going to pack information into it such as the lyrics.” As in the epic “Don’t know what to do with us, they’re fucking us up.” So what should they do? “Leave us alone for a start.”

And they’re understandably worn out after the ten-hour bus ride from San Francisco. In seven hours they’ll be back on the bus again heading for Cleveland, Ohio. Some people at the record company were privately expressing anxiety about letting the band drive halfway cross-country. They might decide not to arrive at the right place at the right time.

But they spent twenty minutes slouched over a table backstage (except when Topper got up to let in the members of the Germs, an LA band who were pummeling on the windows outside). Opposite ten rows of assorted scribes giving half-hearted answers to questions: will they fill in the gap left by the Sex Pistols?

Joe: “I don’t know. I haven’t seen the gap yet.” Will they ever release their first album here? (The record company thought the material and presentation too crude for U.S. radio’s present AM or FM progammes, and with no hope of a bit on their hands, didn’t bother to put it out.)

Joe: “We might release it sometime as a historical document, a greatest hits album.”

Do they have problems being famous? Paul: “We can walk down the street in London, people recognize us and come up to us. It’s like having loads of friends. That’s the way we live, we don’t even think about it.”

We learn that they came here as soon as they could, that touring the odd places at home was getting tedious, that they found what they consider a healthy new wave scene everywhere they’ve been so far, that they intend to come back and finish off the job here in the summer, however much flogging it takes them to make it, and that their ambitions are to do away with Boston, Kansas, Foreigner, and Kiss as quickly as possible and become “the best rock ’n’ roll band in the world.”

If Pearl Harbor ’79 continues its electrifying attack, they’re going to succeed on both fronts. When it comes down to it, the battle is not tying the Statue of Liberty with rope, nor about the right to wear your safety pins, Fiorucci jeans, and prawn silk shirts without protest from your Mum.

It’s about defeating apathy in rock, changing its direction, and taking over its future. And if that’s too much to hope for, all who have seen this tour must agree that they’re halting senility for a while.

_____________________

Originally appeared in Sounds, February 17, 1979.

THE LAST BROADCAST

By Greil Marcus

As the number two British punk band, the Clash began as the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols’ Beatles, but good and bad were reversed in punk. As the Beatles, as those who set the terms of the new game, the Sex Pistols demanded everything and damned everything—knowing they would be left with nothing, they played and sang as if they didn’t care. The Clash criticized, always leaving an opening: the Sex Pistols were wreckers, they were partisans. The Sex Pistols were symbolist, with every meaning left open and uncertain, utopia and hell in a single, unstable body; the Clash were rhetorical, voice to flesh. If the Sex Pistols—or anyway Johnny Rotten—truly were committed to the destruction of rock ’n’ roll not only as myth but as fact, the Clash were committed to changing rock ’n’ roll, to taking it over, to becoming the Number One Band in the World (“The Only Band That Matters,” their American label said, after the Sex Pistols disintegrated). The explanations the Sex Pistols offered when interviewers asked them why-are-you-so-angry turned into the Clash’s songs, songs about boredom, autonomy, lust, power; the Clash took the true anarchy and the real nihilism the Sex Pistols offered and rationalized it, made it seem reasonable.

The Clash latched onto received ideas, but they soon made those ideas their own, and were changed by them—or anyway Joe Strummer was. It was never clear if he wanted to be a star or if he wanted everyone to hear him: in the rock tradition Strummer was so tied to, the difference between the one and the other was never clear. With a giant multinational corporation behind them, the Clash toured the U.S.A. (1977: “I’m So Bored with . . . “) again and again.

In 1982 they finally cracked the American Top Ten: made it twice with Combat Rock on the album charts and the indelible “Rock the Casbah” on the singles list. Most assumed that the Clash were working for nothing else, that the heresies of 1976 London punk were merely the old clothes of bad dreams, but the band’s success seemed to shock Strummer. If the Clash had scored their hits, if large numbers of people were finally happy to listen to what the band had to say, Strummer seemed to have decided that that meant the Clash were no longer saying anything. With work on the boards, he disappeared in Paris, then reappeared with his head shaved. Drummer “Topper” Headon quit; the group was unraveling. Strummer called a meeting, got bassist Paul Simonon’s vote, and kicked guitarist Mick Jones out of the band.

Jones had been a founder; he had asked Strummer to join him. As guitarist, singer, and co-writer, many saw him as far more central to the Clash’s success than Strummer, but in a way that was the point. Jones’s noisy love songs (“Train in Vain,” “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”) had been the Clash’s most effective bids for mainstream airplay before “Rock the Casbah” (a sardonic, up-from-the-Muslim-streets reply to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ban on music in Iran, and written by Topper Headon); Jones’s voice lacked Strummer’s rough edges, his promise that any song could go in any direction, anytime. Strummer detected a spiritual flaw behind the style; despite the punk attempt to destroy the star system, Strummer announced, a pop star was all Mick Jones had ever wanted to be. He was a fake, a revisionist; he had to go.

Strummer and Simonon recruited three new members: drummer Pete Howard, rhythm guitarist Vince White, and lead guitarist Nick Sheppard, the latter both twenty-three-year-old “ex-punks” who affirmed they’d grown up on Clash music. As a band (“The Clash”) they played a few shows; hope against hope, their American label even brought them back to the USA.

It was, for a night, a trip worth taking. “This isn’t white reggae,” Strummer shouted, introducing “Police and Thieves.” “This is punk and reggae. There’s a difference. There’s a difference between a rip-off and bringing some of our culture to another culture. You hear that, Sting?”

It was 21 January 1984. It had been eight years since the Clash formed, six years and one week since the Sex Pistols played their last show in San Francisco, and the Clash were back in town not as “The Only Band That Matters” but as the only punk band left. “What we play now is what we can do,” Strummer had said in 1979. “It wouldn’t be fair to do ranting music because we’ve mastered a time change. So there’s just no point.” “We started to think we were musicians,” he told Joel Selvin, a San Francisco critic, before the new Clash show. “When we made the first record we knew we weren’t. It’s a bad think to think; it’s irrelevant, not to the point.”

To a happy, not quite sold-out crowd in a dumpy, medium-sized hall, the Clash played ranting music. Keeping Strummer’s promise to Selvin, they “went back to where we went wrong, and then forward again.” Against an industrialist backdrop and eight television sets flashing images of present-day social disaster, Strummer shook, scowled, smiled, and sang as if he and his audience had a life to make within a world they’d already lost.

The band was ragged, Nick Sheppard played too many Mick Jones licks, and such rock-star flimsy as if leaps from the drum riser or floodlights in the crowd’s face was still part of the show. The only identifiable new song was the hopeless, “We Are the Clash,” which only added credence to the old rumor that the favorite song of Bernard Rhodes, the Clash’s original and now returned manager, was “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees.” Still, I’d never seen Strummer more exhilarated, or more convincing. In 1978 in Berkeley, “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” was a gesture of contempt to a bourgeois audience; this night it was offered to the audience as their own, and they took it. Some of our culture to another culture.

Still, almost everyone was sure it was the end of the road. As time passed, Strummer gave increasingly confused interviews about “rebel rock,” changing the world, the special role he had to play in that change, England’s turn to the right under Margaret Thatcher, the collapse of the punk community and the possibility of reinventing it, social injustice, fascism, the end of the world, and when there might be a new Clash album. He wasn’t saying anything terribly different from what he and many more had said in 1976 and 1977—but in London in ’76 and ’77, the old rock ’n’ roll dream of “taking over the world” hadn’t meant topping the world’s charts, it was supposed to mean making the charts irrelevant, and then proving that the charts and graphs and ledgers that governed the structures of everyday life—the hierarchies of education, work, family, bureaucracy, politics—could be made just as irrelevant. Now, though, with Thatcher’s brutal, popular Tory rule, the oppressions punk had fought when it gave birth to itself—the oppressions of false leisure, false work, false entertainment—seemed like the playthings of childhood, and Strummer sounded like a crazy old man.

In May 1985, in the UK, the new Clash, the five of them, showed up in a parking lot outside of a hall where the Alarm, a newly popular group, were playing a sold-out show. Strumming acoustic guitars and tapping drumsticks against each other, they were busking—playing for small change. Before 1976, Strummer had been a subway singer, a thick-fingered guitar banger—that was where he got his name. In interviews in the 1980s, he talked often about “going back to the roots,” but no one could have guessed he’d meant going back so far. It was a bizarre reversal, a testament to how desperate Strummer was to dramatize that punk had meant what it said when it said it would destroy all heroes. On their early tours of the UK, the Clash sometimes brought their fans back to their hotel and let them sleep in their rooms; now, playing the Isley Brothers’ (or the Beatles’) “Twist and Shout,” their own “Garageland” (from the Clash’s first album), or “Stepping Stone” (the Monkees again—the Sex Pistols had tried it, too, once), the Clash asked the curious who gathered to hear them if the fans could, you know, put them up for the night. In this moment you could see Joe Strummer’s whole future: on some dank London corner, the drunken bum calls out to passersby. “Hey, you wanna hear ‘Rock the Casbah’? It was a hit, it was a hit, ah, in . . . ”

As the band chanted in the parking lot, you could see the Clash’s past. On the back sleeve of “White Riot,” the Clash’s first single, there was a rough collage of photos (ugly public housing blocks surrounded by rubble; cops; a band) and words. Along with quotes from the Brighton Beach youth culture riots of the mid-1960s (a Mod: “I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for a long time . . . It was like we were taking over the country”), one could read something more suggestive:

That there is, perhaps, some tension in society, when perhaps overwhelming pressure brings industry to a standstill or barricades to the streets years after the liberals had dismissed the notion as “dated romanticism,” the journalist invents the theory that this constitutes a clash of generations. Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled.

The explanations of out of this blind fragment of a found manifesto, the Clash had made a career. In advance of any sort of pop career, the words took in the inevitable dismissal, or failure, of any attempt to use rock ’n’ roll to dramatize a clash between rulers and ruled: As far as almost everyone was concerned, no band could signify more than a transient clash between generations, a present-day (now long past) version of a sixties beach riot between Mods and Rockers, new fans of the Who, and the Small Faces beaten bloody by fans of Bill Haley and Gene Vincent. Teddy Boys who kept the faith were relics whose whole lives were based on the conviction that they had heard the truth and would kick in the faces of anyone who suggested it might be incomplete.

In other words, with that old manifesto now playing against the idea that an old band could make itself new, Strummer, well into his thirties as he spoke—as the new Clash made noise for coins, and then made a new record and asked people to buy it—was precisely the old fart punks had dumped when “White Riot” first hit the stores. Cut the Crap, the new Clash album was titled, and the words were thrown back in Strummer’s face. You should talk, said the British reviews. Go away! Who wants to hear what a dead man has to say! Stop reminding us of what you failed to do the first time around!

On the terms punk set for itself, it would change the world or it would be nothing. In a certain sense, Strummer was never a real rock ’n’ roller, because he trusted neither fun nor money; thus the chart success of the Clash had to mean nothing to him. You could draw two different conclusions from the failure of punk to change the world and its sometime success on the charts: you could conclude that the punk critique of everyday oppression and spectacular entertainment was wrong—or you could conclude that it was correct, and the enemy more invisible, than even the most conscious punks had dared to think. Drawing the first conclusion, you would, if you were Strummer, try to find a place in the record business; drawing the second, you would try to find a new way to say the same old things. And of course it is the second path Strummer has chosen.

Cut the Crap seems to be set in a riot—not the idealized “White riot/Wanna riot of my own” of the 1976 Clash, not their “LONDON’S BURNING WITH BOREDOM NOW!” but a far more prosaic affair, tired, too familiar, the everyday bad news of New Britain. A new king of riot: As the strict re-division of British society into a capitalist and serving classes proceeds, it becomes plain that redundancy and civil disorder are not merely costs of this project, but linchpins. Under Thatcher, redundancy is not simply economics: It is social exclusion organized as spectacle. Those who are cut out of organized social life make up a third class, which is used to terrorize those who still retain their places into a thank-god-it’s-them-instead-of-me acquiescence, which is silence, and that silence has no force without some noise in the streets.

This is power as culture: a form of speech that has answered all questions in advance. Behind the Labour government of 1977, which administered What Is as a final social fact, punk could discover a negative: welfare security as spiritual poverty. With Thatcher, who administers What Could Be (you can be anything, she says, which means, you can also lose everything), oppositional culture can only discover an affirmative. It can only agree, and agreement is a further silence. As the redundants riot, the ranter grabs a passing clerk by the collar and tells him the truth: “You could be next!” “Right, mate,” says the clerk. “That’s why I’m keeping my nose clean. Hey aren’t you Joe Strummer?” As public speech, both the riot and the Clash’s new music have been contained before the fact.

Thus Clash’s new riot, too, sounds like a kind of silence: an exhortation in place of drama, inspirational music for “rebel rockers.” “CLASH COMMUNIQUÉ OCTOBER ’85,” it says on the inner sleeve. “Wise MEN and street kids together make a GREAT TEAM . . . but can the old system be BEAT? . . . no . . . not without YOUR participation . . . RADICAL social change begins on the STREET! . . . so if you’re looking for some ACTION . . . CUT THE CRAP and get OUT there.” The new songs, the new music, aren’t much more convincing. A wash of ambient mass media noise, an old-fashioned punk guitar sound communicating not as a revival of a period style but as a new discovery, an occasional rhythmic jump—too soon, it all seems lost in a shoving match between skimpy lyrics and football-match chants of vague slogans. More than anything, Cut the Crap sounds like a transfer from the Clash to Big Country—a band that scored a good, rousing hit with the self-titled “Big Country,” a teary approximation of early Clash—back to the Clash again. Cut the Crap sounds less like failed “rebel rock” than like failed pop music.

And out of this comes one true moment, “This Is England.” Released as a single, it had a strange jacket: on the front, a Mohawked punk couple wander through Piccadilly Circus, blank-eyed and scared of the sleaze, country mice finally arriving in the big city to find out what punk is, seven years too late: “24 HOUR ETERNAL SUNSHINE STRIP STRIP STRIP,” “SEX STYLE SUBVERSION,” “DISCUSSION DISCO.” There’s no one else on the street. On the back, there are lots of people on the streets, black-and-white shots of 1950s men and women finally shrugging off the privation of the postwar period and shopping, buying, smiling, “IT’S NEW,” “GET IT,” “LAST FEW DAYS SALE,” and, square in the middle, a collage from old painted postcards, Buckingham Palace, the Queen in her carriage, a hand raised to hide her face.

“Who will buy my potatoes?” asks the voice of a small child; a drum machine kicks in, slowly, firmly; synthesizer chords lift the music, hold it in, refuse to let it move through any melody, to find any rhythm; a punk buzz saw guitar rides down, sounding wonderful, alive, free, then beaten. Strummer begins to sing, to talk, walking through the riot like his own tour guide, nearly mute for all his words. As the riot takes place it’s already over; he is singing the ruins, and the passion in his voice, the despair, the plain desperation to make you understand, is like blood frozen on a corpse. The corpse is the singer: It’s the country. “This is England,” an anonymous male chorus says over and over, and again and again Strummer comes off the chorus to try and tell you what it is: “Land of a thousand stances.” Images of random violence, of official murder, pass by; nothing connects. The singer flees; he’s trapped. An incident comes to life with detail, then vanishes as allegory.

On a catwalk jungle

Somebody grabbed my arm

A voice spoke so cold it matched the

Weapon in her palm

This is England

This knife of Sheffield steel

This is England

This is how we feel

England is a nowhere, but all possibilities of feeling seem present in the way Strummer sings that last line, here in the voice of another, throughout the rest of the song in his own. “THIS IS ENGLAND,” echoes the chorus, and then Strummer is solitary, bearing down on the following words so hard he makes them vibrate, the solitary “we” so painful and strange, pressing with such force that all that’s come before, the Clash’s whole career, all the great songs, your favorite, seems trivialized by this quiet, still negation, the patent, the physical gap in the “This” of “This is how we feel,” a frightened hesitation between the “th” and the “is,” a break in time that carries the full weight of what Strummer is saying: carries it, and suspends it, leaving you hanging, unready for the fact that after a few minutes the record, like other records, simply fades out.

Postscript: Shortly after the release of Cut the Crap, the three new members quit the band; it never re-formed. Cut the Crap was never released in the United States. “This Is England” has been excluded from all Clash retrospectives, greatest-hits collections, and CD-boxed sets.

_____________________

Originally appeared in the Village Voice, January 31, 1984; Music (Tokyo), January 1986; Artforum, February 1986; revised January 1992.

Act II

FIGHTING THROUGH THE NIGHT

Joe Strummer as Johnny /Elvis in Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 film Mystery Train. (Mystery Train © 1989 Mystery Train, Inc. Photo by Sukita.)

THE REBEL WAY

Alex Cox, Jim Jarmusch, and Dick Rude on the Filmwork of Joe Strummer

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

For me the problem with writing a novel is that I would not want to be content to be the author. I would want to be the character.

—ROGÉRIO DUARTE

Oh come on Earl. Give me me gun back. I might have to pawn it to pay my tab.

—JOE STRUMMER AS JOHNNY IN JIM JARMUSCH’S Mystery Train

Strummer: What are you going to do with yourself? Ray Gange: I don’t know.

—FROM THE FILM Rude Boy

Standing on the edge of a diving board, Strummer strikes a defiant rockabilly pose for the cover of his first official solo album, Earthquake Weather.[1] The cover foretells the isolation and fall awaiting Strummer after the Clash shut down in 1985. He was venturing out on his own for the first time, an intimidating undertaking for a performer who had always enjoyed the collective comfort of a band. Restless and a bit lost, Strummer carved out a brief, idiosyncratic film career as an actor and a composer, with his most prolific period covering the four years up to 1989. After that point, Strummer entered what Dick Rude—actor, director, and longtime friend—calls his “dark night.”[2]

As a teenager, Strummer became fascinated with cinema, including Hollywood gangster and cowboy pictures as well as politically radical films like Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and Burn! Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and George Raft were a few of the screen actors who helped shape the Clash’s rebel persona. For young filmmakers of the day, the rise of punk and its mix of bold music, brash personalities, and theatrical live performances presented exciting cinematic opportunities. For a group like the Sex Pistols, the music was initially secondary to their posturing, as they seemed to be characters from A Clockwork Orange come to life.

On the other hand, the Clash offered politically charged music buoyed with a raw charisma and delivered via fiery live performances that offered a message of hope. The group also looked the part in clothes pieced together and emblazoned with political slogans. For example, Strummer stenciled PASSION IS A FASHION onto his boiler suit and controversially wore a Brigade Rosse (Red Brigade) T-shirt.[3] This made the band a dynamic subject for film.

Early Clash film work would include a feature-length political film and some short films that foreshadowed music videos. Still, music videos, MTV, and the revolution in filmmaking it would cause were years off.[4] Even so, for aesthetically conscious and politically active bands like the Clash, film was a natural step toward getting their music and message out to a larger audience. With this in mind, the Clash set about making a film that aimed to capture the simmering social unrest of mid-1970s England and place the band squarely in the middle of the political and popular culture fray.

Set against this backdrop, the Clash began participating in an ambitious film project, Rude Boy. It would merge the Clash’s political radicalism, unique aesthetics, and raw performances in hopes of becoming the ultimate agitprop film. But when it was released in 1979, the film was a haphazard mix of Clash concert footage placed over a disjointed narrative that attempted to deal with contemporary issues like racism and state repression. As Strummer pointed out, Rude Boy is not a good film and is not interesting to watch for most of its two-hours-plus running time. “Rude Boy does not even seem to have the participation of the Clash,” Rude explained. And according to Strummer it did not.

Rude Boy is set in 1977 London and opens with a long scene where the police and protestors square off as the National Front attempts to march through an Afro-Caribbean community. It follows the hapless Ray, played by Ray Gange, a disaffected youth who becomes a Clash roadie. From the opening performance of “Police and Thieves,” this plot device gives the filmmakers, Jack Hazan and David Mingay, a great opportunity to film concert footage of the Clash in their electrifying prime. The film fails to capture the flavor of the political and social unrest of the time despite using actual footage of social unrest and fascist group demonstrations. Far more effective at highlighting the group’s political ideals are their performances. We see them performing a blistering set at the Rock Against Racism event, Carnival Against the Nazis in 1978.[5]

As the film unravels, the only engaging scenes, other than the live footage, are those few moments when Strummer attempts to offer the unsympathetic Ray a political education—while drinking in a pub, washing his Brigade Rosse T-shirt in a hotel room, or playing “Let the Good Times Roll” on a piano. The film is not the agitprop work that the Clash hoped it would be, but rather equal parts documentary, social commentary, and concert film. When it was released in 1980, the Clash distanced themselves from the film as it seemed like an attempt to exploit their enormous success and popularity rather than offering anything more substantial. In Punk Productions, Stacy Thompson explains, “But for all of the film’s attempts to link the band to the ongoing racial and political clashes and violence occurring in London in the late ’70s, it stops well short of ever suggesting that any identifiable effects resulted from this particular intersection of punk, race, and politics.”[6]

While Rude Boy did not live up to what many had hoped from the Clash, the band was entering a stage of unprecedented success and influence. It assumed the mantle of the world’s greatest rebel rock band with the release of London Calling. Making their way to America once again in 1981 in support of Sandinista!, the Clash played a three-week stretch of shows on Broadway now known as the Bonds Residency. They would play seventeen shows during this residency, attracting thousands of people from divergent sectors of American society including two emerging pop culture icons who were huge Clash fans: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. They listened to the Clash incessantly, particularly during the filming of Raging Bull. Peter Biskind writes that Scorsese “would go into his trailer, put on the Clash at top volume, and sit there revved up by the music, pacing back and forth.”[7] Scorsese hoped to cast the Clash in his Gangs of New York project. The admiration was mutual—Strummer later shaved his head into a Mohawk à la De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver for the Clash’s punk rock guerrilla phase.

When it became apparent that Scorsese would not get Gangs of New York produced, he shelved the project and began working on the darkly satirical King of Comedy.[8] Strummer and his band mates make a fleeting appearance as “street scum.” The Clash had prepared to produce their own film in New York with close associate Don Letts, the Rastafarian DJ at the Roxy Club in Covent Garden. Letts was a talented young filmmaker who made Punk Rock Movie, a Super 8 film documenting the 1977 London punk scene. He was traveling with the Clash to New York City to shoot a video for “This Is Radio Clash” and film the short documentary Clash on Broadway.[9]

Much of this footage appears in the Letts documentary Westway to the World, released in 2000. At the center of Letts’s film are the charming and often heartbreakingly honest interviews given by each member of the band. Intercut with exceptional concert footage, the documentary follows the band from their celebrated rise to their cheerless end with fascinating anecdotes spotlighting the group’s originality and influence. Jones, Simonon, and Headon each offer thoughtful historical accounts, but Strummer steals the show as he movingly speaks about the music and the politics that drove the band.

At one point Strummer explains, “I quickly realized that either you became a power or you were crushed—and that we were trying to grope in a socialist way for some kind of a future where the world is a less miserable place than it is.” The film is neither nostalgic nor sentimental and serves two important roles—a historical document and a revelatory primer for the uninitiated. Strummer concludes the film by discussing the band’s demise after Jones’s departure and the sadness of an opportunity squandered. “We weren’t parochial. We weren’t narrow-minded. We weren’t little Englanders,” he says. “At least we had the suss to embrace what we were presented with, which was the world and all its weird varieties.”

While Westway to the World is a look backward, Let’s Rock Again is a moving glimpse into Strummer’s new life and the bright future that was ahead. Directed by his friend Dick Rude, the film was meant to get his new music out to a larger audience and to serve as a memoir. Spending an afternoon in New York City with Rude, best known for his role as Duke in the film Repo Man, I learn that the film is an intimate, loving portrait of a person Rude describes as his “brother, best friend, mentor, hero—he remains all things to me.” The film began after Rude went to Strummer’s Somerset farm in an effort to convince him to document the then impending Global A Go-Go tour.

Let’s Rock Again was filmed over a period of about seven weeks and it took eighteen months to complete. Strummer was resistant at first, objecting that “I’m not interesting” and that filming him would be like making “a home movie.” He tried to encourage Rude to make a different documentary about an old woman in Rude’s apartment building in Los Angeles. “That would be much more interesting,” Strummer told him. “No one’s gonna wanna see this.” Strummer finally relented, not suspecting that his decision would have enormous consequences. And while the film does promote his new music, it takes on an entirely different tone, symbolizing a life loving music and a musician loving life.

Rude’s film received only two screenings, both at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. It has no official release date and is still in search of a distributor. A strange twist of irony to be sure, since Rude and Strummer had hoped that this film would help get his new music out. In the film Strummer tells an interviewer that Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, the first album he recorded with the Mescaleros, lost money and that he worried he was taking these young musicians down the road of failure. “I don’t know if they realize what they are in for,” he quietly tells one interviewer. I ask Rude if the other members of the Clash had a chance to watch his film. “I had private screenings both for Mick and Paul,” he tells me. “They each said, ‘Wow, I wanna be like that’—they did not know the man he really was, how pure he was—the person he had become after hitting the bottom spiritually, he was realizing his true self.”

Let’s Rock Again opens with a quick but powerful montage of Strummer’s days with the Clash. It is a perfect complement for the scenes ahead where Rude captures Strummer’s performances with the Mescaleros in all their glory. “When people see this film,” Rude told me, “especially all those who would not normally appreciate Joe, they get sucked in to the person he was—they come to love him.”

Rude catches Strummer behind the scenes and offstage almost unawares. Relaxed and disarming, Rude tells me it was “like we were just hanging out—once he committed to the project he was open and accessible.”[10] The moments on film with the band—at the time, Martin Slattery, Tymon Dogg, Scott Shields, Antony Genn, and Pablo Cook—displayed a real unity. Rude explained that he initiated some of the scenes including those that find Strummer traveling to a local Atlantic City radio station in hopes of getting on the air to promote his show and the new album, or Strummer handing out homemade flyers to people on the boardwalk. Both scenes elicit a strong reaction from viewers, often pity and sympathy. One person at the screening asked Rude, “Was Strummer bitter or angry that he had fallen on such hard times?” Rude takes umbrage to this narrow viewpoint. “When people respond like that they are missing the point—in those scenes, I see a man who is doing something he loves with the wonderment, energy, and enthusiasm of when he was a young musician and playing with the Clash.”

Rude poignantly adds that “while he was alive and had trouble getting his music on the radio, people were like ‘so what?’ and now that he is gone there is a desperation to fill this void instead of being in that moment when he was here and enjoying his music.” In the end, Let’s Rock Again achieves this, and more significantly, helps us deal with Strummer’s loss as not a tragedy but as a celebration of an artist who leaves behind a legacy that can never be duplicated. “There is only one Joe Strummer,” Rude says, “and since the days of the Clash there has been no group that has even come close to doing what they did.” Rude is determined to keep Strummer’s music and message alive to influence generations to come.

Rude first met Strummer during the production of Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy. Strummer was recording two songs for the film’s soundtrack. Rude was in London to write the sequel to the 1984 cult classic Repo Man, which was directed by Cox and starred Rude along with Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton.[11] The sequel was never produced but a scene from the script became Straight to Hell. Shot on location in Spain in 1986, this spaghetti Western parody starred Strummer, Rude, and Sy Richardson as bumbling hit men who decide to rob a bank. The film features many cameos from musicians including Elvis Costello, who plays a waiter who is never without a tray of coffee.

Cox worked with Strummer on three film projects, each a bold political and cultural statement. Cox describes Straight to Hell as a political response: the “Reagan/Thatcher maniac front was working overtime to destroy the Sandinista revolution by any means. Thatcher had even attempted to criminalize the word ‘Sandinista’—hence the Clash album of the same name. It would be a mistake to underestimate the power of the punk movement at that time. The Clash, the Jam, the Pistols, and their successors were almost the only beachhead many of us had against a tidal wave of reactionary politics.”[12]

Cox told me Strummer “was a brilliant film composer, who got better and better as we worked together. He was interested in being an actor as well, but in the case of Walker, used that as a way of being immersed in the production and the place “I think by that point he’d realized he was a composer and musician rather than a thespian.” Cox describes Walker as “a comedy about how badly Americans behave abroad.” The film follows William Walker, a nineteenth-century American adventurer who becomes a soldier of fortune and eventually dictator of Nicaragua.[13] “Walker was such an unpleasant character, a coward, and a liar,” Cox adds. “You can’t make a film about that seriously because he’s an idiot.” Strummer’s committed anti-imperialist stance and his support for the Sandinistas and other Latin American revolutionaries explains the film’s remarkable soundtrack. Cox’s film fit perfectly with his political sensibilities and as Cox confirmed, “I think Walker is one of the best film soundtracks ever composed, a pity it’s no longer available.”[14] Rude agrees, describing Strummer as “not confident as an actor” but his “soundtrack work is genius.”

Interestingly, Strummer was not credited with playing anything on the Walker soundtrack, only singing. Strummer told Bill Flanagan of Musician magazine in March 1988, “I couldn’t credit myself playing because I was afraid of getting sued by Sony, to be honest. I got permission from CBS/Sony to sing on it. See, I can write it, conduct it, produce it, okay? I can do all that and have it on any label quite freely. But should I sing on it or play, then some deal has to be made. So because Walker’s on Virgin I made a deal for the singing with CBS/Sony. Then when I began to compile the credits I thought, Anything I’ve done I better not put on there, ’cause for all I know there may be a separate deal for playing it. It could open a can of worms, right? So I just put down ‘Vocals’ but in fact I’m probably playing some rhythmic instrument on every track, whether it’s piano, guitar, or marimba.”[15]

Nevertheless, critics who believed that Strummer was incapable of producing good music without Mick Jones as a reassuring partner were impressed with the Walker soundtrack. Charles Shaar Murray, who had years before derided the Clash as a garage band and supplied the motivation behind the song “Garageland,” wrote that it was “a remarkably elegant, loose-limbed, and accomplished set of ersatz Latin themes spiked with delicate country touches.”[16] And NME’s Gavin Martin explained, “You may be a little stunned and staggered at first (I was) to find the man with the demon bark and three-chord bite has composed every note here. But from lustrous samba percussion, through flamenco horns, and country inflections, it’s all gorgeously effective and superbly detailed.”[17]

David Byrne, who won an Oscar along with Cong Su and Ryuichi Sakamoto for their score of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, echoed these sentiments. After accepting the Oscar, Byrne told the press he believed that Strummer should have been given the award for his work on the Walker soundtrack. Rude explains, “Strummer could explore both darkness and light in a way few musicians could and that’s what makes Walker and also Permanent Record[18] such compelling work.”[19]

“Because he was a talented artist in another area—music—he realized that you could not do things halfway, you have to be studied,” Rude adds. “While he had that powerful charisma he was not studied enough to be an actor—he was a hack like me.” Although many felt Strummer possessed a natural, unforced ability as an actor, Strummer was the first to admit that this period of acting was more a cathartic experience rather than a serious attempt to become a full-time actor. “I played myself,” Strummer amusingly told me referring to his 1989 role in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. “It was my best performance.”

Joe Strummer and Curtis Vorde Hall in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. (Mystery Train © 1989 Mystery Train Inc. Photo by Sukita.)

Mystery Train is Jarmusch’s discerning examination how various outcasts, outsiders, and foreigners view America. Jarmusch sets the film in Memphis, Tennessee, using the American obsession with Elvis Presley as a grim metaphor for what passes as America. Jarmusch gives us three charming vignettes, each offering a markedly unique perspective. In the first, we follow a young Japanese couple essentially on a pilgrimage to Memphis to explore the city where their American rock heroes (Elvis and Carl Perkins) once roamed. From the young Japanese hipster couple we meet Luisa, an Italian widow. Memphis now serves as an allegory for loss and renewal with Elvis appearing as her spiritual guide, promising comfort and hope. Finally, we encounter Strummer’s Johnny in a bar, a Brit caricature of a 1950s rockabilly outlaw who goes by the nickname “Elvis.” In fact, Johnny is a small-time crook wallowing in desperation after his wife left him, with only his brother-in-law, played by Steve Buscemi, to console him.

Jarmusch’s Memphis in Mystery Train is equal parts exciting, mythical, and dangerous. Yet the film’s allegorical narrative offers a critical analysis of a country as a paradox using the city that became famous for Elvis and rock ’n’ roll as a stand-in for America. As each vignette intersects at a hotel that counts Howlin’ Wolf’s night clerk and Cinque Lee’s bellhop as employees, the film plays on the troubling contradiction of a once thriving and bustling American city that is now hollow and gray, mostly inhabited by African Americans who live with the legacy of a white man who became famous for performing black music.

Top: Joe Strummer as Johnny/Elvis in Mystery Train. Above: Joe Strummer, Steve Buscemi, and Rick Aviles in Mystery Train. (Mystery Train © 1989 Mystery Train Inc. Photos by Sukita.)

Strummer’s performance in Mystery Train is engaging and clever. Jarmusch, an innovative director, places Strummer in this part and gets out of his way. Jarmusch describes Strummer as “so incredibly valuable to me, both as a friend and for all the things he created.” He adds that while bands like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were about “reduction,” Strummer and the Clash took “everything that flowed into their hearts and souls—grabbed onto that essence and used it to make it a part of themselves.” In a final gesture of Jarmusch’s affection and admiration for Strummer, he helped film the video of “Redemption Song.” It was shot in New York City and followed the creation of a mural painting dedicated in Strummer’s honor on a wall on East 7th Street. The mural consists of an image of Strummer in 1950s rebel rock pose with slogans “The Future Is Unwritten” and “Know Your Rights” over a red, gold, and green flag emblazoned with the lion of Judah, a symbol of power and mercy in the Rastafarian religion.[20]

In the late 1980s, Strummer became involved in the Rock Against the Rich tour, which was an attempt to inject class analysis into the political struggle by promoting issues like the redistribution of income and other socialist economic policies. He also played a prominent role in the Free Nelson Mandela concerts organized by Amnesty International.[21] Dick Rude describes Strummer’s politics “as having strong views that he was willing to change,” but overall it was “about taking care of his brother and of justice.” Strummer believed in certain political issues “so strongly he felt they needed to be repeated,” Rude tells me. Alex Cox added that Strummer’s “motto might have been ‘one mustn’t grumble’—which about personal things he never did” and that “he pursued politics as hard as he could for as long as he felt he could.” Finally, both Rude and Strummer himself describe Strummer “as an exemplar of the Rebel Way.” The “dark night” after the Clash and his brief flirtation with acting and soundtrack work was a time of creative reflection and political renewal. In the end, Strummer best sums up both this period and his life’s work: “To someone who says to me, ‘You were the spokesman for your generation and you fucked it up,’ I say, yeah, but we tried—whether we succeeded or failed is immaterial—we tried.”

BE BOP A LULA HERE’S JOE STRUMMER

By Ann Scanlon

Just within earshot of the barrow-boy cries on London’s Notting Hill market is a cramped café, offering whiskey-laced coffee and early morning refuge to anyone who needs it.

For the past four years, Joe Strummer has stared into an empty cup, half listened to the crackle of a caffeine-stained wireless and reflected on a broken past and perpetually uncertain future.

As the former leader of one of the most influential bands of the last decade, Strummer had plenty to think about.

And it took an awful lot of coffee before he was able to understand how the Clash had allowed such anger, passion, and street sensibility to dissolve into complacency, confusion, and parody itself.

“The Clash were fucked by success,” he realizes now. “We were singer/songwriters and the better we did our craft—and we tried to do it real good—the more it removed up from the frame of where we were writing from.”

But it wouldn’t be Strummer to wallow in coulda-always-been-a-contender contemplation forever. Armed with the hard learned lessons of the past twelve years, he’s back in the ring with an impressive soundtrack, Walker, and a clear vision ahead.

Until recently, it was Alex Cox who provided the main outlets for Strummer’s brooding madness. When the latter gate-crashed a Sid and Nancy party in ’86, Cox invited him to work on the score and Strummer ended up writing the central song, “Love Kills.”

A few months later, Cox gave Strummer a lead role in his spaghetti spoof Straight to Hell and subsequently asked him to appear in Walker.

Shot in Nicaragua, Cox’s fourth movie outlines the life of William Walker, the American soldier who declared himself president of Nicaragua in 1855.

Unlike Straight to Hell, which revolved around a small clique of the director’s friends, Walker drew on a huge pool of Hollywood stars and features the talents of Ed Harris, Miguel Sandoval, and Marlee Matlin.

Strummer’s acting capabilities are hardly stretched as Faucet the dishwasher or as a battle extra. “If I had any less of a role then I wouldn’t be there at all,” he says. “It would be best if we had it on video so I could press pause and say, Look, see that guy holding his hat running through the back of the battle scene—that’s me!

“Although I do have another scene where I dive into a river with a rope and try to lasso these naked women who are washing clothes in the water.”

Strummer and his Straight to Hell costar Dick Rude were initially written in as comic relief to the serious storyline but, as Walker was cut from its original three hours to half that length, most of their efforts ended up on the cutting room floor.

“At some point Alex decided that he had to reach the Rambo audience, which you can understand. But really his audience is the people who’d go up to the Gate cinema or the Scala, we could have sat and enjoyed a two-and-a-half-hour Walker, and now it seems to fall between the two stools.

“I think Alex started with both a great script and crew of actors. They were real professionals, no complaints, no tantrums, Ed Harris would sit down in the dirt with the extras, but everything was still very uptight.

“As soon as we got there it was (adopts phony drawl), Right, this is dead serious. This is a five-million-dollar picture and personally I didn’t enjoy the ten weeks we spent there.”

That said, Strummer was glad of the opportunity to visit Nicaragua and—just as on Straight to Hell, he had preferred to “method out” and sleep in a battered Dodge—so he and Dick Rude skipped the luxuries of Managua’s Hotel Intercontinental for a rented house in Granada.

“Nicaragua was just like being in a Gabriel García Márquez book. There’s nothing to do except sit outside on rocking chairs, rocking the mosquitoes away. You’d sit there in the afternoon and feel so clear in the mind that it was like being on a different planet.”

Because they were filming in the south, the Walker crew were well out of the war zone. But Strummer—who once dealt in the polemics of “Sandinista” and the more specific “Washington Bombs”—still maintains his support for the Sandinistas.

“Nicaragua is a country with nothing, and the Sandinistas are the first to admit that they’ve made every mistake in the book. But when they took over from Somoza (the dictator who was deposed in 1979), the first thing they did was to teach everyone to read and write and make sure that there was some sort of medical care.

“There’s a guy called P. J. O’Rourke who writes in Rolling Fucking Stone and represents the typical, Hey, dude, let’s party segment of America and probably doesn’t even know where Nicaragua is. Anyway, he went down there to slag it off, and of course he can go into a supermarket and see all the empty shelves, but he’s not talking about the real issue which is that America supports any kind of fascist dictator so long as he ain’t a commie.”

While Walker was being edited in Granada, Cox asked Strummer to write the score. “I banged the stuff off in two weeks. I had my trumpet, violin, myself, and two suitcases in this house, and every day I’d take a couple of new songs to Al.”

Less straightforward, however, was the actual recording when Strummer had to explain his arrangements to more than a dozen musicians in a San Francisco studio. “That was incredibly nerve wracking. I felt completely paranoid all the way through the first side because the Clash would just record, Bang! Bang! And that was it.

“There’s a song called ‘Omotepe,’ which I wrote with one finger on the piano, and when I explained it to the pianist I was almost apologizing for its simplicity. But she just said, I think that’s tough, and gradually I began to feel better.

“But it was only when we cut the second side country style that it was more like rock ’n’ roll and I could say, This is how it goes, boys. We’d do ten takes: a slow one, a long one, a fast one, a funny one—that’s the way rock ’n’ roll was made.”

On completing Walker Strummer returned to London and, within weeks, a guest appearance to the Pogues at Camden’s Electric Ballroom led to a three week tour of the States with them. “It was funny how it happened,” he smiles. “I’d met Jimmy the Red, a well-known drinker around Notting Hill, and he was telling me that he’d been to Narcotics Anonymous, had given up everything and was feeling great.

“So I decided to knock drinking on the head for a month, went home and sat there feeling all smug with my new decision when the phone rang and the Pogues’ manager Frank Murray said, Joe, you’re gonna come to New York with us in three days’ time.”

Standing in for ailing Pogues guitarist, Philip Chevron refueled his enthusiasm for playing live. “There’s something about thrashing an instrument to the limit and that’s what really appealed to me about the Pogues—the sheer physicality of the music. I’d just done Walker and I loved the way we could really rock the house with a tiny little thing like a mandolin, rather than bludgeoning everyone into submission with a huge wall of sound.

“Philip Chevron is a fantastic rhythm guitar player, and it was scary enough to learn all that stuff let alone try and play it at nine hundred miles per hour.”

Four days after the last of these Pogues gigs, Strummer was back in LA writing a score for Permanent Record, a U.S. movie dealing with teenage suicide.

This time, he put together the Latino-Rockabilly War, a six-strong band which mixed psychobilly with Latin and jazz, and includes Zander Schloss of Circle Jerks and Poncho Sanchez, one of the most respected Latin/jazz musicians on the West Coast.

“I wrote all the songs in two weeks,” says Strummer, “and that’s the best way to do it, ’cos we’re being too damn precious. There’s not enough people pushing themselves to write.

“Instead of rewriting they’ll endlessly tart it up and take it to Memphis and take it to New York and take it to this magic mix master or that. Too much money is spent papering over the fact that it’s shit in the first place.”

Ever since Strummer heard the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away” as a ten-year-old in boarding school, he has thought of nothing but rock ’n’ roll. “It’s the only thing that’s living to me,” he claims. “I shall live and die and be judged by it.”

God knows, he even sold his marriage vows for it. In 1974 he married a complete stranger who needed immigration status in order to travel abroad, and used the resultant £100 to buy the black Telecaster that he has used every night since. “I’d like to get divorced,” he shrugs, “but I can’t find her.”

It’s not something that Strummer—now the father of two daughters—thinks about from one year to the next. “I’ve been with Gabrielle for ten years and we don’t need a piece of paper to tell us we’re together.”

And although he now accepts that the Clash have split for good, he and Jones are closer than ever. “Mick’s daughter Lauren and my daughter Jazzi are the best of friends—a terrible duo—so I see him all the time. I see Paul too and I’m goin’ to go and see Topper who’s been detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.”

Strummer is curious as to what Topper will make of the recent spate of Clash reissues. “When I heard that they were going to release ‘I Fought the Law’ I had a predictable reaction,” he admits. “But then I rang up Rob Steiner at CBS and he explained that he was a long-term Clash fan but hadn’t got ‘I Fought the Law’ because it was released on the since deleted EP, and now sells for £45. Until then I hadn’t thought about it in terms of the audience, and Rob convinced me that he’d made the right decision.”

Together with Jones, Steiner subsequently worked out a track listing. “Story of the Clash Volume One was my idea of a joke. I’ve got no right to assume there will be a second volume, but this double album is made up of all the main stuff and I think we’ve still got an interesting odd bag that might fit on a single LP in a couple of years’ time.”

For today, though, Strummer is back in his favorite Notting Hill retreat, staring into another cup of coffee but surer than ever of his next move. “Sitting here these past four years listening to stuff out of that,” he nods in the direction of an old radio behind the counter, “I’ve realized there’s no Bop Message. And I’ve decided that I’m going to deliver the Bop Message to anyone who’ll listen.

“It’s nothing to do with bebop, I call it the Bop Message ’cos I’m differentiating it from all the drivel that I hear on the radio, which has no message to me except that some fucker wants to be famous.”

It was while Strummer was working with the Latino-Rockabilly War, in a tiny studio in LA, that he fully realized the potential of the Bop Message. “Most of the studios in LA look like the London Rock Shop, but we found this Mexican place called Baby O which was just a simple wooden room. I’ve got a song called ‘Trash City,’ which is going to be released as a single off the Permanent Record soundtrack, and I asked my friend Jason Mael to bring his Super 8 camera and shoot a video.

“He just shot it as we were recording, and the whole thing cost six hundred fifty dollars. That to me is the Bop Message.”

But although Strummer’s message and method is simplicity itself, he is only too aware that promoting the Bop Message won’t be quite so easy. “Right now, I’m a one-man operation and it’s lovely and clear. I’ve got nobody to please but myself and that’s the way I want to keep it.

“Walker sold fifteen thousand copies in America, but there’s never been an advert, it’s not on the radio, and the film died in a week. So I’m not dispirited by those figures ’cos what that means is that there’s fifteen thousand hipsters in America who searched Walker out and found it.

“I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle to maintain so I can almost operate on that level. Whereas if I was trying to compete on a mega-mega level I’d have to have all these wankers polishing my mix and polishing my haircut. I’m just not interested enough in Joe Strummer to push Joe Strummer the way Madonna must push Madonna.”

Strummer might have resigned himself to indie sales figures, but he’s planning to return to the road nevertheless. “Touring is like a drug. You never forget what it was like to be high on that drug, but when someone comes along five years later and gives you another taste, you’re addicted again. And on the Pogues tour, I really felt the bite.”

“But what really annoyed me,” he continues, curling his top lip into the famous snarl, “was that for thirteen numbers the audience would be rocking away, having a great time, but as soon as I stepped up to do ‘I Fought the Law’ and ‘London Calling’ all these tossers would suddenly start gobbing.

“I’m going to go back onstage and when I do I’m going to play everything from ‘Keys to Your Heart’ to ‘Rock the Casbah’—I insist on playing my back catalog—but the first person to gob at me, I’m gonna jump offstage and have that Telecaster right through the center of their head.

“But,” he stresses, “I don’t want my songs to be about my hotel rooms or my ego. I’m a one man operation, and I’m not interested in becoming a superstar ’cos you can’t write.”

Strummer’s train of thought is interrupted by a stray busker who wanders over and unwittingly asks, “Can anyone tune a guitar?”

Within minutes the guitar is at the center of a fully fledged session, a café regular singing while Strummer and his friend Roughler Ray keep rhythm. “I am a sincere man,” echoes Strummer, translating the singer’s Spanish, “the most thing I want in life is to spit my words out into the air.”

And then he’s lost again, keeping time with his teaspoon as simply and effectively as he’d banged out one-finger piano patterns for Walker.

Joe Stummer might have been unsure about where he was going or even of what he was doing, but he could never lose sight of himself.

_____________________

Originally appeared in Sounds, April 2, 1988.

CLASH AND BURN

The Politics of Punk’s Permanent Revolution

By Dennis Broe

A sensuous mob, they think/only of food and drink; They ignore since food is their only goal/the immortality of the soul.

—“THE MIGRATORY RATS,” HEINRICH HEINE

I have the will to survive

I cheat if I can’t win

If someone locks me out

I kick my way back in

—“HATE AND WAR,” THE CLASH

If punk came to “tear away the veil,” to tell the world, and specifically the staid musical world of ’60s rock ’n’ roll, whose former dissent had been commodified, that revolution was in the air, though not on the airwaves, then its primary messengers were the Sex Pistols and the Clash. While the Sex Pistols opened Pandora’s box, negating, just like the Dadaists before them, the very ground on which their art form stood, it was the Clash who would, just as the Surrealists alchemized the Dadaist energy and turned it into something enduring, with their grounding in the specific moment of the rebellion of pre-Thatcherite English working-class youth, transform the pure negation of the Sex Pistols into an animus that would continue to rebound and grow to eventually take in hip-hop and then the worldwide expansion of a globalized multiethnic revolutionary youth culture. Of course Rotten and Vicious could only be about tearing down the false gods, but Strummer and Jones, one name indicating the endurance of the rock ’n’ roll guitar form, the other indicating commonality and the everyday aspect of its followers, would instead point the way toward the potential of lasting rebellion aimed not just at overthrowing the rules of a form that was proving more and more susceptible to cooptation but also at uniting that form with a consciousness that was about not finding a place in the market but shattering the marketplace. Strummer, Jones, and the Clash, most markedly in the first British album and subsequent singles, came not to save the world but to destroy and then to rebuild it.

This impulse sprang not from preordained theory but from an absolute honesty and identification with their moment, with a Britain that offered little to its working-class youth and was in the process of deindustrializing—offering less. Joe Strummer, the diplomat’s kid, was the theoretician, and Mick Jones was the street kid who would always “Stay Free,” that is, in the terms of one of his greatest songs, stay loyal to his working-class upbringing. In addition, both theory and practice were molded not just by white working-class consciousness but also, and crucially, and most adamantly among all the punk groups, by Strummer’s and Jones’s lasting interest in black forms, particularly reggae, and, in the deeper sense, by their interest in uniting, finding a rapprochement between, not only black and white musical forms, but also black and white working-class consciousness. Their radicalness came, as Dick Hebdige points out, in attempting to bridge this chasm at a moment when commercial interests were starting to move in the opposite direction, breaking down audiences into marketable segments. The Clash, the name itself giving voice to Marx’s historical dialectic of change through struggle, also became early commentators on record industry commodification, inscribing their own struggles with their record company, the corporate giant in the pre-conglomerate era, CBS, in their music. That they eventually lost the struggle, succumbing to the temptations of the U.S. market, in an early bout with globalization, in no way diminishes their achievement both in giving expression to an individual moment and in supplying the impetus for the eventual picking up of their torch first by rap in the United States and, then, when that was commodified, by hip-hop across the world.

To identify the way in which punk, and specifically the Clash, helped precipitate a permanent revolution I want to use a remarkable book by the French philosopher Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx. Kouvelakis, through French theorists like Michel Foucault, is concerned with restoring the immediacy of revolution, seeing this process as a rupture that tears down the old without positing a map of the new. What is revolutionary, Kouvelakis claims, paraphrasing Lenin, is the capacity to “recognize the fundamental problem of our time at the time and place of its first appearance . . . [the fact that] every question of the day—precisely as a question of the day—at the same time [becomes] a fundamental problem of the revolution.”[1] This capacity to explore the present, to be immediately of it, marks the first Clash album in the way that, Kouvelakis argues, in the previous century, characterized the work of the German poet Heinrich Heine and the early work of Karl Marx. Heine turned his back on an age which, as a reaction to the upheaval of the French Revolution, craved “harmony, social peace, and political moderation”[2] and portrayed, in poems like “The Silesian Weavers” and “The Migratory Rats,” the insatiable hunger of the workers who in the first poem tell Germany its doom approaches, its “shroud is on our loom” as ominously “we weave.”[3] In the second, the workers take the form of rats who destroy everything in front of them and who will not be appeased by politics or philosophy: “Soup-logic only and reason-dumplings/Will silence their hungry stomach rumblings.”[4]

The last word on the state of permanent readiness as permanent revolution came from a Marx just beginning his career in activism and philosophy who wrote that the lack of an exact idea of what the future ought to be “is precisely the advantage of the new trend: We do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one.”[5] Marx later crystallized this state of being in the now when he stated in The German Ideology that “communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”[6] Marx, at least the early Marx, remember, was not a Marxist. Whoever suspected, though, that he was at heart a protopunk?

ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

The Clash emerged at a moment in 1976–1977, well after the end of the 1960s, when that generation’s rebellion was over, and when another generation’s, that in reaction to Thatcherite England, was just beginning. The U.S. bicentennial in 1976 and the Queen’s Jubilee in Britain in 1977 would be springboards for the repression to come in the Thatcher-Reagan era, and the Clash thrashed violently against the encroaching passivity these events promoted. The Queen’s Jubilee, celebrating, as Clash commentator David Quantick put it, “twenty-five years of grinding the proletariat’s face into the dirt with an iron heel,” would be greeted by the Clash’s first album, a veritable compendium of the grief of working-class English youth.[7] Thatcher herself, crowned queen the next year, is to usher in, as Reagan will in the United States, the post-Fordist era which featured the dissolving of the labor-business pact that had held for thirty years with an attack on the very legitimacy of unions (Reagan’s first official act was to smash the air traffic controllers’ union) as well as the accompanying large-scale exporting of the industrial base of both countries to other areas of the globe in a worldwide corporate “race to the bottom” in order to find the lowest possible wage.[8]

Both the form and style of the first album, simply titled The Clash, announced a break with rock ’n’ roll as usual and an absolute identification with the fate of the group’s audience. This album is one of the great working-class statements of the last century. The Beatles had opened rock ’n’ roll content up beyond the love song, but punk and the Clash restored the purity of the form in their return to the short blunt bursts of the early rock ’n’ roll era. The content, though, was radically different than the silly love songs of early rock ’n’ roll. “Janie Jones” (“I’m in love with a rock ’n’ roll world . . . I’m in love with Janie Jones world”), the name of a madam the punks frequented, outlines both the attraction and alienation of sex as an outlet for the frustrations of the workplace. “Career Opportunities” (“Do you want to be, do you really want to be a cop? the ones that never knock”) details the dead end that English working-class youth faced, leading an earlier generation back to the grind of the factory as depicted by the working-class character (Albert Finney) giving up his rebellion, getting engaged, and going to work at the end of the 1960s film Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. In Strummer’s and Jones’s generation, when the factory itself is disappearing, this frustration leads to the junkie’s clutches, the dole, the army, or prison, expressed in the song “Hate and War,” “the only thing we have today.” This critique of dead-end work has its complement, expressed in “48 Hours,” in the way the group sees the weekend, the two-day reprieve. Their depiction of “leisure” recalls Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” where it is the frantic other of work, recreating in its rote quality the pattern of the factory.[9] This totalizing critique is best summed up in “Remote Control” (“Don’t make no noise . . . Don’t make no money to get out of here”) whose group-chanted bridge is simply the word RE-PRES-SION.

If the album’s content is dystopian, its form belies this content and suggests the beginnings of a way out. Its language is cockney, a working-class argot, so thick as to be often indecipherable for an outsider and with no accompanying words on the album jacket. It celebrates language as the collective wisdom of the working class and makes no pronunciation concessions to the American market, as British groups often do. The choruses are often anthemic, sung or chanted by the group, not just by the frontman, Strummer. They represent the collective element in the music that both challenges the standard rock ’n’ roll division of lead singer and band and presents the chorus sentiments as group (or class) rather than individual statements. Musically, Jones’s guitar slashes through the Clash’s early tunes in staccato bursts of anger, a buzz saw that destroys the intricate harmonies of rock in its now fossilized stage. Yet in key moments, especially in “Police and Thieves,” the guitar plaintively, here in an unadorned solo, plays the melodic line and in a deeper way not only echoes Strummer’s anger and hurt in the vocal, but also suggests that there are reservoirs of feeling beyond anger and hurt which may yet be tapped.

There was still another layer to the Clash. Though it manifested itself imminently, that is, grew out of the specific conditions of their moment, it would enable their revolutionary message to resound across the world. This was their connection to Caribbean youth in Britain through reggae. Strummer had always shown an interest in black musical forms and black politics, with an early song in his band the 101ers (named after the address of a squatter house where the band lived) being a rhythm and blues riff about a “big blue policeman” and his “little black book.”[10]

The defining moment of this connection occurred at the Notting Hill riots in 1976. Strummer and the group’s bass player, Paul Simonon, watched as black youth threw bricks at cops expressing their frustration that would be so much a part of the album the Clash would write in the wake of this event. “White Riot” (“I want a riot, white riot, a riot a’ me own”), their signature song, was written in solidarity with the event. The John Bulls running on the cover of the first album to quash the actual black riot are, in the imagination of the band, alternately running to quell the rebellion the Clash urge on their audience. The secret history of punk is that the movement was born not out of the stick-it-in-your-face attack on the Queen’s Jubilee waged by the Sex Pistols (“God Save the Queen and Her Fascist Regime”) but rather out of a transposing into white circles of the anger evidenced by black youth at Notting Hill the year before.[11]

Reggae, as Dick Hebdige puts it, not only “carried the necessary conviction, the political bite so obviously missing in most contemporary white music” through its “aesthetics born of suffering,”[12] but also, through its use of patois, a language spoken “beneath the master’s comprehension,” made no concession to an outside audience and seemed to be, much as the working-class punks conceived themselves, a “foreign body which threatened British culture from within.”[13]

Both black and white youth were in the crosshairs of the British imperial system, but among the punk bands it was the Clash who perceived this most directly. In “Police and Thieves” (“in the street, fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition”) the Clash take Junior Murvin’s melancholy reggae song and infuse it with punk anger through Strummer’s accusing vocals and Jones’s slashing guitar. It’s the only song on the first album in which the Clash go into a “jam,” the only song over three minutes, or as they later say in “Hitsville in the U.K.,” over “two minutes fifty-nine.” In the song proper and the chanting over the rhythm that extends the musical interlude at the end of the song, the Clash carve out a space not only for a reconciliation of black and white youth, which in its liberal moment begat punk’s Rock Against Racism, but which also attempted, in its more radical moment, to forge a bridge across the interracial chasm that would lead both groups to see their common class enemy and take action against it. The later “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” expresses this sentiment literally, but also suggests in its irony that the time for its coming to fruition may have passed: “White youth, black youth, better find another solution (other than random violence), Why not call up Robin Hood and ask him for some wealth distribution?”

The Clash’s interplay with reggae persisted throughout their career, with Jones and Strummer writing about their trip to Jamaica in “Safe European Home” (on Give ’Em Enough Rope) and using both the ska beat and the language of Jamaican toasters in their later ode to working-class solidarity on London Calling’s “Wrong ’Em Boyo” (“It’s wrong to cheat a tryin’ man”). The interplay was acknowledged on the reggae side when studio impresario Lee “Scratch” Perry, who engineered the Clash’s “Complete Control,” had their likenesses inscribed in a mural in his Black Ark recording studio in Jamaica and later when Bob Marley responded to the Clash’s creation of what was termed “punk dub” by recording his own “Punky Reggae Party.”[14]

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

The second way, besides their representation of the milieu of working-class youth, that the Clash pursued their immanent critique was as artists, in their reaction to their own marketing and commodification by the record industry. Like the Sex Pistols, the Clash participated in a generalized questioning by the punk movement of all phases of the record company mediation between the groups and their audience. The Clash continually made their dealings with this marketing machine an issue in their music.

In “Garageland,” in responding to an infamous review by the orthodox musical press claiming they should be locked in the garage they came from with an engine running, the band viewed this homicidal suggestion as a badge of honor. “We’re a garage band, we come from Garageland,” Strummer snarls on the chorus, then he fills in the class aspect of what it means to be a garage band: “We don’t want to know where the rich are goin’. We don’t what to know what the rich are doin’.”

Two later singles extend their critique of the musical industry. When CBS released “Remote Control” as the first single from their debut album without consulting the band, they wrote “Complete Control,” perhaps their greatest song. The song starts with a series of orders by the record company each of which beginning with “They say,” equating the corporate “they” with the other powerful forces over the lives of working-class youth detailed in the song’s predecessor “Remote Control.” Here the Clash pose their most formally collective alternative to this control in the music itself which, with its fast-clipped singsong pace and raunchy call and response meter, is designed to duplicate the feeling of the band on the road; out there, together, taking on all comers. The song also introduces the note of irony in characterizing the culture industry which will be picked up in their next musical encounter with it. They catalog the ways corporate conglomerate CBS is attempting to manage them and conclude by snarling at CBS’s “complete control even over this song,” recognizing that even their attack against the record company will be used by it for profit.

Finally, in “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais,” the last great song from their early revolutionary period, they deal with the larger question of commodification. Noting the process of punk becoming commercialized in a way that is echoed later in rap’s old school/new school debate (“The new groups are not concerned with what there is to be learned. They’re always fightin’, looking for a good place under the lightin’”), they then address the larger issue of the power of a corporate media that is just beginning to accelerate the process of centralization. In so doing they also raise the issue of the dawning penchant for product placement. “They [the punks] got Burton suits/Hah, ain’t it funny/Turning rebellion into money.” The question of cultural cooptation is the central problematic that both the punks and those who follow them in rap and in global hip-hop will deal with and it is the Clash that raise that question most directly and eloquently.

The next phase of their career, post-1978, is their interaction with the American market, an interaction that, in the end, destroys them. The changes start in the second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope, where Blue Oyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman teaches them how to adapt their critique to the American market, where violent overthrow is suggested, not stated, and where class consciousness must be concealed, as Dick Hebdige says, in style. The album is still interesting and Jones manages in “Stay Free” to use the trope of the love song to describe the parallel between him and a buddy who ends up in jail. The “Stay Free” of the title means literally his hope for his ex-con mate and metaphorically his consciousness that to live a working-class life and not adapt to other values is to stay free.

The next album, London Calling, is pitched to the American market. It’s a perfectly awful mishmash of musical styles, only finally redeemed in the throwaway uncredited last song, “Train in Vain,” which proved that the group was capable of writing a perfect pop song. The distance traveled between the first and third album can be measured by “London Calling,” the title track, which suggests a phony, Hollywood blockbuster, post-Armageddon city, a fantasy dystopia which contrasts sharply to the first album’s “London’s Burning,” a celebration of the possibility of immanent revolution and of a potential utopia realizable because of the recognition of the dystopic elements of the present. The accommodation to the American market, and to their own global marketing, reaches its nadir in Strummer-Jones’s last album together, Combat Rock. “Rock the Casbah,” which peaks at number seven on the American charts, ostensibly about democracy in the Middle East, goes on to become one of the anthems of the American troops in the first Gulf War, where the song is easily translated as a rationale for an imperial attack on the oil resources of that region.

The Clash eventually succumbed to a commodity process which in its present moment is all encompassing. As John Harris says, “Put bluntly Anglo-American popular music is among globalisation’s most useful props. . . . mainstream music, whether it’s metal, rap, teen-pop, or indie-rock, cannot help but stand for a depressingly conservative set of values: conspicuous consumption, the primacy of the English language, the implicit acknowledgement that America is probably best.”[15]

STAY FREE

But the spirit of the first Clash album and the early singles lives on and migrates. If for punk, reggae is a “present absence,”[16] a form around which much of punk composes itself, then for rap, beginning in the Bronx in 1979, a year after the end of the first Clash period, punk was a present or structuring absence as well. Punk taught rappers that they could challenge the record industry and create hits outside the system, that music with a rawer edge could succeed, and that revolutionary immediacy was possible in a commercial art form. Chuck D, the leader of the most politically and culturally conscious rap group of the era, Public Enemy, credited punk with “showing me that music can be a powerful social force and . . . must be used to challenge the system.”[17]

At the same time that rap in the United States was domesticated, transformed in the marketplace into the raunchy but apolitical gangster rap, the movement spread across the globe and returned to the local immediacy of British punk in the 1970s and American rap in the 1980s. As Tony Mitchell relates in Global Noise, models and idioms from hip-hop in the United States have combined in other countries with “local musical idioms and vernaculars to produce syncretic combinations of African-American influences and local indigenous elements.” This form is promoting a worldwide culture of rebellion that, paradoxically, grows out of an absolute commitment by its artists to expressing the local conditions of their repression. Global rappers, the children of Chuck D, but also of Strummer and Jones, in this punk/hip-hop nation include antiglobal communists in Italy, Basque separatists in Spain, Maori street rappers in New Zealand, and the militant Islamists of the Palestinian rap group Shehadin (Martyrs) who advocate armed opposition to Israeli oppression.[18]

By adamantly defining themselves in their early work as being of their place and time, the Clash were conversely able to take part in what Hegel termed “world spirit,” the advancing of humanity forward on a revolutionary path, or what Ishmael Reed, in describing how black music spreads black consciousness and rebellion, labels simply and unequivocally, “The Jazz.”

A BROTHER IN REVOLUTION

Women in Punk Discuss Joe Strummer’s Influence

By Amy Phillips

It was my first year of college. We were listening to London Calling. I said, “Man, how could anyone not love this band?”

“I don’t like them,” said a woman I didn’t know.

A male friend commented, “Yeah, girls don’t like the Clash.”

“That’s absurd!” I exclaimed. “I love them!”

“You,” he scoffed, glancing at my plain, loose-fitting clothes, scraggly hair, and un-made-up face, “you’re not really a girl.”

If being a girl means being boy-crazy, fashion-obsessed, and not a Clash fan, then I’m “not really a girl,” as charged. But if it means having the right bodily equipment and being stirred by the spirit of punk to bring down the sexist state, well, that’s another story. When Joe Strummer shouts “Anger can be power!” in “Clampdown,” the first image that pops into my head is the thousands of protesters at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., in April 2004 (and no, that has nothing to do with the Indigo Girls’ horrendous version of the song on the Burning London tribute album). Like all great art, the Clash’s music is open to interpretation. You take what you want from it, and you leave the rest. It’s inspirational, but not unproblematic—especially for women.

Growing up a punk fan in a post-Clash world, I’ve been conditioned to think of 1976–1982 as a golden age, and Joe Strummer an immaculate saint (let’s forget anything after ’82). I saw him in concert once, on the tour supporting his 1999 album Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. He seemed untouchable, deserving of my admiration and respect but not my criticism. I couldn’t imagine finding fault with Strummer anymore than I could picture dissing Martin Luther King Jr. or Mother Theresa. He was a rock ’n’ roll hero, but not like Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, or any of those stuffy old codgers. I had no problem criticizing them. But Joe, he was different. He was ours—our patron saint, our guiding light, our foundation on which the canon was built.

When I set out contacting female musicians for their take on Strummer, I expected to receive nothing but fawning, reverent responses to my questions about his influence on their lives and work. But these women were smarter than I was, and they knew him as a living, breathing force of nature, not a saint. “Joe was a guy who appreciated women,” artist and journalist Vivien Goldman, who chronicled punk’s beginnings as a writer for Sounds, New Musical Express, and Melody Maker, tells me. “Recently I was talking with this girl from Kid Creole and the Coconuts and she said—I hope I’m not blowing anything when I say this—they would go out on the road with [the Clash] and they would make notes of really good chat-up lines that guys gave. And Joe came out on top. It was Joe who had the best chat-up line.”

Joe Strummer using cheesy come-ons to pick up girls? It blew my mind. Women didn’t always just fall at his feet without any effort on his part, because he was, you know, Joe Strummer? Apparently not. “He made a lot of jokes,” says Ari Up, former lead singer for the pioneering all-girl band the Slits. “He was big on making pranks.” Pranks? The lead singer of The Only Band That Mattered, the voice of Britain’s angry young underclass, the keeper of the punk rock flame, did stupid things to get people laughing? It made him sound almost “human.

Both Goldman and Up speak of how supportive Strummer and his band mates were of their female contemporaries, at a time when it wasn’t particularly fashionable to do so. Being a first-generation punk was hard enough, what with the majority of British society antagonizing the entire nascent subculture, but being a female punk was almost unbearable.

“It was ghastly then,” Goldman says. “It was so difficult, being one of the few females. I’m not saying we didn’t have a lot of fun, but it was rough. It was a boys-only club. But the Clash’s attitude towards chicks was deep. They were really out there being young lions, young warriors.”

Up adds, “We had the whole world against us. We were literally chased on the street. We had to walk with people like Joe or Paul [Simonon, the Clash’s bass player] as bodyguards. They really were the support system of the Slits. It was so important that we had people like the Clash around us to survive all the sabotage and outcasting that was going on.”

In 1977, the Clash embarked on their first nationwide headlining trek, the infamous White Riot tour. They brought the Slits along as a support act, despite the fact that the group, comprised of Up, guitarist Viv Albertine, bassist Tessa Pollitt, and drummer Palmolive, had only previously played three live shows together. As journalist and one-time Clash manager Caroline Coon noted in her book 1988: The Punk Rock Explosion, the Clash paid the Slits’ expenses, and shared their tour bus with the girls, much to the chagrin of the driver. “The bus driver had to be bribed every day just for us to get on the bus,” Up recalls. “It was okay for the boys to be bad—the Clash were tearing up hotel rooms, throwing stuff, going insane. Don Letts stuck his naked ass out the window! But we didn’t do any of that stuff, and we were banned from the bus. It was the middle ages. A total witch-hunt environment. We weren’t doing anything, just being childish and female and wild and free as females could be at the time, but not necessarily outrageous or disgusting. And that was offensive to people.”

Coon wrote, “What they [the Slits] represent is a revolutionary and basic shift of female ego from one which is biologically defined to one which is made strong by an assertive, mainstream role in society. Thus they are far more ‘threatening’ than the male musicians they are touring with.” But the Clash didn’t feel threatened. “They weren’t just our friends,” Up explains. “They were our brothers in revolution. Because we were so isolated from the rest of the world, that made it an even stronger brotherhood.”

The Clash continued to make a point of choosing local acts featuring female members to support them on their tours, and collaborated with women like Ellen Foley and Janie Jones on musical projects. Even their treatment of groupies seems to have been enlightened. Goldman recalls, “They used to have their followers, some of whom were male, some of whom were female, and they would just sort of posse up, and let them crash on the floor of their hotel room, let them travel on the bus. There wasn’t some sort of weird sexual subtext. It was all curiously innocent, in retrospect. Not that nobody had sex ever, but it was, you know, kind of a camaraderie.” Australian aboriginal rights activist Gary Foley, who accompanied the Clash on tour, is quoted on his website as saying, “No doubt there were young women who turned up at the shows and were keen to bed him, but he always deflected them from those sorts of thoughts and tried to encourage them to think about local political issues and engage them in broader political questions.”

All in all, Strummer seems to have been a fairly upstanding gentleman who treated ladies as equals. It makes sense that the women who knew him personally would shower him with praise (reverent or not). But what explains the email responses I received from musicians who weren’t close to him, who only knew the man through his public persona and his work? Penelope Houston, singer for the Avengers, wrote, “I was a fan of the Clash, but not him [Strummer] in particular. He struck me as leaning towards the somewhat humorless pro-working class Brit who’s got a soapbox in his back pocket.”

“The Clash were one of those bands that I always thought was a little too mainstream for my punk rock sensibility,” explained Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler. “The really underground stuff was more my speed. I was a bit of a punk rock snob, I guess. They always seemed like a straight rock band, nothing new or different except the way they dressed (which wasn’t that punk anyway).” Garage-rock revivalist Holly Golightly, Kleenex/Liliput guitarist Marlene Marder, and no wave icon Lydia Lunch all agreed that Strummer’s music had not affected their lives in the least. Sue Gogan, vocalist for the Derelicts and PragVec, posited that in her case, the influencing may have gone the other way around: “The Derelicts had a much more political approach than [Strummer’s first group] the 101ers, and I think that the Clash picked up on that.”

As the replies filled my inbox, I realized that my image of Joe Strummer as founding father and patron saint was completely out of line. This was punk rock I was dealing with, not ancient history. Punk is all about destroying the canon, cutting idols down to size, sticking safety pins in bloated golden gods. By putting Strummer on a pedestal, I was treating him like Dylan or Jagger; I was perpetuating phony Beatlemania as phony Clashmania. Joe himself certainly wouldn’t have stood for it.

But maybe there was more to it. I remembered that college conversation as I read an email from Lora Logic, X-Ray Spex saxophonist and Essential Logic frontwoman: “Speaking personally, I think the Clash emanated a very male energy that kind of passed me by. Great band, but not really an influence on the women I knew.”

Male energy! That explained everything. It was what made the Clash attractive and repulsive simultaneously, and what ensured their place in the rock ’n’ roll continuum. It was what the groupies fell for and the followers wanted to harness. And what groups like the Slits, X-Ray Spex, and Kleenex/Liliput stood in sharp contrast against.

In their 1995 book The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll, Simon Reynolds and Joy Press wrote of the Clash, “It’s not that their songs are misogynist, but rather that they seem to have nothing to say to, about, or for women. You can count on one hand the number of songs in their immense oeuvre that are addressed to or even passingly refer to a woman, while there are endless anthems exhorting (the) ‘boys’ to action.” It’s true: there’s “Janie Jones,” “Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad,” “you” in “1–2 Crush on You,” “baby” in “Brand New Cadillac,” the female alluded to in “Protex Blue,” and not much else.

“The Clash’s music is amongst the most chaste rock ’n’ roll ever created: hoarsely hollered insurrectionary anthems, carried by martial, unsyncopated rhythms,” Reynolds and Press continued, “‘We had group discussions,’ recalled singer Joe Strummer, ‘Bernie [Rhodes, the Clash’s manager] would say “An issue, an issue. Don’t write about love, write about what’s affecting you, what’s important.”’” One of the few songs about a relationship with a girl, Mick Jones’s “I’m So Bored with You,” was misheard by Joe Strummer as “I’m So Bored with the USA,” and so he wrote an anti-American lyric for it. You couldn’t ask for a more dramatic example of the way punk learned the art of rejection from mod put-down songs, and metamorphosised misogyny into militancy.”

Certainly girls can be militant. We want to overthrow The Man, too—probably even more than boys do. And when a group like the Clash creates a militant world in which we’re ignored, well, some of us will form our own gangs and start riots of our own. The Clash may have been, as Ari Up says, our “brothers in revolution,” but their exclusionary lyrics revealed the limits of their vision. Take away all the trappings, and the Clash were a good old-fashioned boy band, no different from the Rolling Stones: “The emotional framework behind the Clash—bored boys breaking loose and letting rip—was actually as traditional as they come,” wrote Reynolds and Press.

Despite all that male energy, the Clash managed to inspire quite a few women throughout the years. The list of female musicians who have covered their songs runs from old-school Canadian punks the Dishrags to pop divas Kylie Minogue and Annie Lennox. The post-riot-grrrl trio Sleater-Kinney, frequently described as heiresses to the “Only Band That Matters” throne, are vocal about the debt they owe to the Clash. Drummer Janet Weiss told Rolling Stone that Joe Strummer was one of her heroes, “Not because he is an infallible genius, but because he chose the path of his own personal truth.”

Perhaps journalist Judy McGuire put it best, in a Punk magazine tribute to Strummer, when she wrote, “I was a painfully shy, depressed, awkward teenager the first time I heard them. They taught me about politics, to think for myself, to question authority, and to become a better, more informed person. Their lyrics gave me the courage to stop caring what other people thought about me and to always be true to myself.”

When it comes right down to it, the Clash were a great rock ’n’ roll band, and Joe Strummer was a great rock ’n’ roll star. You don’t have to be male to appreciate that, you just have to be human. Because that’s what Strummer was, above all else. Not a saint, not an icon, not a god. Just a human.

ALWAYS PAYING ATTENTION

Joe Strummer’s Life and Legacy

By Charlie Bertsch

Asked to define “punk attitude” in a 1999 interview, Joe Strummer begins by critiquing clichés. “Punk ain’t the boots or the hair dye.” But then he stops. Everybody says that. Even if it’s true, the statement is itself a cliché. He isn’t content to pass a reflex off as thinking. “I’ve been asked to define it many times so I’ve actually thought about it for a couple of seconds.” Interviewing rock stars comes pretty close to the proverbial task of herding cats. Wary of being cornered, they rival politicians in their ability to speak in negatives. But Strummer is generous to a fault. He constructs a scenario. “Say that you come in here and the music sucks. I don’t care if the guy is big and in a bad mood. The first thing I do is go up to him and say ‘Change that music!’ I do it in a cool way though but I don’t sit here fuming, getting sick and having to leave in twenty minutes. I go straight in, see what’s wrong and I fix it. If we’re meeting some new couples, the second someone lights a cigarette, I grab an ashtray and it’ll be there while everything’s going on. Everyone else there will be standing around while their ashes fall off.”[1]

This is one way of explaining the do-it-yourself approach. Don’t stand around waiting for someone else to take care of things; take care of them yourself first. But Strummer stresses the point differently than most people who have written about punk. He downplays the individualism in DIY. This isn’t a selfish do-it-yourself approach but a do-it-yourself for others. “I like to be completely aware of what’s going on at all times, even if it’s four in the morning. She needs a chair or he needs a beer. There’s no long wait ’cause I’ve already clocked it.” His DIY ethic is emphatically ethical. “In fact, punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.” It’s hard to imagine a definition of “punk attitude” more sharply contrasted to Sid Vicious’s raised middle finger. Yet that archetypal gesture only tells part of the story. In another interview from the end of his career, this time for Unpop, Strummer recounts the story of the time the Sex Pistols opened for his first band, the 101ers. “They were walking through the dressing room, and the last guy in line was wearing an Elvis Presley gold lamé jacket, and I said ‘Hey, where’d you get that from?’ And he went, ‘Oh, this jacket? I’ll tell you where I got it from. This store up there in Camden.’ And he was really nice and cool about it. And that was Sid Vicious, [who] at the time was kind of a hanger-on.”[2] From his earliest fame until the day he died, Strummer’s conversation was peppered with good words for the people he considered comrades. Even at his most combative, he was more interested in building up a community of rebels than in tearing down those who failed to make the grade.

Surely this explains why the Clash, far and away the most successful first-generation punk band from a commercial standpoint, have never received their full due from music historians. It’s easier to tell the story of punk as a break with tradition, a refusal to play the games of the music industry, a transcendental “No” screamed at the powers that be. Although the sand in Strummer’s and Mick Jones’s voices captured that spirit of resistance as well as anything, the band’s openness to rockabilly, reggae, and the mundane melodicism of the Brill Building exposed them to criticism. If the purpose of punk was to be unpalatable to mainstream audiences, the Clash erred on the side of tastiness. Surprisingly, the biggest spoonful of sugar came from the band’s politics. Their left-wing exhortations were what distinguished them most sharply from the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, and the Ramones and were also, in large measure, what ended up making them more popular.

Instead of encouraging listeners to revel in their alienation, Clash songs called them to overcome it. They invited you to join the party without inquiring into your past or making demands on your future. That meant making room for fans of Elvis, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, as well as disaffected youth caught up in the backlash against 1960s-style peace, love, and understanding. It’s precisely this inclusiveness that Greil Marcus highlights in his 1978 piece reporting on the sessions for the band’s second album Give ’Em Enough Rope. “If the Sex Pistols were frankly nihilistic, asking for destruction and not caring what came of it, the Clash are out for community, the self-discovery of individuals as a means to solidarity, a new ‘I’ as the means to a discovery of an old ‘we.’”[3] Tellingly, however, Marcus went on to produce a massive book centered on the Sex Pistols, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, but has written relatively little about the Clash. Too earnest, too popular, too easy, the Clash became one of those acts—Roxy Music is another—that many people love, but few love to discuss.

Maybe this is a good thing. The blood rush you get listening to Strummer’s cry of “London’s burning!”; the brutish chords of “Guns on the Roof”; the pause-littered path of “Clampdown” can only be done partial justice in words. And Lester Bangs already hit the redline in that foolhardy endeavor way back in 1977. He describes Strummer’s inspired performance one night as “a fury unleashed on the stage and writhing in upon itself in real pain that connects with the nerves of the audience like summer thunderbolts.” In the face of this overwhelming intensity, bouncing up and down struck him as a hopelessly inadequate response. “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.”[4] Yet as sublime as the Clash could be in the heat of the moment, their real legacy wasn’t records or concert performances, but the remarkable ability to realize their values in the mundane stretches between storms. Bangs understood. He had seen the band at their hotel-trashing worst, but it didn’t matter. “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 behavior puts the model of a truly egalitarian society into practice in their own conduct.”[5]

It’s hard to imagine a tougher standard to measure oneself against. That Joe Strummer resolutely refused to settle for a more modest one, even at the height of the Clash’s fame—they played New York’s Shea Stadium, for goodness sake, just like the Beatles—testifies to his steely political will. When a band gets that big, though, problems of scale emerge for which the DIY ethic is ill-equipped. Every new piece of equipment, every roadie required to set it up takes the concert tour out of the realm of the common man. By the time they released their scathing third single “Complete Control” in September 1977, the Clash already understood the depth of the trouble: “On the last tour my mates couldn’t get in/I’d open up the back door/But they’d get run out again.” Yet the band pressed on in its quest for world domination for five more years, willing to forsake the intimacy of a personal relationship with their most devoted fans for the promise of reaching listeners who probably wouldn’t have given them the time of day on the street. All successful major-label acts confront this paradox. But its pressures must have been overwhelming for a populist punk band like the Clash.

Punk has struggled with the contradictions of popularity ever since the Sex Pistols first made the headlines. As the 1970s came to a depressing close, the artiness of postpunk drew in the community’s borders. And a little later, hardcore militarized them. While the Clash was cracking the Billboard Top Ten for both the album Combat Rock and the single “Rock the Casbah,” uncompromising bands like Black Flag, HüskerDü, Minor Threat, and the Minutemen were reconquering the rocky highlands of punk for true believers. In its relentless deferral of the simple pleasures of pop music, hardcore functioned much as bebop had within the jazz world of the 1940s. Independence became the watchword as the resolutely anticorporate magazine Maximum Rock and Roll and its followers reshaped the terms of debate. Do-it-yourself metamorphosed into a synonym for don’t-do-it-on-a-major-label. The collective identity that the Clash had struggled so hard to inspire solidified into a relatively stable “we,” but at the expense of connections to the wider world. Although few artists had the nerve to overtly trash the Clash, the band’s financial success and corporate backing made them a poor fit within the interconnected local scenes of second-generation punk. Perhaps this explains the development of bands like the San Francisco Bay Area’s Operation Ivy, which came eerily close to capturing the special Clash sound that they almost seemed like a cover band on a politically correct independent label.

After the dissolution of the Clash, Strummer kept a low musical profile for several years, focusing his attention on the world of film. When his first solo record, 1989’s underrated Earthquake Weather, did poorly in the marketplace, he was held captive by the recording contract with Epic—now a division of Sony—that he had inherited from the Clash. Even if this silence was purely an accident, the forced hiatus kept him above the fray during the new wave of discussion about “selling out” that accompanied Nirvana’s unexpected commercial breakthrough in 1992. Kurt Cobain was not as overtly political as Strummer, but they shared a desire to instigate social change. Unlike Cobain, however, Strummer never let himself be paralyzed by self-doubt. The difference between them was partially a matter of context. Strummer didn’t grow up at a time when the purity of self-marginalization was highly valued. Although he and his band mates might have lamented the Clash’s position in the industry, he never felt the need to beat himself up for signing to a major label. “Complete Control,” after all, was not a one-off 45 for an obscure indie label, but a major-label single like its predecessors. The band’s critique of corporate machinations was a matter of content rather than its mode of distribution. More broadly, Strummer didn’t waste much time beating himself up for anything. His generosity extended to himself. That may sound like a curious formulation. But in a world where self-loathing is a prime motivational tool, Strummer’s ability to fuse attentiveness with contentment stands out.

Once Strummer figured out how to extricate himself from his contract with Epic, he turned to an independent label. An imprint of the American independent label Epitaph, Operation Ivy and Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat was the perfect political and musical fit. While Strummer probably could have landed a major-label contract if he had wanted, he recognized the advantage of working with people who truly respect your work. But his decision also represented an endorsement of the third-and fourth-generation punk acts signed to labels like Epitaph. As good as Strummer’s new music was—the Mescaleros records are sounding better with age—this willingness to make connections within a punk community radically different from the one that gave birth to the Clash was every bit as important. In nearly every interview he conducted after forming the Mescaleros, Strummer took pains to give props to younger artists, some of whom weren’t even born when he started performing. An interview published by the resurrected Punk magazine after his death is a good example. “I’m into all the new punk. I like to hear Green Day on the radio. It’s a lot better than the other shit they play in England, let me tell you that. I just toured with the Offspring and got really tight with them. And my favorite group of the moment is Hepcat, from LA. They’re the best ska band ever born in the United States of America, bar none.”[6] The names change, depending on the interview, but in each case Strummer clearly has a sense of who needs a chair and who needs a beer.

He was always paying attention. That’s what makes some of his more controversial moves so interesting to ponder. When an interviewer for a fan website asked him about the use of “London Calling” in an American television commercial for Jaguar, he took full responsibility. “Yeah, I agreed to that. We get hundreds of requests for that and turn ’em all down. But I just thought Jaguar . . . If you’re in a group and you make it together, then everyone deserves something. Especially twenty-odd years after the fact. It just seems churlish for a writer to refuse to have their music used on an advert and so I figured out, only advertise the things you think are cool. That’s why we dissed Coors and Miller.” It’s surely no accident that, even though Strummer’s own career had been reborn on an independent label, he chose to praise major-label punk bands like Green Day, the Offspring, and even Blink 182—a fave of one of his daughters—along with his label mates. While he steadfastly promoted the virtues of independent record labels, underscoring the artistic bankruptcy of the corporate conglomerates that own the majors, he cheerily undermined the ideologues’ demand for purity. “Putting your music to an advert is a compromise. But a good advert with cool music can turn on a lot of people. I know when I’m watching TV and you get a good ad, it’s an up.”[7]

Joe Strummer never lost the ability to imagine his listeners’ lives, the sort of people who feel the burdens of the moment ease, however slightly, when they hear a good song on a commercial. He never lost it because he was always listening to music himself, because he listened to what his fans told him before and after his shows, because he was always a good listener. Although he only made it to fifty, Strummer was old and famous enough to have been tempted by the prospect of retreating to the mirrored walls of the self-satisfied mind. But he never gave in. That’s why we owe him an incalculable debt, not only for his prodigious musical legacy, but for staying true to the carefully crafted self he made famous in the Clash, the middle-class diplomat brat John Graham Mellor transformed into the proletarian hero Joe Strummer. He showed us how to get big without going soft. And he showed us how to stay big without becoming too hard. Because he recognized that there is equal danger in bending over backward and refusing to bend an inch. Either way, you’re liable to end up broken. Joe Strummer knew how to stay in one piece. His greatest gift to us is not any particular song or story, but the way all his songs and stories were bound together by the clarity of his consciousness. Even after his death, he’s paying too much attention to let any ashes fall.

WHITE RIOT OR RIGHT RIOT

A Look Back at Punk Rock and Antiracism

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

And the society that spawned them

Just cries out who’s to blame?

And then wraps itself in the union jack

And just carries on the same.

—“THE FEW,” BILLY BRAGG

At the height of the White Riot tour an earnest political journalist asked me, “What are you going to do with all the energy of your audience? How can you harness it? What do you think happens to it?” I said, “It slides under the door and out of the hall.”

—JOE STRUMMER

The scene was utter mayhem. Or at least that’s what the newspaper headlines blared the next day. The frenzied crowd gathered at London’s Rainbow Theatre in May 1977 to see the Clash ripped chairs from their moorings and threw them at the stage. “Playing the Rainbow that night,” Strummer said, was the equivalent of “playing Madison Square Garden . . . we knew that punk had arrived.”[1] Coming on the heels of civil unrest throughout England, including a recent spate of IRA bombings, the Clash’s full-throttle performance was a statement that it was time to find purpose and create “the movement.” Punk was not swearing on TV, as the Sex Pistols famously did only a few weeks before, but becoming an active agent for collective social change, echoing the nineteenth-century poet Rimbaud’s invocation to “change life.”[2]

Freedom, both personal and political, was the driving force behind their performance that night. They issued a spirited declaration that the Clash were going to take charge in the all-important struggle ahead; anything is possible for those who are willing to stand up and fight. The song that “kicked things over that night,” as Strummer said, “was ‘White Riot.’” The Clash wanted to destroy racism and spread the message of unified rebellion. This song was their rallying cry, which aimed to transform Clash followers from passive concertgoers into a guerrilla army tired of “going backwards” and ready “to take over.”

Yet a closer look at punk’s approach to opposing racism reveals that it was far from effective. In some instances, it actually bred racism and undermined any serious attempt to bring together multiracial communities and working-class whites.

The Clash tried to lead the antiracist charge within the punk movement. They took a prominent role in Rock Against Racism and were committed supporters of the Anti-Nazi League.[3] There were a number of reasons for the group’s antiracist activism, primarily the influence of Strummer and Paul Simonon, the Clash bassist. They both greatly admired Afro-Caribbean music (reggae, dub, ska), particularly Simonon. Both had grown up in proximity to multiethnic communities.[4] The respect that members of the Clash felt for the music influenced their interest in and concern for the struggles of Afro-Caribbean communities in England. This attitude reflected the general influence of blacks within English culture following World War II and helped shape the punk movement’s antiracist activism. Conversely, it also limited and weakened the movement’s scope and value.

Beyond the reggae rhythms and ska beats or the important reggae cover songs like “Police and Thieves” and “Pressure Drop,” the group’s antiracist political message was not easily conveyed to their listeners. Two songs that the Clash recorded early on—“White Riot” and “White Man in Hammersmith Palais”—reveal the ambiguity of their multiethnic message. In the latter song, Strummer describes his experience with Simonon at a reggae event at the Hammersmith Palais, recounting the duo’s disappointment in the performances, and his realization that unity between the Afro-Caribbean people and white punk youth seemed nearly impossible. In the song, Strummer describes the fighting and robbing as counterproductive and ultimately dangerous as it further splintered blacks and whites. The true enemy was the state, as Strummer wrote in the following lyric:

Dress back jump back this is a bluebeat attack

’Cos it won’t get you anywhere

Fooling with your guns

The British Army is waiting out there

An’ it weighs fifteen hundred tons

To a certain degree, the ambiguities of “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” work in the song’s favor as the listener gets the sense that Strummer is making a plea for true unity. “I was really trying to get at the division between the black rebels and white rebels and the fact that we got to have unity or we’re just going to get stomped on,” Strummer explained nearly a decade later.[5]

“White Riot” was written after Strummer, Simonon, and the Clash’s manager Bernie Rhodes were caught in a riot between the police and Afro-Caribbean youth gathered at the Notting Hill Carnival on August 30, 1976. In the song, Strummer cries: “Black people gotta lotta problems/But they don’t mind throwing a brick/White people go to school/Where they teach you how to be thick.” While discussing the song Strummer said, “Our goal was to prod those people who were complacent and comfortable . . . it was important to join the struggle with those groups being beaten down and who were willing do something about it . . . ’cause we all were being beaten down . . . we had to realize we were all in the some boat and unity was a necessity or we would get smashed.”

To complicate matters, England was on the cusp of a period of intense political and social conservatism that would dominate the country for the next two decades. The reaction was creating a hostile, violent environment in which many were choosing sides in the escalating conflict between marginalized communities and the white power structure. The Tory Party effectively seized the opportunity to lure working-class white youth to join their party, blaming immigrants and racial minorities for the terrible economic conditions. And in terms of racial violence, the National Front was not alone. The violent Anti-Paki League directed abuse at the South Asians who were rapidly populating cities throughout Northern England. For this reason, “skinhead” came to embody anti-Asian hatred and much of the neofascist music was basically anti-Asian rants.[6]

The National Front, a sinister, neofascist hate group that draped its racist and xenophobic beliefs with the Union Jack, was building a small but significant electoral base among disaffected white working-class voters.[7] As Strummer acknowledged, the same misery that caused people like him “to search for positive solutions” stirred feelings of anomie and hatred among others who ultimately “chose the route of fascism.” The neofascist punk band Skrewdriver became the cultural face of white supremacy, proudly taking up the flag to wage a race war. Their music, described as racialist, helped spread a message of hate while recruiting English youth to join along.[8]

Even among listeners of the Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, and the Jam, the subtle antiracist message caused confusion resulting in a gross misinterpretation of the artist’s intention. Roger Sabin explains that “in terms of song lyrics, anybody who used the word ‘white’ could be asking for trouble.”[9] As a result, songs like “White Riot” became anthemic favorites of the National Front and were given much press in their magazine Bulldog. Furthermore, the incorporation of fascist iconography into their aesthetic by some bands and musicians, including Joy Division (who took their name from Hitler’s military brothel), Siouxsie and the Banshees (who performed wearing swastikas and singing about the Nazis), and even Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, who were in a group called the London SS before they founded the Clash, sent a troubling message to their audiences.[10]

The myopia of the antiracist punk movement was further revealed by its indifference to and participation in other forms of hate crimes. The racism directed against Asians, Hispanics, and Jews was essentially ignored.[11] Rock Against Racism tried to organize events in areas highly populated by Asians, for example, but these events generally failed thanks in large part to the racist blunders of the bands involved, including Sham ’69 and Adam and the Ants.[12] Songs like “White Riot” and the Stiff Little Fingers’ “White Noise” revealed the tenuous line some musicians walked in an effort to promote an ideal of unified rebellion.[13] These songs held a romanticized view of the struggles of oppressed Afro-Caribbean and black communities believed to possess a music, style, and approach to life that was exciting and therefore should be celebrated. Asians, Jews, and other minorities were not represented, begging the question: How does supporting a certain community’s music or culture make one antiracist? Of course, the alliance between punks and the Afro-Caribbean community became the stuff of myth when Bob Marley recorded “Punky Reggae Party” immortalizing the supposed unity:

Rejected by society

Treated with impugnity

Protected by their dignity

I face reality

new wave, new craze

new wave, new craze

new wave, new craze

new wave, new craze

Wailers still be there

the Jam, the Damned, the Clash

Wailers still be there

Dr. Feelgood too, ooh

Norman Mailer’s The White Negro offers some historical context to this romanticized view of racial struggle and the fixation on the “coolness” and “hipness” of “rebellious” blacks. Superficially, Mailer’s book comes across as macho posturing and Beat-era rhetoric.[14] Ultimately, a bewildering fetishization of an aggressive African American response to a history of persecution lies at the heart of Mailer’s White Negro. Mailer contends that white communities must appropriate “blackness” in order to effectively revolt against repressive American society.

The thematic similarities between White Negro and songs like “White Riot” are rooted in the general belief that blacks symbolize oppression and thus model resistance to state oppression. Strummer explained that “White Riot” was “a call to kick things off,” a favorite expression of his, and to bridge the “divide between black and white youth.” Mailer intended to reach white ethnics, intellectuals, and most importantly artists who, like blacks, were excluded from society. Furthermore, Mailer asserted that the appeal of black struggle would deliver whites, namely white hipsters, from the drab conformity of the 1950s.

Mailer’s ideas largely stem from the Beats, from Kerouac to Ginsberg, who wrote romantically about blacks and their struggle. James Baldwin quotes Kerouac in Nobody Knows My Name, “wishing I were a Negro feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy, not enough life, joy kicks, darkness, music, not enough insight.”[15] Mailer adds that blackness offers liberation to a staid, conservative society. White hipsters and the like needed to take on, from Mailer’s standpoint, the sexual freedom and hostility blacks seemed to possess toward the society that subjugates them. This combination would propel hip white society into action. For Strummer, it was more a case of class and recognizing the need for class struggle. Poor working-class whites needed to understand that their lot in life was tied to building relationships with other marginalized communities instead of separating themselves based on socially constructed (not political) differences.

Both Mailer and Strummer believed that at the heart of their work was a demand for critical self-examination and an evaluation of the circumstances that have created the sense of individual complacency and inability to stand against tyrannical society. Mailer argued that the severe treatment of blacks throughout American history has fostered a consciousness that is part psychopath. “Hated from the outside and therefore hating himself,” Mailer wrote, “the Negro was forced into a position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the square automatically condemns as delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt.”[16] He concludes by declaring, rather ridiculously, that we must emulate this part of the Negro and “encourage the psychopath” in ourselves.[17]

Shortly after White Negro was published, James Baldwin wrote a response aimed directly at Mailer, his friend, called The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy. He first rebukes White Negro for demeaning and pathologizing racial minorities and then argues that it is dangerous for anyone to adopt blackness as a means of political self-transformation, particularly if white ethnic minorities are attempting to wear the mask of blackness in an effort to appear stronger in the face of oppression.[18]

Baldwin points out that Mailer’s thesis is defenseless in view of the fact that the majority of black Americans were hardworking, conservative, Christian citizens not displaying any of the quixotic qualities Mailer so greatly envied. And moreover, to consider the struggle of blacks as “cool” or “hip” is unwise. “But why should it be necessary to borrow the Depression language,” Baldwin writes, “of deprived Negroes, which eventually evolved into jive and bop talk, in order to justify such a grim system of delusion.”[19] Mailer’s assertion that the “psychopathic hipster personality” would lead to a joyous transcendence outraged Baldwin, who countered that these personality distortions were in actuality a sign of “humiliation and suffering.”[20]

Still, social upheavals including the civil rights movement led some young whites to identify with and emulate black activists such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, and Martin Luther King Jr. They became the heroic models for would-be white subversives. And this is what occurred in the antiracist punk movement with respect to Afro-Caribbean musicians like Horace Andy, Sly and Robbie, and Toots and the Maytals, and especially Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley. I often wondered what exactly was going through the minds of all those who sang along to songs like “White Riot.” Did the followers of the Clash understand that they were calling for a unified rebellion or were they hearing a different, more sinister message? Punk as a subculture was not impervious to the larger society—the societal values, stereotypes, and ideologies concerning race were difficult to dispel in a three-minute song or even a series of well-intentioned concerts.

David Widgery’s Beating Time makes the case that Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League found a perfect ally in the punk movement. In spite of that, these and other historical accounts are revisionist and to a degree disingenuous. In America, the punk community’s response to racism made that in England look like the new civil rights movement. Lester Bangs addressed this in “The White Noise Supremacists,” a sharp indictment of rampant racism within the New York City punk scene originally written for the Village Voice. He recounts countless examples of prominent musicians who adopted a “racist chic” and “racist cool” attitude. Ivan Julian, one of a handful of black musicians in the New York punk scene at the time, told Bangs, “It’s like a stance . . . a real immature way of being dangerous.”[21] Bangs also recounts Nico of the Velvet Underground’s explanation of Island Records dropping her from the label: “I made a mistake. I said in Melody Maker to some interviewer that I didn’t like Negroes. That’s all. They took it so personally . . . although it’s a whole different race. I mean, Bob Marley doesn’t resemble a negro, does he? . . . He’s an archetype of Jamaican . . . but with the features of white people. I don’t like the features. They’re so much like animals . . . it’s cannibals, no?”[22] In the end, Bangs concludes that Rock Against Racism and other attempts “at simple decency” could never work in a scene that is intolerant and shows indifference to racism.[23]

The situation Bangs discusses has become the norm as punk and pop steer clear of politics, especially in relation to race and class; notable exceptions include Bad Religion, NOFX, and Anti-Flag.[24] Strummer and the Clash remained undaunted if a bit bruised back in England and dedicated themselves to continuing what they started. “The media scrutiny was intense,” Strummer told me. “Any time we made any kind of statement or played a benefit show it would be manipulated and distorted to the point that they were literally putting words in our mouths . . . it took the steam out of us and made us at times somewhat reluctant to speak out.”[25]

Strummer then explained, “But when Margaret Thatcher started using race” and was ingeniously employing a racist rhetoric in her campaign, “the media, for the most part, did little to challenge her.” Thatcher went on to serve as prime minister from 1979 to 1990.[26] Her government rolled back or eliminated many social programs that the 1945 Labour government had inaugurated. It also expanded police powers against immigrant and racial minority communities; one of the results, arguably, were the riots in England’s inner cities during the long hot summer of 1981.

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “the true Rude Boy” as Strummer called him, described those involved in events like Rock Against Racism as nothing more than “liberal racists.”[27] “In the 1970s, sections of the white left in this country were trying to exploit the conditions that blacks found themselves in and trying to win us over to their various ideological positions. They saw us as victims. We had an analysis that we were not victims. We had a history of struggle and resistance against British colonialism, which in a sense was being continued in this country. We needed to build independent organizations that could carry our struggles, our hopes and our aspirations forward.”[28]

Crass, the definitive radical punk band, supported Johnson’s position.[29] In the song “White Punks on Hope,” the group took on the Clash and those in the punk scene with uncompromising, critical directness:

They won’t change nothing with their fashionable talk,

All their RAR badges and their protest walk,

Thousands of white men standing in a park,

Objecting to racism’s like a candle in the dark.

Black man’s got his problems and his way to deal with it,

So don’t fool yourself you’re helping with your white liberal shit.

Johnson took a more nuanced approach about what needed to be done. “I believe in humanity, that all races have more in common than they do different,” he continued.[30] “If you’re not thinking in international terms in the twentieth century you’re backward.” Strummer shared this view completely as evidenced by his subsequent creative and political activity. Johnson felt that some, like Strummer and the Clash, were sincerely trying to move forward and felt that alliances could be built among some groups and organizations at the time. “We did not see ourselves as separatists,” Johnson explains. “We felt that, given the particularities of our historical experience, we needed to organize ourselves independently as a force and to build alliances with progressive white organizations.”[31]

Looking back, Strummer felt that despite the many missteps and contradictions, there was a sincere attempt to respond to issues of racial injustice. Something had to be done and somewhere along the way people understood his message and changed the way they thought and acted. Even so, his “most recent work takes into account a much more global perspective and with it a more thoughtful approach to not only racial injustice but ethnic and immigrant discrimination.” Then he paused and looked at me and said, “When the music you are playing is considered a danger, a threat and then you combine it with a message of justice it can’t not be allowed to stand “you will be crushed by those who are against this political view and also by many who say they are with you.”

Act III

WALKING THROUGH THE CROWD

Performers of choreographer Elizabeth Streb’s STREB Extreme Action Company in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

YOU CAN’T HAVE A REVOLUTION WITHOUT SONGS[1]

The Legacy of Víctor Jara and the Political Folk Music of Caetano Veloso, Silvio Rodríguez, and Joe Strummer

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Victor stood in the stadium

His voice was brave and strong

And he sang for his fellow prisoners

Till the guards cut short his song

His hands were gentle, his hands were strong

—“VICTOR JARA,” BY ADRIAN MITCHELL

As every cell in Chile will tell

The cries of the tortured men

Remember Allende, and the days before,

Before the army came

Please remember Victor Jara,

In the Santiago Stadium,

Es verdad—those Washington Bullets again.

—“WASHINGTON BULLETS,” BY THE CLASH

When Joe Strummer first stepped out onto a London stage, he was a 1970s version of the 1920s and 1930s dust bowl musicians who first stirred his imagination as a young boy. Before playing in the pub rock band the 101ers, Strummer had spent time busking in the London streets and tube working alongside Tymon Dogg.[2] Performing with Dogg helped Strummer hone a musical sensibility that would endure throughout his life. The 101ers were a London music scene favorite and Strummer, who had long hair, wore jeans, boots, and a checkered shirt, began calling himself Woody after Woody Guthrie, one of his musical and political heroes. Guthrie’s profound influence on music and politics serves as both the model and foundation for all of Strummer’s work. He was a cultural pioneer—mixing traditional music with emerging musical styles and forming compositions that were injected with radical political lyrics taking on the cause of the dispossessed.

Joe Strummer performing with Tymon Dogg and Martin Slattery of the Mescaleros during the musician’s series of performances at St.Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, on April 5, 2011. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

At the time of his death Strummer had come full circle. With a distinctive worldview and artistic vision, his newest recordings had a fury reminiscent of the Clash and a maturity gained from hard fought battles won and lost. In the years beginning with the release of Rock Art and the X-Ray Style recorded with his new band the Mescaleros, Strummer was climbing hard to join the ranks as one of contemporary music’s most compelling political musicians.[3] Building on what he started with the Clash, he incorporated scores of world musical styles to create new music that carried his unique subversive wit and humanist politics.

Martin Slattery of the Mescaleros during Joe Strummer’s series of performances at St.Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, on April 5,2011. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

“That’s bullshit dumb,” Joey Ramone once remarked about groups like the Clash who used their music as a vehicle for political activism.[4] “If anything,” he continued, “punks should have no politics or be right wing.”[5] Not only was Strummer up against a political and social environment that rejected much of what he had to say as nothing more than dogmatic leftist rhetoric, he also had to contend with a music scene that felt his exploration and mixing of different musical styles was “unpunk.” The rampant hostility and affected negativity that dominated punk with slogans like “No Future” made for great press.[6] Punk became and remains a largely reactionary music, a trivial reflection on societal problems whether alienation or heartbreak.[7] The record companies like it because there is profit to be made with little risk. Don’t challenge the kiddies to think about their reality in any critical way that may engage and empower them. Make them feel even worse about their lot in life. Commercialize hopelessness. Commodify self-loathing. As Strummer sang, turn rebellion into money. And lots of it.

Strummer’s moment with the Clash and his success, many believed, weakened any political stance he took.[8] “I think I self-consciously destroyed it all,” he remarked to me, “Once Jones was gone the Clash were no more . . . and with Reagan and Thatcher . . . there was no room for questioning and even less tolerance for protest music.” It is true that the once celebrated “only band that mattered” was about the music and the message and without the two, success and all the rest of it did not matter. So Strummer floated a bit for the better part of a decade and returned on his own terms. Music and message were tied tightly together again in what became his last stand.

In a life that was filled with ironic twists, Strummer was entering his prime five decades into his life. All that had come before was a long rehearsal for the next stage in his creative-activist life. Before his death, Strummer was influencing new musicians around the world with his impassioned blend of inspired new music and political activism. “He showed me that music could be a very powerful political tool,” Manu Chao explained. “We should not be willing to compromise, and take the necessary step forward to fight injustice with art.”[9] Manu Chao is a gifted musician, who in many ways is an heir to Strummer’s creative-activist legacy. Crafting music from a wide range of musical styles, Chao expands on the work he started with Mano Negra, named in honor of an Andalusian anarchist group. Spanish natives who immigrated to Paris, Mano Negra combined rai, rock, rap, and flamenco to create a style they dubbed “Patchanka.”[10]

Strummer’s influence on the Rock en Español and the world music movements and, to a lesser degree, hip-hop and reggae, continues to be extensive. Café Tacuba, Tijuana No!, Los Olvidados, Maldita Vecindad, Spaccanapoli, and Anouk are artists ranging from Africa, Europe, and South America who cite Strummer, the musician and political activist, as a primary influence. The self-effacing charm and intellectual maturity Strummer the songwriter revealed in his later recordings is rooted in his appreciation of the political folk of Brazilian Caetano Veloso and Cuban Silvio Rodríguez, musicians dedicated to uplifting the repressed peoples of the world.

For Strummer, the vanguard movements of the 1960s and early 1970s played a huge role in his development as a musician and an activist, and both Veloso and Rodríguez played a significant role in fostering the change. “May ’68 was a moment that showed me that anything was possible,” Strummer told me, “and what followed in the ’70s was just a mess . . . “we needed to get behind something and when punk broke I had something I could not only get behind but be a part of . . . “you see we were part of this post–World War II generation . . . “there was a great deal of disaffection . . . “we wanted no part of what was being offered to us, which seemed to be dead-end jobs that did very little for the working class . . . “and we were frustrated because we had no voice in a political system that was more a tool for the ruling class.”[11]

Strummer watched as people rebelled against right-wing dictatorships and scored some short-lived democratic victories in France, Chile, and to a lesser degree the United States. He also witnessed the role music played in helping to bring about these historic political changes. In the late 1960s, these emerging, exciting artists including the Last Poets and the MC5 in the United States, Léo Ferré in France, and Mercedes Sosa in Argentina—bold composers arranging a new revolutionary soundtrack.[12] Subsequently Strummer would find himself part of the next wave of politically active musicians introducing new music to the world that was electrifying and determined to change things.

Caetano Veloso was a member of this emerging group of radical musicians. Regarded as the father of tropicalismo, the Brazilian musical movement of the 1960s, which he created together with Gilberto Gil at the beginning of the Getúlio Vargas military dictatorship, Veloso was radically altering the face of modern music. Shortly before this time, Silvio Rodríguez had joined with other musicians to form the Movimiento de la Nueva Trova (New Ballad Movement). La Nueva Trova had its roots in the Nueva Canción (New Song) movement.[13] This development was in many ways part of an international wave of political folk singer-songwriters that included Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Roy Brown, and Víctor Jara. Yet for political folk artists including Pablo Milanés and Sara González it was difficult to get recorded, played on the radio, or have concerts in most venues. In what became another key element of political folk, they took it upon themselves to create their own forum in order to get the music out. Casa de las Américas,[14] the literary and cultural center of Cuba, became this forum and their refuge. “La nueva trova and what some of these musicians were doing” Strummer explained, “went a long way to helping us organize protests like Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against the Rich, and the Red Wedge.”

One of the key contributors to la Nueva Canción was Víctor Jara. He had taken political folk music to astounding heights in the early 1970s, describing his role as an artist as “an authentic creator and in very essence a revolutionary . . . “a man as dangerous as a guerrilla because of his great power of communication.”[15] As Strummer remarked, “Jara’s music went beyond protest music, it was revolutionary music.” His music and performances were significant in helping Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity Party ascend to the presidency in Chile in 1970.[16] Jara’s music is filled with his love for the struggles of the indigenous and working people of rural Chile with “La Plegaria de un Labrador (A Farmer’s Prayer)” and “El Manifiesto (The Manifesto)” being two of his most renowned songs. The song “Angelita Huenumán” is a good example of Jara’s support of the hardworking Chilean people from whom he came:

Angelita, in your weaving

there is time and tears and sweat,

there are the anonymous hands

of my own creative people

You Can’t Have a Revolution Without Songs

With his music, theater, and poetry, Jara was a cultural hero in the eyes of the Chilean people. It is no wonder then that his performance at the Stadium of Chile capped Allende’s campaign for office. In 1971 Jara wrote, “In every place where we perform we should organize, and if possible leave functioning, a creative workshop. We should ascend to the people, not feel that we are lowering ourselves to them. Our job is to give them what belongs to them—their cultural roots—and the means of satisfying the hunger for cultural expression that we saw during the election campaign.”[17]

Unfortunately, Allende’s time as Chile’s president was cut short on September 11, 1973, as General Augusto Pinochet, with CIA support, orchestrated a violent coup d’état of the democratically elected government.[18] Tens of thousands were rounded up and placed in the Stadium of Chile. They became known as the desaparecidos, or disappeared.[19] Many were brutally tortured and then murdered. Víctor Jara found himself among the captives and had his hands broken by guards, who then presented him with a guitar and told him to play it. With smashed hands, Jara took the guitar and performed the Popular Party anthem.[20] After torturing Jara, the military shot him with a machine gun and dumped his body in a mass grave. Survivors of the imprisonment managed to smuggle out bits and pieces of Jara’s final unfinished composition, which ended with the lyrics “silence and screams are the end of my song.”[21]

Those who claim “music and politics should not be mixed,” as the Scottish political folk musician and Celtic songwriter Dick Gaughan says, should “tell that to the CIA and their thugs who murdered Jara because his repertoire didn’t suit their interests.”[22] Gaughan adds that Jara’s “people’s music, folk music if you will, is very dangerous stuff! It is subversive to acknowledge that ordinary people actually have a culture with artistic merit. This gives the lie to those who would like us to think that the poor are poor because they are stupid.”[23] Strummer adds, “Jara’s murder is just part of a long history of trying to destroy revolutionary music and the potential it has to mobilize people.”

Veloso had his own encounter with state repression in 1968. Veloso and Gil were arrested by the Vargas dictatorship for “disrespecting the national anthem and Brazilian flag.”[24] After a brief imprisonment, they were exiled to England. This only bolstered Veloso’s resolve to continue speaking out, making him a defiant hero in the eyes of many Brazilians. The exile was a critical mistake on the part of the Vargas dictatorship for it allowed Veloso to introduce himself to a new audience in England and Europe while exposing the troubling political situation in Brazil.

Strummer borrowed heavily from Veloso both thematically and stylistically, as exemplified on the Clash album Sandinista! and much later on his solo record Global A Go-Go. At the heart of Veloso’s tropicalismo was a cultural movement whose aim was the reevaluation of traditional Brazilian music and the incorporation of non-Brazilian musical styles. The movement pushed Brazil into a new era of pop avant-garde but it more importantly challenged the dominant sociopolitical order of the day. Veloso’s impact is revealed in the beautiful “Algeria, Algeria (Happiness, Happiness),” a song recalled in Clash songs like “Know Your Rights.” “I’m going without handkerchief, without papers/Nothing in my hands or pockets,” Veloso sings, alluding to the tightening repression imposed by the Vargas dictatorship on the Brazilian people, who had to carry documentation at all times or find themselves subject to arrest or worse.

“Algeria, Algeria” was, in part, influenced by another Brazilian political musician, Chico Buarque, a politically outspoken and popular performer often described as Veloso’s rival.[25] Buarque’s “A Banda” was the spiritual, musical, and political inspiration for “Algeria, Algeria.” “A Banda” depicts a Brazil that is slipping away:

My long-suffering people

Said good-bye to their sorrows

To see the lands pass by

Singing songs of love

You Can’t Have a Revolution Without Songs

Both songs declared the need to recognize the serious political and cultural problems gripping Brazil during this time. Some of Strummer’s latest recordings, including “At the Border Guy” and “Bummed Out City,” are reminiscent of this political theme. Veloso and the tropicalistas were resisting the introduction of mass consumer culture into Brazilian society and the dictatorship’s attempts to curry favor with the United States. “What is good for the United States is good for Brazil,” Juracy Magalhães, minister of foreign affairs under Vargas, famously declared.[26] Veloso was deeply troubled by this and the threat it posed to Brazilian culture while dismayed by efforts of the Brazilian left to respond to these and other issues.

Veloso realized that the left was easily distracted by sectarianism rather than solidarity. Again, these are beliefs that Strummer shared with Veloso and immortalized in the Clash song “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais,” which challenged punks and nonpunks, black and white youth, and marginalized communities to join together rather than fight one another. Frustrated, Veloso joined with Rogério Duarte,[27] who believed that to truly fight oppression you must first come to remove “the embryonic forms of oppressive structures within the very groups fighting against it.”[28] Veloso found himself unpopular for this stance but pushed forward to establish Esquerda Festiva (Festival Left)[29] as a more thoughtful response to the political turmoil gripping Brazil.

As Veloso was trying to use his music to rebel against the Vargas regime in Brazil, Silvio Rodríguez became captivated with the revolution in Cuba and angered about the country’s subsequent isolation perpetuated by the U.S.-led embargo imposed after the Batista dictatorship was overthrown. Living in Argentina at the time, he was inspired by the political folk music of “the voice of the silent majority,” Mercedes Sosa.[30] Sosa was the driving force behind the Nueva Cancíon movement, and the first to experiment with mixing traditional music and rock ’n’ roll. “Sosa was the mother of rebel music,” Strummer explained. “She had the courage and will to produce something radical and paid a huge political price for it “her work continues to challenge me to this day.”

Soon Rodríguez, like Jara, became an important voice in freedom and justice movements throughout the Americas as he became the heir to the legacy left behind by Jara’s death. He is considered by many to be the current voice of Latin American rebellion, a position he respectfully downplays: “that people identify so well with my songs is for the very fact that they recognize their own lives.”[31] Rodríguez adds that “many people describe me as a poet who sings, but what I am really doing is inviting everyone to join my band, which is the band of the Revolution and of beauty.”[32] Rodríguez’s music is not as overtly political as Strummer’s and his musical style is more esoteric than Veloso’s. As Strummer pointed out, mysticism, poetry, and the innovative use of language expand the boundaries of societal consciousness on all things political and cultural in Rodríguez’s music.

The song “Unicornio” has come to define Rodríguez’s political folk. The poetic imagery is a beautiful subterfuge for a message of human struggle. Rodríguez sings: “My blue unicorn got lost yesterday/but I only have one blue unicorn/and even if I had two/I’d only love that one.” While “Unicornio” captures Rodríguez the mystic, other songs including “Nuestra Temo” (Our Story), “No Hacen Falta Alas” (You Don’t Need Wings), and “Sueño de Una Noche de Verano” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) showcase Rodríguez the steadfast humanist and radical. These recordings have much in common with Strummer’s recordings on Rock Art and the X-Ray Style and Global A Go-Go. It is music that confronts the tired uniformity of popular culture and speaks to the culturally disenfranchised. Even now what is most evident in the music of Veloso, Rodríguez, and Strummer is their unyielding accountability to produce work that celebrates culture as the true foundation of a free society.

Each of these artists felt a responsibility to “turn people on to something new.” With his two first albums, Strummer showed that he was composing “genreless” music, creating records that moved effortlessly from honky-tonk to cumbia to Balkan to Celtic to Arabic music. In his bio on Global A Go-Go Strummer explains that “Shakhtar Donetsk,” the album’s spiritual and cultural anchor, “is the name of a Ukrainian foot-ball team and I just knew there was a good story in there. We don’t know what’s going on beyond our own neighborhood, that’s what it’s saying. The song is about the movement of peoples and exiles and economic fugitives. Refugees add to our culture. They bring talents and abilities with them. So it’s a song calling out for some more intelligent leadership in the world.”

Indeed, fashioning a music that is political yet enchants the listener allowed for each musician to boldly delve into areas of life and society that most performers never dare to explore. With his posthumous final album, Streetcore, Strummer returned to hard-driving rock ’n’ roll evocative of his finest work with the Clash while creating a spiritual and rebellious record. “Where the hell was Elijah,” he sings in “Get Down Moses,” demanding to know where the prophets have gone who promised salvation. “[You gotta] get down Moses,” he continues. “Once we were free/The recipe for living/Is lost in memory.” It is an album of recollections, connections, and faith, channeling every disparate musical influence from bits and pieces of past Clash songs like “The Call Up,” to lyrical touches suggestive of Dylan, Springsteen, and Woody Guthrie. In the track “Arms Aloft,” Strummer may have penned the truest description of the spark that fuels his political spirit:

Falling back in the garden

of days so long ago

somewhere in the memory

the sun shines on you boy

May I remind you of that scene

We were arms aloft in Aberdeen

The spirit is our gasoline

Significantly, the chief distinction between Strummer’s political folk and that of Veloso, Rodríguez, and Jara is that they were products of sweeping political movements. The musicians cast themselves into the middle of the political fray and this served to inspire them to create. The social and political movements of the 1960s, from the civil rights movement in the United States to France in May ’68, provided a compelling forum for artists to originate work that was distinctly political. Just as “you can’t have a revolution without songs,” you can’t have songs without a revolution. While punk was a social movement, it was chiefly a marginalized subculture dominated by reactionaries that did little to change the dominant political culture. Strummer, the eternal seeker and optimist, spent a lifetime creating music in hopes of placing it within a larger social movement.

In the end, the political folk music of these musicians advances a tradition of what Veloso explains as “liberating people to see a broader perspective, enabling a new un-dreamt critique of an anthropological, mythic, mystical formalist, and moral nature,”[33] thus creating a condition of freedom with music that establishes a dialogue with the outside world. These musicians serve an important function in our society, particularly when many people find themselves isolated and at risk in a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of disaster. They craft a soundtrack of our rebellion and give us the courage to conceive of a grand intervention in the future of the world. It is, after all, as Veloso explains, a right that at once begins to be lived as a duty.

CLASH OF THE TITAN

By Joel Schalit

I was ten years old when the Clash’s first record came out, living a short walk from the epicenter of the punk rock explosion: King’s Road, in London. Even for the smallest, youngest, and least hip of awkward immigrant children like me, it was impossible not to know who the Clash were. Like the Sex Pistols, they were literally everywhere: on BBC radio, in London’s weekly entertainment magazine, Time Out, on television shows like Top of the Pops, even on the pages of conservative newspapers like the Daily Telegraph. But at the time, it was very difficult to understand why the British media fixated upon them so strongly.

In contrast to Lydon and company, the Clash’s first two records weren’t the kind of radically conceptual artistic statements meant to start cultural revolutions like Never Mind the Bollocks or the Pistols’ posthumously released The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. Instead of denouncing the music industry as a monolithic authoritarian political structure, albums like Give ’Em Enough Rope were simply really great rock records that you could dance to. They eschewed the Pistols’ antipolitics in favor of a more traditional American folk music liberalism, filtered through the sensibilities of four young men raised on British pub rock, nostalgic for the days of protest singers like Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, and early Bob Dylan.

Like the MC5, the early Clash were all about resurrecting the hyperbole of radical street politics, romanticizing riots, rebellion, and at times even old school revolutionary violence. The brashness of their early songs helped give this nostalgically radical stance a lot of fashionable weight, but the band consistently failed to explain where it was really coming from. Were they Marxists? No. Were they Leninists? No. Were they anarchists? Definitely not. Were they upwardly mobile rock and rollers who coopted revolutionary slogans in order to gain market share? Maybe, depending on what side of the punk fence you stood on. If you were in a band like Crass, you definitely thought they were bourgeois. Accommodationists. “We’re Crass, not the Clash!” they declared. But if you were someone like Billy Bragg, the Clash opened punk’s door to the Communist Party.

While their politics may not have been expertly defined, there was no denying that the Clash had a real axe to grind. No matter how stylized and image-conscious that proverbial axe was, many people felt that the Clash helped demystify much of the tension underlying the Britain of their day. Regardless of how clueless they were about their politics, the Clash’s first two records successfully anticipated the crisis of the British welfare state. To the imminent election of Margaret Thatcher, the failure of the Labour government to address growing income discrepancies, and Britain’s inability to recognize the existence of an increasingly multiracial immigrant society, the Clash’s emotional political drive added the sense of melodrama necessary to raise consciousness about the way the UK was deteriorating.

However, the real significance of the Clash’s work did not become apparent until 1979’s London Calling, followed by 1980’s even more magisterial Sandinista! Over the course of producing these two albums—and an occasional twelve inch—the Clash moved beyond the nihilistic political straitjacket of Sex Pistols–inspired British punk to develop one of the most politically sophisticated critiques of American imperialism ever to surface in rock ’n’ roll. They went after everything, from American consumer culture writ large across the face of the globe, to the Middle East and even the Nicaraguan revolution. It not only made artistic sense but was politically valid too.

Yet what’s difficult to figure out about these records is how they expressed their politics musically. Instead of simply delivering political sermons, for example, “Know Your Rights,” the Clash’s utopia was embedded in how they synthesized the musical forms of England’s emerging multiethnic culture, melding dub and reggae with punk rock and pop, experimenting with hip-hop and New York’s burgeoning postdisco remix culture. Metaphorically speaking, it was all there. Regardless of how many other artists engaged in similar international maneuvering during the ’80s (the Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, or Paul Simon, to name a few), the Clash added an explicitly progressive political dimension to their global explorations that was firmly rooted in the ’60s Left. Whether the band actually understood the implications of what they were doing is beside the point. The fact is that they pulled it off, and in doing so, the Clash helped give punk radicalism its first overtly multicultural set of artistic sensibilities.

By the time the Clash got around to releasing its next to final LP, 1982’s Combat Rock, the band was in total crisis and in deep debt to their record company, Epic, for various reasons, so the Clash decided that it was time to make a hit record. Combat Rock succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, making the band a household word in the United States on the strength of the video for “Rock the Casbah,” a song about the banning of disco music in postrevolutionary Iran, and a rather awkward opening slot on the Who’s Schlitz beer–sponsored premiere farewell tour.

Taking the Clash on tour with them made the Who look like a bunch of savvy opportunists seeking to have their opening band’s countercultural credibility rub off on their rapidly diminishing artistic relevance. However, for a band like the Clash, being taken on an American tour by a band that once smashed their guitars on stage and appeared on album covers mocking commercialism (The Who Sell Out), made perfect sense. Having been raised in the ’60s, they were the Who’s artistic offspring.

No British punk band at the time was more historically self-conscious about analogies like these than the Clash were. They were positioning themselves as inheritors of the ’60s rock ’n’ roll legacy. Nevertheless, playing “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” in Shea Stadium was a far cry from the riot-plagued Bonds Casino shows that the Clash played in New York the year before with the Bad Brains.

While reams have been written about what happened to the band after the Combat Rock tour, the only thing relevant is that the Clash began to fall apart. Having lost drummer Topper Headon before the tour began, Strummer’s primary songwriting partner Mick Jones was forced out. The only surviving original members were Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon.

In a way, it’s kind of fitting for the band to have lost it after the Combat Rock tour. Anyone who accomplished what the Clash did with that record was bound to suffer, especially if you consider the album’s political significance. Based loosely around Strummer’s concept of what he called an “urban Vietnam,” Combat Rock was a highly overproduced but nonetheless jarring record that tried to see the emerging world order of the 1980s through the eyes of the African American ghetto. It was a colonial battlefield, where the American military acted as world gatekeeper and the experience of Vietnam was being repeated in all of the world’s ghettos. A grandiose and highly ambitious gesture, yes, but the commercial success of such an outrageously conceptual political album outweighed the band’s subsequent interpersonal failures.

The Clash went on to record one more album, 1985’s Cut the Crap, but by then, it was clear that aside from that record’s only memorable track, “This Is England,” everything was pretty much over. The group disbanded not long thereafter. Band members went on to pursue solo projects of various kinds: Mick Jones’s better-than-average Big Audio Dynamite, Paul Simonon’s barely passable Havana 3AM, and Joe Strummer’s short-lived but illustrious career acting in Jim Jarmusch, Alex Cox, and Aki Kaurismäki films. However, Strummer took a ten-year break from recording his own albums.

Constrained by contractual problems with Epic over the next decade, Strummer made only one solo album, 1989’s distinctly unmemorable Earthquake Weather, while contenting himself to play sideman in bands like the Pogues, Big Audio Dynamite, Shaun Ryder’s brilliant, cynical dance act, Black Grape, and the all-star comedy band with artist Damien Hurst, Fat Les.

How fitting then that after a decade, Strummer would come forth with his best album since Combat Rock, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, issued by Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat Records. The first of three full-lengths issued by the label over the next three years, Rock Art is a slightly inconsistent but otherwise beautiful record that reestablished Strummer’s significance as a songwriter in leagues with peers such as Patti Smith.

In the midst of a fall 1999 promotional tour of the United States to plug the record, I got a chance to speak to Strummer while he was visiting his new label’s office in Los Angeles. When I picked up the phone at the appointed time, and the publicist asked “Punk Planet, are you ready to rock?” the only thing I could think of was how far away rocking was from my mind. I wasn’t going to rock. I was going to talk to Joe Strummer.

Joel Schalit: One of the ironic things I noted with your record coming out now is that when you were in the Clash, there was no one else taking as much of a critical stance towards American imperialism and American cultural and military hegemony than you. Yet you issued your first full-length record in ten years at a point when American world power is at its highest. The Cold War is over, the Soviets have been defeated. America is literally everywhere. It’s more present in Europe, it’s more present in the Third World. How do you feel about your timing? I find something poetic about it.

Joe Strummer: You have to understand that I’m a European. You guys did a great job from the ’30s until now. Everybody loves American culture in Europe. You’ve done a great job of putting it out over there—we’re all steeped in it. We get all your shows and we have all the films that you have, but we tend to get them a bit later than you. I think they show American films quicker in Tel Aviv than they show them in London. But what we like in Europe is the good American culture, not the generic one.

Joel Schalit: That bias is definitely reflected in the specific types of American culture you’ve personally appropriated as an artist.

Joe Strummer: I’d like to kick for a minute this scene they’ve got here in Hollywood where they re-edit films according to the audience’s reaction sheet. That’s not art. Obviously they’d laugh at me for even suggesting such a thing, but American films between the ’40s and ’70s were art. They were mass entertainment, but they were also art. Now they police audiences by changing a film every week to suit the latest screenings. Obviously it makes monetary sense—studios are making a fortune off of this method. But when you’re seventeen, you want to see something grown up, not made for your benefit. When you’re seventeen, you want to stretch a bit, you want to enter the grown-up world. You don’t want everything to be tailored for your tastes. This is a danger, I think.

Joel Schalit: You can definitely see your new record as being an example of what you’re saying popular art ought to be about. It has nothing to do with American popular culture in the sense that you’re describing it. I think that’s inherent in Rock Art’s global feel—not in the sense of a Peter Gabriel record, but in the manner of a Clash record. In that sense, your work still maintains an implicit critique of American imperialism.

Joe Strummer: That’s true. As long as we keep entertaining the people, we’ll be doing good.

Joel Schalit: I’ve been listening to your work since 1978, when I was in the fifth grade. One of the things I’ve always noticed about your songwriting is that you’ve always had a very ambivalent relationship with the United States.

Joe Strummer: [Laughs] It’s love and hate!

Joel Schalit: On the one hand you’ve been very critical of American politics and foreign policy. But on the other hand you’ve so thoroughly assimilated American pop culture.

Joe Strummer: Certainly, yeah. But let’s point out that the British government is just as bad as the American government.

Joel Schalit: That’s true. So what’s your take on Tony Blair?

Joe Strummer: I came up with this nickname for him the other day. I thought, let’s call him Tony Baloney, he’s a lot of baloney, yeah. I told my friend, “We’re going to get this into the national language within twelve hours.” So I went to this Clash party after they showed the Clash film [a BBC documentary on the band] and I drew on my T-shirt “Let’s get rid of Tony Baloney—the Tuscan Liberation Front,” because Blair goes on holiday to Tuscany. So I wore the shirt into the party, and all these journalists were there. They all asked me “Where’d you get that shirt?” I told them that I’d just come back from Fashion Week in Milan, and that everyone was wearing them. All the reporters immediately got out their notebooks and wrote everything down that was on my shirt. We got it in the first edition of the Evening Standard the very next day. Twelve hours later! [Laughs]

Joel Schalit: There’s not too many Tuscan guerrilla groups.

Joe Strummer: “Fronta Liberazione di Toscana!” But it was all spelled wrong. I wrote it in Italian and misspelled everything, but no one knows it.

Joel Schalit: I’m sure the British press totally ate that up. I know what you mean about Blair, he’s totally fucking noxious. I just read the text of his speech to the recent Labour Party convention . . .

Joe Strummer: Oh no! It’s terrible. We’re never going to get rid of him. Blair’s machine is so perfect that I reckon that if we can get rid of him in fifteen or twenty years, we’ll be lucky.

Joel Schalit: It seems to me that Blair is a charismatic leader in the tradition of Margaret Thatcher—that seems to be what he’s deliberately going after.

Joe Strummer: They’ve learned from the American machine. In fact, it’s even more chillingly machine-like than the Americans have got it so far. Labour has certainly learned from them. You can’t even have an opinion in the party. Say you’re an MP [Member of Parliament] and you go, “Hey Tony, I think that policy sucks,” the Labour Party would go, “Dock that guy’s card. Get rid of him.” There’s no debate there. It’s terrible. We don’t have any debate. We don’t have any dissension. Blair might as well be Stalin.

Joel Schalit: And yet Blair portrays himself as a radical democrat spreading multiculturalism and human rights around Eastern Europe, like all of his posturing during the war in Kosovo, for example.

Joe Strummer: Exactly. Maybe we’ve come to realize that all leaders want is power. They couldn’t give a damn what they say or have to do to get it. But this is quite a hard thing to come to terms with. What are we going to do now?

Joel Schalit: It must be an interesting experience for you, coming from the same generation as Blair. You guys are very close in age.

Joe Strummer: Oh, I know. I’m bewildered by this Blair development. We’re all very confused right now in England.

Joel Schalit: Is there an alternative?

Joe Strummer: That’s why I was saying it’s going to take twenty years to get rid of Blair. There is no alternative. We’re all standing around flapping our arms going “What are we going to do now?” I don’t know. It’s going to be interesting. At least it’s a comedy . . .

Joel Schalit: Do you think it’ll be good for the British counterculture?

Joe Strummer: I think so, definitely. Comedians are having a great time with him. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Joel Schalit: Yeah, it’s true. Margaret Thatcher was great for punk rock.

Joe Strummer: We should make her an honorary punk rocker. I should go over to her house in Chelsea and give her a pink wig or something.

Joel Schalit: Doesn’t she have one already?

Joe Strummer: [Laughs] That’s true.

Joel Schalit: I know a lot of people have criticized the Clash over the years for not having thought out their politics very carefully. For example, you never aligned yourselves with any particular political parties in Britain, yet you wore Italian Red Brigade T-shirts. Or how once the band broke up, you went on the Rock Against the Rich Tour sponsored by Class War, an organization dedicated to violent revolution, after you’d become wealthy.

Joe Strummer: It was all my fault.

Joel Schalit: [Laughs] To an outsider, this sympathy for violence made sense, especially given the kind of street imagery that the Clash always employed. How did you respond to being criticized for adhering to double standards at the time? Where do you see your politics fitting in? Does it have a framework?

Joe Strummer: Right now I realize that in Britain, my vote is useless. We’ll never get rid of Blair because there is no alternative to him. So I ask myself what I’ve got, and I find that I have a dollar bill in my pocket. So I’m going to vote like that. I’m going to shop locally—that’s how I’m going to use my dollar bill—as a vote. I’m not going to give it to the corporations.

Joel Schalit: You’re going to support small business . . .

Joe Strummer: Putting my money into records and food, anything I’m going to try and buy. I think of my dollar bill as a vote. Every time I spend it in a small, independent local spot, it’s like one less dollar I’m giving to massive global corporations. The only vote we’ve got is the dollar bill in the pocket. Obviously you’re going to have to take your kids to McDonald’s when they’re screaming, but this is what I want to push myself to do.

Joel Schalit: I understand what you’re saying, but how then does it feel to be working with Mercury Records in Europe? They tend to symbolize a lot of the things you don’t like.

Joe Strummer: At least they had the guts to come forward with me. There must be a lot of companies in Europe, but every man jack of them went, “Get out of the office.” But Mercury said, “This is pretty good.” I have to respect them for that, because it was looking pretty bleak.

Joel Schalit: It doesn’t seem like your politics were about typically punk things like being independent. Rather, your music has consistently proffered some kind of radical multiculturalism symbolized by your early experiments synthesizing dub and reggae with rock ’n’ roll. To me that’s a pretty identifiable political position.

Joe Strummer: Don’t forget that our entry into hip-hop culture was back in 1980 with “Magnificent Seven.” It was a huge hit in New York that summer on WBLS. I want to point out that because we always get passed over in these hip-hop histories. Whoever puts together these accounts just hasn’t done their onions.

Joel Schalit: Right, I agree. Such accounts tend to attribute the kinds of breakthroughs that the Clash pioneered to groups like the Beastie Boys. Not to diss them, but that’s generally what’s assumed.

Joe Strummer: Nineteen years ago we entered into hip-hop culture. Nineteen years ago! So lick upon that! [Laughs]

Joel Schalit: The first time I heard “Radio Clash” was on a black radio station in New York back then.

Joe Strummer: That’s incredible. Stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore.

Joel Schalit: You also experimented a lot with remixing in the early ’80s.

Joe Strummer: And it still sounds good too. When you hear that “Radio Clash” remix, it sounds like some guy just did it down the block.

Joel Schalit. The experimentation and international slant that the Clash took seems to have come from—or at least been influenced by—your own background. I’ve been reading a lot about your personal history and your background recently. You grew up all over the world. I read that your dad served in the British Foreign Service.

Joe Strummer: That’s right. I was born in Ankara, Turkey. I spent a couple of years there, followed by Cairo for a couple of more years. We also lived in Mexico City for a couple of years, followed by this fairly boring town in Germany called Bonn. Then I went to boarding school in England. My parents went on to move to Tehran. They spent five years in Iran.

Joel Schalit: Hence “Rock the Casbah.”

Joe Strummer: [Laughs] Then they went to Malawi, in central Africa.

Joel Schalit: That certainly explains the cosmopolitanism of your musical arrangements. On that tip, you employ a bit of Arabic on the new record, especially in the song “Yalla Yalla.” You want to tell me what that’s about?

Joe Strummer: It came out of the idea of a bunch of us coming down the street in London, in top form, shouting, “Yeah, we’re free.” I found out that in Arabic it means, “Come on, let’s go.” When I came up with the song’s chorus, I wondered if I’d had it stored away somewhere in my brain and it just popped out. But what the song is about is that freedom is gone and we’re fucked up in Britain. All we’ve got to do is fight with each other on the streets after dark. When they close all the bars at eleven, it can get kind of grim out on the street. So “Yalla Yalla” is a story starting with Adam and going through “C’mon, let’s cut out of this scene. Let’s go grooving.” If there’s some culture happening in Glasgow 600 miles away, we’re going to go 600 miles—there’s no object. And then it gets to the freedom verse, “Yalla Yalla Yalla Yallah.”

Joel Schalit: It’s interesting that you’re talking about freedom. It seems to me that a search for freedom (particularly given your contractual problems with Epic) led to your transition to film after the dissolution of the Clash. Some people saw that as a radical break in your career at the time, but it made metaphorical sense because there’s a real cinematographic quality to your songwriting.

Joe Strummer: Seeing people work in front of cameras, people who’d been thinking about it all their lives, makes you realize that you can’t really jump in on a game. You might get lucky though. There are exceptions, like Tom Waits, who can easily move between the two roles. And there are other actor-singers who can do it great. But for myself, I figured that I have to really own up that there’s no way to be better than these actors because they’ve been thinking about acting since they were born. I don’t think you can catch up on that; I think you have to respect that. I’m just going to stick to plugging the guitar in and trying to make something interesting with that. Leave the acting to the actors. Personally, that’s my hope.

Joel Schalit: Nonetheless, you got to act in some seminal indie films.

Joe Strummer: I had my go and appreciated it.

Joel Schalit: Then let’s get back to music. I bet that one of the things which must amuse you making rock ’n’ roll after all these years is how people still fight over what’s “punk.” I distinctly recall how much shit you took for making Combat Rock. That bore many parallels with what Nirvana had to deal with nine years later. When Nevermind came out and the shit hit the fans, it was as though no one could remember that the popularity of Combat Rock triggered many of the same cultural crises about punk going mainstream as Nirvana later did.

Joe Strummer: What a disaster that was. Poor Kurt Cobain!

Joel Schalit: Do you feel any affinity with the kind of backlash that Nirvana had to suffer?

Joe Strummer: It’s just typical, isn’t it? Cobain writes a brilliant record and everybody disses him. This is exactly what we had to put up with, way before Combat Rock even, back in London in 1977. As soon as you do something really brilliant, obviously it’s going to attract more from your fellow human beings. As soon as that happens, all of a sudden all of these hipper-than-thou people start railing off at you. These are the kinds of people you just have to shuck off, because you’re going to meet them in any corner of life. Any time you do something good, people are going to come and kick you down for it. You’ve got to be ready for it at any moment.

Joel Schalit: So for you, that’s what the whole discourse about selling out is: simply jealousy.

Joe Strummer: Exactly. That’s all it is.

Joel Schalit: I totally understand where you’re coming from, especially if you consider some of your more early lyrics on songs like “Hitsville U.K.” It’s not as though you weren’t critical of the process of commercialization. That’s why I think it was unfair to flog you for “giving in.” After all, you were writing songs about how it sucks to be a commodity.

Joe Strummer: What can you do?

Joel Schalit: I have very mixed feelings about the selling out thesis, particularly in the case of Combat Rock, because it was the most explicitly political record to top the American charts since the late ’60s. For god’s sake, any record that combines spoken word rants with funk and sneaks Allen Ginsberg into a top-ten album is pretty subversive in my book.

Joe Strummer: That’s true, so true. Good old Ginsberg!

Joel Schalit: How did he end up on the record?

Joe Strummer: I used to call him a hustler for a joke. He was just coming to hang out at the Combat Rock sessions. He was sitting there with Peter Orlovsky [Ginsberg’s lifelong companion, and a poet in his own right]. They’d just sit there and watch us record. After about a week, I just turned around to him and said, “You’re America’s greatest living poet and you’re going on the mic now.” He said, “Well great, what should I do?” I said, “I want the sound of God!” I told him, “You’re perfect for the role. I just want you to do the intro to ‘Ghetto Defendant.’” I gave him two or three minutes scribbling on the piano and on paper. And then there he was, “Slam dance the cosmopolis.”

Joel Schalit: [Laughs] He is acting as though he was an old Beat poet fronting a jazz band.

Joe Strummer: Absolutely.

Joel Schalit: That makes a lot of sense. I remember reading a lot of your press in places like the New York Times in the early ’80s, and recall how older rock critics were saying that the Clash were resurrecting a particular way of making popular art that they hadn’t seen since the mid-’60s. I seem to remember one critic even saying that the Clash were essentially modern contemporaries of the former Beat generation, and this was well before Ginsberg had collaborated with you.

Joe Strummer: For me, the Beats were the only game in town. During the ’60s, England was probably more like the ’50s were in America, but we carried it on longer. The Beatniks were exactly what we needed. The 1965 Beat poet’s reading at the Royal Albert Hall blew the lid off of everything—that was the day that the old culture died in England. We already had the Beatles and the Stones. When they hired the Albert Hall, the jewel of normal, boring culture and brought in all the Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg, it brought it all down and turned everyone on. That’s when the ’60s really began.

Joel Schalit: That makes sense, especially if you consider that in some respects British pop culture can be even more anti-intellectual than American pop culture.

Joe Strummer: Yes, I am completely anti-intellectual. I am pro-intuition and pro-instinct. We’ve already given too many props to intellectualism. The intellectuals’ time is over. They’ve done nothing for us. They write long, boring philosophy books that no one can understand except themselves. All we’ve ended up with is a world full of jet airplanes screaming overhead with laser-guided bombs and rockets. I figure that all the intellectuals should go off to an island somewhere and wear wooly clothing.

_____________________

Originally appeared in Punk Planet, January-February 2000.

A MAN THAT MATTERED

By Kristine McKenna

When the Clash burst on the scene in 1977, I dismissed them for the same reason I’ve always hated U2. Their music struck me as humorless, self-important political blather that wasn’t remotely sexy or fun. Definitely not for me. Nonetheless, being a dedicated punk I had to check them out when they made their Los Angeles debut at the Santa Monica Civic on February 9, 1979, and what I saw that night changed my mind—but only just a little, though. As expected, Mick Jones came off as a typical rock fop who clearly spent far too much time thinking about neckerchiefs and trousers. Joe Strummer, however, was something else. With the exception of Jerry Lee Lewis, I’d never seen anyone that furiously alive on stage. Legs pumping, racing back and forth across the stage, singing with a frantic desperation that was simultaneously fascinating and puzzling, he was an incredibly electric presence.

At the press conference following the show that night, LA’s ranking punk scribe, Claude Bessy, jumped up and snarled, “This isn’t a press conference—this is a depressing conference!” (Jeez, tempers always ran so high during that first incarnation of the punk scene! Who knows why the hell we were all so crabby!) I remember that Strummer looked genuinely hurt by the comment. Mind you, he was a working-class Brit so he wasn’t about to start sniffling in his sleeve, but he didn’t cop an attitude either. I was touched by how unguarded and open he was—and I was certainly impressed by the man’s vigor. I wasn’t surprised when I subsequently learned that Strummer ran three marathons without having trained at all. His preparation? “Drink ten pints of beer the night before the race and don’t run a single step for at least four weeks before the race.”

That first show at the Santa Monica Civic didn’t transform me into a Clash fan but Strummer interested me. So when the band showed up in 1981 in Manhattan, where I was living at the time, I decided to see what he was up to. The Clash had booked a nine-show engagement at Bond’s, an old department store on Times Square in Manhattan, and this turned out to be not a good idea. The place wasn’t designed to handle the crowds the band drew, and the engagement turned into a nine-day standoff between the band and the fire marshals. I attended three nights in a row and can’t recall them ever actually making it to the stage and performing. But then, that was business as usual during the glory days of punk, when gigs were forever being shut down, aborted, abruptly canceled. This was political theater, not just music, and nobody embodied that idea more dramatically than the Clash.

Cut to June 14 of the following year and I finally saw the Clash complete a full set at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. By then, I’d finally begun to appreciate the breadth and fearlessly experimental nature of the band’s music, and Strummer was at the peak of his powers as a showman. The huge hall was packed, and Strummer was a maestro conducting this undulating mass of sweaty people; he could raise or lower the pitch at will. Boots, beer bottles, and articles of clothing flew through the air, and people leapt on stage then leapt back into the arms of their friends, while Strummer stood at the microphone stoking the fire. Somehow he managed to keep the proceedings just a hairbreadth short of total chaos for two hours. It was a commanding display from a man who clearly knew his job and knew his audience.

Following the breakup of the Clash in 1985, Strummer charged head-on into a busy schedule of disparate projects. He acted in several independent films and composed six film soundtracks, including one—for Alex Cox’s lousy film of 1988, Walker—that was remarkably beautiful. I wrote an admiring review of the score for [now defunct] Musician magazine, and a few months after it was published Strummer was passing through LA and invited me to lunch in appreciation for the supportive words. We were to meet at a Thai restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and though I was nervous on the way there, he put me at ease the minute we met. Strummer was such a genuine person that it was impossible to feel uncomfortable around him—I know it sounds corny, but he truly was a man of the people. He was funny and generous in his assessments of people, but he didn’t sugarcoat things either. He had no trouble calling an asshole an asshole when it was called for. The thing that ultimately made Strummer such a spectacular human being, however, is so simple that it barely seems worth mentioning: he was interested in people. He wanted to hear your story and know what was going on in your neighborhood, he asked how you felt about things and was an empathetic listener—he paid attention! The other thing I immediately loved about him was that he was an enthusiast and a fan.

Just how big a fan he was became clear to me a few months later when he guest-hosted a radio show I had at the time on Santa Monica radio station KCRW. My show was at midnight on Saturday, and the KCRW studio is hard to find, so our plan was to meet behind the Foster’s Freeze at Pico and 14th at 11:00 P.M. He roared into the parking lot exactly on time in a car with four pals, and the lot of them tore into the record library at the station looking for the records on Strummer’s playlist. His plan was to play all the records that shaped his musical taste as a teenager in the order that he discovered them, and the show he put together was equal parts history lesson and autobiography. Included in the farflung set were tracks by Sonny Boy Williamson, Lee Dorsey, Captain Beefheart, Bo Diddley, Hank Williams, and loads of fabulous, rare reggae and dub. His loving introduction to the Beach Boys’ “Do It Again” brought tears to my eyes. Several fans crashed the studio when they heard him on the air and realized he was in town, and he welcomed them all. It was a wonderful night. He had fun too, and as he thanked me and said goodnight, he kissed me on the cheek. I blushed.

Strummer spent the next ten years struggling to restart his career post-Clash and stumbling repeatedly. “The only thing that got me through was sheer bloody-mindedness—I just won’t quit,” he told me when I interviewed him in October 2001. We were talking on the occasion of the release of his second album with his five man lineup, the Mescaleros. Global A Go-Go was rightfully hailed as the best work Strummer had done in years. He was happy with the record, and when I saw him perform at the Troubadour a few weeks after we spoke, he seemed happy in general.

“I’ve enjoyed my life because I’ve had to deal with all kinds of things, from failure to success to failure again,” Strummer told a journalist from Penthouse magazine in 2000. “I don’t think there’s any point in being famous if you lose that thing of being a human being.”

That’s something that was never a danger for Strummer. During that last interview, I asked him what the great achievement of punk rock had been, and he replied, “It gave a lot of people something to do.” Though I loved the complete lack of self-importance in that answer, however, this isn’t to suggest Strummer ever broke faith with punk. “Punk rock isn’t something you grow out of,” he told Penthouse. “Punk rock is like the Mafia, and once you’re made, you’re made. Punk rock is an attitude, and the essence of the attitude is ‘give us some truth.’

“And, whatever happens next is going to be bland unless you and I nause everything up,” he added. “This is our mission, to nause everything up! Get in there and nause it out, upset the apple cart, destroy the best laid plans—we have to do this! Back on the street, I say. Turn everything off in the pad and get back on the street. As long as people are still here, rock ’n’ roll can be great again.”

The following conversation took place on the eve of Strummer’s final U.S. tour, during the winter of 2001–2002. He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty on December 22, 2002.

Kristine McKenna: You say the great achievement of punk rock was that “it gave a lot of people something to do.” What was its great failure?

Joe Strummer: That we didn’t mobilize our forces when we had them and focus our energies in a way that could’ve brought about concrete social change—trying to get a repressive law repealed, for instance. We’re stuck in a kind of horrible holding pattern now, and it seems to me that the only way to change it is if we get hipsters to stay in one place long enough to get elected. The problem is that no hipster wants to get elected.

Kristine McKenna: I saw the Clash several times during their U.S. tours of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I remember the sense that something profoundly important was at stake at those shows, that they were about something much larger than pop trends. What was at stake?

Joe Strummer: In the rush of youth you assume too much—and so it should be—but we felt that the whole machine was teetering on the brink of collapse. Some amazing things went down in Britain during the ’70s—the government decided they could disempower the unions by having a three-day week, for instance. Can you imagine that? Monday morning you wake up, and suddenly there’s only a three-day week, from Monday to Wednesday. There were garbage strikes, train strikes, power strikes, the lights were going out—everything seemed on the brink, and looking through youthful, excitable eyes it seemed the very future of England was at stake. Obviously, that’s very far from the feeling these days, when everything’s pretty much smugly buttoned down.

Kristine McKenna: Has England recovered from the Thatcherism that dominated the country during the years you were with the Clash?

Joe Strummer: It will never recover—and now we’ve got Blairism. We are so completely confused. If you think of England as a patient laying on the couch in a shrink’s office I’d say it’s time for the straitjacket. Imagine the party we had in England when Blair got into office after all those years of Thatcher. Everyone was cheering, “this is the dawn of a new day,” but since then we’ve had no vision or justice. The Blair administration just wants to get into bed with the richest corporations, and the very notion of labor has vanished into the mist. Obviously, the worse it gets, the better it gets for artists, so culturally, England is doing OK. But politically, it’s total mixed-up confusion.

Kristine McKenna: What’s the proper course of action when everything around you is falling apart?

Joe Strummer: It’s not a good idea to run away. You gotta smile, whistle, look self-assured, and try and fix things up a bit.

Kristine McKenna: Given that the Clash’s music grew out of a situation specific to England, did it strike you as odd that it was embraced in America?

Joe Strummer: No, because everybody feels the same on a certain level. The zeitgeist is a real force of nature, and although we don’t know how it’s transmitted, it’s like an invisible tidal wave.

Kristine McKenna: How would you characterize the zeitgeist now?

Joe Strummer: I think people are feeling a bit cheated and frustrated. They’ve come to realize that voting is basically useless because either side you vote for has no more than a shade of difference from the other side, and ultimately politics is about nothing but the mighty dollar. So OK, say the people, let’s forget politics and get into drugs or skateboarding—anything that passes the time and gives you some sense of freedom. People want to feel free, and it’s a hard feeling to come by in this world. People have a right to change their consciousness, too, and in the back of their minds they know they have that right. So people are gonna flout the laws established to prevent them from smoking marijuana or experimenting with Ecstasy, because they know that nobody—especially a politician half pissed on gin—has the right to tell you what goes on in your mind.

Kristine McKenna: You say it’s hard to experience the feeling of freedom: do you feel free?

Joe Strummer: No, I do not. If I invited nine friends over to my house and put on an acid house record, and we stood in the garden listening to it, we’d all be arrested and fined a thousand pounds each, because in the United Kingdom it’s illegal for ten or more people to listen to repetitive beats—this is in the statute books, “repetitive beats!” People in Britain are much less free than people in many other counties because we’ve got really repressive laws. All bars there must close at 11:00 P.M., for instance. As to why I continue to live there, I really think all British people have a streak of sado-masochism. I live in the middle of nowhere, so you’d think I could get away with playing a record, but such is not the case.

Kristine McKenna: Why do you live in the middle of nowhere?

Joe Strummer: I’ve got no idea! If you wanted to be harsh you could describe the area where I live as nothing but an agribusiness abattoir—all you see is people wearing masks, riding tractors, and spraying god knows what onto the ground. I’m a townie, and I don’t know what I’m doing out there, although it is nice being able to see all the stars in the heavens at night.

Kristine McKenna: As a rule, people tend to resist change; why is this so?

Joe Strummer: Because they’re afraid of the new and the unknown, and familiarity is comforting. For instance, when you live out in the middle of nowhere as I do, you really appreciate small things, and one of the things I’d come to appreciate was this small bar not far from where I live. The guy who ran it was cool, he kept the lights low, and there would always be interesting jazz playing when you popped in there. In the middle of nowhere, that’s like a gold mine. I popped in the other day and the music was gone, it was brightly lit, and a smiling woman chirped, “Can I help you?” The bar had been sold, so the place I knew no longer exists. Arthur Rimbaud said “some destructions are necessary,” and that’s a lesson I’m really trying to learn.

Kristine McKenna: An overriding theme in all of your music is personal and political conflict. Why can’t people get along?

Joe Strummer: I think fear is the corrupting agent, and I don’t know how we can eliminate that. Of course, there’s no way to eliminate the most terrifying reality—that we all have to die—but at least the sun shines, and we’ve got a bit of time, so it’s not all sniveling. Maybe if every child in the world was shown a really good time, a new breed of human beings would appear. On the other hand, I believe some people are just born bad—I’ve met a few of them, too. Whether they were born bad, what happened to them was bad, or it was a combination of the two, by the time they’re teenagers you can see they’re gonna flip. No matter who loves them or what happens to them, they’re gonna smash up the room.

Kristine McKenna: Do you believe in karma, or do some people get away with smashing up the room?

Joe Strummer: Surely karma must be one of the few things we can believe in. Even if it were proved to me that it wasn’t in play here on earth, I’d still hope that in another dimension, in the spirit world, it does exist. I do think it operates in this world.

Kristine McKenna: What forces played a role in shaping your sense of morality?

Joe Strummer: My mother was Scottish, and a no-nonsense kind of woman, and maybe I got some vibes from her.

Kristine McKenna: What’s been the most difficult year of your life?

Joe Strummer: I took a long breather after the Clash broke up, and I had a really hard time about half way through that. I needed a rest, so I was kind of grateful for the break, but at a certain point I became overwhelmed by a sense of self-doubt. In the music business, an eleven-year layoff is like 111 years, and felt like I’d blown it and would never get up there again. The only thing that got me through was sheer bloody-mindedness—I just won’t quit! Every time I think “you’ve had your lot, now just shut up,” a larger part of me says, “no, there are things you can say better than anyone, and you must say them.” The other thing that carried me through that period was the fact that I had a lot of responsibilities—I’d managed to have children, and both my parents died during those years.

Kristine McKenna: How were you affected by the death of your parents?

Joe Strummer: I wasn’t close to them, because when I was eight years old I was sent to a boarding school, where I spent nine years. I saw my father once a year between the ages of nine and twelve, then twice a year from then on. As to whether I felt cheated by his absence, I didn’t bother with that, because I was in a hard place. You know Tom Brown’s School Days? Imagine being in a second-rate boarding school in South London in 1961. You had to punch or be punched, so I became hard and ceased being a mama’s boy pretty quickly.

Kristine McKenna: You’ve been referred to in the press on several occasions as “the son of a diplomat who dropped out of art school to be a bohemian.” Is that an accurate description?

Joe Strummer: No. In my first ever interview in Melody Maker, when I was suddenly regarded as “somebody,” I said that my father was a diplomat simply because I wanted to give him his due for one time in his life. My father was an excellent eccentric who liked nothing better than dressing up for a party, and he was great fun, but he was basically a low-level worker in the hierarchy of the British embassy, and we actually had fuck all. A four-room bungalow in Croyton was all he managed to accrue during his life, and Croyton is not much of a salubrious suburb.

Kristine McKenna: When you were twenty years old, your older brother, David, committed suicide. How did that mark you?

Joe Strummer: I was deeply affected by it, and I don’t know if I’ve come to terms with it yet, because it’s a mysterious thing to try and understand. We were only separated by eighteen months, but we were opposites: whereas I was the loudmouth ringleader who was always getting everybody into trouble, he was quiet and never said much. When we were teenagers in the ’60s, there was a load of shouting about Rhodesia, and that led to his becoming a member of the National Front in 1968. At the time, I was too busy listening to Jimi Hendrix to really understand what was going on with him, but I don’t think his politics had anything to do with his suicide. I think it had more to do with his shyness.

Kristine McKenna: What’s the most valuable thing you could teach your children?

Joe Strummer: I don’t think I’ve taught them anything, and don’t feel like I’ve been a very good father. My first marriage split up after fourteen years when my two daughters were still relatively young, and you feel guilty about that forever. They get born, and suddenly the thing they were born into is pulled apart. It eats away at my mind, particularly since my parents stayed together.

Kristine McKenna: You married again in 1995; what’s the secret of a successful marriage?

Joe Strummer: You have to love your partner more than you love yourself—and I do.

Kristine McKenna: What’s the most widely held misconception about you?

Joe Strummer: That I’m some kind of political thinker. I definitely am not. I think about politics all the time, but it’s become increasingly difficult to know what’s going on in the world. I grew up hearing my parents go on about World War II, which was an episode of history that seemed very clear: Hitler equals bad, everyone else equals good. People are basically lazy and we want to see a good guy and a bad guy. Obviously, nothing is black or white, yet we yearn for that beautiful clarity, but I’m finding it more and more difficult to come to those kinds of conclusions—possibly because we’re getting more information and we have to sift through it. I used to believe it was possible to learn what was going on in the world by reading the newspaper, but that began to change around the time that the Balkans thing kicked off. Either the newspapers aren’t up to snuff or I’m losing my mind, but I found it very difficult to get a grasp on what was going on there.

Kristine McKenna: Do you believe music has a responsibility to address social and political issues?

Joe Strummer: I do, but I would add that the climate of the times dictates the way people write.

Kristine McKenna: How are you evolving as a songwriter?

Joe Strummer: Oh god, backwards man! I’m trying to be less idiotic. Every writer likes to feel that when he sits down to write he’s gonna zoom off into a new field he didn’t even know existed, but the truth is that writing is basically a process of blundering in the dark, and there’s a lot of luck that comes into play.

Kristine McKenna: Are there specific issues that are particularly well suited to being addressed in music?

Joe Strummer: Love—because with music, you have the extra dimension of melody to communicate things that are beyond language.

Kristine McKenna: Name a song that never fails to make you cry.

Joe Strummer: Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia.” It has a quality of yearning and reminiscence that are incredibly moving to me.

Kristine McKenna: What was the last record you bought?

Joe Strummer: The Call, by Alan Skidmore, who was a bebop saxophone player who could probably be described as washed up, not to be too rude. He went to South Africa and hooked up with a group called Amampondo, and they made this record together that’s basically a bunch of crazed drumming with a bebop guy free-falling all over it. It’s not bad, but when I put it on everyone else leaves.

Kristine McKenna: What’s your favorite Clash song?

Joe Strummer: I really like “If Music Could Talk,” which is on side 21 of Sandinista! [Laughing] I like it because it’s quite weird, and it shows we were willing to try stupid things all the time.

Kristine McKenna: What do you miss about being in the Clash?

Joe Strummer: That was so long ago that it’s all faded, and I’m never on the nostalgia tit, but we did have a very good camaraderie and an extremely acute sense of humor. It was fun being in the Clash.

Kristine McKenna: Was there ever a time when you believed the myth of the Clash?

Joe Strummer: No, and that’s why I managed to survive. They say you should never read your press, and that comes in handy when they’re saying you suck.

Kristine McKenna: Does the adversarial nature of the music press help keep musicians honest, or does it simply undermine them?

Joe Strummer: On several occasions it’s definitely knocked me for six, but then I’d grudgingly get up and dust my clothes off, and say better that than the other way. The press is harsher in England than it is other places, but I think it’s a good thing because it keeps you on your toes and prevents you from getting too pretentious. Yes-men tend to collect around famous people, so the conditions are really conducive to becoming pretentious. So you might as well get the mean guys in to flay you alive.

Kristine McKenna: How has fame been of use to you?

Joe Strummer: It obviously has its uses, but it’s really more of a liability than an asset to anyone interested in writing. If you want to write, the first thing is, you’ve got to experience life like everyone else experiences it. Secondly, you need room to think. If you’re incredibly famous, all you can think about is, “oh my god, has that person over there recognized me, and did I bring enough bodyguards to the supermarket with me.” By accident I managed this quite well, because the Clash never went on television in Britain. If you wanted to see the Clash you had to actually get up and go out to one of the shows. Consequently, I’m able to move about Britain without being recognized, for the most part.

Kristine McKenna: Are fame and money invariably corrupting?

Joe Strummer: Definitely. The Clash never had to struggle with the latter of those two things, however, because we never got any money. The music business is a bad racket, and the people on the first crest of a wave never get paid. I don’t like to moan on about money, but you have to realize that although you might’ve heard of the Clash, we didn’t sell any records. Nobody sends me five pounds every time somebody’s heard of the group. We never had any real power, either, other than in an abstract, poetic way. What I wrote on a piece of paper might influence someone somewhere down the line, and that’s something I still take great care with. Not writing things that are stupid or easily misconstrued is something I keep onboard at all times. But it would’ve been nice to have the power to say, “50,000 people down to the Houses of Parliament now!” We might’ve been able to get 1,500 people at the height of our power, but ultimately, it’s the big money men who have the power. Then again, I suppose somebody must’ve seen us as some kind of threat back in the day, because we were constantly being arrested for petty shit. We’d go to play small towns in the north of England and you could almost hear them thinking, “here they come, those punk rockers from London—we’re not having any of that!” So they’d pull over our cars, search us, shake down our motel rooms—it was all very petty.

Kristine McKenna: Does the legacy of the Clash continue to get in your way?

Joe Strummer: Not anymore, because enough time has passed. But certainly, for ten years after the group broke up, I found it difficult to deal with. But I managed to chill long enough that it’s allowable for me to come back and knock in a few good albums. It’s not pissing anybody off.

Kristine McKenna: You’ve traveled quite a bit as a touring musician; what’s the scariest place you’ve ever been?

Joe Strummer: Mozambique. There was a war going on there, and I was only there for a day, but the entire time I was there I was nervous about who might be lurking in the bushes along the roadside. It was also a little unnerving playing Ireland with the Clash, but you have to laugh. You fly in there, you check into the Europa Hotel in Belfast, and the clerk cheerfully informs you that this is the most bombed hotel in Europe. Twenty-eight bombings so far! Then you go up to your room where you ask yourself; should I crawl under the bed? Do I dare stand at the window? We were quite pragmatic and decided to just get on with things, because we couldn’t see how either side could gain anything politically by blowing up a rock ’n’ roll show. It wasn’t as if the whole world was saying, “Oh wow, the Clash are in Belfast.” The only people who cared that we were there were the other scrawny punk rockers walking around Belfast.

Kristine McKenna: In A Riot of Our Own, the 1999 book about the Clash written by Johnny Green and Garry Barker, everyone in the band comes off well, with the exception of Mick Jones, who’s depicted as being ridiculously obsessed with his wardrobe. Is the book accurate?

Joe Strummer: Yes it is, but you need some of that in a rock ’n’ roll band! If Paul Simonon hadn’t been in the Clash I doubt that we would’ve been as successful as we were, because you need to look stylish. People don’t think of Bob Dylan as a glamorous guy, but he was actually pretty good-looking. When you think of his Cuban heel phase, with the curly head, the Carnaby Street clothes, the polka-dot tab collars, the tight jeans, the boots—he was pretty styling.

Kristine McKenna: Rumor has it that Bob’s had a face-lift.

Joe Strummer: That’s probably a good idea. You have to remember, this is show biz, and it’s not as if Bob’s a merchant banker or a film critic or something. If he wants to go out on the road for another twenty or thirty years, he’s gonna want to tuck it up a bit. It’s not as if we’re novelists who can hide in our studies like J. D. Salinger and never have our photos taken. It’s easy for those people to say what the heck. You don’t know what it’s like having photos taken of yourself all the time. It’s appalling to regularly see the destruction of age marked out sharply on your face in photos, videos, and on television. This is a visual thing we do. Johnny Cash dyes his hair, and I think it’s only right that we try and scruff up a shambling face.

Kristine McKenna: At what point did you become an adult?

Joe Strummer: Are you kidding?! I’m nowhere near becoming an adult.

Kristine McKenna: What do you think you represent to the people who admire you?

Joe Strummer: Maybe they see a good soul.

Kristine McKenna: Tell me about someone who inspires you.

Joe Strummer: Bo Diddley is inspiring. When he was a young musician starting out he needed some maracas, so he went to the local scrap yard, got some of those floating balls that sit in the tank of a toilet, filled them with black-eyed peas, then used them to invent a whole new kind of music. That’s heroic and inspiring.

Kristine McKenna: What’s the biggest obstacle you’ve overcome in your life?

Joe Strummer: I wouldn’t say I’ve overcome it yet, but it’s my sheer laziness. I’d rather sit and watch Popeye cartoons than do anything. Nowadays I’m into The Simpsons, South Park, and SpongeBob Squarepants.

Kristine McKenna: The second album by your current band, the Mescaleros, is dedicated to the late Joey Ramone. What was the nature of his genius?

Joe Strummer: A sharp intelligence. People think of spirit when they think of the Ramones, but the more I listen to those records the more I’m struck by how smart they are.

Kristine McKenna: Where do you think Joey is now?

Joe Strummer: He’s in heaven.

Kristine McKenna: Do you believe in heaven?

Joe Strummer: Maybe not for me, but certainly for Joey Ramone.

Kristine McKenna: What’s the most one can hope for in life?

Joe Strummer: The sense of having accomplished something—and I don’t have that feeling yet. Being in the line of work I’m in, you hold yourself up against the real greats like Dylan, Ray Davies, Jagger and Richards, Paul Simon, Lennon and McCartney, and John Fogerty. I’m not in that pantheon yet, but I’m gonna get there.

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Originally appeared in Arthur, Spring 2003.

WHEN THE TWO SEVENS CLASHED

By Carter Van Pelt

When Bob Marley sang his 1977 reggae-stepper “Punky Reggae Party,” he called out “The Damned, the Jam, the Clash. . . . ” Marley may have overlooked the Pistols’ reggae-loving Johnny Rotten, but few in the London punk movement were drawn to the party with the passion of the Clash’s Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, and nobody did more to represent reggae to the punk rock scene.

Members of the Clash grew up in close proximity to the Jamaican community that relocated to England in the post–WWII period. Paul Simonon’s “Guns of Brixton” is a direct reflection of this experience, as is Strummer’s “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.” The latter documents Strummer’s night in a Jamaican dance hall in West London, as he explained in 1991: “All over the world people are oppressed and in London there were the dreads and there were the punks, and we had an alliance. England is a very repressive country. . . . Immigrants were treated badly. “So these people had a sense of pride and dignity, and when we went into their concerts, where we should have had the grace to have left them alone. . . . “And they didn’t jump us, they didn’t stomp us, they didn’t beat the seven shades of you-know-what out of us. . . . “They understood that maybe we needed a drop of this roots culture. And ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ is a song that was going through my mind while I was standing in the middle of the Hammersmith Palais . . . in a sea of thousands of Rastas and dreads and natty rebels. That song was trying to say something realistic.”

Vic Ruggiero of the Slackers performing in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Evidence of the group’s interest in reggae could be seen before it was heard. The picture sleeve of the first single, “1977,” strongly resembles the cover of Joe Gibbs and the Professionals’ State of Emergency album—men lined up with their backs to the camera, hands on a wall, on the verge of arrest. On the “1977” sleeve, the theme was augmented by the Jamaican political slogans on Strummer’s clothes—“Heavy Manners” and “Heavy Duty Discipline.” These ideas were likely gleaned from Prince Far I’s Under Heavy Manners album, an often-cited Clash favorite. Later visual references to the group’s cultural interests include the cover of Black Market Clash, which features a picture of a lone Rasta in defiance of riot police at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival. Strummer’s and Jones’s experiences at Notting Hill in 1976 were the inspiration for the song “White Riot.”

The Clash’s first attempt to work with reggae musicians was a short alliance in 1977 with the “Rasputin of reggae,” Lee Perry. The result, “Complete Control,” was less than inspired, but the group kept at it, achieving intercultural consanguinity in 1980 when they brought Jamaican deejay/producer Mikey Dread to the controls. Their collaboration on “Bankrobber” and “Robber Dub” (from Black Market Clash) was followed by the “Train In Vain,” B-side “Rockers Galore-UK Tour,” and the tracks “Junco Partner,” “Living In Fame,” “One More Time,” “One More Dub,” “If Music Could Talk,” and “Shepherd’s Delight” on the massive Sandinista! album. (Mikey Dread’s vocals can be heard on “Living in Fame,” “One More Time,” and “If Music Could Talk.”)

While Mikey Dread is still in contention today with the Clash’s management over alleged unpaid publishing and lack of recognition for the album sales garnered by Sandinista!, his respect for Strummer’s and Simonon’s “reggae mission” remains.

“I see Joe Strummer as a leader in the rock world who never got the recognition that he deserved for his upfrontness, addressing issues that other people were reluctant to address—‘White Riot’ and all dem tings deh. When I met them, I was surprised that these people were supporting reggae, buying reggae every week, and up-to-date with what’s going on . . .

“One thing I can say about the Clash, they were no racists. There were a lot of times I been to places where skinheads and punks wanted to kick my butt, as a black man, and [the Clash] would warn me, ‘Tomorrow don’t go out alone, have one of us follow you.’ They start to wear their Doctor Martens shoes, and they buy me a pair as well so they know we’re on the war path. Anybody come, we just mess them up.”

Mikey Dread’s live performances with the Clash involved taking the stage alone to sing over recordings of his own “Dread at the Controls” rhythm productions and later joining the Clash for encores. This Jamaican dance hall–style performance was understood and received enthusiastically in Europe, but Mikey ran into problems at his first U.S. appearance. “I wasn’t supposed to be on tour with them, but they asked me to come along. They wanted to introduce me to their crowd, but I got a bad reception in LA. I’ll never forget Los Angeles. We played all over the world and when we came to Los Angeles, all the punkers tried to boo me off stage. The punks got really mad, and I’m looking at like 20,000 people and wondering what the hell is gonna go on. I told the guys, ‘I’m not playing tonight, cause they don’t want to see a black man out there.’ We had one black bouncer and me. That is it for blacks. And it was pure white man out there, some bad punks! They wanted to eat me alive! Joe Strummer is the one who was like ‘Go get them Mikey, don’t let them tell you what to do!’ And me just go out there and get serious and say, ‘You know, I’m coming to the United States, [and] I was thinking I was going to be meeting a lot of intelligent people, people who are open-minded, people who are cosmopolitan, people who are not prejudiced and racist, people who want the world to live in unity.’ I give them a speech and chastise them for their rude behavior. And trust me mon, the crowd went quiet like you could hear a pin drop. Then I said, ‘I know you’re here to see the Clash, but I’m going to introduce you to some reggae music, from the roots! Are you ready?’ And they say, ‘yea!’ And we just start lick some tune and that was it. We broke the ice.”

Vic Ruggiero of the Slackers performing in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Vic Ruggiero of the Slackers performing in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Not only did the Clash cover reggae tracks like Willi Williams’s “Armagideon Time,” Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” and Tools and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop,” they name-dropped and referenced their reggae heroes in their lyrics—Prince Far I in “Clash City Rockers,” Dr. Alimantado in “Rudy Can’t Fail,” the Abyssinians’ “Satta Massagana” in “Jimmy Jazz,” and Dillinger, Leroy Smart, Ken Boothe, and Delroy Wilson in “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.” Strummer even documented his and Jones’s chaotic jaunt to Kingston in “Safe European Home.” (Curiously, Simonon—arguably the band’s biggest reggae head—was left behind in England, a major slight that he talks about with obvious residual bitterness in Don Letts’s Clash doc, Westway to the World.)

Strummer’s love of Jamaican music continued in his solo career. The lyrics on “Techno D-Day” from the Mescaleros’ Rock Art and the X-Ray Style describe “using the headphones for a mike; for Tenor Saw’s delight, I sang another new sound is dying,” a reference to Tenor Saw’s “Ring the Alarm.” Strummer also recorded a cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” with DJ Tippa Irie and the Long Beach Dub Allstars on the Free the Memphis 3 benefit album, and co-wrote the disquieting title track for Horace Andy’s Living in the Flood album, released on Massive Attack’s Melankolic label.

Over the last twenty-five years, the Clash’s embrace of Jamaican music has inspired like-minded efforts by musicians including Bad Brains, Massive Attack, 311, Rancid, Sublime, Long Beach Dub Allstars, and No Doubt. The punky reggae party that started so improbably way back in ’77 has never really stopped.

Originally appeared in Arthur, Spring 2003.

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Thanks to Jim Dooley and Stanley Whyte for the fact assists.

WHATEVER IT TAKES

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

It might have been twenty years ago. Maybe. I can’t really remember. I was walking down South Street in Philadelphia to a small music venue and saw a group of people attacking the stage. The club was crowded, not packed, but the searing energy from the audience blew me away. I watched the group onstage perform a blazing, furious set as if to an arena packed with tens of thousands. I didn’t catch the name of the band because I had to rush off and check out another band at a nearby club. Sometime later I was with my friend Markoos, a music lover of the highest order. He pulled out a cassette tape and told me to prepare myself for a sound combining rap, rock, and a guitar style on a turntable spinning a thousand different sounds. It was all melded together with a punk rawness and the technical mastery of a guitar virtuoso. The first tune was “Bombtrack.” Boom! I realized I had heard it before, on that night years before in the small Philly club. The band’s name was Rage Against the Machine and they soon were filling arenas and selling millions of records. Tom Morello is the guitarist.

Spend a moment with Morello, as I did for the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour, and you learn that the energy is all his. Pulsating, effervescent, and uninhibited, he seemed to share Joe Strummer’s enthusiasm. In between Rage breaking up and re-forming (sort of), Morello cofounded the Axis of Justice, a nonprofit that brings together musicians and fans to lobby for social justice, with Serj Tankian of System of a Down. He rolled out more than one Justice Tour, a concert series that benefits progressive causes, like independent media and labor. He connected with three other Let Fury Have the Hour film participants—Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Billy Bragg, and Boots Riley of the Coup—to become a key member of Jail Guitar Doors, an organization that donates instruments to those who use music to help rehabilitate prison inmates. And his venture with Boots Riley, Street Sweeper Social Scene, a project dedicated to “revolutionary party jams,” continues to reward devotees with political music that is intense and stirring. All the while, Morello has taken to heart the manifesto on Woody Guthrie’s guitar, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” He scrawls his own credo with his machine, declaring to do “whatever it takes” as the Nightwatchman, his alter ego solo act that preaches progressive politics.

Musician Tom Morello during the filming of Antonino D’Ambrosio’s Let Fury Have the Hour, November 11, 2010. (Photos by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

After sitting down with him at his home in Los Angeles, Morello gave me The Nightwatchman’s Little Red Songbook. “Let Freedom Ring!” he wrote on it when he handed it to me. From full throttle arena rock to performing a massive protest just before the police surged on the crowd instigating a riot at the 2000 Democratic National Convention to walking the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, in solidarity with workers currently under assault there, guitar in hand and leading the people in song, Morello is Pete Seeger with a flamethrower.

THE CLASH LEGACY

Speech to Induct the Clash into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2003

By Tom Morello

I had the good fortune to see the Clash play at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago when I was a teenager. It was an experience that changed my life. Even before the first note was played the transformation began. I bought a T-shirt in the lobby. I was used to buying heavy metal T-shirts with lots of garish wizards and dragons on them, but this Clash shirt was different. It just had a few small words written over the heart: “The future is unwritten.”

And when I saw the Clash play, I knew exactly what that phrase meant. The Clash performed with passion, commitment, purpose, righteousness, and an unflinching political fire. There was such a sense of community in the room that it seemed like absolutely anything was possible. I was energized, politicized, changed by the Clash that night, and I knew that the future was unwritten. And maybe we fans and that band were going to write it together.

Watching the show, I realized that Joe Strummer was playing through the same little amp that I had in high school. They proved to me that you didn’t need walls of Marshall stacks and a castle on a Scottish loch to make great music. All you had to do was tell the truth, and mean it. I had never seen a better band before that night, and I have not seen a better band since.

The Clash was one of those rare bands that are greater than the sum of their parts, and yet the parts were amazing. Mick was the brilliant arranger and tunesmith, always looking forward musically and pushing the boundaries of what was possible for a punk band, of what was possible for any band. Paul was just so damn cool looking, and the image of him smashing his bass on the cover of London Calling sums up the fury and beautiful force of the band. He also wove in the reggae influence that completed the Clash chemistry of three chords, a funky groove, and the truth. Terry Chimes provided the cavalry charge beats that propelled some of their early anthems, but it was Topper who made it all possible with his drumming. He effortlessly, and with great originality and skill, steered the band through genres undreamed of by their peers. But really, the band had no peers, because at the center of the Clash hurricane stood one of the greatest hearts and deepest souls of twentieth-century music. At the center of the Clash stood Joe Strummer.

Joe Strummer died on December 22, 2002.

Joe Strummer played as if the world could be changed by a three-minute song, and he was right. Those songs changed a lot of people’s worlds forever, mine at the top of the list. He was a brilliant lyricist who, with anger and wit, always stood up for the underdog. His idealism and conviction instilled in me the courage to pick up a guitar and the courage to try to make a difference with it.

In the great Clash anthem “White Riot” Joe sang:

Are you taking over,

Or you taking orders?

Are you going backwards,

Or are you going forwards?

The Clash Legacy

When I first heard that, I wrote those four lines down, put them on my refrigerator, and answered those four questions for myself every day. And to this day, I still do.

Joe Strummer was my greatest inspiration, my favorite singer of all time, and my hero. I miss him so much. I was looking forward to him standing on this stage and rocking with his friends tonight. And I know he was too. I am grateful, though, to have the tremendous legacy of music that the Clash left behind. Through it, Joe Strummer and the Clash will continue to inspire and agitate well into the future.

In fact, the Clash aren’t really gone at all. Because whenever a band cares more about its fans than its bank account, the spirit of the Clash is there. Whenever a band plays as if every single person’s soul in the room is at stake, the spirit of the Clash is there. Whenever a stadium band or a garage band has the guts to put their beliefs on the line to make a difference, the spirit of the Clash is there. And whenever people take to the streets to stop an unjust war, the spirit of the Clash is definitely there.

Tonight we will honor the Clash and Joe Strummer with toasts and applause, but the best way to honor them is by putting the Clash’s philosophy into practice, by waking up each morning knowing that the future is unwritten, and that it can be a future where human rights, peace, and justice come first. But it is entirely up to us.

To me, that’s what the Clash was all about. They combined revolutionary sounds with revolutionary ideas. Their music launched thousands of bands and moved millions of fans and I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without them.

During their heyday, they were known as “the only band that matters,” and twenty-five years later, that still seems just about right.

Act IV

BETTER GET YOUR WEAPON READY

Musician Tom Morello during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour, November 11, 2011. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

THE WORLD IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR

Two Creative Activists, Michael Franti and Tim Robbins, Continue Joe Strummer’s Legacy

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Action is the antidote to despair.

—JOAN BAEZ

Your silence will not protect you.

—AUDRE LORDE

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions, which have been hidden by the answers.

—JAMES BALDWIN

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few.

—“THE MASK OF ANARCHY,” PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

As a kid growing up in early 1980s California, Michael Franti began to experiment with the scores of musical styles that would find their way into his own music. “I came to the Clash in kind of a backwards way,” he told me. “I was really into reggae and found out that Mikey Dread was working with them so I had to learn more about their music.”[1] Mikey Dread is a music legend in Jamaica and the London music scene, where he was a prolific DJ, artist, and producer. Dread’s work with the Clash would come to be looked upon as some of the most creative and influential collaborative productions of the punk era. Clash songs including “One More Time,” “Bankrobber,” and “Police on My Back” became iconic recordings thanks in large part to Dread’s brilliance as a “dub master.”[2]

For aspiring young musicians like Michael Franti and Chuck D, the Clash’s experimentation with “black music” was inspiring. As Franti explains, the Clash’s approach was not your ordinary punk styling. “Their music was fun and exciting . . . it taught me to look at everything around me as an influence and that you could make good music with a decisive political message.” He adds, “When you listen to the Clash and the new Strummer recordings you understand that the world is a terrible, scary place but the world is worth fighting for.”

Franti is no stranger to fighting for the world and the people he believes in. Beginning with the Beatnigs, a San Francisco–based avant-garde group that fused industrial and punk music as a vehicle for social and political change, Franti began to make important strides in music and activism. Shortly after, Franti formed the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy with former Beatnigs band mate Rono Tse. The duo’s first and only album, Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury, established them as leading proponents of multiculturalism and justice. Their lyrics challenged hip-hop tenets like homophobia and misogyny while producing music with a distinctly intelligent, forward-thinking global analysis of issues including U.S. imperialism. Their 1991 song about the Gulf War—“The Winter of Long Hot Summer”—remains remarkably prescient in today’s political climate.

It all seemed so idiotic all the accusations of unpatriotic

The fall we’ll always remember, capitulating silence

election November before the winter

of the long hot summer

Somewhere in the desert

we raised the oil pressure

and waited for the weather

to get much better

for the new wind to blow in the storm

We tried to remember the history in the region

the French foreign legion, Imperialism,

Peter O’Toole and hate the Ayatollah

were all we learned in school

Not that we gave Hussein five billion

The loss of life on both sides

pushed the limits of resilience

The scent of blood in our nostrils

fuel of the fossil land of apostle

The blackness that covered the sky was not the only thing

that brought a tear to the eye or

the taste of anger to the tongues

of those too young to remember Vietnam

Other provocative Franti compositions include “Everyday Life Has Become a Health Risk,” “Television: The Drug of the Nation,” “Socio-Genetic Experiment,” and a brilliant reworking of the Dead Kennedys’ classic “California Über Alles.” His clarity and depth presented a radical counterpoint to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, which was dominating the music charts at the time and taking hip-hop into a decidedly different direction, mainstreaming gangsta rap and fashioning it as the new pop cultural force.

Franti’s current work with the group Spearhead has allowed him to develop and expand his music and activism. Like Strummer’s most recent work with the Mescaleros, Franti brings maturity and skillful musicianship to the compositions. Sandinista!, the much maligned fourth record from the Clash, is Franti’s musical model in many ways due to the expansive sounds, beats, styles, and musical compositions. “I realized that when you listen to the Clash, the music they create is the Clash,” he tells me. “You can’t point to any one style and the only way to describe the music when you hear it is ‘oh yes, this is the Clash.’” And that’s what he has been able to fashion with Spearhead. When you hear Spearhead it is unmistakably Michael Franti’s unique sound and emotion coming through.

On Spearhead’s most recent album, Everybody Needs Music, the track “Bomb the World” takes on the absurdity of creating peace through war:

we can chase down all our enemies

bring them to their knees

we can bomb the world to pieces

but we can’t bomb it into peace

whoa we may even find a solution

to hunger and disease

we can bomb the world to pieces

but we can’t bomb it into peace

Franti sees himself as a musical communicator with the singular goal of maintaining a critical approach to crafting humanist music. For Franti, Strummer also served as a model to continue fighting no matter the odds. “Strummer’s music was always uplifting,” he says, “albeit the issues he was singing about were startling and distressing.” He continues, “My message is clear . . . even though things seem hopeless we must keep struggling . . . that is what is at the root of Strummer’s music and at the root of my music.”

Likewise, Strummer’s music gave Franti the courage to explore: “It showed me, and all who listen, that we are not alone in this world,” Franti declares, “and political songs are important because they can help us change ourselves and then hopefully things we don’t like in this world.” Franti acknowledges that music can’t change the world but does give the listener a belief that change is possible. Thoughtful music also helps us cope with our day-to-day lives and discover a sense of community. Franti adds that it shows us “we are not crazy and that there are people like me out there.” The Clash and Strummer gave him a sense of community and now Franti is helping to create community for countless others.

Franti shares many of Strummer’s concerns, especially the increasing consolidation of the music industry and the demise of independent record labels. “In the ’70s and ’80s labels like Island Records,” he explains, “put out the socially conscious music of artists like Bob Marley and U2. They did great work to really get them out there to a wider audience. They worked hard for these artists. But then Island got taken over by a larger label, which got taken over by another label, which got taken over by another label.”

Franti and Strummer also connect in their unyielding belief that music and rebellion react to the conservative state of the world, creating a “groundswell that will lead to another moment where our message will get out there and challenge the way people think.” However, the challenge lies in conveying that message. Like Strummer, Franti encounters opposition to his work, and Spearhead faces an essential “blackout” on the radio. When Franti asks why, the answer given is that they are “too political.” In another example Franti tells me about a recent situation involving one of his band mates who has a sister serving in Iraq. He will not be named to prevent further troubles for the band. Before she was sent over to Iraq, two government agents visited her family and asked about having one child in the military and another in Spearhead, a music group with “radical political views.” “They knew almost everything about what we did, where we went,” Franti explains, “and questioned why we named our management company Guerrilla Management.” Franti pauses and then tells me, “You have to realize they are watching even those involved in the smallest political activity—like going to protests—I call this total information awareness.”

“Punk rock was everything I needed when I first heard it because it informed me on all levels—socially, politically,” Tim Robbins tells me as we sit in his production office in Chelsea.[3] “We would smash disco and smash the system,” he adds with a smirk. Robbins is a creative activist who has achieved enormous success while maintaining a vocal, committed progressive social consciousness in the face of political and media scorn. In 2004 he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as a man dogged by unbearable childhood trauma in Mystic River while at the same time producing, writing, directing, and starring in the sharply critical theatrical satire Embedded.

Embedded takes on the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, neoconservative influence, and the corporate media’s complicity in supporting a war seemingly built on intimidation, misrepresentation, and outright lies. Robbins crafts the play in the spirit of Bertolt Brecht, breaking down the boundary between artist and audience with the clever use of mixed media (music, video, film, etc.). As Larry Bogad points out in Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, it also stands as an allegory in activist aesthetics for the wall that separates art from reality under capitalism.[4] Robbins’s insider-outsider status gives him a unique perspective as well as a significant opportunity to fashion a work that is socially, culturally, and politically rebellious. For me, viewing Embedded was a direct, intense experience that comes at the audience in a high-speed rush.

Embedded, which opened at the Public Theater in New York City, is dedicated to Joe Strummer and is tied together by punk music (the play opens with the Clash’s “Know Your Rights”) that captures the play’s anger and trepidation toward the government and media that seems to be the moving away from democracy. Like the Italian playwright Dario Fo, who took on Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with the bitingly satirical Two-Headed Anomaly,[5] Robbins’s attempt to take a serious political situation and frame it in a farcical light has not pleased the powerful. Several attempts were made to shut down the play, which had its first run in Los Angeles before finding a home in New York City’s Public Theater. As Fo himself declared, laughter does not please the mighty.

Throughout a prolific career that includes acting, writing, directing, and music, Robbins maintains a sensibility that is every bit as punk as Strummer’s ferocious performances and progressive politics. Robbins grew up in New York City and was introduced to art as a political tool at a young age, due to his musician father’s influence.[6] The folk music of the 1960s combined with political art helped shape Robbins’s early consciousness.

Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” affected him in a way no other song had before. “The song pulls no punches,” he says. “That’s hard core song writing, that’s poetry and he’s not hiding behind anything.” Robbins became inspired by the song’s “take no prisoners message” and vehement anger about a society that condones the murder of a black woman at the hands of her wealthy white employer. “I’m going to knock you down and I’m going to watch you fall,” he says. “I’m going to stand over your body to make sure you’re down . . . that’s the kind of writing that was nowhere to be found after the mid-’60s.”

Robbins’s search ended in the mid-1970s when he heard punk for the first time. Robbins explains that his ear was open to punk, its spirit and message. “They had no qualms about going after people, after their gut and going for a knockout.” He continues, “It’s not just that I disagree with your politics . . . it’s that I want to destroy your politics. I want to destroy your hatred, bigotry, your insensitivity, and your mistreatment of the weak. I am going to take you and throw you down into the gutter and watch you suffer “that’s what was missing.” At this point in his life Robbins was on his way to becoming one of the premiere actors of his generation, first in theater with the Los Angeles theater group The Actors’ Gang, and then in television and film.

The music and activism of the Clash gave Robbins an indefatigable confidence that he could, and should, imbue his own creativity with the same radical consciousness. “Telling the truth in a very direct way that was not half-ass, not touchy-feely,” he tells me. “That wasn’t equivocating, it wasn’t apologizing for itself, it was fuck you . . . and ultimately that was what was so amazing about the Clash.” At this point Robbins recounts his first big acting gig. It was on the hit television show St. Elsewhere, and Robbins played a terrorist. He had completed one day of shooting and that night the Clash were in town on the early part of their Combat Rock tour. Robbins decided to go and participate fully in what he described “the caring, comfortable community” Clash shows provided. The next day he was three hours late for shooting.

Robbins wryly tells me that he showed up for work and said nothing about being late. “I was going to pull this part off using all the punk rock energy Strummer and the boys gave me the night before,” he says laughing. It worked. He did not get fired, although he later learned that both the producer and his agent wanted to fire him. The St. Elsewhere performance opened Hollywood’s eyes to Robbins’s immense talent. “Punk made me what I am today,” he adds, “and the only reason I am any good in acting is because I took this attitude from punk rock . . . I had nothing to fear.”

“Take the song ‘Spanish Bombs’ for example,” Robbins explains while singing a few lines of the song. “At first I listen to it and hear the amazing music. It draws me in, then I start to hear what they are singing about.” Strummer wrote the song in the style of a punk Andalusian poem in tribute to the freedom fighters who fought for democracy against the fascists in Spain in 1939. It alludes to the brutal death of antifascist poet Federico García Lorca and the U.S. role in aiding the military dictatorship’s terrible rise to power.[7] The song opens powerfully:

Spanish songs in Andalucia

The shooting sites in the days of ’39

Oh, please, leave the vendanna open

Federico Lorca is dead and gone

Bullet holes in the cemetery walls

The black cars of the Guardia Civil

Spanish bombs on the Costa Rica

I’m flying in a DC 10 tonight

“It made me want to learn more about Andalucia, Lorca, and what really took place at that time in Spain,” Robbins adds, “this is what good music does—it teaches you.”

As we discuss Robbins’s overtly political work, including Dead Man Walking, Bob Roberts, Cradle Will Rock, and Embedded, he stops to point out a constant source of frustration for him.[8] “Be careful about using the word ‘political’ because it will turn people off,” he ardently declares. “‘Political’ is a way to marginalize.” Robbins believes that he and Strummer among other creative activists are really humanists or rebels, not “political people.” Returning to Strummer he continues, “You know there was no one that was less political than Joe Strummer.” He adds, “If you look up the word in the dictionary—it’s someone whose behavior is affected by calculation—Strummer’s was affected by justice, a sense of fairness.”

I mention to him that Franti and others always return to the fact that Strummer’s work is first and foremost fun and entertaining. Robbins absolutely agrees. “We don’t want to lecture to anybody. I want to feel. I want to be able to laugh . . . to be able to achieve that in the entertainment you are doing, that’s the high art for me.” Robbins, much like Strummer when I met him, rails against contrived and pretentious intellectualizing in political art. Both also seemed to share the simple goal of crafting work that reaches as wide an audience as possible. “Creating something that touches people and still has substance is the real achievement,” Robbins explains.

Still, for all his success, Robbins continues to face what Franti and other creative activists encounter on a daily basis, what he calls “cultural assassination.” Strummer faced this type of intense media scrutiny during his time with the Clash and more specifically after the release of Sandinista! I relay my conversation with Strummer to Robbins regarding the weariness Strummer and the band felt during the Sandinista! period. Everywhere they went they would face hordes of reporters who wanted to focus on the name of the album.[9] Were the Clash communists? Did they believe in violence as a means to political change? Were they providing support to the Sandinistas? Strummer’s music, in effect, had become secondary to politics.

Robbins has faced this before during his career, first in 1993, when he and Susan Sarandon spoke out at the Oscars about several hundred Haitians with AIDS being detained in “work camps” on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.[10] Then with his vocal and very public criticism of the Bush administration’s buildup to the war in Iraq and the subsequent occupation. Still, the intense media scrutiny and subsequent backlash was nothing compared to what has engulfed the production of Embedded. “The media went after me with a vengeance,” he says. “It was an attempt to shut down the play.”

Looking at the reviews of most American theater critics, it is hard to deny that there seems to be a deliberate attempt to destroy the play.[11] As Robbins points out, nearly all the reviews don’t even tell the play’s story or look at what is unique about the play. Instead, they focus on the playwright’s politics. The foreign press has been much more fair and balanced, and this is not a coincidence in Robbins’s opinion. “If I look at this through the prism of my own ego and try not to be paranoid,” he tells me, “and I do feel that I am a well-established artist, I have to ask ‘Why is my new work ignored?’ Is this an active decision, a personal thing?”

Robbins draws a parallel between the critical reception of Embedded and Strummer’s dark time following the Clash’s breakup. “What happens when you step out in front—and when the shit starts and there is nobody there?” he asks me. “There is no sense of loneliness deeper than that,” he continues. “You feel betrayed, bewildered, you wonder how did this happen? I know what I am doing is right, is good. How did I get to be the one who is ostracized? How did I get the blame and why am I held responsible?”

Like Strummer, Robbins had to endure this kind of attack in connection with his more personal and humanistic projects. Robbins’s third directorial effort, Cradle Will Rock, was a painful lesson in how the media can agitate politically in an effort to destroy a work. The film’s account of the 1930s staging of the progressive play The Cradle Will Rock for the WPA-funded Federal Theater Project did not sit well with some major American film critics.[12] At a lunch meeting of American film critics in Cannes, one critic encouraged his colleagues to write reviews that undermined the film. He described Robbins as a “subversive” and the film as “dangerous.” Subsequently Cradle was ignored and vanished from screens swiftly, denying the public the opportunity to see it. “It was a painful death,” Robbins says.

Still, Robbins was far from defeated and resolutely faced unsettling battles ahead. First, Robbins and his longtime partner, Susan Sarandon, were banned from the fifteenth-anniversary celebration of Bull Durham at the National Baseball Hall of Fame because of their public antiwar stance. Second, a right-wing furor dogged the production of Embedded. In his April 2003 National Press Club address, Robbins described the situation. “Susan and I have been listed as traitors, as supporters of Saddam, and various other epithets by the Aussie gossip rags masquerading as newspapers, and by their fair and balanced electronic media cousins, Nineteenth Century Fox.” Robbins continued, “And both of us last week were told that both we and the First Amendment were not welcome at the Baseball Hall of Fame.”[13]

Robbins’s kinship with Strummer runs deep after these experiences. “When they throw all these labels at you,” he argues, “radical, revolutionary, I am trying to say ‘no’; at the core I am humanist and what I believe comes from a simple place “I am just asking questions, that’s all.” Both Franti and Robbins are doing more than asking questions. Their work serves as a beacon continuing a tradition of committed creative-activism, fighting for a world free of tyranny.

CULTURE CLASH

From Brixton to El Barrio NYC

By Not4Prophet

You have the right not to be killed.

Murder is a crime!

Unless it was done by a police man or aristocrat.

—“KNOW YOUR RIGHTS,” THE CLASH

Growing up in the B-boy barrio slum sidewalks of Nueva York, with junkies under the stairs, pig police patrolling the avenues, guards at the gates, and guns on the roof, I was a young (Poor-to Rican) punk lookin’ for the perfect beat with nothin’ to eat but the sounds that emanated from the street. Survivin’ on shit and sonics and growing bored with the USA, I grew up groovin’ to Public Enemy, BDP, Poor Righteous Teachers, and storefront preachers. Music was the sustenance for the soul (food) that the gutters and gods couldn’t provide, the (musical) meals that were never enough in my mecca bodega of the mind. Music was my (counter) culture, the notes between the notes between the cracks in the pavement.

When they kick at your front door/How you gonna come?/With your hands on your head/Or on the trigger of your gun?/When the law break in/How you gonna go?/Shot down on the pavement/Or waiting in death row?

—“THE GUNS OF BRIXTON”

I was sprouting up faster than the weed I was smoking, and reasoning Malcolm, Marcus, Martin, Marcos, the Macheteros, Mumia, Move, the Young Lords, Latin Kings, the Panthers, ghetto gangsters with ghetto blasters. But I was always ciphering the sound, digging deeper than the beats, noise and politics, sonic and sedition. I wanted soundtracks that screamed survival, records that roared revolution, albums that were armed, and PE was the only one bringing the necessary noise. So I would dissect every lyric out of Chuck D’s mouth, turn every turn of a phrase into a ten-point program, dust the dust covers for ancient hieroglyphics that would indicate new (un)civilizations that were older than me and music itself.

I’m all lost in the supermarket/I can no longer shop happily/I came in here for a special offer/A guaranteed personality

—“LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET”

Eventually my search for truth (and soul) caused me to venture into enemy territory, a backdoor boricua entering through the exit of racist rock clubs, and sneaking into segregated squats for hardcore punk shows, because I knew that though PE was in an (after school) class by themselves, they couldn’t possibly be trotting this school of hard knocks by they lonesome. Or could they? But I guess I was fooled by the allure of loud guitars and rebel yells, because in my soul sojourns all I ever found was louder mouths that were talkin’ loud and sayin’ nothin’, and didn’t even have a jungle groove to move to. No funk in their punk, no soul in their rock ’n’ roll. So I continued to scratch at the signs of the surface, searching for sabotage and the sounds of survival and what Jean-Michel Basquiat called “royalty and the streets.”

Then one day, after many a trod through Babylon, I walked into a used (and slightly abused) record store in some anonymous avenue in money making Manhattan, where the clerks were unfriendly poser punx who were trained in special tactics on how to make a browsing Puerto Rican feel unwanted, uncomfortable, unwelcome, but still, I dived (hip-hop) head first into turbulent waters, deep beneath the polluted seas and stale sounds, and came up with Fishbone, Bad Brains, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, and deep at the bottom of the crates and craters was some old worn white boy(?) wax called SANDINISTA! I carefully took it out of the crate, checked for (one too many) scratches, dusted it off, and took it home for the title alone. And, shit, in my interest and excitement, I even forgot to pay for it. I’d heard of the Clash, even read about how these British blokes invited Kurtis Blow to open for them when they played in New York shitty because they dug hip-hop, only to see him pelted with rotten vegetables by a less than appreciative “punk” audience. And I had no illusions about American (and European) history and the reality of Elvis, the Rolling Stones, and a slew of other white boy bands that specialized in cultural theft. Yeah, black folks had created all kinds of amazing sounds, from jazz to rock ’n’ roll, to funk to reggae, to salsa to hip-hop, and been ripped off by ofays wit attitude every time. But I figured if the Clash were cool enough back in 1980, to name an album after a Latino armed rebel organization that the U.S. hated and tried to destroy, then, hey, they couldn’t be all bad, now could they?

I gotta shed this skin I been living in/Gotta shed this skin I been living in

—“SHED THIS SKIN”

Sandinista!, a sprawling three-vinyl release that, back in 1980, was sold for the low low price of one record (due to the band’s taking the monetary loss for the major labels’ refusal to go along with the Clash’s idea that a three-record set could/should be sold at a one-record price as a gift to the consumer/fan), was a revelation wrapped loosely in revolution. I liberated (uh, bought) it mostly for the title, but I got so much more, and I would go on to free their entire anthology from the confines of record stores that insisted on placing them in the cheapie bin, close to the trash bin, or (conveniently for me) close to the exit door. The Clash, Black Market Clash, Give ’Em Enough Rope, London Calling, Combat Rock, shit, even Cut the Crap provided the punk politics I was looking for and even gave me some hope that maybe, just maybe, not all anglos were white supremacist red necked conquistador colonizing crackas who turned off ya mom’s apartment’s heat in the dead of winter, and tossed your dad in a cold jail cell in the heat of summer. Yeah, the Clash knew they were white, and the legacy that entailed, and they knew that the days were racial tension and the nights were racial fear, and that London was burning and Brixton was already ashes. But precisely because (or in spite) of this, they also knew that something had to give, and so they tried to give something in the hopes that perhaps they could play a part. And all they really had to give that was worth a god damn in these troubled days was punk, so they put their punk sensibilities and abilities where it counted. Yeah, the black (market) planet was in revolt, so these white boys asked for a riot of their own.

Kick over the wall, cause governments to fall/How can you refuse it?/Let fury have the hour, anger can be power/If you know that you can use it.

—“CLAMPDOWN”

The Clash were far from the best band on the planet (though one mainstream rag called them “the only band that mattered”), and they were even further from being the best band for the job that they chose to accept. Their musicianship was par for the punk course, really, and their lead singer, Joe Strummer, sang like he had one too many marbles in his mouth after a bout of two too many ales. But I actually enjoyed (and respected) hearing Joe Strummer yelp what was supposed to be a rap, and claw his way through what was supposed to be funk, and all with an ear toward punk as politics. If anyone was “Overpowered by Funk,” it was Strummer. He had to know that he wasn’t gonna be givin’ Melle Mel or George Clinton a run for their money anytime soon, nor was Strummer writing groovilicious hit songs that the record labels and radio stations would greedily latch onto, when he ventured into shallow funk punk polluted waters and uncharted rap rock territory. Most of the Clash hits were the fast, pure poppy punk of songs like “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” “London Calling,” all “Lost in the Supermarket,” and, the somewhat funky in spite of itself, “Rock the Casbah.” So why record the Latin(o) tinged “Washington Bullets,” which beckoned folks to “please remember Victor Jara, es verdad,” or for that matter toss badly mangled Spanish into their tunes, as they did in “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” And what in the world could explain the cornball grooves of “Overpowered by Funk,” which (complete with a bad rap by Graffiti writer Futura 2000) actually copped to the question of cultural thievery when it placed Benny Goodman on a list and sentenced him to a trial by jury. And then knowingly asked whether perhaps the Clash’s name might be on that same list? So hits was never quite the point in spite of the fact that the masters of DIY punk themselves, Crass, stated (very eloquently, I might add) that Epic “signed the Clash, not for revolution, just for cash.” No, the Clash were never “sellouts.” They tried way too hard to be against the grain and the mainstream brain to sell their soul, and knew, maybe better than anybody, that punk meant counter culture, and if it wasn’t counter culture it wasn’t punk.

Yo te quiero infinito/Yo te acuerda oh mi corazon

—“SPANISH BOMBS”

The Clash’s significance musically, culturally, and politically is as important and relevant today as it was back in ’77 (when it really seemed like punk might/could actually “kick over the walls and cause governments to fall”) because we are still dealing with the same isms and skisms that they tried to tackle with their proletariat prose and punk politics. And the fact that they never got back together for the big money reunion (like old Johnny Rotten’s Sex Pistols did), or that Joe Strummer kept right on makin’ socially conscious music until his very last breath, serves as yet another reminder that punk is not dead(!), just maybe on a revolutionary respirator. Yeah, the Clash is a reminder of the battle between “police and thieves,” the clash between capitalism and culture. They weren’t really around that long, but along the way, they got ripped off and taken advantage of by the corporate vampires (just like so many others who chose to swim in that putrid ocean by they lonesome), but they were among the very few bands that were what Bad Brains called “Fearless Vampire Killers” and their stake (and garlic) was in their words, and they really did rage against the machine as best they knew how. That’s what moved and inspired one raging rican would be rockero who knew that brixton was right next door to brooklyn. These cats were trying (real hard) to make music that was honest and honestly political, and that blurred the lines of genre, and trampled down borders (and any border patrol who might be standing in the way) all through a punk principle of raw reality and rebellion and revolution rock, and what they came up with was pure culture clash.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

How the Clash Inspired Public Enemy

By Chuck D

The first time I heard the Clash was in 1981. I was in college at Adelphi University on Long Island, and one night I went down to this show in Manhattan—one of Kurtis Blow’s hip-hop package shows. The crowd was rough. People from different camps were there—the hip-hop people and the punk rock people. They even started throwing tomatoes at Kurtis, so that’s the type of wild kids who were there. But the Clash completely broke it that night. It was an awakening for a New York cat like myself.

As I delved into the music scene, I started learning about how the kids across the water in England were rebelling against the Queen and the aristocracy. Around the same time, Bill Stepheny, a friend of mine from Adelphi and one of the original members of Public Enemy, started playing the Clash’s records on his hip-hop radio show, which opened up a lot of people’s minds. He would reach into the Clash’s catalogue, as well as the Sex Pistols’, and make those kinds of songs work in the context of a hip-hop show. He was instrumental in exposing a lot of hip-hop cats to what the Clash were doing. I had great respect for Joe Strummer. How he used his music—incorporating a lot of black music like hip-hop and reggae—was very different from the guys who invented rock ’n’ roll: he always paid homage to those who came before him. I admired him for his humility as an artist and for the fact that he dug musical cats, no matter what type of music they played. He was constantly pushing the boundaries of the Clash’s sound and of what music could do on a greater level. And Joe was still rebellious: he was speaking about things he saw in his life—the things right in front of his face that no one wanted to talk about—and taking his message around the world.

Public Enemy is an American group but we address the same issues—political, social, musical—on an international level: we take our conversation worldwide. I learned the importance of that from Joe Strummer. Right now there’s a hunger out there for a musician like that. As a musician, it’s not an easy way to go, but there are people who are doing it in hip-hop right now—politically outspoken groups like Dead Prez and the Coup, who are totally fearless and noncapitulating in their work. That’s Joe Strummer’s legacy—the idea that you need to stand by your word every step of the way.

Chuck D during the filming of Antonino D’Ambrosio’s Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photos by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

_____________________

Originally published in Interview, December-January 2004.

THE JOE I KNEW

By Billy Bragg

The Clash were the greatest rebel rock band of all time. Their commitment to making political pop culture was the defining mark of the British punk movement.

They were also a self-mythologising, style-obsessed mass of contradictions.

That’s why they were called the Clash.

They wanted desperately to be rock stars but they also wanted to make a difference.

While Paul Simonon flashed his glorious cheekbones and Mick Jones threw guitar hero shapes, no one struggled more manfully with the gap between the myth and the reality of being a spokesman for your generation than Joe Strummer.

All musicians start out with ideals, but hanging onto them in the face of media scrutiny takes real integrity.

Tougher still is to live up to the ideals of your dedicated fans.

Joe opened the back door of the theatre and let us in, he sneaked us back to the hotel for a beer; he too believed in the righteous power of rock ’n’ roll.

And if he didn’t change the world, he changed our perception of it. He crossed the dynamism of punk with Johnny Too Bad and started that punky-reggae party.

Billy Bragg during the filming of Antonino D’Ambrosio’s Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antoninio D’Ambrosio.)

RADICAL BAND

He drew us, thousands strong, onto the streets of London in support of Rock Against Racism.

He sent us into the garage to crank up our electric guitars. He made me cut my hair.

The ideals that still motivate me as an artist come not from punk, not even from the Clash, but from Joe Strummer.

The first wave of punk bands had a rather ambivalent attitude to the politics of late ’70s Britain. The Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Stranglers, none of them, not even the Jam, came close to the radicalism that informed everything the Clash did and said.

The U.S. punk scene was even less committed. The Ramones, Talking Heads, Heartbreakers, and Blondie all were devoid of politics.

Were it not for the Clash, punk would have been just a sneer, a safety pin, and a pair of bondage trousers.

Instead, the incendiary lyrics of the Clash inspired 1,000 more bands on both sides of the Atlantic to spring up and challenge their elders and the man that we all looked to was Joe Strummer.

INSPIRING FORM

He was the White Man in Hammersmith Palais who influenced the Two Tone Movement. He kept it real and inspired the Manic Street Preachers.

And he never lost our respect. His recent albums with the Mescaleros found him on inspiring form once again, mixing and matching styles and rhythms in celebration of multiculturalism.

At his final gig, in November in London, Mick Jones got up with him and together they played a few old Clash tunes.

It was a benefit concert for the firefighters’ union.

One of the hardest things to do in rock ’n’ roll is walk it like you talk it.

Joe Strummer epitomised that ideal and I will miss him greatly.

_____________________

Originally published by BBC News.

GETTIN’ BACK TO THE BAD SEEDS

The Legend of the “Long Shadow”

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

All’estremità, tuttauna persona ha è illoro honor e dignità—nessuno opossono eliminare quella.

In the end, all a person has is their honor and dignity—no one can take that away.

—LORENZO D’AMBROSIO, 1941–1988

Ever insurgent let me be make me more daring than devout.

—LOUIS UNTERMEYER

One’s truth must add its push to the evolution of public justice and mercy, must transform the spirit of the city whose brainless roar went on and on at both ends of the bridge.

—ARTHUR MILLER

It was sometime around Thanksgiving 2003. I was driving down I-35 making my way through Texas from Austin to San Antonio and I had just picked up Streetcore, Joe Strummer’s posthumous final recording. Unsure of what to expect and a bit reluctant to listen, I experienced the music that poured out of the speakers as nothing short of a revelation. From the opening rift of “Coma Girl” to the closing bluesy ballad “Silver and Gold,” the record is an achievement. Listening to Strummer’s new music on a long, lonely stretch of highway in the middle of the state that boasts both Buddy and Willie as native sons, I could not help but think that this is just how Strummer would have wanted everyone to hear his new music. The record travels back and forth in time, emotionally capturing the essence of Strummer’s music, his timeless optimism and political idealism. Streetcore is anchored spiritually and politically by two subtlety recorded and performed songs: “Redemption Song” and “Long Shadow.” it so well because I don’t intend to ever try to do it again.” Instead, Cash became a powerful voice of hope, a working-class hero who refused to dream someone else’s dream, choosing instead to live his own.

Joe Strummer performing with the Mescaleros at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, on April 5, 2001. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

During the production of Streetcore, Strummer spent some time in record producer Rick Rubin’s Los Angeles studio. There he met Johnny Cash for the first time. These two performers had much in common. Both were music pioneers and profoundly committed humanists who passed through life with humility and honor. When he met Cash, Strummer was intending to record Bob Marley’s timeless protest anthem “Redemption Song” for his new album. The duet does not appear on Strummer’s album but on a Cash box set released after his death titled Unearthed. The version on Streetcore was recorded with Blue’s great Smokey Hormel and longtime Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench. Johnny Cash, a poor sharecropper’s son who sang to himself as he picked cotton, would die ten months after Strummer on September 12, 2003, in Nashville, Tennessee. “My roots are in the workingman,” Cash told the Music City News in 1987. “I can remember very well how it is to pick cotton ten hours a day, or to plow, or how to cut wood. I remember it so well because I don’t intend to ever try to do it again.” Instead, Cash became a powerful voice of hope, a working-class hero who refused to dream someone else’s dream, choosing instead to live his own.

Strummer told me simply that Cash “is music.” Cash was a tremendous cultural force in music, recording over 1,500 songs in a career that spanned more than four decades. Cash created his own sound that went beyond traditional genres—emotional folk singer, rock ’n’ roll desperado, down-in-the-mouth country crooner. The now famous photo of Cash with Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ray Perkins (dubbed the Million Dollar Quartet) at Sun Studios tells us that his career began with the birth of rock ’n’ roll. But his rebel posture and straightforward, plain-spoken musical approach told us that his music was something more, his life was something more.

Strummer admired Cash’s ability to forge on throughout a life and career that had more than one dark period. First he recalls listening to Cash’s album, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, which challenged the U.S. treatment of Native Americans with such songs “Apache Tears,” “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” and “Custer.” In the latter, Cash sings “With victories he was swimmin’ he killed children, dogs and women . . . It’s not called an Indian victory but a bloody massacre/and the General he don’t ride well anymore/There might have been more enthusin’ if us Indians had been losin’.”

“That album was filled with the anger and fire that would inspire me from my Clash days onwards,” Strummer said. In his autobiography, Cash wrote, “I dove into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. By the time I actually recorded the album I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage; I felt every word of those songs, particularly ‘Apache Tears’ and ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes.’ I meant every word, too. I was long past pulling my punches.”

Second, Strummer points to Cash’s work as a member of the Highwaymen in 1980, a quartet that included fellow “music outlaws” Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson, as an example of Cash’s ability to keep growing. Strummer explained that Cash seemed to teeter on the edge of a cliff “and risk everything, seemingly inviting the end” in an effort to find a new voice. The musician John Mellencamp echoed this sentiment, describing Cash as “an American original, uncompromised in his craft and incomparable in its execution. He makes you feel that he is playing solely to reach the best part of your spirit.”

In 1994 Rubin approached Cash about recording an album of songs composed by contemporary musicians, including Nick Lowe, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits; Strummer was one of many who contributed an original composition. The album, American Recordings, brilliantly captured Cash’s crossover appeal and introduced him to a new audience. Rubin explained that he worked with Cash because “he was an outsider who was never part of a trend . . . a rock star is a musical outlaw and that’s Johnny Cash.” The song Strummer wrote and Cash recorded, “The Road to Rock ’n’ Roll,” remains unreleased, although Strummer recorded it for Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. Strummer remained determined that Cash should record one of his songs. In the early 1990s he recorded a demo of “Long Shadow” and submitted it to Rubin and Cash for their consideration. Cash never had a chance to record the song for any of the four albums he recorded with Rubin.

It now stands as both a tribute to Cash, the rebel mentor and hero outlaw, and a desperate, poignant epitaph for Strummer. He scrawled the lyrics to “Long Shadow” on a pizza box, supplemented by a paper towel and roll of insulation tape. And this is how Strummer presented it to Cash. Rubin describes Strummer as very thoughtful during the duration of recording, slipping away into his car to listen to his cumbia tape again and again. Rubin explained that for Strummer this served as a source of inspiration and chance for meditation in helping him gain energy and strength in their recording sessions together.

“Redemption Song” and “Long Shadow,” the heart and soul of Streetcore, were the only two songs Rubin produced for the album. Strummer preferred to record the music in a garage on a small tape recorder rather than Rubin’s state-of-the-art studio. When you listen to “Long Shadow” along with the other nine songs that appear on this album, Strummer’s pure emotion and joy come shining through. You can almost see the glint in his eye, the flash in his smile, and the quiver in that famous guitar leg when he sings the anthem-like refrain of the revolution-themed “Arms Aloft” and the Telecaster-soaked jam “All in a Day.” “Burning Streets” is a moving follow-up to the Clash classic “London’s Burning” with Strummer quietly declaring that the new century has brought us little relief from the hostilities that divide and ultimately destroy cities and nations. Closing the album is “Silver and Gold,” a heartbreaking cover of “Before I Grow Too Old,” penned by Bobby Charles and recorded by Fats Domino.

Strummer was humbly writing the next chapter in his life without realizing that the journey was coming to an end. Yet as Dick Rude explained to me in describing Strummer’s new work, this is far from an ending; Strummer’s life and work will continue to manifest itself for generations to come. Strummer once said that “we must go back to sortin’ things out” and that “getting back to the bad seeds” and “going underground” is where music needed to return. Johnny Cash and Strummer were both “bad seeds.” The quintessential rock outlaw, Cash supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War, just two of the unpopular political stances he would take throughout his life. For Strummer, Cash was someone who lived comfortably outside the lines because standing within them meant complicity in the injustice and hypocrisy that stain our society. Cash fought the law with little regard to winning, walking the line only for love and never compromising his integrity.

“Are you taking orders,” Strummer once sang, “or are you taking over.” Cash famously responded to those who asked why he wore black: “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down/Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town . . . But ’til we start to make a move to make a few things right/You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.” Authority for both was a system of control that had no inherent wisdom. “Just look around,” Strummer asked when I met him. “Does the march to war now represent the interests of the world’s people?” Music, whether punk, rock ’n’ roll, country, blues, tropicalismo, is a pure expression of what must be said and what must be done.

Ultimately, Cash and Strummer forged a bond between two people coming from entirely different places but meeting with the same purpose in mind. Both were storytellers motivated by innate instincts rather than the ideological trappings of celebrity. Just as he was poised to offer the world his best music to date, Strummer left us. Cash resisted nagging health problems that dogged him for many years, recording until the end. “Joe was a nice man, a good man,” Cash said following Strummer’s death, “and a good musician.” No one could say it better. And for Strummer, I could only imagine that it would be the ultimate compliment. I can just hear him saying with that innocent enthusiasm of his, “Can you believe it? Johnny Cash thinks I’m a good musician.”

“LONG SHADOW”

Written by Joe Strummer for Johnny Cash

Performed by Joe Strummer; appears on Streetcore

Well, I’ll tell you one thing that I know

You don’ face your demons down

You grab ’em, jack ’em

And pin ’em to the ground

The devil may care

And maybe God he won’t

Better make sure you check on

The do’s and the don’ts

Crawl up the mountain

To reach where the eagles fly

Sure you can glimpse from the mountaintop

Where the soul of the muse might rise

And if you put it altogether

You won’t have to look around

You know you cast

A long shadow on the ground

Then one day I can tell my tracks

By the holes in the soles of my shoes

And that’s the day I said

I’m gonna make the news

And

Falling back in the garden

Of days so long ago

Somewhere in the memory

The sun shines on you boy

Playing in the Arroyos

Where the American river flows

From the Appalachians

Down to the Delta roads

A man could think so long

His brain could well explode

There’s trains running through junctions

And king cotton’s down the road

And if you put it altogether

You won’t have to look around

You know you cast

A long shadow on the ground

Listen to the country, to night jar and the bell

Listen to the night streamliner

Sounding like all the wolves of hell

Head for the water—the waters of the cleansing spell

It was always our destination

On the express of the ne’er do wells

And we rock through Madison city

And we didn’t even know she was there

And when we hit the buffers in Memphis

And Beale Street didn’t have no prayer

And I hear punks talk of anarchy—

I hear hobos on the railroad

I hear mutterings on the chain gang

’cause those who men built the roads

And if you put it altogether

You didn’t even once relent

You cast a long shadow

And that is your testament

Somewhere in my soul

There is always rock ’n’ roll

Yeah!

Act V

TRANSCONTINENTAL HUSTLE

Senegalese musicians performing in Athens, Greece. (Still from Let Fury Have the Hour. Photo by Yrthya Dinzey-Flores.)

GLOBAL CITIZENS, DANGEROUS CREATORS

Eugene Hütz

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Again I am, waho, Vasco da Gama

In my headphones is Bob Marley and a-Joe Strummer

I’m on a quest for solar amalgama

I’m on a quest for Never-Neverest

With my contaminated friends

—“TRANSCONTINENTAL HUSTLE,” GOGOL BORDELLO

July 7, 2007. London. The spirit of legendary Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, watching and listening, must have been elated by the scene unfolding on the Wembley stage. A world-class pop star invited two members of a Gypsy punk band to join her in singing the 1987 pop hit “La Isla Bonita” (The Beautiful Island). Madonna’s Live Earth concert aimed to amplify the issue of climate change. When Gogol Bordello’s guitarist/vocalist Eugene Hütz and violinist Sergey Ryabtsev joined her on stage, she didn’t know that the occasion would also uplift a people and culture that had been under attack for centuries. On this day, performing with Madonna, Hütz made sure that the voice of the Roma people would be heard. With hundreds of millions of people watching around the world, Hütz sang in Romani, a language spoken by millions of people spread throughout Europe and Latin America. “Afterwards, I got so many messages from Roma people all around the world about it,” Hütz says. “I still get messages. Hearing their language out loud blasted around the world was something very important, very special.” Wherever Bartók is now, I’m sure he was smiling wide with admiration.

Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello performing Joe Strummer’s “Johnny Appleseed” in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, September 23, 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

The performance was set against the backdrop of a new wave of attacks on Roma people taking place throughout Europe. In Italy, my family’s homeland, Silvio Berlusconi’s government, heavy on fascist ideals of racial purity, planned to register the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies. Roberto Maroni of the xenophobic Northern League insisted that fingerprinting of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove children from their parents. Italy’s highest appeals court ruled that discriminating against Roma on the grounds that “all Gypsies [are] thieves” is acceptable. This antiquated racist idea would be laughable if these events weren’t really happening. The situation continued to escalate as official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps were augmented by vigilante attacks. In Naples, rumors that a Gypsy woman abducted a baby fueled a rampage of racist violence against Roma camps. Thugs wielding iron bars torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes. The Camorra, the local mafia, organized dozens of attacks. The reaction of Berlusconi’s government to the bombing and ethnic cleansing was not surprising: “That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies,” Maroni noted callously. Fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi proudly stated, “The people do what the political class isn’t able to do.” Wherever Bartók is now, I’m sure he’s crying with shame.

In 2010 Nicolas Sarkozy’s French government initiated a program of repatriating Romanian and Bulgarian Roma, even though these groups are allowed to enter France without a visa. Just as in Italy, the policy led to a surge in violence with vigilantes and hooligans attacking Roma camps. European Union justice commissioner Viviane Reding described the deportations as a “disgrace,” citing a 2004 EU directive on freedom of movement, which affirms “the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States.” Reding added, “This is a situation I had thought Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War.”

What the situation facing the Roma confirms is that a shadow element emerges when people believe a certain group endangers them. One element of the population is unleashed on another, with terrifying results. This conflict has existed throughout history due in large part to nativist upheavals stoked by the fears and uncertainties that crop up during an economic downturn. In 1863 the New York drafts riots occurred, “the largest civil insurrection in American history other than the South’s rebellion,” Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University explains. In order to raise an army, the United States ordered a draft. A man could avoid the draft by paying $300, a steep sum that only the very wealthy could afford. By Tuesday, June 12, 1863, artisans and craftsman had organized themselves into a mob. Their anger boiled over into violence unleashed at the wealthy, but ultimately the overwhelming majority of victims were people of color. The story is artfully told in Luc Sante’s Low Life and portrayed with a sinister sheen by Daniel Day Lewis as “Bill the Butcher” in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York. (The director at the time had hoped to cast Joe Strummer as one of the characters.) “I don’t see no Americans. I see trespassers, Irish harps. Do a job for a nickel what a nigger does for a dime and a white man used to get a quarter for,” Bill explains. “What have they done? Name one thing they’ve contributed.”

These words give timeless expression to the human tendency to seek comfortable, simple explanations for the complex social, political, and historical forces that can throw our lives out of control. The first spark of a mob mentality that sets ablaze campaigns of terror. “A posse is like an animal, moves like one, and thinks like one,” Sterling Hayden says in Nicholas Ray’s western Johnny Guitar, a film that explores the toxic mixture of fear, ignorance, and hate that leads to wanton vigilantism. “They’re men with itchy fingers and a coil of rope around their saddle horns, looking for someone to hang,” Joan Crawford’s character responds. “Either you side with them or us,” a spokesman for the posse answers. The film is played out live and in full color daily. This dialogue is echoed every day by out-of-touch politicians and played back without context or analysis by a compromised media: “They took our jobs.” “They don’t speak our language.” “They hate our freedom.” “They are less than human.” “They get everything for free while we pay for it.” “We’ll make them pay for it.”

In parts of Europe, there has always been a tension between pursuing “racial purity” and the acceptance of cultural diversity, which is harvested mainly through the arts. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco used this backward sensibility of maintaining racial purity as a tool to bludgeon resistance and help keep their hands on the levers of power. During the Nazi reign and its ensuing genocidal campaign, many non-Nazis willingly turned over Gypsies, deeming them “racially inferior.” Some 23,000 Gypsies were deported to Auschwitz, where 19,000 of them were murdered. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports that “of slightly less than one million Roma believed to have been living in Europe before the war, the Germans and their Axis partners killed up to 220,000.” More recent historical examples of ethnic cleansing abound from South Africa to Kyrgyzstan to northern India to Niger, the Sudan, Albania, Rwanda, Chechnya, and Bosnia, where 2.7 million people were displaced.

As people fall under the spell of leaders who encourage them to scapegoat foreigners, they become distracted from the true problems—and from those who are actually responsible for those problems. The problems remain concealed as people focus on fighting the “enemy.” It’s an effective propaganda tool that lulls the masses into submission. Herbert Marcuse brilliantly explored these themes in One-Dimensional Man (1964). “But the struggle for the solution has outgrown the traditional forms,” Marcuse wrote.

The totalitarian tendencies of the one-dimensional society render the traditional ways and means of protest ineffective—perhaps even dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty. This illusion contains some truth: “the people,” previously the ferment of social change, have “moved up” to become the ferment of social cohesion. Here rather than in the redistribution of wealth and equalization of classes is the new stratification characteristic of advanced industrial society.

Yet Marcuse finds hope in fighting back against the waves of fascism that ebb and flow throughout history. He looks to art and more specifically creative response as the best way to reveal the truth and see more clearly what we’re up against. Then we can unify our society around ideals based on a shared humanity. “The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real,” Marcuse explained.

“The Roma people are the original global citizens,” Eugene Hütz tells me in my film Let Fury Have the Hour. “Their entire existence was based around traveling to find work mostly as musicians, moving from place to place, season to season. They were the first globetrotters.” Hütz knows something about “globetrotting,” first with his family and then as an international musician. Stigmatizing the Roma people as “thieves” and “subhumans” dates back to feudal times. Hütz is quick to point out that the Roma people were “always peaceful, never violent.” They were feared and loathed for shallow and banal reasons. Hütz shreds this shibboleth in the song “Break the Spell” taking pride in the fact that as a Roma, an original globetrotter, he can easily see through the ignorance that some so willingly wallow in:

You love our music but you hate our guts

And I know you still want me to ride the back of the bus

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Opportunities for me is a red carpet to hell

But I’m a Roma wunderkind I’m gonna break the

Break the spell (break the spell)

I’m gonna break the spell (break the spell)

Hütz was born in Boyarka, near Kiev, to a mother who is half Servo Roma (descendents of blacksmiths, musicians, and horse traders) and a Russian father. Hütz recounts a story from Soviet times when his father clandestinely listened to the BBC, discovering the music of the Doors, the Stones, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash. He wrote down everything he heard and thought in his notebook. Soon the Ukrainian security services were skulking around looking to make trouble for Hütz’s father and his family. “We needed to seek political asylum,” Hütz says. “But our story is nowhere [near] as bad as those of other people then and many people now.” The family was eventually granted U.S. asylum and settled in Vermont. Hütz quickly fell into the culture of creative response—punk and skateboarding—as a way of finding himself in an ever-changing world.

Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello performing “Immigraniada” in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, September 23, 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

When I first saw the group perform many years before their ascent to international stardom, their name conjured Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol’s question: “How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined cultivated manners?” Borrowing from Gogol, Hütz and the band answered that question in the best tradition of punk rock: by identifying the establishment as obscene or ridiculous and redefining it through a jumbled romantic, surreal, incendiary, grotesque, and celebratory response. Hütz does this most skillfully when presenting the stories of the creative immigrant and the imaginative migrant in the new millennium.

Hütz is acutely aware of the conditions that define life for many trapped between the old world (in Hütz’s case a world defined by the dying ideology of the Soviet Union) and a new one (governed by globalization). The experience of forced migration (Hütz’s journey took him to Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Italy before arriving in the U.S.) included visceral confrontations with many of the most frightening events of the past three decades. A case in point: Hütz’s family lived close to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which melted down on April 26, 1986. Each Gogol Bordello record—Voi-La Intruder (1999), Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony (2002), Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike (2005), Super Taranta! (2007)—added more weight to Village Voice Robert Christgau’s claim that Gogol Bordello was “the world’s most visionary band.” In a now classic tune from Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, Hütz wistfully translates the immigrant experience and the discovery of creative response (punk) as a connection to an expansive worldview that continually widens as we move away from narrow confines that dictate how we should define ourselves and connect with each other. The song moved me, even though my immigrant story differs from Hütz’s. As a minority mob demands a return to a world that never existed, the majority movement of global citizenship finds the quiet spaces between the screams by organizing their imaginings with creative response:

Of course we immigrants wanna sing all night long

Don’t you know the singing salves the troubled soul?

So I’m relaxed, I’m just lurking around

I got a method and you don’t

You got a dictionary kicking around?

Look up the immigrant, immigrant, immigrant punk!

“When I discovered punk rock, it was like I never heard music before,” Hütz tells me. “Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, Fugazi was a big new cultural experience for me. Those records automatically became a carrier of political information, too.” Just as I had, Hütz encountered all this other information—records—that provided another language to what we were forced to listen to at school, on TV, in the media, from the mouths of politicians. In fact, Hütz learned English by listening to Johnny Cash records. Still, Hütz saw the West and primarily the United States as foes less because we were the enemy and more because Reagan had deemed his country an “evil empire.” “Well, you guys were the evil empire,” Hütz says with a smirk. “We were just like the innocent pioneers with the white shirts on and red handkerchief, you know, red tie on.” Hütz adds, “But then it was like, wait a second, it can’t be that bad over there if they’re making such great music.”

The Clash, with songs like “Know Your Rights,” represented “revolution street poetry,” Hütz says. “Statements in the rawest form.” The experimentation with sounds and incongruent styles blew open Hütz’s perception of the world around him. “Like what are all the sounds that open up into this other space?” Hütz asks me. “I wasn’t familiar with the reggae approach. That experience of one band sets you on a trip through a whole lot of gold mine.” The gold mine set free Hütz’s imaginations and dreams. When he deejayed at underground clubs and parties in New York City, he mixed traditional eastern European music and Gypsy folk tunes with the punk music of Black Flag. It was the world citizenship soundtrack he was spinning then and now. Spending time with him during and after the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour, I got to see his infinite energy and enthusiasm up close. You can see it as well in his enchanting performance in Liev Schrieber’s Everything Is Illuminated (2005), based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Hütz played Alex, a Ukrainian guide for a young Jewish man searching for the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II. His performance turns on two pieces of dialogue that moved me:

Alex: I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now should remain buried along the side of our memories.

and

Alex: This is not so unusual.

Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello performing “Immigraniada” in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, September 23, 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Jonathan: What?

Alex: Not knowing.

“I heard it like so many times, people come up and say, ‘Listen, I’m from Brazil, but I live here in Sweden,’ or, ‘I’m here from Australia and live in Canada, but your music makes me feel home, man,’” Hütz tells me. “That’s why we made it, because it made us feel home.” Hütz’s music is colored with a surreal quality but rooted in a jagged realism that often speaks to the world’s reverberating cruelty and counters it with blistering defiance. The universality inherent in Hütz’s music is tied together by the infusion of music reflective of Hütz’s Gypsy roots. Hütz sees this music as a major traditional art form just as Bartók once proclaimed. He rankles at the depiction of indigenous cultures as a mascot, meant to be petted on the head in pity. “It’s Hollywood movies feeding us a stereotype,” Hütz tells me. “The poetic yet stupid Gypsy.”

Hütz is also interested in the situation of immigrants in the United States. After Arizona enacted SB 170, shredding civil liberties and human rights, musicians organized the Sound Strike to boycott the state. Refusing to perform in Arizona until the law is rescinded, musician Tom Morello explains that many people “have become suspects first and people second.” The Sound Strike statement further explains: “Law enforcement agencies in Arizona engage in protracted and fanatical harassment of immigrants. Arizona is a place where immigrant parents are routinely separated from their children for simply having a broken tail-light. The agitated climate has allowed the most notorious sheriff in America, Joe Arpaio who has detained immigrants working on chain gangs and performed other barbaric and demeaning tasks, to establish frightening almost all white ‘volunteer posses’ in his immigrant sweeps. Many of his volunteers are armed.”

Along with Gogol Bordello, over four hundred musicians have joined the boycott, including Willie Nelson, actor Jack Black’s group Tenacious D, Carlos Santana, Sonic Youth, Kanye West, MIA, and Ozomatli. Hütz and the other musicians on the list continue to call for more artists and citizens of all stripes to join the boycott. “The situation in Arizona forces you to take a stand, politicizes you,” Raul Pacheco of Ozomatli tells me. “We are declaring that this planet is for all of us to share.” Of course, opponents to the boycott tried to shift the debate stating that the musicians were hurting young people and businesses by not performing in Arizona. “Look, it’s making people think about why we’re not coming there,” Hütz explains. “We’re saying that you cannot use fear and hatred as a main tool of manipulation.” The movement also prompted Hütz to look at the United States differently. “In Italy and France, there is a backlash to the Roma people, to immigrants,” Hütz says. “So I see it’s not always the U.S. leading the way doing despicable things. I see that as easy and predictable to say ‘the U.S. is bad, it’s better over there.’ Italy and France are not doing anything like the Sound Strike.”

Working with iconoclast record producer Rick Rubin on Gogol Bordello’s 2010 record Transcontinental Hustle, Hütz gave us a contemporary anthem for the new millennium migrants who inhabit the world. The song “Immigraniada” places a fine point on the timeless story that, despite actions meant to keep people down, it’s the quiet revolution of the human spirit that wins out:

Immigrada immigraniada

Immigrada immigraniada-da

Immigrada immigraniada

We’re coming rougher every time

Frozen eyes, sweaty back

My family’s sleeping on a railroad track

All my life I pack/unpack

But man I got to earn this buck

I got to pay representation

To be accepted in a nation

Where after efforts of a hero

Welcome start again from zero

Unlike any other artist of his generation, Hütz truly grasps the notion of creative response and the role it plays in the movement for world citizenship. “After the struggles of immigration and life as a political refuge, everything else seems like business class,” Hütz tells me wryly. He has set himself apart as an inheritor, not an imitator, of those who went before—Joe Strummer, Manu Chao, Bartók, Seeger, Cash. He loves performing his own rendition of Strummer’s tune “Johnny Appleseed,” which he did for me in my film. Clearly Hütz is moved by the lyrics: “Lord, there goes Martin Luther King/Notice how the door closes when the chimes of freedom ring/I hear what you’re saying, I hear what he’s saying/Is what was true now no longer so.” In the last line Hütz’s spirit as a creative responder is revealed, for he remains true to the art of living, using creative response as a chisel, at times smashing and occasionally tapping, but always carving out a new way to see things, a new way to say things.

1. Five moments of coming rougher with Eugene Hütz from the film Let Fury Have the Hour: Transcontinental hustle, the idea, is about the evolution of the globetrotting tendency as a movement of world citizenship.

We gonna build new kind of globalizer

2. It’s all about ability and your space, and if the political setting does not provide it, it’s just a constant affront and offense on your being.

Without Pantzer-Foust or a shmiser

3. If you aren’t building community with your art, it kind of defeats the purpose of that art, you know, because you’ve got a microphone. Better use it in a good way, man.

And may the sound of our contaminated beat

4. The beat will eventually wipe them off their feet because that way of thinking, that way of being is a complete dead-end.

Sweep all the Nazi purists off their feet

5. It’s like those issues never been resolved. They just fade in and fade out. They’re always there. They’re still waiting for some humanitarian approach to them. Not with a crude bureaucratic approach, but it needs to be a “no human being is illegal” kind of approach to it, you know?

’Cause I’ll be climbing top of Never-Neverest

With my contaminated friends

Gah!

Hey heyheyhey, halihali ho, halihali hey

JOE STRUMMER, TERRORIST?

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

It felt like “London Calling” on April 5 when I opened my email to find an inbox clogged with a score of messages: “Man Held as Terrorism Suspect Over Punk Song.” This was not spam but a news item from Reuters reporting that Harraj Mann had been detained for questioning by British antiterrorism detectives after they received a phone call from a taxi driver who had taken Mann to the Durham Tees Valley airport. The driver became alarmed after hearing Mann, a mobile phone salesman of Indian descent, sing along to the Clash’s “London Calling.” The lyric that triggered the cabbie’s concern: “Now war is declared—and battle come down . . . a meltdown expected.”

Released after questioning by British authorities, Mann fumed, “There’s caution and then there’s taking it to the point where it’s absurd and ludicrous.” Ludicrous indeed, and a chilling reminder that once again fear combined with the perversion of law has trumped rationality (not to mention democracy or basic civil liberties).

“London Calling” is a song about terrorism, but not the kind we have become so familiar with after 9/11. Written in 1979 by the late Joe Strummer, it describes the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe, environmental disaster, starvation, and war. The threat or terror of nuclear destruction was something that deeply concerned Strummer because some world leaders seemed to treat it as nothing more than a game. “You had Ronald Reagan campaigning on building up nuclear arms. “He said the West is losing the arms race to Russia, the ‘evil empire’. . . .It was like toys to them or a movie where nothing bad would really happen,” Strummer told me when I interviewed him in 2002. Sound familiar?

Today’s reactionary political climate, built on a merciless patriotism that relies on historical ignorance, creates an atmosphere that cares little for the issues “London Calling” raises. Strummer understood the struggle to be heard over the politically hostile din emanating from a society that wraps itself in the flag of morality and virtue. “In the late 1970s, the National Front [a right-wing extremist hate group] was spreading across England,” Strummer said. “They were a terrorist group if there ever was one, but bands like the Clash were deemed dangerous, evil even, by Thatcher and the like.”

He understood how undemocratic democracies can become when they seek to solidify the dominant political order and maintain control under the guise of nationalism. He vividly captured that sentiment in “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”: “If Adolf Hitler flew in today/They would send a limousine anyway.”

That’s why Strummer had declared early on that the Clash would be “antifascist, antiviolence, antiracist . . . we’re pro-creative, against ignorance,” while other groups (insert Sex Pistols here) were famously declaring that there is “no future.” This made the Clash an anomaly in the 1970s counterculture scene, standing in direct opposition to the nihilism and alienation dominating punk. The group boldly linked itself historically to artists of every discipline who had fought against tyranny. In “Spanish Bombs,” Strummer sings about the Spanish Civil War and the brutal murder of writer Federico García Lorca. “Washington Bullets” illustrates Western imperialism and invokes the spirit of Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara. And when Strummer learned that beat poet Allen Ginsberg was a fan, they collaborated on the haunting “Ghetto Defendant.”

ON THE EDGE

While Strummer did not suffer any serious political reprisals for his art, he was one of the artists who dangled on the edge of creating work whose themes were unpopular sociopolitical issues of the day.

“Not being understood by the record label, press or government meant we were on the right track,” Strummer said. For his dogged commitment to not “write any love songs,” the Clash became even more successful as they became increasingly politically radical. “London Calling,” which borrows its name from the World War II BBC News report that began, “This is London calling,” serves as a modern-rock news alert told in Strummer’s big howling voice on top of Mick Jones’s air-raid alarm guitar, Topper Headon’s drums, and all strung together by Paul Simonon’s thumping bass line. Commercially and critically successful (Rolling Stone selected London Calling as the best album of the 1980s), it is considered a classic and remains one of the most influential records of the past twenty-five years.

Still, no one would be less surprised at Mann’s detention than Joe Strummer. When I first met Strummer in 2002, one of the first things we discussed was the suppression of counter-voices as the United States banged the drum for war, made the Patriot Act law, and established the Department of Homeland Security. He understood that there was a very real—and frightening—possibility that music like his would not only be censored but held up as subversive or dangerous.

“After all,” he said, “we had trouble with these songs then . . . you have to wonder what is wrong with singing about working people [“Clampdown”], racial unity [“(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”], and censorship [“Rock the Casbah”].” It didn’t stop the Clash, which disbanded in 1986, from becoming the biggest (and certainly most important) punk band. As musician Billy Bragg put it: “The Clash were the greatest rebel rock band of all time.” And it didn’t stop Clear Channel Communications, which owns more than 1,900 radio stations, from placing “Rock the Casbah” on the list of songs not to be played on the air after 9/11 (the BBC did the same in the first Gulf War).

Unfortunately, my time with Strummer will always be shrouded in sadness because he died of a rare congenital heart condition not long after we met. His death tabled a documentary film I had asked him to narrate, but it led to a book, Let Fury Have the Hour.

PUSHING BOUNDARIES

The arrest of Harraj Mann goes against everything Joe Strummer and his music were about. Strummer’s music always reflected the world around him. Chuck D talked about this in Let Fury Have the Hour: “I had great respect for Joe Strummer. How he used his music—incorporating a lot of black music like hip-hop and reggae—was very different than the guys who invented rock ’n’ roll: He was constantly pushing the boundaries “speaking about things he saw in his life, the things right in front of his face—and taking this message to the world.”

It was important for Strummer to stand up and be counted as a citizen of the world. His music is alive with that sensibility. “Even though there are extremists in the world,” he explained, “we’ve got to hold on to our sanity and not get crazed with vengeance.” His words echo those of Freda Kirchwey, who in October 1939 wrote in The Nation: “Democracy was not invented as a luxury to be indulged in only in times of calm and stability. It is a pliable, tough-fibered technique especially useful when times are hard. Only a weak and distrustful American could today advocate measures of repression and coercion, or encourage a mood of panic.”

Strummer did his part to keep us sane. His later work moved toward humanism while remaining fiery, honest, and original. With his new band, the Mescaleros (formed in 1999), Strummer continued to entertain and educate with musical themes as diverse as globalization (“Johnny Appleseed”), ethnic tolerance (“Bhindi Baghee”), and the plight of refugees in the global economy (“Shaktar Donetsk”). He declared that his music was resistance against “the demographic fascists . . . and the political ones as well.”

On December 22, 2002, the day Joe Strummer died, the United States began dropping leaflets and making radio broadcasts over Iraq in hopes of getting people to rise up against Saddam Hussein. As they did in the first Gulf War, some U.S. fighter pilots used “Rock the Casbah” as a soundtrack as they bombed Baghdad. This was all done without any sense of irony, of course. And the day that Harraj Mann became a terror suspect while singing Joe Strummer’s song—the same day Oscar Wilde more than one hundred years earlier was arrested and charged with gross indecency—I realized what the true meaning of “London Calling” is: unity. It is up to all of us who see the light in the darkness shrouding our time to join together no matter where we come from—our lifestyles, perspectives, or experiences—because we are all in this together. That’s what Joe Strummer fought for throughout his life.

Is “London Calling” a dangerous song? I leave it to you to decide. And if you are so inclined, I encourage you to listen to the entire album. I guarantee that you too will be humming and singing these songs just as Harraj Mann was. Just be careful who hears you.

_____________________

Originally appeared in The Nation, April 20, 2006

GLOBAL CITIZENS, DANGEROUS CREATORS

Edwidge Danticat

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Suddenly you have someone who’s speaking to the world your experience.” These are the first words author Edwidge Danticat spoke to me after she agreed to participate in my film Let Fury Have the Hour. Danticat had already expressed this idea many times in her writing. Danticat is a Haitian immigrant who once resided in Brooklyn and now lives with her family in Miami—a world away from my own experience growing up in an Italian immigrant community in the Philadelphia area. But I felt that she was “speaking to the world my experience.” It was an “experience” that I had when I read the opening lines of her family memoir Brother, I’m Dying: “I found out I was pregnant the same day that my father’s rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis.” Her story spoke to the loss of my own father (and grandmother). In a voice that was at once joyful and sorrowful, Danticat allows her readers to feel these highs and lows while pushing them to a timeless challenge: how do we move forward? Can we move forward?

“What’s powerful is where I tell my story and you tell your story and [where] we realize, much to our astonishment—though it shouldn’t astonish us anymore—that, oh, it’s the same story,” Danticat explains. As a global citizen engaged in creative response, Danticat displays a certain daring, a certain independence of mind in her work. The moments that she ties together in her writing offer a safe haven, a place to know that we are not alone. “Writing, it’s the place where I am probably most at home,” Danticat tells me. “Because I can bring all these other homes there.” Creating a “home” not defined by doorways or borders or countries is something that Danticat views as vitally important to human survival. “I think we’re all born citizens of the world and we proclaim it, even in the worst of times,” Danticat tells me. “We proclaim it through our being; we proclaim it through our art. So it’s all a constant struggle towards existence.”

Celebrated author Edwidge Danticat during the filming of Antonino D’Ambrosio’s Let Fury Have the Hour, November 26, 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Danticat explores the struggle that many face as new millennium migrants in a time of intense economic, political, and environmental crisis. This is a worldview that ties her closely to Joe Strummer. As a global citizen engaged in creative response, Strummer displayed an ever-growing recognition and concern for what was happening around him. He mined these themes most evocatively in his later work with the Mescaleros with beautifully empathetic songs including “Bhindi Bhagee”:

Ragga, Bhangra, two-step Tanga

Mini-cab radio, music on the go

Um, surfbeat, backbeat, frontbeat, backseat

There’s a bunch of players and they’re really letting go

We got Brit pop, hip hop, rockabilly, Lindy hop

Gaelic heavy metal fans fighting in the road

Ah, Sunday boozers for chewing gum users

They got a crazy D.J. and she’s really letting go

Oh, welcome stranger

Welcome stranger to the humble neighborhoods

“When I say ‘my country’ to some Haitians they think I mean the United States,” Danticat writes. “When I say ‘my country’ to some Americans they think I mean Haiti.” But Danticat feels “her country” is a space occupied by the immigrant and artist. “Haiti had nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland,” Danticat writes. “The ideological one, which joined all Haitians living outside, in the dyaspora.” Her country is assuredly the tenth department.

Oh, welcome stranger

Welcome stranger to the humble neighborhoods

In Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, she presents a deeply personal “reflection on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis.” The idea for the book was inspired by Albert Camus’s last published lecture, “Create Dangerously.” We spoke extensively about the shared influence of Camus and other creative activists throughout history on our work and worldview. “Our proudest duty is to defend personally to the very end, against the impulse toward coercion and death, the freedom of that culture,” Camus wrote. “In other words, the freedom of work and of creation.”

Danticat looks at writing and reading as a profound act of resistance, resilience, and survival creating that space for freedom of work and of creation that Camus held as sacred. She still encounters the prejudice and the small-mindedness of folks who think nothing worthwhile comes from Haiti. “People are shocked that I write books,” Danticat tells me, laughing at the hackneyed bias that people from Haiti are “uncivilized” or worse. Undaunted, Danticat explores the power of the immigrant reader’s imagination borrowing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: “We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner: must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.” Danticat is the immigrant artist speaking our experiences, taking up space in places that cannot bear immigrants’ company. “Hamlets that need our labor but want our children banned from their school,” Danticat writes. “Villages that want our sick shut out from the hospitals, big cities that want our elderly, after a lifetime of impossible labor, to pack up and go off somewhere to die.”

Danticat’s writing displays a subtle balance between the fantastic and stark realism. Its cinematic equivalent is found in Gregory Nava’s 1983 film El Norte, where a brother and sister flee Guatemala to “el norte” (the north) looking for the promised land after their father is murdered by the government and their mother is disappeared. A scene between father and son early in the film provides the images and dialogue evocative of Danticat’s work: “I’ll tell you something life has taught me. I’ve worked in Mexico and the coastal plantation and many other places. It’s the same everywhere. For the rich, the peasant is just a pair of arms. That’s all that they think we are. Arms for work.”

Our country has no notion what it has done to itself by participating in the continued exploitation and consequent denigration of human beings. As the twenty-first century unfolds, we appear to be turning back time, indulging in long discredited theories and ideas about people and the world and fighting battles over immigration, public health, public education, housing, civil rights that were settled amid the social conflicts of the twentieth century. Danticat’s objective is to lay bare these phony notions. Her work reveals an artist thinking about the world in beautifully crafted language that only someone who is exquisitely sensitive to the vibrations of humanity can intimately transpose in fiction and memoir. Danticat exposes the real political and human duty in our society to rebuke the institutional mechanisms that obstruct freedom and promote bias. Danticat’s books reveal how these institutions carry out political violence even though they present the illusion of being innocuous, disinterested agents in society. Pulling them out from the shadows so that we can clearly see what is occurring, Danticat allows us a chance to break their spell.

Haiti is never far from Danticat’s consciousness. The first country to have a successful slave revolt, it won its freedom in 1804, becoming the Western Hemisphere’s second republic (and its first black republic). Haiti’s independence sparked anxiety in Thomas Jefferson: “If something is not done, and soon done, we shall all be murderers of our own children.” As Danticat writes, it took “six decades for the U.S. to acknowledge Haiti’s independence” while keeping it under consideration “as a possible penal colony for the U.S.” Since then, the United States has allowed Haitian dictators to rise and fall and then be replaced by even more ruthless despots. The ruthless François “Papa Doc” Duvalier ruled the country from 1957 until his death in 1971. Papa Doc let loose a gang dressed in blue jeans strutting around Port-au-Prince with pistols in their waistbands and wearing black sunglasses. Known as Tonton Macoutes (bogeymen), their brutality was reminiscent of Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s brownshirts. The very sight of the Tonton Macoutes terrified people and helped keep them in line.

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed an estimated 316,000 people, injured 300,000 more, and left 1 million homeless. But Danitcat rejects the stereotype of Haiti as a lost country. There are lessons that Haiti taught the world in the aftermath of the earthquake. Danticat first connects the tragedy to what occurred in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina: “This was a moment [when] everyone around the world could see that there were countries within the larger country of the U.S.” New Orleans was the moment when anyone can look at a place like Haiti and no longer say that “this happens in other places but never here.” The tragedies tightened the bond we all share living on this planet with our resolute ability to get back up and start over. That’s the “quiet lesson of Haiti,” Danticat says. “We’re still going!” Danticat revels in the indefatigable nature of the human spirit. It’s where her creative inspiration emanates, this idea of the real maravilloso (real marvelous). Cuban Alejo Carpentier introduced this concept in his 1949 book The Kingdom of This World after a trip to Haiti. “I was treading earth where thousands of men eager for liberty believed” that they would be free despite the odds, Carpentier wrote. “With each step I found the real marvelous.”

The real marvelous can be described as magical realism rooted in the past and present and always in the spirit of the Haitian revolution. “The real marvelous is in the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken and the unspoken,” Danticat writes. “In spite of their slim odds, [the real marvelous] accept[s] nothing less than total freedom.” This beautiful depiction, uniting old and new ideas, words from the past and present, underscores what propels Danticat’s work, the lesson that the quiet revolution of the human spirit is forever pressing on. “Haitian art can be a dream,” Danticat tells me. “It’s someone giving themselves the liberty to reimagine the world around them in constant pursuit to create the world we want to live in.” Just as Danticat used her imagination to repatriate Camus and Sophocles as Haitians and citizens of the world, we can do the same with these dangerous creators, who counter reality by positing that the most singular story is actually the most universal. Introduced to me by Danticat in Create Dangerously, the progenitors of the real marvelous are the time travelers who live at any point in history, moving with us, encouraging us to go even farther. They include:

- Marie Vieux-Chauvet, author of the trilogy Amour, Colère, Folie published with the support of Simone de Beauvoir by Gallimard Press in Paris. Papa Doc Duvailer considered the work an attack on his regime, and Vieux-Chauvet was forced into permanent exile in New York. Danticat calls the trilogy “the cornerstone of Haitian literature.”

- Jan J. Dominique, author of Memoir of an Amnesiac, which explores exile, loss, and memory. “It demands a preponderant place for social and political problems in literary texts,” Dominique explained. But rather than being presented by an omniscient narrator, reality “is viewed partially through the eyes and feelings of a little girl.”

- Haitian physician-novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, “Who wrote such beautiful prose that the first time I read his description of freshly baked bread,” Danticat writes, “I raised the book closer to my nose to sniff it.” In 1961 Alexis was tortured and killed by the Tontons Macoutes. “The trees fall from time to time, but the voice of the forest never loses its power,” Alexis wrote. “Life begins.”

- Assassinated Haitian journalist and radio commentator Jean Dominique, who spoke out against various Haitian dictators. He was one of the first to broadcast in Creole. Filmmaker Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist suggests that Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government orchestrated Dominique’s assassination. Demme recalls: “I remember thinking at the time how poignant this self-image was: the mercurial man of the world, poet/genius analyst of the microphone, crusader for democracy in his beloved nation—and he likes to picture himself as the country mouse, never more true to himself than when he’s shooting the shit about rainfall and the next mango crop with the other farm boys down in the boondocks.”

- Haitian novelist Dany Laferrière’s 2009 book L’énigme du retour received the French literary award Prix Médicis, which is given to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent.” A mixture of poetry and prose, the book follows Laferrière’s return to Haiti after a thirty-three-year absence. “Laferrière proves himself to be one of the finest North American literary provocateurs,” the Toronto Quarterly writes. Citing the likes of Bukowski, Miller, Kerouac, and James Baldwin as major influences on his writing, Laferrière explains: “I can not say that any of these writers have influenced me back then or today. I simply noticed that many of them viewed life the same way I did. My world became more complicated when I began writing of my Haitian experiences in my books. At that point, I was far from writing like Bukowski or Kerouac. Or even Baldwin. However, with Baldwin I walked alongside him the longest.”

- Haitian photographer Daniel Morel explains his work: “Our role is important as independent photojournalists to tell the story as it is. I was there to document accurately this tremendous tragedy [Haiti earthquake] for future generations.” His photos depicting the effects of the earthquake on Haiti offered a starkly different image than what the majority of the Western mainstream presented. “CNN is playing with people,” Morel said after the earthquake. “They are doing show business with people’s lives here.”

- Haitian painter Hector Hyppolite, A lifelong sevite, a disciple of Vodou, Hyppolite was known for his aesthetically intricate yet instinctive paintings. French surrealist André Breton, who purchased five Hyppolite paintings in 1920, declared that the artist’s work would revolutionize modern painting because “it needs a revolution.” The Haitian government declared 2008 as the year of Hector Hyppolite.

Danticat’s work has helped me become a more involved citizen, not just in the places where I live, but also in the world in general. With this as my guide, I leave you, dear reader, with words by Edwidge Danticat from the film Let Fury Have the Hour. I introduce it by borrowing the dedication from her book Create Dangerously: For the “two hundred thousand and more . . .”

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

This is what, among other things, might join Albert Camus and Sophocles to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Osip Mandelstam, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Waldo Ellison. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, we may also save someone’s life, because they have given us a passport, making us honorary citizens of their culture.

“THE ONLY BAND THAT MATTERED” “STILL DOES

The Story of the Clash As Told by the Clash

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

I wanted to be Pete Townshend, the bloke who throws his arms and jumps up and down.

—PAUL SIMONON, THE CLASH

The year 2008 was the thirtieth anniversary of the American release of the Clash’s self-titled first album, which at the time became the highest selling import in American history. To celebrate the anniversary, the former members of the Clash put out a coffee table book simply titled The Clash. Here it all is, packed in tight between bright pink covers, the Clash’s story told in their own words with stunning photos and original art (some of the best ever created in music). The book does much to stress the significance of the Clash as a transformative and invigorating force in political popular culture. With a reflective, documentary-like presentation, The Clash presents the unique moment in history that was the Clash. It proves that the hallmark of any great artist is to create work that is timeless and wholly original. The book is at its best when it recounts how the band grew from various musical influences—internalizing them, making them wholly their own. In the end, what was produced was purely the Clash (Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Duke Ellington are examples of artists who did the same), a band that ultimately found a sense a redemption in a musical career that lasted less than a decade, with only five of those years with the lineup that mattered: Joe Strummer on guitar and lead vocals; Mick Jones on lead guitar and vocals; Paul Simonon on bass; and Topper Headon on drums.

La Lutta DJ spins the Clash’s London Calling during the special performance event “This Is a Movement.” (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

As I read this book, I found myself in a reflective mood. I first met Joe Strummer—or actually ran into him—moments before he was going on stage at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in April 2002. I was there to discuss a documentary film project with him. His people had given me the go-ahead to take some photographs from the stage. I found myself roaming the backstage area, looking for the best spot to jump on stage and snap my photos of Strummer and his current band, the Mescaleros. But here we were, nearly knocking each other over. We spoke for a moment. “Are you Italian, mate? I love the Italians.” These were Strummer’s first words to me.

The show found Strummer in classic form playing a mix of new and old songs. He ended the show with a tear-the-roof-off version of the Clash song “Police on My Back.” Strummer, always sharply ironic, dedicated the song to former New York City mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s quality-of-life policing, which helped transform the city into “Disneyland” and “a giant mall.” After the show, a bunch of people crowded into Strummer’s dressing room. Strummer called me over to sit next to him in the corner. We started to talk. “Well, I gotta say George Bush is making old Maggie [Thatcher] and Ronnie [Reagan] look more and more like Castro and Guevara,” Strummer said as he gave me a wink and nod. Everyone in the room, which now included Steve Buscemi, Matt Dillon, Jim Jarmusch, and a thick cloud of smoke, chuckled.

I spent the next few days hanging out with Strummer, discussing everything from the great Jamaican ska/reggae singer Desmond Dekker to England’s upcoming World Cup hopes (none, I told him) to the looming Iraq War to the suit jacket Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols gave him after one of their first shows together in 1976. Nearly eight months later, Strummer died of a rare heart ailment. It was undiagnosed and could have taken his life at any moment. The BBC News reported “he died peacefully in his sleep.” Just didn’t seem right. Strummer was only fifty years old when he died, but in his short life he left behind a now legendary legacy. And it all began with the Clash. As the U.K. weekly Sounds wrote in 1977, “If you don’t like the Clash, you don’t like rock ’n’ roll.”

The Clash presents a unique glimpse into the hearts and minds of the musicians behind the music. It captures all the musicians in a refreshingly new and unpretentious mood. Here’s Strummer: “I called myself Joe Strummer because I can only play all six strings at once, or none at all.” The Clash combined revolutionary ideas with revolutionary music. For all their efforts, they touched millions of people around the world. Just as the Clash were thrilling to listen to and watch, the book is loads of fun to look at and read. The ability to create music with a message that is entertaining and fun remains the group’s enduring legacy. Bassist Paul Simonon, a onetime abstract expressionist painter, explains the Clash “were brothers in arms trying to get their message across.” It didn’t matter if they succeeded or failed in what they were trying to do. “At least we tried,” was Strummer’s philosophical attitude. Thankfully for us they did.

Twelve reasons make the Clash, as Billy Bragg told me, “the greatest rebel rock band of all time,” supporting the band’s daring claim that they were (and still are) the “only band that mattered:”

1. The first release: The Clash. The self-titled album is the greatest punk record ever made, full of all the necessary ingredients—pure in its passion and determined in its demand for social change. It moves from straight-ahead rock (“London’s Burning”) to reggae (a cover of Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves”) to punk antiwar anthem (“Hate and War”) to the band’s call for racial unity (“White Riot”) to the now classic Bobby Fuller Four cover (“I Fought the Law”) to condemning the corporate takeover of music (“Complete Control”). “[(White Man)] In Hammersmith Palais,” with its mix of reggae, ska, punk, roots music, and social commentary, is the album’s highlight.

2. The alliance. The Clash was one of the first bands to recognize the natural alliance between Jamaican music and punk, with the shared ascendant theme of a spiritual battle catalyzed by music. When Bob Marley was in London and saw them perform in 1978, he was deeply moved. He later explained that he admired the Clash’s angry attack on race and class oppression and decided to pay homage to them and the affinities between punks and rastas with the now classic anthem “Punky Reggae Party.”

3. The world citizenship movement. The Clash infused all their work with a sense of humanity not commonly found in rock or punk. They saw themselves as part of a larger community, and as a result their underlying rallying cry was to encourage their audience to become engaged in the movement of world citizenship. On their first tour of America, the Clash placed flags of different nations behind them on stage to make it clear where they stood.

4. The performance: Rock Against Racism. On Sunday, April 30, 1978, in London’s Victoria Park, the Clash took the stage as headliners for Rock Against Racism before a crowd of 100,000. Jack Healey, former North American head of Amnesty International, who later worked with Strummer on Free Nelson Mandela, described the Clash’s work with Rock Against Racism as the model for all the human rights concerts that followed.

5. The vision: positive thinking, the future is ours. While much of punk wallowed in self-defeating nihilism, the Clash stridently traveled a different path. They spoke boldly and directly in terms framed in hopefulness and the exciting opportunity the future offers to those who are willing to “grab the future by the face” as Strummer sang. Acclaimed director Jim Jarmusch, who directed Strummer in Mystery Train, described it best when he told me the Clash were about producing, “not reducing,” unlike other punk bands including the Sex Pistols.

6. The disciple: Public Enemy. The Clash inspired thousands of listeners to become musicians committed to creating a new “I” in hopes of discovering an old “we.” No one group is more emblematic of the Clash’s influence than hip-hop pioneers Public Enemy. Chuck D said it best when he told me: “There would be no Public Enemy if the Clash hadn’t existed.”

7. A record’s record: London Calling. The album remains one of the most important records produced over the past three decades. If you haven’t listened to it by now, you’d better.

8. The song: “Clampdown.” This is the best rock song I’ve ever heard. With its sharp critique of the modern shift toward technocracy (this was late 1970s England; high employment, lack of opportunity, and ultraconservative Thatcher were a few years away) and the dehumanizing effect it was having on workers and the poor, the song offers an alternative view of how to respond, calling for unity and working class rebellion.

9. The Pearl Harbor tour. The Clash’s first U.S. tour was a thrilling event for a group enamored with American music culture. The group’s label was unhappy with their choice of supporting act: Bo Diddley. “I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” Diddley said. The Clash hoped to make amends for this gross ignorance. The band believed Diddley to be the true father of rock and eventually got their wish to include him. The tour was a success, further validating the band’s inclusive musical approach.

10. The band. These four musicians harmonized in a way that, with sincerity and a sense of mission, created genreless music. Strummer, with his rough, warbled singing, offered thoughtful songwriting. Mick Jones, a great composer, was a rock star guitarist. Paul Simonon was simply cool. Topper Headon, a slight man, played drums in a way that was hard, loud, and ferocious.

11. The new folk music. Strummer at one time called himself “Woody” in tribute to Woody Guthrie. As all music should, it reflects the concerns and feelings of that particular time but also transcends it. The Clash’s punk sound remains a popular sound, a new folk. Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, said it best when she told me that if her father were alive today, he would certainly be a rock musician with a punk spirit.

12. Humility. Not common among rock stars. But as Strummer pointed out to me more than once, “Mistakes were made. None of us were saints. But in life you gotta have some regrets. We were seeking, groping in the dark, to do something better and to try to be part of making this world better.” Maybe that’s the most important thing they continue to teach us—that the world is worth fighting for.

_____________________

A version of this piece previously appeared in The Rumpus.

EVOLUTIONARY STREET POETRY

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

Head pounding. Sick. Standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. So sick that it was all he could do to find the strength to walk the few blocks to the studio. If only the pain in his head allowed him a moment to think about the notes, the chords, the words that still needed to fit together. Washington Square Park was a few blocks away. Maybe I should just go and lie down on a bench. Drift a minute. Sleep might help him get through the long night ahead. He was still walking through the New York streets when he had a curious thought. You get a job. You become the job. He laughed to himself thinking about the lines spoken by the Wizard (played by Peter Boyle) in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver, a recent obsession. He was the job now. Still the job was special, offering a rare opportunity, an intense responsibility. Certified gold. Certified platinum. There was a human quality more important to certify. It was unnamable but he knew we all share it.

Standing on a corner in downtown New York, the city that offered him so much to dream about as a young boy, he thought of Woody: “Anyone who uses more than two chords is just showing off.” Before he stopped at 52 West 8th Street, his thoughts strayed once more to the film Taxi Driver and its main character, the aberrant and alienated Travis Bickle, brought to life by Robert De Niro. The character was oddly fascinating, and he was going to adopt Bickle’s Mohawk hairstyle. Shaved bald, clean on both sides, with a curly strip on top, that’s the way he felt and he wanted to show it. Remember: “You get a job. You become the job.” He recalled another exchange from the film that fit his mood:

Poet Allen Ginsberg with Joe Strummer meeting for the first time after “Ghetto Defendant” was recorded in New York City, September 1982. (Photo by Hank O’Neal.)

Betsy: You know what you remind me of?

Travis Bickle: What?

Betsy: That song by Kris Kristofferson.

Travis Bickle: Who’s that?

Betsy: A songwriter. He’s a prophet . . . he’s a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction. A walking contradiction.

Travis Bickle: [uneasily] You sayin’ that about me?

Betsy: Who else would I be talkin’ about?

Travis Bickle: I’m no pusher. I never have pushed.

Betsy: No, no. Just the part about the contradictions. You are that.

We are all that: a mix of stark pragmatism and heady dreams manifesting in a jumble of contradictions: part prophet, part pusher. This is what I envisioned Joe Strummer was thinking and feeling as he headed into Electric Lady Studios in December 1981 to finish the album Combat Rock. Over a decade before, studio founder Jimi Hendrix recorded the instrumental tune “Slow Blues” in that studio before vanishing from this world. You could hear his Fender Stratocaster echo as the Clash walked into Studio A. The walls reverberated with the sounds of Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind (1972), Richard Hell’s Blank Generation (1977), and their own record Sandinista! Extraordinary partnerships sprang to life: David Bowie and John Lennon on Bowie’s Young Americans (1975) and Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson on It’s Your World (1976). After adding their own boom to the studio sound, the Clash were followed by Run-DMC’s Tougher Than Leather (1988), the Roots’ Things Fall Apart (1999), and Steve Earle’s Washington Square Serenade (2007), each blasting through to new paths of expression. Electric Lady Studios was the only place for the Clash to achieve a popular global rhythm that could sway the world. Not sure but okay with the uncertainty of it all as the band stood in the shadow of its previous effort, the monumental Sandinista! (In a nod to that record as well as a statement declaring their refusal to retreat in the face of criticism, the Clash eventually numbered Combat Rock “FMLN2,” borrowing the abbreviation from El Salvador’s FLMN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional). “I try to use my music to move people to act,” Hendrix said. “I wish they’d had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would’ve been straightened out.” Stirring up some action and maybe straightening some things out felt just fine to the Clash. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Know your rights

These are your rights

All three of ’em

Allen Ginsberg with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones scanning books that Ginsberg gave the musicians while recording “Ghetto Defendant,” New York City, December 19, 1981. (Photo by Hank O’Neal.)

It has been suggested

In some quarters that this is not enough!

Well . . .

Steven Taylor, longtime Ginsberg guitarist, and record producer Hank O’Neal, Ginsburg’s friend, provided me with lively details that allowed me to sketch the above scene in my mind. Strummer was on his way to the studio to join his band mates and the protest poet laureate to record “Ghetto Defendant,” a sound and language experiment that is even more poignant today than when it was released on May 14, 1982. Ironically, it was also the twenty-first anniversary of the time when a group of civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders were severely beaten by an angry mob after their bus was fire-bombed near Anniston, Alabama. The two events serve as a remarkable confluence; the latter emblematic of an unsettled, violent history reaching out to change the course of human events that the former yearned to speak to. This is what the Clash and Ginsberg attempted to create with their song: understanding that the “then” and the “now” are one.

Stephen Taylor explains that the Clash and Ginsberg coming together was natural. “Ginsberg was an avatar of democracy,” Taylor tells me. “He went to see the Clash at Bonds in June 10, 1981, and loved their sense of vaudeville. He was drawn to that. They were offering an alternative to where we are now, coming from the edge, the dark end of the street.” The poet saw the Clash’s music as a mirror held up to the culture asking everyone to reconsider what condition society was in. “Ginsberg invented the notion of interconnectedness,” Taylor tells me. “He understood that the poet was a historian, a keeper of the culture and the language. He saw the Clash filling a similar role. They were speaking to the human condition.” Ginsberg also believed that if the art is good, it’s already revolutionary and inherently democratic because it includes many voices. “I was listening to a lot of punk, and I’d heard about the Clash from Steven Taylor,” Ginsberg later explained to music journalist Harvey Kubernik. “I went backstage once at their seventeen-night gig at Bonds Club on Times Square.” When Strummer met Ginsberg, he asked the poet to address the crowd. “We’ve had somebody say a few words about Nicaragua and Salvador and Central America,” Strummer told Ginsberg. “But the kids are throwing eggs and tomatoes at ’im. Would you like to try?” Ginsberg didn’t want to make a speech but offered to perform a punk song of his own. “I don’t know about making a speech but I’ve got a punk song about that,” Ginsberg said. “Simple chords, we rehearsed it five minutes and got it together. I gave them the chord changes.”

“Yeah, we have something, ah, something never before seen and never likely to be seen again either,” Strummer told the crowd. “May I welcome President [Mick Jones strums his guitar], President Ginsberg. “C’mon Ginsberg!” As Ginsberg makes his way to the stage, the crowd waits in quiet anticipation and then Strummer says “Let it rip, give me an A.”

“I don’t like the government where I live,” Ginsberg starts to recite. “I don’t like dictatorship of the rich.” As the Clash backs him, Ginsberg recites “Capitol Air,” a blazing wail lamenting the state of the world. “‘Capitol Air’ is based on “‘I Fought the Law,’” Taylor tells me. “Ginsberg felt that it had an anthem-like quality like the good Clash music.” Ginsberg told Kubernik, “The guy, who was my friend in the soundboard, mixed my voice real loud so the kids could hear, and so there was a nice reaction, because they could hear common sense being said in the song.” The moment was stirring. “You can hear the cheers on the record,” Ginsberg remembered. He wrote “Capitol Air” in 1980 on the way back from Yugoslavia and a tour of Eastern Europe. “I realized that the police bureaucracies in America and in Eastern Europe were the same, mirror images of each other finally,” Ginsberg explained to Kubernik. “The climactic stanza ‘No Hope Communism, No Hope Capitalism.’ Yeah, ‘everybody is lying on both sides.’ We didn’t play the whole cut because we didn’t have enough time, but they built up to a kind of crescendo, which was nice when the whole band came in.”

The whole night was a wonderful accident. “I wandered into a place called Bonds, which at that time was a big club in New York,” Ginsberg told Kubernik. “The Clash at the time had a seventeen-night run, and I knew the sound engineer, who brought me backstage to introduce me and Joe Strummer.” And that’s how it started for Ginsberg, from the stage to the studio. A punk poet born, part pusher and part prophet. “The Sandinista record really impressed us, especially Allen,” Hank O’Neal says. It displayed a unique sensibility that emphasized “the relationship of music to the larger society.” That record went high and wide, looking out like a lighthouse bringing everyone lost at sea inland. This new record was going to be long and deep. “There are always cracks and that’s where the vitality and the renewal comes in,” Taylor says. “With the music on Combat Rock we’re just learning to decipher things that it’s saying that we couldn’t when it came out.”

“As railhead towns feel the steel mills rust water froze/In the generation/Clear as winter ice/This is your paradise,” are the lyrices of “Straight to Hell.” They certainly describe the current state of things.

When O’Neal came to the recording session to take pictures, he found Joe Strummer sick. Band members were sitting around the mixing console thumbing through books that Ginsberg had given them, engaged in a quiet discussion. O’Neal, who worked for many years with pioneering record producer John Hammond, was immediately taken with Strummer. “I had produced a record with Earl Hines,” O’Neal says. “And Strummer knew all about Hines (Hines is considered a massive influence on modern jazz piano).” At the session a young Tymon Dogg performed piano on “Death Is a Star.” Strummer encouraged O’Neal to record Dogg, who later became a key performer in Strummer’s solo act, the Mescaleros. As a person attuned to culture, Ginsberg liked getting into activities outside his field. “He would absorb what he could from people like celebrated photographers Berenice Abbott and Robert Frank,” O’Neal tells me. “He wanted to be a photographer, a folksinger, a musician. He looked at Strummer and the Clash as in line with Robert Frank and Bob Dylan.”

Longtime Allen Ginsberg guitarist Steven Taylor performing “Ghetto Defendant” for the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Ginsberg perceived the Clash as a key part of a distinct historical moment excitedly coming to life. There was a cross-fertilization between music and the visual arts. “You can trace the punk, DIY movement back to the film movement and Maya Deren,” Taylor says. “A lot of punk people in the U.S. punk scene were visual artists like Patti Smith and Richard Hell.” Ginsberg was motivated and inspired by this exchange. It’s what always moved him. The mix of sounds, images, and words offered a unique window onto the world. The goal was to show the shadows of the living coexisting with the shadows of the dead. It’s the essence of creative response: superseding time, constructing a free space.

The Clash achieved a special kind of popular poetics on Combat Rock, particularly with the tunes “Know Your Rights,” “Straight to Hell,” and “Death Is a Star.” Taylor explains that Ginsberg thought “Death Is a Star” was powerful poetry and was especially moved by the closing: “smoking in the dark cinema/see the bad go down again.” “They were getting to that most sacred, deepest place,” Taylor says. “Their work revealed that and people connected to that. It’s a source of poetry and that’s where global citizenship comes from.” Taylor and Ginsberg believed that the Clash were defying consumerism and the commodification of the individual. People were becoming increasingly isolated and trying to connect through consumerism rather than civic involvement. Ginsberg thought that punk was a cry against the dominance of a stifling culture. “They were saying you were something more.” Taylor says. “It’s ‘Rising Sun Art,’ with the creative impulse as a form of love, kindness, and compassion.” It was a place that creates community in a society that destroys community, offering anyone an opportunity to get involved. “Speaking from the pulpit conscious of history as my role as a poet,” Ginsberg explained. Combat Rock—the music and the album title—supported Ginsberg’s belief in defending the free world against “aggressive hypocrisy that damages the planet’s chance of survival.”

Ginsberg possessed a unique quality, placing himself in the middle of whatever the cultural zeitgeist was. As one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated poets, he had the cachet to slip in and out of spaces that very few could without calling into doubt their sincerity and authenticity. “When he was a kid,” Taylor says, “he knew Lester Young and Charles Mingus.” In Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson stumbles upon Ginsberg at a party in the Bay Area filled with the San Francisco chapter of the Hell’s Angels. “This was Ginsberg’s first encounter with the Angels and he quickly became an aficionado,” Thompson wrote. Afterward, the police stopped and questioned Thompson and Ginsberg: “For several moments there is no talk at all—only the sound of Ginsberg humming a Near Eastern raga, backed up now and then by the spastic crackling of the voice from headquarters.” The hum was the sound of God, as Strummer later described Ginsberg’s voice. Listen.

Yet through these encounters, Ginsberg, with mind wide open, gleaned valuable insights about the world. They made him better as an artist and even more engaged as a citizen. He recalls that after meeting the Angels he was asked to help organize a peace march in the Bay Area against the Vietnam War. The Angels intended to stop the march, which they saw as an action in support of communism. Meeting with the Angels and their leader Sonny Barger led to a discovery: the parade as peaceable health, the reverse of fighting back blindly. A light clicked on when Ginsberg took Barger to meet Bob Dylan after a show. Dylan asked Barger, “What’s your act? If you want to extend yourselves, you can’t make it by hanging around Oakland beating up on your image.” Whether they were stunned or stoned, Ginsberg remembers, “they realized that they had nothing to say, or else if they did, they hadn’t found the right theater.” Ginsberg writes: “And we had the same realization: our march had to get its theater together, just as the police and the government did. I think that was the beginning of our realization that national politics was theater on a vast scale, with scripts, timing, and sound systems. Whose theater would attract the most customers, whose was a theater of ideas that could be gotten across?” In Ginsberg’s view, Strummer and the Clash had found the right theater: a popular culture spectacle let loose with the intent of never compromising. Only those who look in their heart and speak frankly can claim to prophesy, Ginsberg believed. He wanted to play a role.

It’s likely that Strummer read Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. Ginsberg’s surreal dealings with both ends of pop theater’s players (the cops and robbers) helped him pen the anticensorship tune “Rock the Casbah.” “Now the king told the boogie men/You have to let that raga drop.” Let the raga drop! It was a phrase borrowed from the mouth of God, floating above the incessant chaos in search of a fragile peace. And like an apparition Ginsberg appeared fifteen years after the moment with Thompson and the Angels, inserting a new raga into “Ghetto Defendant,” delighting the band. At the end of the song, Ginsberg slipped in the mantra “The Heart Sutra” (Heart of the Perfection of the Transcendent Wisdom), one of the most popular of all Buddhist scriptures. “It was the voice of God,” Strummer said. The God that Strummer believed in anyway.

When the Clash and Ginsberg collaborated, they fused their aesthetic objectives in one moment. Interest. Identify. Immersion. The Clash’s history included Ginsberg and the Beats, of course, but now Ginsberg’s history included the Clash. “The fifth meaning of the phrase Beat generation is the influence of the literary and artistic achievements of poets, filmmakers, painters, writers, novelists,” Ginsberg wrote. “Liberation of the Word from censorship. Return to appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against the state regimentation.” Empathy. Engage. Equanimity. It all flows together and becomes one acute cultural guide. Whatever his motivation was, whether he wanted to touch the famous or convert the infamous, Ginsberg managed to squeeze himself in and then into creative partnerships with fascinating results.

A precursor to his work with the Clash, Ginsberg recorded an album that featured musician Bob Dylan and poet Anne Waldman, and was produced by John Hammond. With stripped down vocals, Ginsberg’s First Blues (1983) is cultural anthropology stitched together as a poetic documentary. Ginsberg’s raw honesty and thoughtful beauty are held together by his natural charisma and disarming irascibility. Ginsberg always heard the truth behind the images he saw around him, always saw the reality underneath the language spoken to him. Later Ginsberg recorded William Blake poems set to music (Songs of Innocence and Experience) as well as Allen Ginsberg Reads Kaddish: A 20th Century American Ecstatic Narrative Poem, and The Lion for Real. With composer Philip Glass, he recorded a theatrical production of “Wichita Vortex Sutra” called Hydrogen Jukebox and after with Glass and Paul McCartney on the antiwar “Dance of the Skeletons.” Ginsberg also worked with celebrated jazz musicians Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot.

Ginsberg was always looking for the right word—right to the bone. Poet Ed Sanders of the Fugs described his writings as “emblems of conduct.” Ginsberg spent a lifetime in search and service of this liberating literary quest. And that’s what Ginsberg achieved in the opening of “Ghetto Defendant,” less the “American Sentences” he presented in 1994’s Cosmopolitan Greetings and more a swift slice of syllables through the air and into our psyche. Along with “Death Is a Star” and “Straight to Hell,” the core of Combat Rock remains “Ghetto Defendant.” Ultimately, Ginsberg’s contribution to the song is an early exploration of “American Sentences,” the term the poet used to describe this form of his poetry. “Allen never went for the haiku,” poets Bob Holman and Margery Snyder explain. “In talking with him, he spoke of how the seventeen characters of this Japanese form just don’t cut it as seventeen syllables of English, and that divvying them up in 5-7-5 syllable lines makes the whole thing an exercise in counting, not feeling, and too arbitrary to be poetry.” Ginsberg’s solution was “American Sentences”: one sentence, seventeen syllables, nothing else.

Ginsberg was the unique citizen-artist who could both suggest and insist while performing as court jester and troublemaker. You can see this in his contribution to “Ghetto Defendant,” showing Ginsberg as “American sentient”:

“Ghetto Defendant” lyric sheet with notations by Joe Strummer and Allen Ginsberg, New York City, December 19, 1981. (Photo by Hank O’Neal.)

starved in metropolis

hooked on necropolis

addict of metropolis

do the worm on the acropolis

slamdance the cosmopolis

enlighten the populace

Enlighten the populace. Off we go into the wormhole, sliding down through the song as quantum realities appear. The defendants are many: “Walled out of the city/Clubbed down from uptown.” The ghettos are everywhere: “Forced to watch at the feast/Then sweep up the night.” Ginsberg brought decades of courageous sensitivity and paired it with the fantastic energy of the Clash, unleashing words that live and breathe, giving voice to people squashed down and ready to explode. Ginsberg always broke down human interaction to its basic ingredient: the word. His taste for discovery allowed him to go farther than just capture life and spit it back to us. With his imagination and dreams, Ginsberg sparked the urge to dig deeper. “Life is valuable—when completed by the imagination,” poet William Carlos Williams wrote. “And then only.” Ginsberg saw himself as a liaison for discourse, concerned with the past and the present only if it points the way to the future. Joining together with the Clash, Ginsberg secured the magic only cultural insurgents possess: to listen, to synthesize, and then to act.

Allen Ginsberg with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones during the recording session for “Ghetto Defendant,” New York City, December 19, 1981. (Photo by Hank O’Neal.)

The spirit of Combat Rock is best illustrated by a line from another film Strummer had become obsessed with, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. “What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin?” Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, says. “A lie. A lie and we have to be merciful.” Mercy granted to those who train their sights on us with bogus dreams of wealth and power while we do the killing for them. Then we wait our turn, next in line. The assassins accuse the assassin. With Reagan and Thatcher riding high in the West and the ideas and awareness that shaped Sandinista! still fresh in their heads, Strummer and Ginsberg, while piecing together “Ghetto Defendant,” focused on preventing the further plunge down the mountain into a dystopian politics where at the bottom citizens were drowning in consumer culture and cynicism. It’s a lie and we have to be merciful.

Humanity and compassion traded in for a can of Coke and a cheap toaster. “It ain’t Coca-Cola it’s rice/There ain’t no need for ya/Go straight to hell boys.” Strummer’s questioning of Vietnam and the chaos it unleashed in the United States—and the world—meshed well with Ginsberg’s experience. The poet offered Strummer a first-person narrative of a citizen-artist living out loud in the middle of a century splitting apart. “U.S. intervention in Vietnam is a mistake because the motives were wrong from the very beginning,” Ginsberg wrote. “The consequences of our actions have compounded the original miscalculations to such a tangle that no one in his right mind or wrong mind could follow all the threads anymore.” Ginsberg encountered Thompson again while the former was protesting at and the latter was covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As the Chicago police surged out of control brutalizing the protestors, Ginsberg, Thompson, and French activist-artist Jean Genet found themselves trapped together. Ginsberg later wrote that 1968 was the year that “the youth movement not only came out on the streets not only in New York, Chicago, San Francisco but also in Singapore, Budapest, Belgrade, Paris, London, in cities on both sides of the Iron Curtain.” Thompson described it as the moment of violent clarity: “what I learned, in Chicago, was that the police arm of the United States government was capable of hiring vengeful thugs to break the very rules we all thought they were operating under . . . There was no point in appealing to any higher authority, because they were the people who were paying those swine to fuck me around. It was LBJ’s party and I was an unwelcome guest, barely tolerated.”

The social upheavals and the Vietnam disaster in the 1960s left the threads of democracy frayed at one end and knotted tight at the other end. “Now, years later, I still have trouble when I think about Chicago ’68,” Thompson explained. “That week at the Convention changed everything I’d ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it . . . Every time I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why . . . Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me.” This is what shaped and colored much of how Strummer saw society shifting under the political leadership of Reagan and Thatcher; what ended in the 1960s was the possibility of not only America but also democracy. It spilled over from the songs on Sandinista! splattering the new music on Combat Rock. “Don’t you know what happened down there?” Strummer asked on “Washington Bullets” in Sandinista! He was still searching for the answer with Allen Ginsberg in Electric Lady Studios. When the Clash returned to New York in September 1982 touring in support of Combat Rock, Ginsberg went to the concert at Pier 84 to greet the band, O’Neal remembers. Strummer met the poet outfitted with a Mohawk and fatigues, an international hit against censorship dangling from his belt like a baton. Twenty-five years later, Mos Def, in his own creative response anthem “Hop-Hop,” summed up the feeling Strummer and Ginsberg aimed to transmit: “Speech is my hammer, bang the world into shape, now let it fall . . . huh!” For the band and the poet, it was all or nothing. They drew a line in the sand and dared those they took issue with—Reagan’s revolution and Thatcher’s social deconstruction—to cross it.

“The weary Ambassador waits relatives late at the supper table.” This is my favorite of Ginsberg’s “American Sentences.” Stop. Read it more than once. And then read it again. It possesses that kind of majesty. Stop. Think. Act. When I first read it I pictured Ginsberg, Strummer, and Jones huddled together in the studio, absorbed in the exchange of ideas about the world. Each at once the ambassador and the relatives, just as all of us at one time or another serve as the ambassador and the relatives. A back-and-forth between “one” and “many,” linked together by what increasingly has moved from the obvious to the oblivious. “All we have to work with from now on is the vast empty quiet space of our own consciousness,” Ginsberg lamented. “AH! AH! AH!” In his heart, Ginsberg could never be so defeated, so scornful. No way. I remember meeting him in front of St. Mark’s Church on New York’s Lower East Side sometime in 1995 or 1996. I had often seen him walking around the neighborhood. We struck up a conversation as if we’d known each other for years and made plans to meet again. I wanted to hear more about his experiences living through the rare historic compression that was the second half of the twentieth century. Ginsberg was always at the front of the front lines, fighting the will to crush anything that defies the status quo. We never met again; Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997. I see him in my dreams as I write these words.

I remember him telling me something like morality in art means no compromise and that true popular media has the impulse for people to take care of each other embedded within it. A scorched earth attack cannot destroy it because the roots wait underneath, ready to sprout once again. My belief in world citizenship was cemented that day speaking with Ginsberg outside St. Mark’s Church. We are a world of immigrants, but bureaucrats refuse to come to terms with that. Good for us. That’s our opening. “Aware Aware/wherever you are/No Fear,” recited Ginsberg on “Capitol Air” thirty years ago. Ginsberg is the resolute symbol of the artist as troublemaker, starting from scratch to demolish accepted norms and rebuild a new world. “Trust your heart/Don’t ride your Paranoia dear.” He smashed the status quo, forever on the cusp of the vanguard and with the touch of the ethereal. “Breathe together with an ordinary mind.” He refused to walk backward. He moved forward, peering ahead to envision the future. “Armed with Humor Feed & Help Enlighten Woe Mankind.” Just listen to him one more time with the Clash, always suggesting and insisting while the raga drops.

AH!

AH!

AH!

BEND THE NOTES

A Creative Response Initiation

By Antonino D’Ambrosio

At first I find it hard to look away from the distorted images rendered in cracked paint. The fierce, angular figures communicate agony, but below them is stark whiteness, that quiet moment when the artist first stood silently in front of the stretched canvas with one hand on his hip and the other clutching his brush. His thoughts were filled with suffering; he was trying to communicate something, anything, to capture a moment in human history that needed to be told not just in a new way but also in a way that transmitted truth. I find it hard to look steadily at the painting for too long, it’s so unsettling. The painting as a whole and then its parts, taken piece by piece, scream at the viewer from a past that presides over the present like a specter. This painting whispers something to every person who steps in front of it. The artist emptied himself in this creative moment in an extraordinary mix of animation and anguish. Years later, when German officers appeared at his Paris studio to question the artist, one officer noticed a photograph of the artwork lying on a table. “Did you do that?” the officer asked. “No, you did,” the artist answered.

Picasso’s Guernica is less a painting and more a resolute chapter in the diary of the human race, standing alongside Goya’s The Third of May 1808 as a clarion call. These works were not just reactions against evil, but actions that amplified a truth: there is only one people. Picasso describes art as “the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” Guernica, the 137.4-inch by 305.5-inch oil on canvas, was his response to the strafing and carpet bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, when hundreds of defenseless civilians were slaughtered. Dubbed Operation Rügen, the Italian Aviazione Legionaria and the German Luftwaffe carried out this act of terror, believed to be one of the first air strikes in the history of military aviation on unarmed civilians. Later at the Nuremberg trials Hermann Göring explained, “I urged Adolf Hitler to give support to Franco under all circumstances. First, in order to prevent the further spread of communism in that theater and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical respect.” The clinical tone of this testimony offers us a glimpse into how the Nazis (and the Italian fascists) perceived the Basque: as a different people, separate and disconnected from their own humanity. The lives (and deaths) of Basque people were a necessary part of the fascists’ quest for world domination.

Just before the assault, the Spanish Republican Government had commissioned Picasso to produce an original work for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Picasso had no idea what he was going to paint until history intruded. In Guernica Picasso displays our grand talent as human beings—the ability to act imaginatively in challenging the problems that paralyze us. Picasso’s work is a humanist action that I call creative response. Guernica expresses a universal truth about what living in this world could be if we were free from brutality. It made what once seemed inaccessible and closed off to me—art, particularly painting—feel like something I could be a part of.

“What do you think an artist is?” Picasso asked. “He is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” The war is clear: it erupts between those who ask “why” and those who ask “why not.” “Others have seen what is and asked why,” Picasso said. “I have seen what could be and asked why not.” This sentiment is embedded in my film Let Fury Have the Hour and vigorously expressed by a film participant, musician, and founder of Dischord Records Ian MacKaye, who reiterates this idea: “My question is never, ‘Why?’ It’s, ‘Why not?’”

Ian MacKaye, founder of Dischord Records and member of Minor Threat, Fugazi, and the Evens, during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Roaring from different ends of history, Picasso and MacKaye illuminate our current trial: what happens when we don’t ask, What if? Over history this has led to the erosion of liberty and compassion and the suppression of imagination. I spent twelve interminable years in Catholic schools where three things were force-fed: (1) be quiet, (2) stand in line, and (3) never ask questions. This dogma is demoralizing; it holds down the human spirit and harms the community it is meant to help. Throughout history this fact has been borne out—from the Spanish Inquisition in which the novel was banned for three hundred years to the English civil war, when Puritans shut down all theaters including the Globe, which showcased Shakespeare’s many works. Silencing expression and banning the interrogation of ideas has consistently brought about the destruction of freedom. As Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa put it, “The Spanish understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.”

Picasso’s Guernica speaks directly to the roots of creative response and the core of creativity. He knew that if we fail to question the status quo, there is no hope of progress. “Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination,” filmmaker Luis Buñuel said. “That is the only thing that protects our freedom. Despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.” Guernica places at the center of any political or cultural debate the understanding that systematic brutality must not be treated as exceptional but rather witnessed as paradigmatic—at the heart of the problems that confront us.

I was prepared to open my eyes wide to Picasso’s triumph with Guernica by first experiencing creative response through punk, skateboarding, street art, hip-hop, and reading. The spirit behind each helped me recalibrate my ideas about what reality is. Each experience allowed me to voice feelings that otherwise would have found no outlet. “Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas,” Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño said. “Like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.” With skateboarding, I reorganized the physical environment around me. A pool was not just for swimming, a sidewalk was not just for walking, and a street was not just for driving. So every time I went down my block, I looked at it slightly differently, as a possibility of what the future could be opened up. “So you’re never going to think the same again about that curve or that bench or that rail or about fucking anything,” film participant skateboard pioneer Tommy Guerrero tells me. “Skateboarding saved my life.”

Squeezed out by the active collusion of the political elite and institutions of money and power, creative activists create space by launching transformative ideas that leave huge aftershocks in the wider popular culture. Creative response is the celebration of the unconventional and the rejection of hopelessness. By embracing the odd idea, the idiosyncratic thought, the impossible strategy, creative response twists and refashions Herbert Marcuse’s concept of the “great refusal,” which is the only fitting act of confrontation to sweeping structures of rule. “If you look back at the arc of human history, and whether it’s the invention of the city or the printing press, the most important ideas have been things that connect us and bring us together,” film participant and scientist Jonah Lehrer explains. As an example, Lehrer cites nineteenth-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who went to chemistry lectures every day. “Coleridge said ‘I go to the chemistry lectures to renew my stock of metaphors,’” Lehrer tells me. “That’s always been this wonderful remark about how the cultures can benefit from each other, that here’s this poet going to watch chemists in a theater set shit on fire, and yet he realizes it’s not just chemistry, it’s not just some foreign language; ‘I can use this and make my poetry better. I can steal their metaphors.’”

Street art from the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

In the wake of the global economic crisis and the seemingly omniscient rule of pop culture—a culture that generates the illusion that we are participating and connecting always—digging for new metaphors is more crucial than ever. Creative response helps us to establish a dynamic counternarrative. The more corporate technocrats try to program pop culture down to the last detail and manipulate it, the more people are held under its sway as they dizzily consume it. In contrast, creative response is the art of the unforeseeable and spontaneous, a process that through self-generated channels resists the power of technocracy and money, and triggers new ideas and actions. “New technology can never be a substitute for human values,” humanist Neil Postman wrote in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Creative response places the emphasis on humanity because technology is not a panacea to what ails us in the modern world.

“They rule us with guns and machines,” Algerian independence leader Ferhat Abbas said when France and Algeria met on the soccer field in the 1960s. “On a man-to-man basis, on the field of football, we can show them who is really superior.” In using sport as a metaphor in understanding our complex human existence, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano elaborated on Abbas’s statement that creative response opens up democratic possibilities where true equality and fairness are forged: “When you least it expect it, the impossible occurs, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bowlegged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.”

The David in Galeano’s David versus Goliath anecdote is legendary Brazilian soccer star Garrincha, who played alongside Pelé, Vavá, and Didi on two World Cup championship clubs. Garrincha’s trademark was his ingenious dribbling ability and uncanny vision to discover any and every way to get by the defender with the ball. He was known as Anjo de Pernas Tortas (Angel with Bent Legs). Garrincha’s story is a thrilling example of creative response: crass, lumbering brute force is no match when opposed by the vast power found in the imaginative, the resourceful, the spontaneous spirit.

Garrincha and his fellow Brazilian football players from that era—the 1950s and 1960s—saw sport as something more. “Football as art, as drama, as ballet, or orchestral music,” David Goldblatt writes. Football was life; it was living in the moment, being present to all the possibilities available on the field and thereby the world. It was creative response shredding the exclusionary conditions of how the game is played and smashing biased perceptions of who can play it. And that’s why Garrincha, dead at age fifty nearly thirty years ago, remains beloved by the Brazilian people, who called him, alternatively, Alegria do Povo (Joy of the People).

When you look at something familiar from a new perspective, whether soccer or traditional music, a fresh awareness arises. We understand that the “elsewhere” and the “here,” the “then” and the “now” are the same. Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók understood that the then and the now are critical to shaping a future filled with promise and delight. “In art there are only fast or slow developments,” Bartók explained. “Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.” Bartók, by protecting and reviving disappearing histories, rejected the dual curses of modernity—alienation and cynicism—and brought forward the idea that everything that is imagined is real in some way. “It is impossible to imagine a more complete fusion with nature than that of the Gypsy,” Bartók explained. Bartók’s passion for folk and Gypsy music helped lead to the founding of ethnomusicology. More importantly, Bartók revived a particular kind of storytelling and cultural tradition threatened with extinction and considered unworthy of being protected. “Bartók remained loyal to the landscape of his dreams,” Alex Ross writes. “That hidden empire of peasant music, which stretched as far as Turkey and North Africa.” Bartók’s unique creative response involved the merger of the local and the universal. He disregarded the finely drawn boundaries between musical genres, denouncing separation, to borrow Joe Strummer’s phrase, as “demographic fascism.” As Ross explains, Bartók countered the rise of “genocidal racism by extolling racial impurity—the migration of styles, the intermingling of cultures.”

Often the genesis for creative response is a candid attempt to begin a dialogue where once there wasn’t one. “Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music,” pianist and composer Herbie Hancock explains. Hancock alludes to the most basic and important right that creative response uplifts: freedom of expression. “Our freedom of speech is the freedom of death,” film participant Chuck D raps. “We got to fight the powers that be.” Buoyed by this stance, creative response is an action, a democratic contribution that an open free society cannot do without.

Art cannot exist without the melding and migration of styles. In order to be an artist, one must be a global citizen—someone who actively participates in shaping the community and the world. Embedded within this idea is the recognition of the complexity and power of human connections, the belief that living in this world means being aware of our interconnected and interdependent nature. It reinforces our shared humanity as we sift through the lies to uncover what is true. “The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda,” photographer Robert Capa said. Creative response is advanced by cultural activists who create work that can breach sideline spaces and transform the popular culture and consciousness. Playwright Harold Pinter summed up the efforts of creative responders in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds, which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation, which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us—the dignity of man.” Creative response is a worldview that reflects our dreams and struggles. “That idea of having an international consciousness, being driven by something more than self-interest, I think that idea grew” in the last four decades, the MC5’s Wayne Kramer tells me. “There were people before me, Woody Guthrie, it goes back generations and generations. This is the business of civilization building.” It’s Odetta singing “Oh Freedom” at the civil rights march, Nina Simone spontaneously singing “Mississippi Goddam” at Carnegie Hall to protest the Medgar Evers assassination in 1963, and exiled South African Miriam Makeba singing out against apartheid.

The glow coming from Picasso’s Guernica is not from the shock of the images but from the spirit that permeates the painting. It arises out of an artist’s history and experience of engaging in the oldest social network: collaboration and exchange with thinkers across every cultural spectrum. From the beginning of his time in Paris, Picasso associated with writers Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, artist Georges Braque, and composer Erik Satie. It was all about exchange and communication. In 1917, working with the Ballets Russes, Picasso joined with Satie, Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire (who invented the term surrealism), Léonide Massine, and Sergei Diaghilev to produce the circus-like theater piece Parade. An iconoclast of the fin de siècle, Satie found a daring new voice in the world of classical music by composing the three piano pieces Gymnopédies. Satie’s stripped down compositions rebuked centuries of highbrow pretension. “Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again,” conductor Reinbert de Leeuw has written. Similar to Claude Debussy before him, Satie was creating an alternative modernism that did not have the “smell of the lamp” but that “of the sun.”

Following the respected tradition of artists who refuse to accept the artificially constructed world imposed on us, creative response wipes away a false idea and replaces it with the best idea. Satie reminds me of another iconoclast, the sixteenth-century European Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, who answered the religious strife around him by creating a new form, the essay, in which general topics—friendship, love, the new world, intolerance—are treated from a personal perspective. Equally, Satie’s work moved from the grand orchestrations to a bare, intimate sound that resonated beyond his time influencing artists in unimaginable places. Later, avant-garde composer John Cage, who was inspired by Satie’s nerve, offered his own manifesto: “Art is a sort of experimental station where one tries out living.” Cage then took inspiration from Satie and applied it to his relationships with choreographer Merce Cunningham and the new artists exploding the borders of European classical art: Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jasper Johns.

Likewise, Picasso’s friend and sometimes rival—artist Amodeo Modigliani—turned to poets Charles Baudelaire, Giosuè Carducci, and Comte de Lautréamont to help shape his central ethos that the only route to authentic creativity is through rebelliousness and anarchism. Modigliani looked back at Dante and forward with Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the latter teaching the artist that “the work of art requires great patience, and above all determined struggle against medium.” For this reason, whether it’s cubism, surrealism, Dada, neorealism, French new wave, punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, or street art, each art form is a counternarrative offering an inscrutable way to ask limitless questions. The significance is not contained in the answers people find to these questions but in the celebration of the many constantly asking more questions. “What kind of a question could an artist or human ask that has the capacity to have an enormous range?” film participant and choreographer Elizabeth Streb asks me. “The question’s the thing, not how it gets answered. If it’s a great question, it’s going to be answered in a diverse number of ways by maybe hundreds and thousands of people.” Creative response is another way of collecting these questions.

Even more, creative response smashes the notion that the ideologies dominating our lives are natural. “Every ideology in history has always tried to disguise the fact that it’s an ideology by saying its doctrine is natural,” novelist and film participant Hari Kunzru tells me. “It’s about mechanisms that are really, really embedded but don’t necessarily feel coercive. This is a great con trick.” One of the strengths of creative response is that it is a way for us to identify a different way of understanding the world. It opens up a consciousness that can conceive and wrestle with what type of a society we want to live in. What else do artists and writers and musicians do except dream about ways of doing something anew? “If you look at history, behaved people change nothing,” playwright and film participant Eve Ensler tells me. “And I believe in misbehaving.” Ensler echoes German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. “Temptation to behave is terrible,” Brecht explained. “All art forms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.” With this as the foundation of awareness, artists perform a valuable function—coming in and having some kind of effect, opening up spaces of possibility. These fissures led to Ensler’s groundbreaking feminist production The Vagina Monologues, which helped inspire mainstream discussion of female sexuality and sexual violence, just as they allowed Brecht’s antiwar epic Mother Courage and Her Children to take on fascism more than a half century earlier.

Currently, even though spectacle and unreality control our politics and culture, there are people making art that will empower us to want to do better. Their art recognizes that “ethics and aesthetics are one,” as philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Otto Weininger believed. One is lost and useless without the other. By obliterating the restrictions imposed on them by a system that discourages collaboration and cooperation among perceived disconnected mediums, creative response makes clear that society and civilization operate through the birth of new relationships based on a shared worldview rooted in our ranging curiosity and deep-seated sensitivity. History is overflowing with models of inimitable creative response alliances. Author Marcel Proust and photographer Eugène Atget shared a fervent enthusiasm to record everything happening around them. This mutual creative worldview brought them together by linking the written word with the visual image. Italian photographer Tina Modotti, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and Mexican muralist Diego Rivera worked side by side presenting a timeless visual rendering of the Mexican peasant struggle in the early twentieth century. Modotti also worked with photography modernizer Alfred Stieglitz who also collaborated with artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee created a lasting portrait of an invisible stratum of America besieged by the Great Depression in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Musician Billy Bragg sums up the outlook supporting creative response: “I know in my heart I have the potential to offer someone that different perspective. To send someone away feeling as if they’re not alone.” This spirit of solidarity expands the reach of creative response, allowing it to spread out to every corner of the world. “The great thing about art of any kind is that it finds its way into those unlikely places,” novelist Hari Kunzru tells me. “Some kid gets hold of it in another country, in a context which we could never have predicted, and a lightbulb appears above that kid’s head.”

I was that kid stumbling across “art of any kind” when I read Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Written in 1958, the book is a powerful modern allegory of the downfall of a proud man serving as a stand-in for the failure of an entire society. Borrowing the title from William Butler Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming,” Achebe’s sensitive touch in rendering the struggles of the Okonkwo and the Igbo people showed me how the novel’s themes—loneliness, despair, fear, change, hope—were collective issues. Like John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Goethe’s Faust, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, or the book that started it all for me—Cervantes’s Don Quixote—each work linked the emotional and the intellectual, allowing me to push out words that otherwise remained stuck in my throat. The words these writers chose reflected the tragic past of an unknown time and place but also expressed the uncertain, shifting historical moment the world was moving through. The same year Achebe’s masterwork was published, photographer Robert Frank published The Americans. Taken at a distance, the visual images presented every vein of American society, offering a nuanced, unadorned portrait of the era. “Black and white are the colors of photography,” Frank explained. “To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.”

When Patrice Lumumba traveled to Belgium in January 1960 to meet with Belgian leaders at the Round Table Conference, he did something very unusual. He brought with him the musician Joseph Kabaselle and his orchestra. Lumumba at the time was leading the independence movement that eventually would end Belgium’s 150-year rule over the Congo. His political party had scored a huge victory in the recent elections, recording 90 percent of the vote. This landed Lumumba in jail. Kabaselle placed his music in the center of the struggle for independence, composing “Le Grand Kalle.” The song quickly became the anthem of the Congolese independence movement, helping to rally the country behind Lumumba, forcing the Belgians to free him from prison, and allowing him to participate in the Round Table Conference. Kabaselle’s song triggered an enormous movement of gifted African musicians who similarly mobilized people through their art: Nigeria’s Fela Kuti, Senegal’s Salif Keita, Zimbabwe’s Thomas Mapfumo, and Wassoulou’s Oumou Sangaré.

Fela Kuti broke free with Afrobeat, which blends rock, funk, and jazz with traditional Yoruba music, highlife, and chanted vocals all held tightly together with percussion and unique vocalization. “Afrobeat music was informed by Fela’s experience as a global citizen,” musician and film participant Martin Perna of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra tells me. “Coming in contact with other people feeling like the world needs to go in this direction.” Stuart Bogie of Antibalas elaborates further: “They say, ‘You play Fela music? That’s Nigerian music. You’re Americans.’ And one of the things that I found is that his music serves us and heals us. We play it because it’s useful and critical, and it’s not enough to just put on the record and be like, ‘Oh, gee, what was it like in 1976?’ No. We want to experience this. We want to embody it. We want to put together the chemical combinations of these instruments, and that’s the justification, it’s because the music is the medicine.”

Stuart Bogie and Martin Perna of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

At the same time, the new wave film movement was sweeping through France and out toward the sea. Often cited as a strong influence on the movement, filmmaker Alain Resnais embraced anarchic narrative devices in rendering stories of a vague past and an angst-ridden contemporary world, as evinced by his Last Year in Marienbad. His award-winning 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour and later La guerre est finie (The War Is Over) underscore his tenet that “the present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.”

The movement came alive for me when I saw François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Truffaut’s film flipped the archetypal coming-of-age story by presenting a visually startling yet richly told story of an adolescent boy’s erratic perceptions and diminishing expectations as he moves to adulthood. The film gave me a clearer idea of where I could place myself psychologically and physically in the world, showing me that we don’t really “come of age” but are always chasing “the age” or historical moment we are living in, trying desperately to grab hold of it with both hands. Yet it always remains elusive, hard to see and uncover. It was a companion piece to Vittoria de Sica’s neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief. I could see the two halves of myself in each of the film’s young main characters: Antoine in the former film and the boy Bruno in the latter. Antoine struggles with the transition to adulthood, facing the grim truth that reality offered much less than his dreams did about how to find contentment in this world. Young Bruno watches his father desperately trying to stand erect, to find a shred of self-respect in order to take care of his family. It’s a search for fundamental human dignity denied by a broken societal structure that says “it’s your fault that you’re poor.” The film shatters the illusion that the world is set up for everyone to share equally in its pleasures and possibilities.

The father of new wave, Andre Bazin, explained that “the cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.” Other filmmakers of the movement—Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Demy—presented an archetype of creative response by making collaboration central to their work. Godard’s contribution in Breathless, for example, with his “false matching shots,” the use of jump cut editing and no artificial lighting, rivaled Gregg Toland’s use of deep focus in of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Their influence, particularly with its emphasis on collaboration, continues to shape creative response cinema today, most notably by the Mexican film trio Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. “It’s not casual or a coincidence us sharing our work and ideas because our work is about communication and challenging the dominant ideologies,” Cuarón says. “We’re brutally honest us with each other but we’re also support groups for each other while we’re shooting because we suffer so much during the process.”

Aspiring young filmmakers in the early 1960s were inspired by the movement’s declaration that “if you wish to transform reality you must first film it.” Italy’s Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist) and Gilo Pontecorvo (Battle of Algiers), Greece’s Costa Gavras, America’s John Cassavetes (Shadows), Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène (Mandabi), and Poland’s Andrzej Wajda (Gates to Paradise) present a mix of authenticity and dream realism transposing old stories—love, war, poverty, violence, friendship—in ways that stirred emerging generations turned off by the musty and artificial representations of the world presented by conventional cinema. Old masters were renewed, as Luis Buñuel (The Exterminating Angel) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up) continued their relentless cinematic challenge of making audiences think, each testing the boundaries of cinema and the perception (and tolerance) of the viewer. And just as Montaigne created a new literary form with the essay, filmmakers like Chris Marker with his photographic futuristic essay La Jetée, and Emile de Antonio’s unrelenting visual assault on the Vietnam War, In the Year of the Pig, were erasing the confines of documentary filmmaking and creating a new type of hybrid narrative blending photography, film, literature, animation, and anything else they could throw into the creative response cauldron. They brought forward to the cinema surrealist artist Magritte’s The Human Condition, testing observers’ restricted impressions of the world around them.

The artists engaged in creative response forecasted the underground eruption of 1968 as cities around the world were split apart by protest and riots. Godard was at the center in two respects. First, when protesting the government removal of Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque, Godard was cracked in the head, bloodied by the police. “If they attacked Godard without worry or consequence in front of the eyes of the world, we knew that something was desperately wrong in society,” French student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit explained. Second, with his seminal works Breathless, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, and Masculin Féminin, with their compelling narrative. In many ways, however, the narrative is secondary to how Godard made the films, representing a sweeping departure from filmmaking. If Godard ever acknowledged rules, it was to show that they could not speak to the issues shaping the world. “Godard was always rebelling against something, even his own ideas,” Breathless cinematographer Raoul Coutard explained. “He wanted to show it was possible to make films a different way.” With fellow filmmaker Truffaut supplying the story and Claude Chabrol on board as technical adviser, Godard sketched out the scenes in the morning and then shot them during the day. It was on the fly, DIY filmmaking, shot on location with no lighting and mismatched sound, not in a sterile studio soundstage. The actors roamed the streets of Paris with nonactors moving in and out of frame behind them continually. “Jean-Luc would say the lines out loud and then the actors would repeat them,” Coutard said. Shooting with photographic film, which has greater sensitivity to light, allowed Godard to shoot at night with little reliance on cumbersome equipment and time-consuming setups. “Breathless set certain people free who wanted to make films differently,” Coutard explained. “I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy,” Jean Seberg’s character Patricia Franchini says in the film. Godard called it filmmaking as social criticism, tapping into the growing sense of confusion and uncertainty gripping the culture.

At the same time, we in America saw the rise of a new kind of writer—Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Jack Newfield, Harlan Ellison, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker—presenting reality and political consciousness with an intensely intimate style of storytelling. “B.B. King and Ben E. King were warm-up acts for Martin Luther King. Rock ’n’ roll didn’t lead to delinquency: it led to democracy,” Jack Newfield wrote. Musically, the MC5 provided an elaborate soundtrack that helped us find the correct way of reading this reality. “The music itself, in the sound, in the way I played the guitar, was parallel with the political frustration and the outrage of what I experienced in my life in the streets of America,” MC5 founder and guitarist Wayne Kramer tells me. “And what I did in my music in the MC5 was part of this larger thing that was happening all around the world. I realized if I tell the truth in the song, there’s a chance that you will feel the same way I do and then we meet in the song.”

From the streets of America to the soccer fields of Europe, Johan Cruyff, a lanky, long-haired Dutch soccer player dubbed “Pythagoras in boots,” was ushering in his own era of creative response on the field. Leading the play like a first chair musician and not a conductor in an orchestral performance, Cruyff saw himself as one of many, knowing the right tempo to play as part of the ensemble and the proper tone to establish as soloist. Cruyff saw through the chaos of the contest, slowing the play down, never anxious, always anticipating every angle of each pass before it developed. With machine-like precision, Cruyff could calculate in a moment the best placement of the ball, creating an opportunity for success. Content to be a support on the back or organized in the middle as one of many interlocking parts, Cruyff knew when to burst out front and push the play forward, never disrupting the delicate harmony and the balance of team play. Cruyff urged everyone to perform in the same key, all blended together, not one jarring note. Cruyff opposed the backwardness of the soccer establishment, fiercely confronting the hypocrisy of power. “Cruyff got into all kinds of conflicts,” Dutch journalist Hubert Smeets said. The reason: “he started asking the question the whole generation was asking, Why are things organized like this?”

While Cruyff’s style altered the landscape of modern soccer, a group of Dutch performance artists known as the Provos (provocateurs) were challenging the entire social and political structure of Holland. Inspired by a range of eclectic ideas from anarchism and Dada to the cultural theory of Herbert Marcuse and Marquis de Sade, the Provos combined nonviolence and absurdist humor in search of social change (the Provos were the clown counterparts to the Merry Pranksters, Diggers, and Yippies in 1960s America). Their entertaining public performances and exhibitions were farcical spectacles, which included “Happenings” and “Be-Ins” attacking the racism and alienation endemic in Dutch society. Dutch young people were inspired, and new artists were emerging daily. A new political movement known as the Kabouters (the Gnomes) was born, successfully running candidates for public office.

The Provos were deeply influenced by Il Ruzzante’s (Angelo Beolco) commedia dell’arte and the satire of Moliere as well as the modern era’s greatest progenitor of popular theater, Nobel Prize–winning Italian playwright Dario Fo. During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Fo realized his dream of a “popular theater, a literature, an artistic expression that spoke to everyone and is relevant,” as he described in his book Tricks of the Trade. This period in Italy was one of political turmoil and instability. From judicial corruption to government-sanctioned murders of leftists, Italy was reeling. During this time, Fo created some of the most intelligent and dynamic theater of the twentieth century. His achievements include Guerra di popolo in cile (The People’s War in Chile), Non si paga, non si paga! (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!), and Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist). In 2004, Fo set his satirical sights on Italy’s notorious prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The result is the hilariously surreal play Two-Headed Anomaly, portraying Berlusconi sharing Russia’s Vladimir Putin’s brain as a two-and-a-half foot dwarf. Fo described the special kinship he felt with Molière and Beolco, who were both mocked and censored by the leading men of letters of their times. They “were despised for bringing onto the stage the everyday life, joys, and desperation of the common people; the hypocrisy and arrogance of the high and mighty; and the incessant injustice,” Fo said. “And their major, unforgivable fault was this: In telling these things, they made people laugh. Laughter does not please the mighty.”

Comedians and satirists from Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor to Lewis Black know this all too well, Pryor in particular. Playwright Neil Simon called Pryor “the most brilliant comic in America.” He was a groundbreaking social critic taking on racism with brutal honesty. Criticized for his use of profanity and street language, Pryor responded. “A lie is profanity,” he said. “A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth, especially about oneself.”

Throughout history, poets have been at the center of creative response as both influencers and innovators. In the quest to present a sharper view of reality, poets serve to reframe the image and adjust the sound of our public conversations, finding the exact words to rouse a new consciousness. Current U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Levine went to work as an auto assembler at a very early age. While sorting universal joints—a coupling that allows rods to bend in a drive-shaft—he chatted with a black coworker named Eugene. Their discussion led Levine to write his groundbreaking poem “They Feed They Lion.” As they sorted, Levine and Eugene placed the joints in burlap sacks with “Detroit Municipal Zoo” written on them. “And he laughed, and said, ‘They feed they lion they meal in they sacks,’” Levine recalls. “And I thought, ‘This guy’s a genius with language.’ He laughed when he said it, because he knew that he was speaking an English that I didn’t speak, but that I would understand, of course. He was almost parodying it, even though he appreciated the loveliness of it. It stuck in my mind, and then one night just after the riots in Detroit—I’d gone back to the city to see what had happened—somehow I thought of that line.”

For Jamaican-born, U.K.-based dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, poetry manifests itself in the same way: in the beauty of indigenous language that expresses more truthfully what the dominant language does not. Johnson is the only black poet and the second living poet published by the Penguin Classics series. Using Jamaican patois over dub reggae, Johnson rose to fame during the Thatcher era. “Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon,” Johnson explains. “It might sound very intellectual but I’m trying to understand the relationship between experience that goes into the music, into reggae music, what implication that has for the listener when he hears his own experience on record.” Both Levine and Johnson embody the courageous spirit of a poet to initiate the debate, to find the words to say out loud, to expose the hustlers, to keep us from going numb, and to fortify our world.

A few years after Levine’s groundbreaking poem, filmmaker Charles Burnett assembled its cinematic counterpart. “In retrospect, it can be seen that the two great independent features of the late ’70s were Killer of Sheep and Eraserhead,” J. Hoberman wrote in Village Voice. “A masterpiece,” Dave Kehr added in the New York Times. “One of the most insightful and authentic dramas about African-American life on film. One of the finest American films, period.” Burnett’s neorealist classic Killer of Sheep offered a glimpse into black American urban life seen through the eyes of the people in the Watts community of Los Angeles. The film can be seen as a tone poem, unrelentingly playing the same note: the quiet struggle of a Watts family as it moves through life with great dignity but few prospects. The film was not released in 1977 due to issues surrounding music clearances. Yet Burnett refused to remove songs by Etta James, Dinah Washington, George Gershwin, Sergei Rachmaninov, Paul Robeson, Earth, Wind & Fire, and others because each piece fit so perfectly with the story he was offering. The main character, Stan, is wracked by melancholy and insomnia. Working at a slaughterhouse to support his wife and two children, Stan kills sheep to keep his family alive. The troubles he grapples with “lie within the family, trying to make that work and be a human being.” Burnett explains that what we learn from this film is that one doesn’t “necessarily win battles; [one] survive[s].”

“Every line means something,” painter Jean-Michel Basquiat explained.

Arising out of the culture clash of punk, street art, underground cinema, and the mix of Haitian and Puerto Rican culture, Basquiat’s flexible aesthetic was representative of a rising pocket of America, enriched by cross-cultural resettlement and defined by a broader worldview. Basquiat brought everything to the surface of the canvas. “He freely borrowed from and floated among many cultural and geographic traditions,” Edwidge Danticat writes. “Like many other culturally mixed, first- or second-generation Americans, his collectivity was fluid.” Basquiat’s artwork captured an aspect of living in the modern world otherwise unknown to many, particularly the insular—mostly white—elite art world. Basquiat’s hand moved with the melody of the jazz giants he celebrated in his art.

In addition to jazz, Basquiat’s work carried with it the posture of punk with a dash of new wave and hardcore mixed in to add bite. When I look at his work, I hear Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, the great punk bands Death and Bad Brains, and the hardcore group Minor Threat. “Don’t care what they may do we got that attitude,” Bad Brains sang. “Hey, we got that PMA (positive mental attitude). Hey we got the PMA.” This could have been Basquiat’s anthem. “When I got into punk rock, I turned the radio off forever, for real!” Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat tells me. That’s what I felt and did. In the same way, Basquiat’s paintings were keys unlocking the doors to the gallery residing in the streets, my imagination, and the unknown world.

One of Basquiat’s heroes was Charlie Parker, who began a 1949 Paris performance by incorporating the first notes of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” into his solo “Salt Peanuts.” Thirty-six years earlier, in Paris on May 29, 1913, Stravinsky’s pioneering partnership with choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, set designer Nicholas Roerich, and Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes caused a riot among outraged theatergoers. Once the dust settled, the old theatergoers couldn’t find their seats again. Stravinsky had dramatically recast the staid symphonic and cultural terms that had constrained classical music. Equally, the cultural cognoscenti looked down their nose at Basquiat’s work describing it as base and primitive.

They dismissed the work just as they did that of Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and countless others. There can be no doubt that the experimental work of those still to be born will face a similar struggle. Yet when the paint dried, Basquiat had joined the immortal community of creative response. There is always tension between art and commerce, particularly when the dominant culture tries to appropriate something deemed “rebel” or “revolutionary.” That’s why it’s important to understand that art in and of itself cannot change things: you need people organizing behind a common issue. Creative response is the first step toward that joining together and encouraging action. It’s less about taking risks and more about people who find a way to see around the corner, taking the first few steps to discover what lies ahead but always firmly rooted in bringing people together to act as one. It’s less about the game of politics and more about the reality of humanity, with all its flaws and imperfections. Some may coopt the artwork but no one can commodify its spirit. “I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous,” painter Mark Rothko explained. “The reason I paint them is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.”

Perhaps the most intimate work happens on the street where artists scale walls and buildings, hopping from roof to roof, sliding in the shadows, evading every kind of authority and the glare of streetlights. Graffiti/street art/public art, to me, has always been about finding a way to speak anonymously to an anonymous people in hopes of creating a public dialogue. “So whether that’s graffiti in a Nazi prison, whether that’s graffiti on the subway train, whether that is lyrics to a song, what it revealed was a kind of common humanity,” film participant Stanislao Pugliese, author of Desperate Inscriptions, tells me. “We are fathers, we are sons, we are brothers, we are husbands, and we have this thing in common, and we want to be free.” Public art offers a visceral statement into the hidden things that shape a people’s collective consciousness.

Just as Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska was a response to President Ronald Reagan’s harsh brand of politics, Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man took on Reagan policies. “I think that when Ronald Reagan became president a darkness settled over this country . . . my idea was to put forth an alternative vision of the America that was being put forth by the Reagan-era Republicans,” Springsteen said. Gould’s book took on the history of psychometrics and intelligence testing as a form of scientific racism. More specifically it challenged the use of discredited scientific tools, including eugenics and biological determinism, to develop and institute public policies, which were used to manipulate data in support of an argument that looked to roll back key social policies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Gould fought against pseudosciences that advanced racism and sexism. He challenged creationism, using the term “Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)” to describe how science and religion cannot comment on each other. An adherent of Darwin, Gould rebukes the appropriation of the English naturalist’s work, which argues that Darwin’s theories make for a cruel and compassionless world. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent but the one most responsive to change,” Charles Darwin wrote. It isn’t “survival of the fittest” but the advancement of creative response that makes society strong.

Graffiti on the wall of Serge Gainsbourg’s house on the rue de Verneuil in Paris. From the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

“If you expect to lose hope.” Street art from the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Doctor and drummer Imran Malik of the punk band the Kominas during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

During the 1980s, Public Enemy turned up the heat on the Reagan revolution with persuasively stimulating rap music. The group’s political orientation led to a distinctive partnership with filmmaker Spike Lee. “If it wasn’t for Spike Lee being able to mesh theme, music, and film, ‘Fight the Power’ wouldn’t have been what it was to influence an entire generation,” Chuck D tells me. “So everything was done as a collective, and behind that is the community dealing with the community issue that was taking place, that was able to galvanize a situation against injustice. That’s what we make art for. Black music always had to be love music, not just a ballad, but I got your back, I’m looking out for you.” The song is our generation’s “We Shall Overcome” and “Strange Fruit” compressed into a potent popular anthem. Public Enemy’s emergence in popular culture came with the rising tide of neoliberalism where social relations could only be established in a hyperindividualized state. “We’ve been extremely influenced by the Clash,” Kominas drummer Imran Malik tells me. “They represented the poor working white man in England. We represent a certain niche, and I think people like Public Enemy represent a certain niche, but it actually relates to everyone.” It’s a new kind of folk that speaks to the human condition, like the Carter Family, Guthrie, Seeger, Cash, and Bob Marley. “Marley, that’s amazing folk music,” musician and film participant Sean Hayes tells me. “All those different influences of rock and reggae and Ska and Motown and all those things. At its best, it breaks through and reveals something about being alive.”

Out of the glowing embers of all of this, a new era of creative responders arose: playwrights Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Suzan Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog); novelists Edwidge Danticat (Krik? Krak!), Zadie Smith (White Teeth), Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist), Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street), Kenzaburo Oe (Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!), and Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives); poets Suheir Hammad, Staceyann Chin, and Saul Williams; graphic novelists/illustrators Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis); punk art surrealist Winston Smith (Dead Kennedys album art and logo) and Seth Tobocman (You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive); musicians Manu Chao, Rachid Taha, Café Tacuba, DJ Spooky, and Violeta Parra; artist Ai Weiwei, philosophers like Slavoj Žižek; scientists like Brian Greene; environmentalists like Lester Brown, and many others representing economics, architecture, graphic design, photography, and medicine. Each stepped into the fray hoping to unplug not just the mechanism but also the mind-set of individualism and the neoliberal way of engaging the world.

So, creative response junks the view that change is impossible and resists those who dismiss anything that tries to advance change as “utopian,” a word now used as a slur to denounce the possible. You’re a utopian—you’re a fool, a dreamer, naive. The only things “possible” are gleaned through private pleasure and individual interactions with technology. “What the ruling ideology is telling us, maybe we will live forever, maybe we will become omnipotent, whatever you want—we will all travel to the moon—that’s all possible,” Žižek explains. “But a small social change of more health care is not possible. Maybe the time has come to change this and to dream less about these Gnostic possibilities in which we will all turn into digital entities and more about quite modest social changes.” Instead of the things that we used to invest in like community action and solidarity (now “impossible”) we focus on consumption as what binds us together, what satisfies us (always “possible”).

Now more than ever, we live in an age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants feeding creative response and the movement of world citizenship. “Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul—these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations,” Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk said. “Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness.” Such emigrations extend our perception and tailor our consciousness to the turmoil reverberating in the modern world. The role of artists, particularly those engaged in creative response, continues to be essential as our current political and economic climate continues to disintegrate. “I wonder whether one day we will wake up from the nightmare that is life for so many people,” Portuguese writer José Saramago wrote in The Notebook. “Persecuted for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I feel humble, almost insignificant, faced with the dignity and the courage of the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano, the man who has mastered the art of living.”

With his expose Gomorrah, Saviano presents in gripping detail the true story of unrestrained globalized hypercapitalism combined with the brutal violence of mafia corruption running wild in the pursuit of instantaneous wealth. The casualties are the most vulnerable human beings—the invisible class—on the planet; the new millennium migrants whose lives are simply tossed aside like yesterday’s trash. In his masterwork of creative response, Saviano merges prose with old-school investigative journalism, recalling the work of Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the Cities) and the literary touch of Gabriel García Márquez (News of a Kidnapping). Saviano faces death threats from the mafia and has been forced to live underground for years. For all this, celebrated Italian semiotician Umberto Eco calls Saviano a national hero.

“When we revolt, it’s not for a particular reason . . . there are many reasons but we revolt because we cannot breathe,” a character explains in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum. When the worn-out thinking of politics and stale pop culture institutions fail us, there is music, art, literature, and film, there is Miles Davis bending the notes to create a new way of saying what seems impossible to articulate, confusing to comprehend, and unsettling to address in the whirlwind of economic globalization and exponential technological change. As we bend, jump over, under, and around to find new spaces of freedom, we maintain a mysterious harmony that unites us and replenishes our inspiration. By cultivating a visionary approach, we maintain our sensitivity to human nature and our ability to adapt to the shifting concerns of our history. Creative response.

“So you have to use your intelligence and intuition,” French actress Juliette Binoche said. “And that’s why art is more important than politics.” Binoche made these remarks after winning the Best Actress Award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for her role in Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s magnificent Certified Copy, a film in which reflections multiply constantly, asking us to reconceptualize every action we see and every word we hear. Kiarostami is one of many filmmakers throughout the world who are inheritors and not imitators in bending the narrow constraints of storytelling, refusing to be narrative, documentary, journalistic, or just pop culture entertainment. It’s whatever the viewer conceives it to be. Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar; Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki; New Zealand’s Christine Jeffs; Romania’s Corneliu Porumboiu; Brazil’s Walter Salles; Hong Kong’s Wong Kar Wai; America’s John Sayles, Julie Dash, Spike Lee, Lucy Walker, and Jim Jarmusch; England’s Ken Loach; Germany’s Wim Wenders; and South Africa’s Neill Blomkamp all end up at a similar point as they work outside in and inside out to bring new work to the world. “Yes, there is a structure there,” John Sayles tells me. “When we can use the structure, let’s use the structure, but let’s not have the structure use us.”

New York City graffiti following the economic collapse of 2008. From the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

Ultimately, creative response refuses to accept the immutability and the unchallenged “truth” of standard operating procedures. The U.S. invasion of Iraq offers a telling example. The United States asserted that Saddam Hussein was so evil, so debased that he gassed his own people. “The question is, Did Hussein think of the Kurds as his own people? I think he saw them as a different people,” musician Ian MacKaye tells me. “Much like George Bush and his friends thought of the Iraqis as a different people. If you’re bombing people in another country, you’re killing your own people, because there’s only one people.” Picasso’s Guernica is a visual manifestation of what MacKaye describes: there’s only one people. That’s the enduring legacy and influence of creative response: it transmits something that is lasting and timeless, because at the core of the work is an awareness that is deep-rooted and ancient: only one people.

It’s for this reason that during the march to war in 2002 the United States forced U.N. officials to hang a blue curtain over a tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica at the entrance of the United Nations Security Council in New York. The location is where diplomats and others make statements to the press, and ostensibly officials thought it would be inappropriate for Colin Powell to speak about war in Iraq with an iconic protest against the inhumanity of war as his backdrop. They were afraid of people catching a glimpse of Guernica over Powell’s shoulder as his remarks were broadcast around the world, since it would pull down the curtain concealing the orchestrated con game the U.S. was playing. For this reason, it’s important to understand that creative response is first and foremost the images and the soundtrack we create together when we see injustice and start finding a new way to talk about it. Creative response is only the beginning of the conversation, but given the effort and the sensitivity, what follows can be profound, and the result can cultivate engagement.

As the contemporary world sways between collapse and evolution, we must be vigilant in our awareness that history is not a static thing that happened in the past. We are agents of an evolving planet, and history is being made by our actions or our indifference. As we wrestle against complicity and conformity, creative response allows for the reimagining of everything around us. It permits us to take a snapshot of our lives but then see the entire history of the world we wish to occupy, balancing the particular and the specific so we can locate our aspirations for something real and tangible. Creative response recognizes that we must break down the illusory wall between those who watch and those who act. Where everybody gets a chance to participate. Where we celebrate excellence and recognize shortcomings not as weakness but as points of engagement. Where people can discover new interests and unknown proclivities, mining them for all they’re worth. That’s a world worth living in and a world worth fighting for. Creative response underlines the affinity between the frame (life’s outline) and the image (our shared humanity), which always asks the spectator (us) to see more, to grasp the point from which we must cooperate, to see anew, to meet. It supplies a language we can use to write our own story, with words that might be foreign, populated not by fantasies but by action and people. Even though we may come to the theater of life as individuals, once inside we join together as an audience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Yrthya Dinzey-Flores and all our family, John Sherer and everyone at Perseus Books, Carl Bromley and all at Nation Books, Jonathan Gray and all at Gray Krauss Des Rochers, Mark Urman and the Paladin Films team, Wayne Kramer, Billy Bragg, Eve Ensler, Tom Morello, Shepard Fairey and all at Studio Number One and OBEY GIANT, Edwidge Danticat, DJ Spooky, Eugene Hütz, John Sayles, Jim Jarmsuch, Ian MacKaye, Hari Kunzru, Rob McKay, Margaret Saadi Kramer, William Clark, Hank O’Neal for his wonderful Ginsberg/Clash photos, Peter Hale of the Allen Ginsberg Estate, Adam Block of Sony Music, the Let Fury Have the Hour production team, all the past and current contributors, all the bookstores, universities, schools, community centers, theaters, and concert halls that invited me to share my work with an audience, La Lutta NMC, A Bricklayers Union Productions, and everyone else who provided support, insight, opinions, and love during the writing of this new edition.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN

1. Crass offered the only criticism of the Clash that has merit. The Clash inspired their political sensibility. Crass launched their own efforts to realize the non-compromise music-based militancy envisioned in the early days of punk. The American punk band Bad Brains also expanded the political activism of music during this time.

2. Strummer performed at the FBU benefit at Acton Town Hall, London, in November 2002, helping raise money and awareness for the Fire Brigade’s fair pay campaign.

3. Many critics hold that Sandinista!, the album following the monumental London Calling, was a missed opportunity for the Clash to expand on their groundbreaking prior recordings. Sandinista! is an important achievement that defined the Clash’s sound for the sheer breadth of influences, styles, and genres. Standout tracks include “Police on My Back,” “The Call Up,” “The Leader,” and “Washington Bullets.”

4. The Bobby Fuller Four was influenced by another rock ’n’ roll star from West Texas, Buddy Holly. Sonny Curtis, Holly’s lead guitarist, wrote “I Fought the Law.” In later years music influenced by the Bobby Fuller Four was recorded by such groups as the Clash, the Blasters, and Los Lobos.

5. Future Forests is a UK-based company with a global vision to protect the earth’s climate: “We recognise that to some degree we all contribute to global warming—but also that we can all do something to slow it down. That’s why we make it quick and easy for people and companies to find out how much carbon dioxide they produce; to provide them with straightforward ways of reducing those emissions, and interesting options for ‘neutralising’ what can’t be reduced. Those options include tree planting, and investments into climate friendly technology.”

6. The program was recorded every Saturday afternoon at the BBC Studios at Bush House, London, and was broadcast around the world. The first program consisted of American folk, reggae, African rock, and German techno. Global Boom Box, the pilot, was filmed and directed by Dick Rude, and was going to be a series on MTV2.

7. From Joe Strummer’s press release for his second album with the Mescaleros, Global A Go-Go.

THE REBEL WAY: ALEX COX, JIM JARMUSCH, AND DICK RUDE ON THE FILM WORK OF JOE STRUMMER

1. Earthquake Weather was released in 1989. The album hints at the work that Strummer would produce in the mid-1990s and early 2000s with the Mescaleros. A strong and interesting record, Earthquake benefits greatly from Joe Strummer’s impassioned charisma, his trademark musical experimentation and exploration, and his unique voice. The album is highlighted by the conviction of a musician who always gives a passionate and engaging performance.

2. Dick Rude, interview, April 20, 2004. Go to www.dickrude.biz/_lets_rock/_lets_rock_intro.htm to find out where you can see Let’s Rock Again.

3. Strummer made this T-shirt for an Anti-Nazi League performance and then wore it for many years. Brigade Rosse refers to the radical Italian political group Red Brigade. In 1978, they kidnapped and killed ex-Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. They are still politically active in Italy today.

4. The Clash would be part of the “MTV revolution” as well. The video for “Rock the Casbah” was a big hit for MTV, as it was played in heavy rotation in the early days of the network’s rise to video dominance.

5. See my chapter in this book, “White Riot or Right Riot: A Look Back at Punk Rock and Antiracism.”

6. Stacy Thompson, Punk Productions: Unfinished Business (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 164–168.

7. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 392.

8. It would take Scorsese another two decades to bring Gangs of New York to the screen. The King of Comedy is a stark examination of the American obsession with celebrity and fame. It stars Robert De Niro as the obsessed fan of Jerry Lewis’s TV show host character.

9. Clash on Broadway is an enjoyable historical record of the Clash’s Bond residency. The film captures the emerging hip-hop scene from break dancing to rap to grafitti. Even more interesting are the scenes filmed outside of Bonds, where the Clash had to contend with a fire marshal who ordered the venue shut down, an intimidating police presence, and a constant crush of fans.

10. Strummer produced the film with his wife, Lucinda Strummer.

11. Repo Man was the directorial debut of Alex Cox. The film is an innovative mix of science fiction, punk rock, and postmodern satire. It takes on 1980s Reagan America with sharp and humorous dialogue, as few films have done before or since. Cox elicits great performances from Stanton as a hardscrabble repo man, Estevez as an antagonistic young California punk, and Rude as a maniacal nihilistic hooligan. The score includes Latino punk band the Slugz with music by Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, and Fear playing throughout the film.

12. Alex Cox, interview, April 2004. For more information on Alex Cox, please go to www.alexcox.com.

13. As Cox explains: “William Walker was an American soldier of fortune who in 1853 tried to annex part of Mexico to the United States. He failed, though his invasion contributed to the climate of paranoia and violence which led to Mexico surrendering large areas of territory shortly thereafter. Two years later he invaded Nicaragua, ostensibly in support of one of the factions in a civil war. But his real intention was to take over the country and annex it to the U.S. He betrayed his allies and succeeded in making himself president. He ran Nicaragua, or attempted to run it, for two years. In the U.S. he had been an antislavery liberal, but in Nicaragua he abandoned all his liberal pretensions and attempted to institute slavery. He was kicked out of Central America by the combined armies of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras. Walker tried to go back twice and was eventually caught by the Hondurans and executed. He is relatively unknown today, but in his day he was fantastically popular in the United States. The newspapers wrote more about Walker than they did about Presidents Pierce or Buchanan.”

14. Released by Virgin/EMI, the soundtrack has been deleted from the catalog.

15. Bill Flanagan, “The Exile of Joe Strummer,” Musician, March 1988.

16. Marcus Gray, Last Gang in Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 467.

17. Ibid.

18. Directed by Marisa Silver, Permanent Record (1988) deals with teen suicide and stars Keanu Reeves. Strummer recorded several songs for the soundtrack under the name Joe Strummer and the Latino Rockabilly War. Some of these songs appear on Earthquake Weather.

19. Missteps along the way included using Strummer’s cover of the Celtic ballad “Minstrel Boy” on the Black Hawk Down soundtrack. The film is based on the October 3, 1993, U.S. raid on Somalia, where eighteen soldiers were lost and Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. Directed by Ridley Scott, the film does not seem like something Strummer would support, particularly in light of his political activism around globalization, imperialism, and racism. Many leading American movie critics took umbrage at the film’s obvious manipulation of the truth by failing to tell the Somali side of the story while whitewashing the U.S. role in the military operation. Troublingly, the character Ewan McGregor plays as a war hero is currently serving a prison sentence for raping a twelve-year-old girl, and there is evidence that U.S. troops shot and killed women and children during the mission.

20. The video was released October 21, 2003. “Redemption Song” was the second single following “Coma Girl” off the album Streetcore. The mural appears outside of Jesse Malin’s Niagara bar in New York City. Malin, a close friend of Strummer’s, is the lead singer of D-Generation, the group spearheading the revival of garage rock.

21. In the 1990s, Strummer performed with the Pogues for a time, contributed songs to soundtracks including When Pigs Fly and Grosse Point Blank, and appeared in the films I Hired a Contract Killer and Docteur Chance.

CLASH AND BURN

1. Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (London: Verso, 2003), 3.

2. Ibid., 4.

3. Maynard Mack, ed., The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 2:340.

4. Ibid., 642–643.

5. Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution, 281.

6. Ibid.

7. David Quantick, The Clash; ed. John Aizlewood, (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000), 14.

8. The illusion of the entire country bowing before the Queen, celebrating the monarchy, was echoed early in the Reagan administration when “the Great Communicator” proposed putting up decals of a thriving South Bronx visible from the highways in order to conceal the systematic looting and burning of the area by landlords and developers.

9. The album is on the verge of recognizing that in the post-Fordist regime the concept of the weekend will soon be obsolete. The new “flexible pattern of accumulation”—originally presented as flexible hours—is simply that we all work all the time.

10. Quantick, The Clash, 4.

11. This is a far cry from the post-gentrification image of Notting Hill as a pristine playground for the rich where Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts frolic, in the Hollywood film of the same title.

12. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 64.

13. Ibid., 65.

14. Quantick, The Clash, 25.

15. John Harris, “The Bland Play On,” Guardian, May 8, 2004, 16–17.

16. Hebdige, Subculture, 67.

17. Antonino D’Ambrosio, “Let Fury Have the Hour: The Passionate Politics of Joe Strummer,” Monthly Review, June 2003, 43.

18. Tony Mitchell, Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 9.

ALWAYS PAYING ATTENTION: JOE STRUMMER’S LIFE AND LEGACY

1. Jason Gross, “Interview with Joe Strummer,” Perfect Sound Forever, www.furious.com/perfect/joestrummer.html.

2. Shawna Kenney, “Joe Strummer: Still Punk After All These Years?—Interview,” Unpop, www.unpop.com/features/int/strummer.htm.

3. Greil Marcus, Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1982 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 29.

4. Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (New York: Vintage, 1988), 239.

5. Ibid., 233.

6. Judy McGuire, “Interview with Joe Strummer,” Punk, www.punkmagazine.com/morestuff/joe_strummer.html.

7. “Interview with Joe Strummer,” www.strummersite.com/Joe%20Strummer%20interview.html.

WHITE RIOT OR RIGHT RIOT: A LOOK BACK AT PUNK ROCK AND ANTIRACISM

1. Joe Strummer, interview, April 2002. All Strummer quotes are taken from this interview unless otherwise noted.

2. On December 1, 1976, the Sex Pistols appeared on Thames Today; Bill Grundy interviewed them a week after the release of the single “Anarchy in the UK.” The interview was “designed to investigate the blossoming moral abyss, which was punk.” The show featured an allegedly drunk Grundy goading the Pistols into what became a profanity-laden conversation.

3. The most memorable Rock Against Racism event was Carnival Against the Nazis in April 1978. A huge rally of 100,000 people marched the six miles from Trafalgar Square through London’s East End—the heart of National Front territory—to a Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park. This would be the largest crowd the Clash would perform in front of. Also on the bill were X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse, and Tom Robinson. Today the Anti-Nazi League is campaigning again in the name of Love Music Hate Racism—a demonstration of the positive energy of the music scene against the hate-fueled beliefs of the British National Party, National Front, and Combat 18.

4. Strummer was a diplomat’s son and spent time in countries like Turkey, where he was born. Simonon grew up in Brixton, a poor section of inner-city London largely populated by Afro-Caribbeans, and witnessed terrible instances of police and state-instigated violence against them.

5. Marcus Gray, Last Gang in Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 319.

6. “I Won’t Let That Dago By: Rethinking Punk and Racism,” in Roger Sabin, ed.,Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London: Routledge: 1999), 213.

7. The National Front was formed in Westminster, England, in 1967. Among their basic principles is that multiracialism and immigration are wrong and must be stopped. All current racial and ethnic minorities must be removed by any means necessary. It continues to be a social and political force not only in England but also in other countries, including France and Germany. Presently, the National Front in England has morphed into the British National Party.

8. Skrewdriver was one of the first and the most successful white supremacist groups in not only the punk scene but also the music scene in general. Violent and vicious, they believed in “racial purity” and the “need for a race war.” Ian Stuart, the leader singer/songwriter, is considered the founder of the racialist movement. Bulldog, September 1993.

9. “I Won’t Let That Dago By,” 210.

10. Music history, not just punk, is rife with fascist and racist ideology used to strike a dangerous, sinister pose. Here are a few examples. When Joy Division reformed after Ian Curtis’s suicide, they used a term associated with the Hitler era, “new order” (Hitler’s plan for controlling the world). Other instances in English rock include David Bowie’s “thin white duke” phase, which was his self-proclaimed “fascist period.” Eric Clapton addressed a crowd in a concert hall, asking them to stop Britain from becoming a “black colony” and adding that “he’d like to get the foreigners out.” In March 1979 in Columbus, Ohio, Elvis Costello told an interviewer that James Brown was “a jive ass nigger” and Ray Charles “a blind, ignorant nigger.”

11. There were notable exceptions. For example, the epic strike by Asian workers at Grunwick in North London was a huge catalyst for solidarity from left groups and white and black trade unionists.

12. “I Won’t Let That Dago By,” 216.

13. Ibid.

14. Mailer’s fascination with black masculinity in The White Negro is indicative of his fixation on machismo. For another example, see his novel The American Dream.

15. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dial, 1961), 182.

16. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam’s, 1959), 348.

17. Ibid.

18. James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in Nobody Knows My Name, 182.

19. Ibid., 181.

20. Thomas S. Hibbs, “Angst, American Style: A Review of Existential America, by George Cotkin,” Claremont Review of Books, September 22, 2003.

21. Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, 275. Ivan Julian was the guitarist for Richard Hell and Voidoids.

22. Ibid., 279.

23. Ibid., 282.

24. Political punk organizations, including Punk Voter, are involved in political organizing in areas including voting, the arts, and free speech.

25. Joe Strummer, interview, April 2002.

26. Paul Johnson of Time magazine glowingly described Thatcher as a “champion of free minds and markets” who “helped topple the welfare state and make the world safer for capitalism.” Time, April 13, 1998.

27. Linton Kwesi Johnson is a towering figure in reggae music. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in the Brixton section of London, Johnson invented dub poetry, a type of toasting descended from the DJ stylings of U-Roy and I-Roy. Johnson was also instrumental (with his friend Darcus Howe) in publishing a socialist-oriented London-based newspaper, Race Today, that offered him and like-minded Britons, both black and white, an outlet to discuss the racial issues that were tearing the country apart.

28. Bev Forbes, “Word Warrior,” Searchlight, January 2000.

29. Crass produced politically and musically radical records. They took on the horrors of war, injustice, sexism, racism, media hegemony, and the flaws of the punk movement. In many ways, they embodied the hope and potential of music as an agent of social and political change. They put out their own records and formed an anarchist commune that worked with other artists and labels, for and on the behalf of various political causes.

30. Robert Christgau, “Sense Outa Nonsense,” Village Voice, April 23, 1991.

31. Ibid.

YOU CAN’T HAVE A REVOLUTION WITHOUT SONGS: THE LEGACY OF VÍCTOR JARA AND THE POLITICAL FOLK MUSIC OF CAETANO VELOSO, SILVIO RODRÍGUEZ, AND JOE STRUMMER

1. “You can’t have a revolution without songs” was emblazoned on a banner suspended over Salvadore Allende following his election as president of Chile. It shows the influence that the new song movement [nueva canción] had over the political process in Chile.

2. Strummer met Tymon Dogg when the latter was busking in the London underground. The formed a strong friendship and musical relationship. Dogg taught Strummer to play the ukulele and compose folk music. They collaborated sporadically while Strummer was with the Clash but worked closely when Dogg joined the Mescaleros on Global A Go-Go.

3. Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, released in 1997, was the first full-length solo album from Strummer in ten years. Prior to that he had released Earthquake Weather, not his finest effort, and had done some fine work composing music for films. Notable soundtracks include Walker and Permanent Record. Strummer told me that no one should listen to his new work, which includes two albums proceding Rock Art. “If people were expecting to hear the Clash,” he told me, “do me a favor and don’t buy it unless you are willing to really listen to something new from me.”

4. John Holmstrom, “An Interview with Joey and Johnny Ramone,” Punk, October-November 1977.

5. Steve Wishnia, “Gabba Gabba Hey,” In These Times, May 28, 2001. The Ramones eventually adopted a more progressive stance. While never overtly political, Joey Ramone penned the song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” after Ronald Reagan visited a German cemetery in 1985 and left a wreath commemorating German war dead, including many SS soldiers.

6. The most obvious example of this was the Sex Pistols’ refrain “no future” on the track “God Save the Queen” from Never Mind the Bullocks. The Clash and Strummer, on the other hand, were employing slogans like “positive change,” “passion is a fashion,” and so on.

7. There are notable exceptions to this including Bad Religion, NOFX, Anti-Flag, RICANSTRUCTION, Renegades of Punk, the 512 Collective, and others.

8. While the Clash enjoyed great audience success for a short time, whether they were financially successful is unclear. They signed a record contract that heavily favored their record company, Epic: ten years, ten albums, $100,000. In addition, in a dispute with their label over the pricing of the three-record album Sandinista!, the Clash forfeited their royalties in exchange for pricing the album as one record to keep it affordable for their listeners.

9. Strummer at one time described Mano Negra’s music as having the same force as that of the Clash. Strummer, interview by Mark Vennard, BBC Online, Winter 2002.

10. Standout Mano Negra records include Puta’s Fever, Patchanka, and Casa Babylon. Manu Chao solo albums include Clandestino and Proxima Estacion: Esperanza.

11. Joe Strummer, interview by Antonino D’Ambrosio, April 2002.

12. Antonino D’Ambrosio, “Soundtrack to Struggle,” Color Lines, Winter 2003–2004. Léo Ferré was a precursor to the spoken word artists of today. The events of May 1968 in France left a mark on Ferré. In early 1969, he released a new album inspired by the agitation of May ’68 with such songs as “Comme une fílle,” “L’été 68,” and “Les Anarchistes.”

13. The history of New Song coincides with political events occurring in Latin America and U.S. influence on Central and South American countries. The United States has often sought to manipulate events in these countries for its own benefit. The artists of New Song use this as a basis for the themes of their songs.

14. The creation of Casa de las Américas was a way of guaranteeing that revolutionary artists who were persecuted and condemned in their own countries would always have a podium to speak from.

15. Joan Jara, An Unfinished Song: The Life of Victor Jara (UK: Tichnor & Fields, n.d.). Reviewed by Tony Saunois in Socialism Today, April 2000.

16. The Popular Unity Party had plans to expand education and supply housing, free medical care, state control of oil refineries, mines, etc., and return land to the people, among other social programs.

17. Jara, Unfinished Song.

18. There are many fine books and other media accounts of the coup d’état but none as powerful as filmmaker Patricio Guzman’s exceptional documentary Battle of Chile. Guzman was forced into exile in France following the coup. In addition, the plan to overthrow Allende was devised by then secretary of state Henry Kissinger and received financial support from the Ford Foundation and various U.S. conglomerates.

19. Thousands of people remain missing to this day, and their families continue to search for them.

20. Many stories indicate that Víctor Jara’s hands and testicles were cut off and his tongue cut out so that he could not perform for his fellow prisoners. But in Victor: An Unfinished Song, Jara’s wife Joan indicates that when she saw him after his death his hands were broken, not severed.

21. From the companion booklet bound with the CD Victor Jara: El Creador.

22. Quote from Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, and Jon Lusk, eds., The Rough Guide to World Music (Rough Guides, 2006), “The Uncompromising Song” in vol. 2. For more on Gaughan, check out his records, including No More Forever, Handful of Earth, and Redwood Cathedral.

23. “Bard of Freedom: Dick Gaughan speaks with Bill Nevins,” Rootsworld, Summer 1998.

24. Derek Beres, “Caetano Veloso and the Meaning of Exile,” Rattapallax 9 (2007).

25. Much has been made of this perceived rivalry. In his autobiography, Tropical Truth, Veloso emphasizes that any rivalry was overblown and really did not exist at all.

26. Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (New York: Da Capo, 2003), 31.

27. Rogério Duarte was a Bahian intellectual, activist, and teacher whose lasting and profound friendship with Veloso began in 1964.

28. Veloso, Tropical Truth, 61.

29. Veloso modeled this on a similar festival created by Italian artists who found it effective in organizing creative political activity in Italy.

30. Mercedes Sosa is a giant of contemporary music. Strummer described her music as “heroic, possessing the essence of beauty.” Sosa was viewed as a serious threat by the Argentine government, and in 1975 she was arrested during a live performance. Forced to leave Argentina, she remained in exile for three years. Her brilliant works include La Negra, Sino, and Misa Criolla, for which she won a Grammy in 2000.

31. From liner notes to Cuban Classics, vol. 1, The Greatest Hits of Silvio Rodríguez: Canciones Urgentes.

32. Ibid.

33. Veloso, Tropical Truth, 61.

THE WORLD IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR: TWO CREATIVE ACTIVISTS, MICHAEL FRANTI AND TIM ROBBINS, CONTINUE JOE STRUMMER’S LEGACY

1. Michael Franti, interview, April 15, 2004.

2. Mikey Dread’s influence on the Clash and Strummer was extensive and far-reaching. It can be heard on Clash recordings including the antiwar song “The Call Up.” In addition, “Police on My Back” continues the Clash’s impressive reinterpretation of a song first recorded by East London’s The Equals, led by West Indian Eddy Grant. See Carter Van Pelt, “When the Two Sevens Clashed,” in this volume for more on Mikey Dread and the Clash.

3. Tim Robbins, interview, May 5, 2004.

4. L. M. Bogad, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 2004).

5. See Antonino D’Ambrosio, “The Playwright vs. the Prime Minister,” The Progressive, April 2004.

6. One of Robbins’s earliest performances was with his father, Gil Robbins, when they performed a folk song, “The Ink Is Black, the Page Is White,” in Greenwich Village.

7. Lorca’s murder at the hand of nationalists took away one of the world’s most gifted dramatists and poets. He was thirty-eight. His work includes Romancero Gitano, The Gypsy Ballads of García Lorca, Poema del Cante Jondo, and Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter and Other Poems. Francisco Franco, who had ordered Lorca killed, ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. Known as “el Caudillo” (“the leader”), he presided over the authoritarian government that had overthrown the Second Spanish Republic.

8. Bob Roberts is a political satire shot as a mockumentary, following a right-wing senatorial candidate played by Robbins who campaigns by singing folk songs that attack his liberal opponent, played by Gore Vidal. Robbins wrote the script and the songs, directed, starred in, and produced Bob Roberts. Dead Man Walking is based on a true story dealing with the debate surrounding capital punishment. Robbins’s longtime partner, Susan Sarandon, won an Oscar for her performance in the film, which includes an excellent performance by Sean Penn.

9. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was named for Augusto César Sandino, a former insurgent leader. It was formed in 1962 to oppose the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Nicaragua. In 1979 the Sandinistas launched an offensive from Costa Rica and Honduras that toppled Somoza. They nationalized such industries as banking and mining. The United States organized and supported guerrillas known as Contras to overthrow the Sandinista-dominated government.

10. In 1994 Human Rights Watch issued a report on U.S. human rights violations: “The indefinite detention of HIV-positive Haitian asylum-seekers at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, a practice discontinued in the summer of 1993 by court order, violated Article 7, which forbids cruel inhuman or degrading treatment, and Article 9, which requires a statutory basis for detention. It also violated Article 10, which forbids inhumane conditions of confinement, and Article 26, which forbids discrimination on the basis of national origin (only Haitians were subject to medical screening and detention based on HIV status; intercepted Cubans, for example, were not medically screened and were transported directly to the United States). The practice of indefinitely detaining all undocumented people, including children, violates Article 9’s prohibition of arbitrary detention.”

11. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media outlet, viciously attacked the play, calling it “anti-American,” “not realistic, devoid of facts.” Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic wrote in a review titled “Devious Plot” that “Embedded, moreover, is not only dumb. It is poisonous, a production-length conspiracy theory guilty of the very sins it attributes to the ‘cabal’ that it claims to expose.”

12. In 1935, 8 million Americans were out of work and 3 million youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four were on relief. On May 6 of that year the government created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) through Executive Order 7034. The Federal Theater Project (FTP) was one of four (later five) arts projects within the WPA; the arts projects were known collectively as Federal Project Number One. The FTP was the federal government’s largest and most ambitious effort to organize and produce theater events.

13. Please see the transcript of the speech given by actor Tim Robbins to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2003, www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htm.

FUTURE LISTENING, WATCHING, READING, AND SEEING

FUTURE LISTENING

7 Seconds. 1984. Crew. Better Youth Organization, 1994, compact disc.[*]

Amadou & Mariam. 1999. Tje Ni Mousso. Circular Moves, 2000, compact disc.

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra. 2010. Who Is This America? Ropeadope, compact disc.

At the Drive-In. 2000. Relationship of Command. Virgin, compact disc.

Bad Brains. 1983. Rock for Light. Caroline Distributions, compact disc.

——. 1986. I Against I. SST Records, compact disc.

Bartók, Béla. Suite for Orchestra No. 1, Sz. 31, BB 39. (Op. 3). Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra. Zoltán Kocsis. Hungaroton Sacd, compact disc, 2010.

Black Flag. 1981. Damaged. SST Records, compact disc.

Black Star. 2002. Black Star. Rawkus Records, compact disc.

Bolden, Buddy. 1997. Buddy Bolden’s Blues. ITM, compact disc.

Bragg, Billy. 1986. Talking with the Taxman About Poetry. Yep Roc Records, 2006, compact disc.

Bragg, Billy, and Wilco. 1998. Mermaid Avenue. Elektra, compact disc.

Buarque, Chico. 1966. “A Banda.” In Chico Total, Motor Music, 1997, compact disc.

Cage, John. 1997. The Seasons. ECM, compact disc.

Cash, Johnny. 1994. American Recordings. American/Sony Music Entertainment, compact disc.

The Clash. 1977. The Clash. Sony Music Entertainment, 2000, compact disc.

———. 1978. Give ’Em Enough Rope. Sony Music Entertainment, 2000, compact disc.

———. 1979. London Calling. Sony Music Entertainment, 2000, compact disc.

———. 1981. Sandinista! Sony Music Entertainment, 2000, compact disc.

———. 1982. Combat Rock. Sony Music Entertainment, 2000, compact disc.

———. 1993. Super Black Market Clash. Sony Music Entertainment, 2000, compact disc.

Colón, Willie. 1969. Cosa Nuestra. Fania, 2000, compact disc.

Copeland, Aaron. 1990. Copeland Conducts Copeland (Appalachian Spring). Columbia symphony, compact disc.

Davis, Miles. 1960. Sketches of Spain. Sony Music Entertainment, 2000, compact disc.

———. 1972. On the Corner. Sony Music Entertainment, 2000, compact disc.

Death. 2009. . . . For the Whole World to See. Drag City, compact disc.

Diddley, Bo. 1958. Bo Diddley. MCA, 1986, compact disc.

DJ Shadow. 1996. Endtroducing. Mo Wax, compact disc.

Ellington, Duke. 1978. Take the A Train. Compose Big Band, compact disc.

Erik B., and Rakim. 1987. Paid in Full. 4th & Broadway, 1996, compact disc.

Freestyle Fellowship. 1993. Inner City Griots. 4th & Broadway, compact disc.

Fugazi. 1990. Repeater. Dischord Records, compact disc.

———. 1991. Steady Diet of Nothing. Dischord Records, compact disc.

Gang of Four. 1979. Entertainment! Rhino, 2005, compact disc.

Ginsberg, Allen. 1983. First Blues. Water Music Records, 2006, compact disc.

Gogol Bordello. 2005. Gypsy Punks Underdog World Strike. Side One Dummy, compact disc.

———. 2010. Trans-Continental Hustle, American Recordings, compact

Guerrero, Tommy. 2003. Soul Food Taqueria. Mo’ Wax, compact disc.

Guru. 1993. Jazzmatazz. Virgin Records, compact disc.

———. 1995. Jazzmatazz, Vol. 2. Virgin Records, compact disc.

Guthrie, Woody. 1941. “Buffalo Skinners.” In Struggle: Documentary No. 1. Smithsonian Folkways, 1990, compact disc.

Hancock, Herbie. 1965. Maiden Voyage. Blue Note, compact disc.

Hayes, Sean. 2010. Run Wolves Run. Sean Hayes Music, compact disc.

Hines, Earl. 1965. Blues in Thirds. Black Lion, 1989, compact disc.

———. 1970. The Quintessential Recording Session. Chiaroscuro, LP (vinyl).

The Jam. 1978. All Mod Cons. Ume Imports, 2004, compact disc.

Jarret, Keith. 1975. The Köln Concert. ECM, 1999, compact disc.

Keita, Salif. Destiny of a Noble Outcast. 1991. New York: Polygram, VHS.

Kidjo, Angélique. 1991. Logozo. Mango, compact disc.

The Kominas. 2008. Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay. The Kominas, compact disc.

Kramer, Wayne. 2002. Return of Citizen Wayne. Dm Records, 2009, compact disc.

Kuti, Fela. 1977. Zombie. MCA, 2001, compact disc.

———. 1981. Black President. EMI Nigeria, compact disc.

Leaders of the New School. 1991. A Future Without a Past. Elektra, compact disc.

Les Nubians. 1998. Princesses Nubiennes. Virgin, compact disc.

Maal, Baaba, and Mansour Seck. 1989. Djam Leelii. Palm Pictures, 1998, compact disc

Makeba, Miriam. 1960. Miriam Makeba. RCA, Vinyl LP.

Massive Attack. 1998. Mezzanine. Virgin, compact disc.

The Mekons. 1989. The Mekons Rock ’n Roll. A&M, compact disc.

Minor Threat. 1984. Out of Step. Dischord Records, 1991, compact disc.

MC5. 1969. Kick Out the Jams. Elektra, 1991, compact disc.

———. 1970. Back in the USA. Rhino, 1992, compact disc.

———. 1971. High Time. Rhino, 1992, compact disc.

Ocote Soul Sounds. 2009. Coconut Rock. Eighteenth Street, compact disc.

Odetta. 1956. Sings Ballads and Blues. Tradition Records, 1996, compact disc.

———. 1960. Ballads for Americans and Other American Ballads. Vanguard, Vinyl LP.

Perry, Lee “Scratch.” 1978. Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Cornbread. VP Records, compact disc.

Poor Righteous Teachers. 1990. Holy Intellect. Profile, compact disc.

Public Enemy. 1987. Yo! Bum Rush the Show. Def Jam, 1995, compact disc.

———. 1988. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Def Jam, 1995, compact disc.

———. 1990. Fear of a Black Planet. Def Jam, 1994, compact disc.

———. 1991. Apocalypse 91 . . . The Enemy Strikes Back. Def Jam, 1994, compact disc.

Rise Against. 2006. The Sufferer and The Witness. Geffen Records, compact disc.

Rodríguez, Silvio. 1993. “Unicorno.” In Unicornio/Al Final de Este Viaje. FNC, compact disc.

The Roots. 1995. Do You Want More?!!!??!. DGC, compact disc.

——. 1996. Illadelph Halflife. DGC, compact disc.

Satie, Erik. 1990. Trois Gymnopédies. Pascal Rogé. Decca, compact disc.

The Slackers. 1998. The Question. Hellcat Records, compact disc.

———. 2010. The Great Rocksteady Swindle. Hellcat Records, compact disc.

Soul Side. 1987. Trigger. Dischord Records, 12” EP vinyl.

Spaccanapoli. 2000. Lost Souls. Real World, 2008, compact disc.

Stravinsky, Igor. Rite of Spring. 1962. Columbia Symphony, compact disc, 1988.

Strummer, Joe, and the Mescaleros. 1999. Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. Epitaph Records, compact disc.

———. 2001. Global A Go-Go. Epitaph Records, compact disc.

———. 2003. Streetcore. Epitaph Records, compact disc.

Taha, Rachid. 2000. Made in Medina. Polygram, compact disc.

Television. 1977. Marquee Moon. Elektra, compact disc.

Toots and the Maytals. 1974. In the Dark. Trojan Records, 2007, compact disc.

———. 1976. Reggae Got Soul. Mango, 1989, compact disc.

Various Artists. 1991. State of the Union: DC Benefit Compilation. Dischord Records, compact disc.

Veloso, Caetano. 1968. “Algeria, Algeria.” In Caetano Veloso. Polygram, 2000, compact disc.

Wu Tang Clan. 1993. Enter the Wu Tang-36 Chambers, RCA Records, 2007, compact disc.

FUTURE WATCHING

12:08 East of Bucharest. 2006. Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. New York: Tartan Video, 2007, DVD.[*]

35 Shots of Rum. 2008. Directed by Claire Denis. New York: Cinema Guild, 2010, DVD.

The 400 Blows, 1959. Directed by Francois Truffaut. New York: Criterion, 2006, DVD.

The Agronomist. 2003. Directed by Jonathan Demme. Los Angeles: New Line Home Video, 2005, DVD.

Army of Shadows. 1969. Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. New York: Criterion, 2007, DVD.

Au Revoir, Les Enfants. 1987. Directed by Louis Malle. New York: Criterion, 2006, DVD.

Baby It’s You. 1983. Directed by John Sayles. San Diego: Legend Films, 2008, DVD.

The Bad Sleep Well. 1960. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2006, DVD.

Biutiful. 2010. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Los Angeles: Roadside Attraction, 2011, DVD.

Bob Roberts. 1992. Directed by Tim Robbins. New York: Lions Gate, 2001, DVD.

Bus 174. 2002. Directed by José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda. New York: Arts Alliance America: 2004, DVD.

Caro Diario. 1993. Directed by Nanni Moretti. Los Angeles: New Line Home Video, 1998, VHS.

Daughter of the Dust. 1991. Directed by Julie Dash. New York: Kino International, 2000, DVD.

The Exterminating Angel. 1962. Directed by Luis Buñuel. New York: Criterion, 2009, DVD.

The Gleaners and I. 2000. Directed by Agnès Varda. New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2002, DVD.

La Grande Illusion. 1937. Directed by Jean Renoir. New York: Criterion, 1999, DVD.

Gomorrah. 2008. Directed by Matteo Garrone. New York: Criterion, 2009, DVD.

La Haine. 1995. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. New York: Criterion, 2007, DVD.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour. 1959. Directed by Alain Resnais. New York: Criterion, 2003, DVD.

La Jetée. 1962. Directed by Chris Marker. New York: Criterion, 2007, DVD.

Lights in the Dusk. 2006. Directed by Aki Kaurismäki. Culver City, CA: Strand Releasing, 2007, DVD.

Matewan. 1987. Directed by John Sayles. Santa Monica: Artisan Entertainment, 2001, DVD.

Moolaadé. 2005. Directed by Ousmane Sembène. New York: New Yorker Video, 2007, DVD.

Mystery Train. 1989. Directed by Jim Jarmusch. New York: Criterion, 2010, DVD.

The Organizer. 1963. Directed by Mario Monicelli. Rome, Italy: Cristaldi Films, 2007, DVD.

Painters Painting. 1973. Directed by Emile de Antonio. New York: Virgil Film and Entertainment, 2009, DVD.

Pan’s Labyrinth. 2006. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Los Angeles: New Line Home Video, 2007, DVD.

Proletariat Trilogy. (Shadows in Paradise / Ariel / The Match Factory Girl). 1986, 1988, 1990. Directed by Aki Kaurismäki. New York: Criterion, 2008, DVD.

The Punk Rock Movie. 1978. Directed by Don Letts. London: EMI, 2006, DVD.

Repo Man. 1984. Directed by Alex Cox. Troy, MI: Starz/Anchor Bay, 2000, DVD.

Rude Boy. 1980. Directed by Jack Hazan and David Mingay. Wallingford, CT: Prism Leisure, 2004, DVD.

The Secret of the Grain. 2007. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. New York: Criterion, 2010, DVD.

Straight to Hell. 1987. Directed by Alex Cox. Troy, MI: Starz/Anchor Bay, 2001, DVD.

Syndromes and a Century. 2006. Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Culver City, CA: Strand Releasing, 2008, DVD.

Walker. 1987. Directed by Alex Cox. New York: Criterion, 2008, DVD.

Week End. 1967. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. New York: New Yorker Video, 2005, DVD.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley. 2006. Directed by Ken Loach. Santa Monica: Genius Products, 2007, DVD.

FUTURE READING

Achebe, Chinua. 1994. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor.

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. 2001. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Mariner.

Avedon, Richard. 1994. Evidence: 1944–1994. New York: Random House,

Baldwin, James. 1984. Notes on a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bolaño, Roberto. 2007. The Savage Detectives. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Bragg, Billy. 2007. The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging. London: Transworld Publishers.

Brecht, Bertolt. 2001. Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated and edited by John Willet. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bulgakov, Mikhail. 2001. The Master and Margarita. New York: Penguin Classics.

Cage, John. 1978. A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-One Waltzes, and Fifty-Six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity for Performer(s) or Listener(s) or Record Maker(s). New York: Henmar Press.

Capa, Robert. 2005. Photographs. New York: Aperture.

Camus, Albert. 1977. “Melusina’s Book.” In Youthful Writings. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books.

Danticat, Edwidge. 2008. Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Vintage.

———. 2010. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time Images. Translated by Hugh Tomilson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Didion, Joan. 2008. Slouching Toward Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Dunn, Christopher. Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture. 2001. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

Ellison, Harlan. 1965. PAINGOD: Repent Harlequin said the Ticktockman; Crackpots; Sleeping Dogs; Bright Eyes; The Discarded; Wanted in Surgery; Deeper Than the Darkness. Salem: Pyramid Books.

Fo, Dario. 1991. The Tricks of the Trade. London: Routledge.

Frank, Robert. 2008. The Americans. London: Steidl.

Galeano, Eduardo. 2003. Football in Sun & Shadow. New York: Fourth Estate Paperbacks.

———. 2009. Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. New York: Nation Books.

Ginsberg, Allen. 2000. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995. New York: HarperCollins.

Gould, Stephen J., and Rosamond Wolff Purcell. 2000. Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Greene, Brian. 2004. Fabric of the Cosmos. New York: Knopf.

Hebdige, Dick. 1991. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Methuen.

Hesse, Hermann. 2002. The Glass Bead Game: Magister Ludi. New York: Picador USA.

Johnson, Linton Kwesi. 1996. Dread, Beat and Blood. Paris: Bogle L’Ouverture Press.

Kunzru, Hari. Forthcoming, 2012. Gods Without Men. New York: Knopf.

Levine, Philip. 2004. Breath: Poems. New York: Knopf.

Mailer, Norman. 1999. An American Dream. New York: Vintage Books.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. 1997. War and Peace in the Global Village. San Francisco: HardWired.

Montaigne, Michel de. 1999. The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne: Comprising the Life of the Wisest Man of His Times. Boston: David R. Godine.

Moravia, Alberto. 1999. The Conformist. Hanover: Zoland Books.

Newfield, Jack. 1966. A Prophetic Minority. New York: New American Library.

Orwell, George. 1980. Homage to Catalonia. Boston: Mariner Books.

Stein, Gertrude. 1959. Picasso. Boston: Beacon Press.

Press, Hans Jürgen. 2005. Aventuras de la Mano Negra. Barcelona: Espasa-Calpe.

Russell, Bertrand. 1950. Unpopular Essays: 12 Adventures in Argument. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Saramago, José. 2011. The Notebook. New York: Verso.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1963. Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr. New York: Pantheon.

Saunders, Edward. 2000. The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem. New York: Overlook Press.

Sayles, John. 2005. Union Dues. New York: Nation Books.

Seldes, George. 1935. Freedom of the Press. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Thompson, Hunter S. 1996. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. New York: Random House.

Thomson, David. 1983. The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

Vaneigem, Raoul. 2001. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Wellington, New Zealand: Rebel Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. Interrogating the Real. New York: Continuum.

———. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press.

FUTURE SEEING

Basquiat, Jean-Michel. 1981. Per Capita. Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas. The Stephanie and Peter Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT.

———. 1983. The Nile. Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas mounted on wood supports. Collection Enrico Navarra.

———. 1984. Gold Griot. Oil and oil paintstick on wood. Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica.

Goya, Francisco. 1814. The Third of May 1808. Oil on canvas. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Hyppolite, Hector. 1948, St. Francis and the Christ Child. Oil on board. Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee.

———. 1947. Maitresse Erzulie. Centre d’Art, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Kahlo, Frida. Roots. 1943. Oil on metal. Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico.

———. 1946. Tree of Hope. Oil on masonite. Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico.

Klee, Paul. 1920. Angelus Novus. Cooper etching plate, Intaglio printing with acidic watercolor on drypoint. Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Magritte, René. 1933. The Human Condition. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Modotti, Tina. 1927. Bandolier, Corn, Guitar. Throckmorton Fine Art, New York.

—. 1929. Hands of the Puppeteer. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis.

Modigliani, Amedeo. 1919. Gypsy Woman with Baby. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Picasso, Pablo. 1937. Dream and Lie of Franco. Etching and aquatint on plate and sheet. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

———. 1937. Guernica. Oil on canvas. Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Rivera, Diego. 1930. Mercado de Tehuantepec. Lithograph. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

———. 1931. Sugarcane. Portable fresco panel. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

Rothko, Mark. 1959. Untitled (Seagram mural sketch). National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation.

Strand, Paul. 1916. Abstraction. Twin Lakes, Connecticut. Silver-platinum print. Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 copyright © 1997, Aperture Foundation, Paul Strand Archive. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

———. 1916. Blind. Platinum print. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933. Copyright © 1997, Aperture Foundation, Paul Strand Archive. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Weiwei, Ai. 2010. Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

———. 2010. Sunflower Seeds. The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei, Tate Modern, London.

_____________________

[*] In entries with two dates of release like this one, the first year shown is the date the work was originally released on CD, the second date is the most recent release commonly available.

[1] In entries such as these, the first year shown is the date the work was originally released on CD; the second date is the most recent release commonly available.

THE AUTHOR

Antonino D’Ambrosio, a writer, filmmaker, and visual artist, is the author of the critically acclaimed A Heartbeat and A Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears with original art by Shepard Fairey and rarely seen photography from celebrated photographer Jim Marshall. Legendary musician Pete Seeger describes the book as “a rare work that is beautiful and inspiring”; acclaimed historian Howard Zinn calls the book an “important contribution to the cultural history of our time”; and visionary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch lauds the book as “a truly fascinating journey.” D’Ambrosio’s most recent book, Mayday, is a unique collaboration with Shepard Fairey. Musically, D’Ambrosio is working with Chuck D of Public Enemy, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, and Martin Perna of Antibalas on a new project.

D’Ambrosio’s writing has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, The Believer, Salon.com, and many other publications. A frequent guest on TV and radio, D’Ambrosio has hosted radio shows on WBAI and East Village Radio. Chuck D of Public Enemy has described him as “the voice of a new generation—passionate, intelligent, and fierce—whose work educates and inspires.” D’Ambrosio has produced more than fifteen documentaries and other films, including the award-winning film No Free Lunch, starring comedian Lewis Black, which received a notice of distinction from Vanity Fair in 2008. During 2009—2010, D’Ambrosio produced and performed in a series of multimedia special events in support of his book A Heartbeat and a Guitar. Performers included Antibalas, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Chuck D, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Chris Mills, Sean Hayes, Shepard Fairey, Ocote Soul Sounds, Rocky Votolato, Dick Weisman of the Journeymen, and Jeremiah Lockwood of The Sway Machinery. D’Ambrosio was a featured performer at the 2009 SXSW Music Festival, Philadelphia Book Festival, and the 92nd Street Y (Tribeca).

D’Ambrosio is the founder of La Lutta New Media Collective (lalutta.org), a nonprofit social media and documentary production group that The Nation selected as one of the top independent media groups in the country. In 2009, he was named artist-in-residence at the Center for Contemporary of Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he launched the multimedia visual land arts series La Terra Promessa. D’Ambrosio’s current feature length film, Let Fury Have the Hour (letfuryhavethehour.com), chronicles the movement of world citizenship via creative response inspired by his essays from the book of the same name. In 2006, he became New York University’s Gallatin Lecturer, an honor bestowed upon a contemporary artist creating innovative and social engaging work.

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Charlie Bertsch is coeditor-in-chief at Souciant (souciant.com). He has written about culture and politics for The Oxford American, Tikkun, New Times, ZEEK, and the pioneering internet site Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, which he helped to found. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Arizona; and Arizona State University. He lives in Tucson.

Billy Bragg is an important creative and political voice in contemporary music. With a mix of folk music reminiscent of Woody Guthrie and punk rock inspired by Joe Strummer and the Clash, Bragg’s musical career is eclectic, spanning nearly three decades. Standout records include Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, Don’t Try This at Home, and William Bloke. Also a political activist in the UK, he has helped organize events like the Red Wedge tour, a socialist musician collective that also featured Paul Weller. A fixture at political rallies, protests, strikes, and benefits, Bragg founded Jail Guitar Doors, nonprofit organization that helps rehabilitate prison inmates through music programs and justice reform.

Dennis Broe’s newest book, Globalizing America’s Dark Art: International Film Noir, is forthcoming in 2012. Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception/Bombast, Blacklists, and Blockades in the Postwar Art World was published in 2011. His Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2009. Dr. Broe’s articles on film, politics, music, and culture have appeared in Situations, Cinema Journal, Framework, Film and History, Social Justice, and Science and Society. His work as a film critic and commentator has appeared in Newsday and the Boston Phoenix and on WBAI Radio in New York. Broe was the Graduate Coordinator in Media Arts at Long Island University in the early 2000s.

Chuck D, one of hip-hop’s most commanding and recognizable voices, has influenced an entire generation of both fans and artists. Originally from Long Island, he found fame as the frontman for Public Enemy, a group known for their revolutionary lyricism and groundbreaking production. The group’s fiery rhymes and unique stage show won them millions of fans worldwide. They released four classic albums: Yo! Bum Rush the Show, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Fear of a Black Planet, and Apocalypse ’91 The Enemy Strikes Back. Chuck D has remained politically and musically active, working on a wide range of projects, including a solo album, Autobiography of Mistachuck, released in 1996, and Chuck D: Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, edited by Yusuf Jah, in 2006. He continues to work with scores of musicians across all spectrums from all around the world. He helps run two website/online labels (rapstation.com and Slam Jamz.com), writes for various press outlets, and also works the lecture circuit.

Mikal Gilmore is a journalist and music aficionado who has written for Rolling Stone since the 1970s. Gilmore’s first book, Shot in the Heart, is a National Book Critics Circle and L.A. Times Book Prize–winning memoir about his older brother Gary, the first man to be executed in Utah after pleading guilty to murder, whose life was chronicled in The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer.

Wayne Kramer is a songwriter whose reputation for writing music for film and television risks supplanting his legend as one of the world’s stellar guitarists. Rolling Stone lists him as one of the top hundred guitarists of all time. Recent playing can be heard on Marianne Faithfull’s album Horses and High Heels. Teenage leader of Detroit’s ultimate incendiary rock band of the 1960s, the MC5, Kramer formed the White Panther Party in solidarity with other organizations working for racial and economic equality during the Vietnam War. He and manager John Sinclair’s resulting dubious position at the center of the target for the FBI’s counterintelligence program between 1968 and 1971 is well documented. After the breakup of MC5, Kramer suffered from drug addiction, culminating in a federal prison sentence at Lexington Federal Correctional Institution. Afterward, Kramer returned to his musical career and even greater acclaim. He has since put out ten solo albums and is considered a pioneer of both punk rock and heavy metal. Long a respected film and television composer with strong involvement in social action causes, he scored Sony Pictures’ comedy feature Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (directed by Adam McKay); the controversial HBO documentary Hacking Democracy (about the 2004 U.S. presidential election voting machine scandal); and the PBS film The Narcotic Farm (about Lexington Federal Correctional Institution and America’s decades-long failed drug war), as well as three seasons of the hit HBO series East Bound & Down. With Billy Bragg, he created Jail Guitar Doors USA, the Los Angeles–based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission is to help rehabilitate prison inmates. Kramer recently joined Tom Morello on Axis of Justice music and activism tours and made a special appearance at an antiwar protest concert for ten thousand fans at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver with Rage Against the Machine. He regularly writes with and produces upstart rock bands. See www.jailguitardoors.org and www.waynekramer.com.

Margaret Saadi Kramer is the co-owner of Antic Inc. (www.anticinc.com), a successful Los Angeles—based music licensing company that provides and represents carefully selected music and images for television, video game, and feature film campaigns. Her clients include major and independent studios, networks, and postproduction houses worldwide for such high-profile film campaigns as The Matrix series, the Harry Potter series, the Spiderman series, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Batman series, Iron Man, The Mummy series, Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Wall-E, and literally hundreds of others, as well as commercials, new media, demos, and home video. Margaret is currently music-supervising the Danny McBride–created comedy series East Bound & Down (Gary Sanchez Productions) for HBO and its accompanying soundtracks. Recent projects include music supervision on the Shira Piven-directed feature Fully Loaded (Adam McKay, executive producer), PBS’s controversial historical documentary Narcotic Farm, and the documentary film Let Fury Have the Hour. Over the last five years, Kramer has executive-produced Sonic Revolution: A Celebration of the MC5 and its accompanying DVD. Both ran as broadcast staples for Channel 4 in the UK and Trio Networks respectively; music consulted on the feature-length HBO documentary Hacking Democracy as well as the feature film Court Jesters; and the Noggin Networks series South of Nowhere, music supervised by Margaret, was nominated for a GLAAD award. With legendary singers/songwriters Wayne Kramer and Billy Bragg, Margaret Kramer is a cofounder of the nonprofit group Jail Guitar Doors USA.

Greil Marcus was born in San Francisco and now lives in Oakland. He is the author of Mystery Train, The Dustbin of History, Lipstick Traces, In the Fascist Bathroom, The Shape of Things to Come, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America, and most recently, When That Rough God Goes Riding and The Doors. He is the editor, with Sean Wilentz, of The Rose & the Briar and, with Werner Sollors, of A New Literary History of America, published by Harvard in 2009. In recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, New York University, and the New School.

Kristine McKenna is a widely published critic and journalist who wrote for the Los Angeles Times from 1977 through 1998. Her profiles and criticism have appeared in many different publications, including Artforum, the New York Times, Artnews, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. Since 1998 she’s devoted most of her time to organizing exhibitions and editing books on fine art. In 2010, along with two partners, she launched Foggy Notion Books, a publishing imprint that specializes in volumes on art and popular culture of the twentieth century. She recently edited Richard Prince: Collected Writings for Foggy Notion Books.

Tom Morello is an original member of the rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, two groups responsible for multiple Grammy Awards and a combined 30 million albums sold worldwide. His first solo album, The Nightwatchman: World Wide Rebel Songs, was released in 2007. In 2009, Morello formed the band Street Sweeper Social Club with Boots Riley of the Coup. He has also been recognized by Rolling Stone as one of the “100 Greatest Guitar Players of All Time” at #26. Since graduating from Harvard University with honors, with a major in political science, he has become a widely recognized political activist. In 2006, he received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award. His family has been a constant source of political and social inspiration: his great-uncle, Jomo Kenyatta, was the first president of Kenya; his mother, Mary Morello, founded Parents for Rock and Rap, an anti censorship counterweight to Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center. With System of A Down’s Serj Tankian, Morello formed Axis of Justice, a social justice organization that brings together musicians, music fans, and grassroots political. In spring 2008, Morello launched The Justice Tour, a recurring nationwide concert tour featuring members of Guns N’ Roses, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction, MC5, Alice in Chains, Cypress Hill, and many more, whose daylong visits to cities are dedicated to a local charity with a rock show to benefit that charity at each stop.

(not4)Prophet was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and raised in the South Bronx and East Harlem in New York City. He is the MC for the political hip-hop group X-Vandals and the former lead singer of the punk rock/Latin Fusion-band Ricanstruction (and founder of the art and agitation collective, Ricanstruction Netwerk), as well as a graffiti writer and “AgitHop” activist. Though not recognized in mainstream and commercial pop music circles, in the alternative DIY movement N4P is considered to be an underground icon and anti-corporate hero (both on- and offstage) for his staunch independent music and antisystem politics.

Amy Phillips is a senior editor at Pitchfork Media, where she has run the news section since 2005. She has also written for the Village Voice, Spin, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Seventeen, and many more. A native of Philadelphia, she currently lives in Chicago.

Ann Scanlon is the author of The Pogues: The Lost Decade and Those Tourists Are Money: The Rock ’n’ Roll Guide to Camden. She was features editor of the legendary music paper Sounds and has written for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Times and The Guardian (both UK), Mojo, and Vogue Italia. She is also an award-winning travel writer.

Joel Schalit is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed Israel vs. Utopia and Jerusalem Calling. He has edited some of America’s most influential independent magazines, including Punk Planet and Tikkun, and has contributed to such news outlets as France 24, The Guardian, and open Democracy. A founding editor of one of the world’s first online magazines, Bad Subjects, Schalit began his publishing career as an intern at Mother Jones. Based in Berlin, he is working on a book about Muslims and Jews in contemporary Europe. During daylight hours, he is coeditor-in-chief of Souciant.

Peter Silverton is a writer. His most recent book is Filthy English: The How, What and Why of Everyday Swearing, published by Portobello.

Sylvie Simmons is a music journalist and author. Born in London, she moved to LA in the late 1970s as U.S. correspondent for the UK magazines Sounds and Kerrang! Now living in San Francisco, she is Mojo Magazine’s contributing editor and a ukulele-playing singer-songwriter. She recently finished a biography of Leonard Cohen to be published in 2012. Simmons’s previous books include a biography of Serge Gainsbourg, A Fistful of Gitanes, and a collection of rock-related short stories, Too Weird for Ziggy.

Carter Van Pelt has been documenting Jamaican popular music as a writer, radio broadcaster, and archivist since the early 1990s. He has a master’s degree in arts administration from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska. In addition to his master’s thesis on collective rights management in Jamaica, he has published articles that were included in Reggae, Rasta, Revolution (edited by Chris Potash, from Simon & Schuster, 1997) and Let The Fury Have the Hour and in The Beat Magazine. In the late 1990s, he published the fanzine 400 Years. Van Pelt produced the DVD documentary for Burning Spear’s album Our Music in 2005 and compiled the Thompson Sound release Linval Thompson: The Early Sessions, including the accompanying DVD, in 2006. He hosted “400 Years: Radio Free Mondo” on KZUM in Lincoln, Nebraska, for eight years and was cohost of “All Star Reggae Thursdays” on WKCR in New York from 2005 to 2007. Now the host of WKCR’s “Eastern Standard Time,” which airs on Saturday morning, he has also been a guest commentator for National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”

Steve Walsh was an art student in 1975, and like many of his contemporaries, was frustrated with the stagnation and “corporatization” of the ’70s music scene. He became involved in punk after happening on the Sex Pistols’ first gig at St. Martin’s Art College. He fell into journalism after meeting Mark P (editor of Sniffin’ Glue) at a Ramones gig. An acquaintance with manager Bernie Rhodes led to an offer to interview a new band named the Clash. This was their first interview, and it spawned such unforgettable and quotable punk aphorisms as “like trousers, like brain.” Recruited by Mr. Vicious himself, Walsh later became a member of the semi-legendary Flowers of Romance. Although the group rehearsed in every squat in West London, they never performed live and had only one song, “Belsen Was a Gas,” later developed by the Sex Pistols. Walsh went on to write articles on other punk and post-punk acts such as Subway Sect, Adam and the Ants, the Banshees, This Heat, and the Pop Group for papers like ZigZag and NME. Later, disillusioned with punk’s evolution, he moved on to play guitar with the very angular post-punk group Manicured Noise, which released two singles: “Metronome” and “Faith.” In 1979, back in London, he began a solo career. After various deals and collaborations, he stopped working in music around 1990 and reverted to his default career as graphic designer. He still works in design and dabbles in music for pleasure and has DJ’d at various clubs. In 2007 he produced a compilation album of previously undiscovered tracks by Manicured Noise titled Northern Stories.

PERMISSIONS

We gratefully acknowledge all those who gave permission for the written material that appears in this book. We have made every effort to trace and contact copyright holders. If an error or omission is brought to our notice, we will be pleased to remedy the situation in future editions of this book. For further information, please contact the publisher.

“Strange Bedfellows: How the Clash Influenced Public Enemy” by Chuck D copyright © Chuck D. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpt originally published as “Revolution Rock” in the December/January 2004 issue of Interview magazine. All rights reserved. • “Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer” by Antonino D’Ambrosio copyright © Antonino D’Ambrosio. Reprinted by permission of Antonino D’Ambrosio. Adapted from an essay originally published in Monthly Review, June 2003. All rights reserved. • “The Very Angry Clash” by Steve Walsh copyright © Sanctuary Group. Reprinted by permission of the Sanctuary Group. Originally published in Sniffin’ Glue, Issue 3½, September 28, 1976. All rights reserved. • “Greatness from Garageland” by Peter Silverton copyright © Peter Silverton. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published in Trouser Press, February 1978. All rights reserved. • “Anger on the Left” by Mikal Gilmore from Rolling Stone. Reprinted by permission of Rolling Stone, March 8, 1979 copyright © Rolling Stone LLC. All rights reserved. • “The Clash in America” by Sylvie Simmons copyright © Sylvie Simmons. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published in Sounds, February 1979. All rights reserved. • “The Last Broadcast” by Greil Marcus copyright © Greil Marcus. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published in In the Fascist Bathroom (aka Ranters and Crowd Pleasers). All rights reserved. • “Be Bop A Lula Here’s Joe Strummer” by Ann Scanlon copyright © Ann Scanlon. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published in Sounds, April 2, 1988. All rights reserved. • “Clash of the Titan” by Joel Schalit copyright © Joel Schlait. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published in Punk Planet, January/February 2000. All rights reserved. • “A Man That Mattered” by Kristine McKenna © Kristine McKenna. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published in Arthur, March 2003. • “When the Two Sevens Clashed” by Carter Van Pelt copyright © Carter Van Pelt. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published in Arthur, March 2003. • “The Joe I Knew” by Billy Bragg copyright © Billy Bragg. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published by BBC News, January 2, 2003. • All photos by Hank O’Neal published here courtesy of Hank O’Neal. • All photos from Mystery Train by Sukita published here courtesy of Sukita/Jim Jarmusch/Mystery Train Inc. • All Shepard Fairey artwork published courtesy of Shepard Fairey. • Photo by Yrthya Dinzey-Flores published courtesy of Yrthya Dinzey-Flores. • All photos by Antonino D’Ambrosio © Antonino D’Ambrosio/La Lotta Inc./A Bricklayers Union Productions.

INDEX

Abbott, Bernice, 273

Adam and the Ants, 127

Adolescence, 42

Aerosmith, 50

Aesthetics, 45, 50, 101, 202

Africa, 14, 15, 140

African-Americans, 105, 127–128

Albertine, Viv, 109

Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 257

“Algeria, Algeria” (Veloso), 144–145

“All in a Day” (Joe Strummer), 225

Allende, Salvador, 5, 142, 143

Amampondo, 176

Anarchism, anarchy, 22, 61, 150, 292, 300

Andy, Horace, 130

Anger, 46, 61, 107

Anouk, 140

Anti-Nazi League, 124, 130, 142

Anti-Paki League, 126

Antiracism. See Racism

Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 257

“Arms Aloft” (Joe Strummer), 147

Armstrong, Tim, 120, 153

Arpaio, Joe, 241

Axis of Justice, 189

Bad Brains, 188, 211

Bad Religion, 131

Baez, Joan, 197

Baldwin, James, 128–130, 197, 258

Bangs, Lester, 117, 130–131

“Bank Robber” (The Clash), 185, 198

Barger, Sonny, 275

Bartók, Béla, 231, 232, 233, 240, 242, 289–290

Basquiat, Jean Michel, 210, 303–305

Battle of Algiers (film), 74

Bay City Rollers, 43

BBC. See British Broadcasting Corporation

BDP, 209

Beach Boys, 167

Beastie Boys, 159

Beat poets, 128, 162–163

The Beatles, 61, 65, 98–99, 117, 118

Beatnigs, 198

Beatniks, 163

Bebop, 119

Beefheart, Captain, 167

Berkeley Community Theater, San Francisco, 53, 63

Berlusconi, Silvio, 203, 232, 233

Berry, Chuck, 35, 36, 37, 42

Bertulucci, Bernardo, 81

Bessy, Claude, 165

“Bhindi Bhagee” (Strummer and the Mescaleros), 14, 249, 252

Bickle, Travis, 76, 267–268

Big Audio Dynamite, 152, 153

“Big Country” (The Clash), 67

Big Youth, 38

Billbard Top Ten, 118

Billboard’s Top 200, 51

Biskind, Peter, 76

The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy (Baldwin), 129

Black, Jack, 241

Black Ark recording studio, 102

Black Flag, 110, 118, 211

Black Grape, 153

Black Market Clash (The Clash), 184, 185, 212

Blair, Tony, 155–157, 169–170

Blink 182, 121

Blondie, 218

Blow, Kurtis, 211, 215

Blue Oyster Cult, 48, 103

Bogie, Stewart, 295–297

“Bomb the World” (Spearhead), 200

Bono, 15

Bop Message, 92–93

Bordello, Gogol, 231, 238, 241, 242

Boredom, 21, 61

Bossi, Umberto, 233

Boston, 50, 60

Bowie, David, 269

Bragg, Billy, 4, 15, 123, 150, 188, 190, 218fig, 247, 264, 294

“Brand New Cadillac” (The Clash), 112

Brando, Marlon, 74, 279

Brazil, 141–142, 144–145

Brecht, Bertolt, 202, 293

Brigade Rosse (Brigade Rosse), 74, 75, 157

Brighton Beach youth culture riots (1960s), 65

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 149, 155, 236, 247, 248, 263

Broadway, 6, 76

Brown, Clarence “Gatemouth,” 41

Brown, Roy, 142

Buarque, Chico, 144

Bukowski, Charles, 258

Bulldog (magazine), 127

Bunuel, Luis, 286

Burn (film), 74

Burning London tribute album, 107

“Burning Streets” (Joe Strummer), 225

Buscemi, Steve, 263

Bush administration, 202, 206, 263, 312

Buzzcocks, 29, 54, 117

Byrne, David, 81

“The Call Up” (The Clash), 147

Capitalism, 4, 6

“Capitol Air” (The Clash), 271–272

“Capitol Radio” (Clash), 43

“Career Opportunities” (The Clash), 8–9, 40–41, 99

Caribbean music, 9, 124, 127

Carmichael, Hoagy, 176

Carmichael, Stokely, 130

Carnival Against the Nazis, 75

Carpentier, Alejo, 256

Carter, Jimmy, 12

Cash, Johnny, 180, 222–228, 236, 238–239, 242, 261

Cashbox magazine, 55

CBS, 80, 92, 96, 102–103

CBS Records, 48

“Cell Block No. 9” (The Clash), 55

Central America, 12

Chao, Manu, 140, 242

Chevron, Philip, 90

Chile, 5, 141, 142–143

Chimes, Terry, 36, 38, 48, 192

Chuck D, 15, 198, 210, 216fig, 248, 265, 290, 308

Circle Jerks, 91

“City of the Dead” (The Clash), 43

Civil rights movement, 130, 148

“Clampdown” (The Clash), 10–11, 107, 117, 212–213, 247, 265

The Clash

audience of, 27–28, 54, 100, 123, 189

breakup of, 13, 61–69, 73, 85, 87, 160, 166–167, 173, 207

criticism of, 11, 43–44, 47, 49–50

drug use and, 43, 47

fans, relationships with of, 64–65

formation of, 35–38, 47–48

heritage of, 23–27

influences on, 6, 28–29

legacy of, 117–118, 178, 191–193

live performances and, 3, 8, 33–34, 39–40, 41–42, 43, 44, 45–46, 123, 189, 191

lyrics of, 4, 8, 126–127

media and, 10

musical style of, 3

naming of, 22

poetry and, 267–282

politics of, 116–117, 139–140, 149–151, 157, 165

popularity and, 34–35, 43, 87, 119, 149

racism and, 123–133

radicalism of, 45–46, 50, 74, 96, 218–219

rap music and, 6

reggae and, 43, 101–102, 183–188

revolution and, 95–105

Rock Against Racism movement and, 5

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and, 15, 191–193

rule structure of, 34

Sandinista revolution and, 11–13

significance of, 43, 150, 213–214

sound of, 8

style of, 34

tempo of, 4, 43

themes of, 10

in United States, 9–10, 50, 53–60, 63–64, 151–152, 169, 170

See also Headon, Nicky “Topper”; Jones, Mick; Punk rock; Simonon, Paul; Strummer, Joe

The Clash, 261–266

The Clash (The Clash), 8, 48, 98–101, 104, 212, 264

Clash on Broadway (documentary), 76

Clash on Broadway tour, 6

Class, 45, 84, 129, 264

Clear Channel Communications, 247–248

Cliff, Jimmy, 16, 130, 188

Clift, Montgomery, 74

Cobain, Kurt, 119

Cobham, Billy, 38

Cohen, Leonard, 224

Cold War, 153

“Coma Girl” (Joe Strummer), 221–222

Combat Rock (The Clash), 13, 14, 62, 104, 118, 151, 152, 153, 161, 162, 212, 269–274, 279, 281

Combat Rock tour, 152, 204

Communism, 10, 98, 105, 150, 272, 284

“Complete Control” (The Clash), 102–103, 118, 119, 185, 264

Conservatism, 126

Cook, Pablo, 78

Coon, Caroline, 109–110

Corleone, Michael, 46

Cosmopolitanism, 160

Costello, Elvis, 55, 79

The Coup, 190, 216

Cox, Alex, 79–80, 84–85, 88–90, 167

Crass, 132

Creative resistance, 5–6

Creative response

art and politics and, 284–285

Bartók, Béla and, 289–290

Basquiat, Jean Michel and, 303–305

Garrincha and, 288–289

ideologies and, 292–293

legacy and influence of, 312–313

new wave film movement and, 296–299

Picasso, Pablo and, 283–286, 291, 312–313

poetry and, 302–303

Provos and, 300–301

Crimes, Tory, 36

Cruyff, Johan, 300

Cuba, 142

“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Adorno and Horkheimer), 99

Cut the Crap (The Clash), 66, 67, 69, 152, 212

Dadomo, Giovanni, 39

Daily Telegraph, 149

D’Ambrosio, Lorenzo, 221

The Damned, 18, 30, 37, 183, 218

Danticat, Edwidge, 251–259, 303–304

Darwin, Charles, 10, 307

Davies, Ray, 181

De Beauvoir, Simone, 257

De Niro, Robert, 76, 267

Dead Prez, 216

“Death Is a Star” (The Clash), 274, 277

Dekker, Desmond, 263

Demme, Jonathan, 257–258

Democracy, 104, 141, 203, 204, 245, 281, 299

Democratic National Convention (2000), 190

Democratic National Convetion (1968), 280–281

Deren, Maya, 274

Diddley, Bo, 9, 53, 167, 180, 266

Dillon, Matt, 263

Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 198

DIY ethic. See Do-it-yourself ethic

“Do It Again” (Beach Boys), 167

Dogg, Tymon, 78, 138, 273

Do-it-yourself ethic (DIY ethic), 17, 115–116, 118, 119, 213, 274, 299

Dominique, Jan J., 257

Dominique, Jean, 257

Dread, Mikey, 185–186, 198

Drug use, 43, 47, 170–171

Duarte, Rogerio, 73, 145

Dub, 124, 167

Dylan, Bob, 47, 108, 111, 147, 149, 179, 181, 203, 261, 273, 275, 276

Earthquake Weather (Joe Strummer), 73, 119, 153

Ellington, Duke, 261, 304

Embedded (film), 202–203, 206–207

England

conservatism in, 126

freedom in, 170–171

government in, 155–157

imperialism of, 8, 101

London firefighters’ strike in, 5

music scene in, 30–31, 36–37, 76

punk rock in, 17

racism in, 3, 130

English Civil War, 98–102, 285

Ensler, Eve, 293

Epic recording label, 12–13, 51, 119, 151, 153, 160, 213

Epitaph recording label, 120

Essential Logic, 111

Eurythmics, 15

Everybody Needs Music (Spearhead), 200

Everything Is Illuminated (Scrieber), 239–240

Fascism, fascists, 22, 49, 50, 64, 127, 204, 235, 284, 290

Ferréé, Léo, 141

“The Few” (Bragg), 123

Finney, Albert, 99

First Gulf War, 13, 104, 198, 248, 249

Fishbone, 211

Flanagan, Bill, 80

Fo, Dario, 203

Foley, Ellen, 110

Foley, Gary, 110

Folk music, 10, 141–148, 266

Foner, Eric, 233

“48864” (Joe Strummer), 15

Ford, Gerald, 98

Foreigner, 60

Foucault, Michel, 97

France, 4, 141

Franco, Francisco, 234, 284

Frank, Robert, 273

Franti, Michael, 197–202, 205, 206, 208

Free Nelson Mandela, 84, 265

Freedom, 160, 170–171, 285–286, 290

French Revolution, 97

Gabriel, Peter, 151, 154

Gange, Ray, 73, 75

Gangs of New York (film), 76, 234

Gangsta rap, 199

“Garageland” (The Clash), 39, 65, 81, 102, 117

Gaughan, Dick, 143

Generation X, 37

Genet, Jean, 280

Genn, Antony, 78

The German Ideology (Marx), 98

“Get Down Moses” (Joe Strummer), 147

“Ghetto Defendant” (The Clash), 246, 277, 278fig, 279

Gibbs, Joe, 184

Gil, Gilberto, 141

Ginsberg, Allen, 128, 162, 163, 246, 268fig, 270–282

Give ‘Em Enough Rope (The Clash), 9–10, 45, 48–49, 51, 101, 103–104, 117, 149, 212

Glam rock, 3–4, 18

Global A Go-Go (Strummer and the Mescaleros), 14–15, 77, 144, 146, 168

Global Noise, 105

Globalization, 14, 97, 237, 248–249

Gogan, Sue, 111

Gogol, Nikolai, 237

Goldman, Vivien, 108–109, 110

Golightly, Holly, 111

González, Sara, 142

Goodman, Benny, 213

Gould, Stephen Jay, 305, 307

Goya, Francisco de, 283–284

Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, 6

The Grateful Dead, 54

The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (Sex Pistols), 149

Green, Johnny, 179

Green Day, 120, 121

Guernica (Picasso), 283–286, 291, 312–313

Guerrilla Management, 202

Guevara, Che, 263

“Guns of Brixton” (The Clash), 183, 209–210

“Guns on the Roof” (The Clash), 50, 55

Guthrie, Woody, 14, 138, 147, 149, 190, 266, 291, 309

Gypsies, 231–233, 235–236, 239, 240–241, 289

Haiti, Haitians, 253, 255–257

Haley, Bill, 65

Hall, Albert, 163

Hammond, John, 273, 276

Hard rock, 10

“The Harder They Come, the Harder They Fall” (Jimmy Cliff), 15–16

Harris, Bruce, 51

Harris, Ed, 88, 89

Harris, John, 104 “Hate and War” (The Clash), 95, 99, 264

Headon, Nicky “Topper,” 36, 46, 47, 48, 59, 62, 65, 92, 152, 247

Healey, Jack, 265

Heartbreakers, 218

Heavy metal, 104

Hebdige, Dick, 96, 101, 103

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 105

Heine, Heinrich, 95, 97

Hell, Richard, 274

Hellcat Records, 120, 153

Hell’s Angels (Thomspon), 274–276

Hendrix, Jimi, 174, 269

The Highwaymen, 223

Hip-hop music, 6, 97, 105, 140, 158–159, 199, 215, 216, 248

Hitler, Adolf, 127, 175, 234–235, 246, 256, 284

“Hitsville in the U.K.” (The Clash), 101, 162

Hollywood Palladium, Los Angeles, 166

Hot Rods, 30, 34

Houston, Penelope, 110

Howard, Pete, 62–63, 69

HüskerDü, 118

Hussein, Saddam, 249, 312

Hütz, Eugene, 231, 236–243

Hyppolite, Hector, 258–259

“I Fought the Law” (The Clash), 92, 93, 264, 271

“If Music Could Talk” (The Clash), 176, 185

“I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” (The Clash), 8, 57, 62, 63–64, 112

“I’m So Bored with You” (The Clash), 112

Immigration, immigrants, 91, 126, 150, 183, 241–242, 310

Imperialism, 4, 8, 13, 101, 150–151, 153, 155, 198, 246

Indigo Girls, 107

Individualism, 115–116, 309

IRA, 5, 123

Iran, 62

Iraq war, 202, 206, 312, 313

Ireland, 5, 27, 178–179

Islamism, Islamists, 13, 105

Island Records, 131, 201

Isley Brothers, 64–65

Israel, 105

Italy, 5, 105, 203, 232–233

Jagger, Mick, 111, 181

Jaguar, 121

Jail Guitar Doors, 190

The Jam, 80, 126, 183, 218

James, Brian, 18, 30, 37

James, Tony, 37

“Janie Jones (The Clash), 28, 41, 99, 112

Jara, Victor, 142–143, 146, 147–148, 213, 246

Jarmusch, Jim, 73, 81–84, 153, 263, 265

Jazz, 10, 91, 119

Jennings, Waylan, 223

Jimmy the Red, 90

Joe Gibbs and the Professionals, 184

“Johnny Appleseed” (Strummer and the Mescaleros), 14, 242–243, 249

Johnny Guitar (film), 234

Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 131–132, 302–303

Johnson, Lyndon B., 280

Jones, Janie, 110

Jones, Jim, 56

Jones, Lauren, 92

Jones, Mick, 21, 57, 81, 179, 217, 247

The Clash and, 100

The Clash, decline of and, 62

The Clash, formation of and, 35–38

“Career Opportunities” (The Clash) and, 40

The Clash Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and, 192

departure from the Clash of, 13, 140, 152

Give ’Em Enough Rope and, 49

influences on, 28–29

live performances and, 42, 55, 165

post-Clash career of, 152

reggae and, 101

songwriting of, 46

Strummer, Joe and, 5–6, 13, 92, 116

Walsh, Steve interview with, 22–31

See also The Clash

Joy Division, 127 356

Julian, Ivan, 130–131

“Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad” (The Clash), 112

“Junco Partner” (The Clash), 185

Kansas, 60

Kaurismäki, Aki, 153

Kent, Nick, 50

Kerouac, Jack, 128, 258

“Keys to Your Heart” (101ers), 18, 94

Khomeini, Ayatollah, 62

Kid Creole and the Coconuts, 108

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 108, 130, 242

King of Comedy (film), 76

Kirchwey, Freda, 248

Kiss, 60

Kleenex, 111

“Know Your Rights” (The Clash), 144, 151, 203, 209, 239, 274

Kosovo war, 156

Kouvalakis, Stathis, 97

Kramer, Wayne, 190, 291, 299–300

Kristofferson, Kris, 223, 268

Kubernik, Harvey, 272

Labour government (1945), 131, 150, 156

Laferriere, Dany, 258

The Last Emperor (film), 81

“Last Gang in Town” (The Clash), 50

Last Poets, 141

Latin America, 14, 80, 146

Latin-Rockabilly War, 91, 92

Lee, Spike, 308

Lenin, Vladimir, 97

Leninism, Leninists, 150

Lennon, John, 181, 269

Lennox, Annie, 112

Les, Fat, 153

Let Fury Have the Hour (film), 189, 190, 236, 243, 248, 251, 259, 285

Let’s Rock Again (documentary), 77–79

Letts, Don, 76, 109, 187

Levine, Keith, 38, 47

Liliput, 111

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Marcus), 117

“Living in Fame” (The Clash), 185

Llosa, Mario Vargas, 286

Logic, Lora, 111

London, England, 3, 30–31, 36–37, 62, 76, 183

London Calling (The Clash), 9, 10, 76, 101–102, 104, 107, 150–151, 192, 212, 265

“London Calling” (The Clash), 93, 104, 120–121, 213, 245–246, 247, 249

London firefighters’ strike, 5

London SS, 35, 37, 47, 48, 127

“London’s Burning” (The Clash), 43, 104, 117, 225, 264

“Long Shadow” (Joe Strummer), 221–228

Lorca, Federico Garcia, 204, 246

Lorde, Audre, 197

“Lost in the Supermarket” (The Clash), 210–211, 213

Lounge jazz, 10

Love songs, 62, 99, 103, 308

Lowe, Nick, 224

Lumumba, Patrice, 295

Lunch, Lydia, 111

MacKaye, Ian, 285, 304, 312

Madonna, 93, 231–232

Mael, Jason, 93

Magahaes, Juracy, 145

Mailer, Norman, 128–130

Maldita Vecendad, 140

Malik, Imran, 308–309

Mandela, Nelson, 15, 84

Mann, Harraj, 245, 247 248, 249

Mano Negra, 140

Maori street rappers, 105

Maquez, Gabriel Garcia, 89

March for Women’s Lives, 107

Marcus, Greil, 117

Marcuse, Herbert, 235–236, 287, 300

Marder, Marlene, 111

Mark P., 24, 29–30

Marley, Bob, 84, 102, 127–128, 130, 131, 183, 201, 264, 309

Maroni, Roberto, 232, 233

Martin, Gavin, 81

Marx, Karl, 96, 97–98

Marxism, Marxists, 150

Massive Attack, 188

Matlin, Marlee, 88

Matlock, Glen, 41

Maximum Rock and Roll magazine, 119

May 1968 protests (France), 5, 148

MC_5, 4, 150, 190, 291, 299–300

McCartney, Paul, 181

McGuire, Judy, 113

McKenna, Kristine, Strummer, Joe interview with, 169–181

McLaren, Malcolm, 37

Media, 6, 10, 45, 149, 176, 207

Mellencamp, John, 224

Mellor, John Graham, 121

Melody Maker magazine, 131, 174

Mescaleros, 13–16, 77–78, 120, 139, 168, 180, 187, 200, 248–249, 252, 262

MIA, 241

Middle East, 104, 151

“The Migratory Rats” (Heine), 95, 97

Milanés, Pablo, 142

Military, U.S., 13

Miller, Arthur, 221, 258

Miller brewing company, 121

Million Dollar Quartet, 223

Mingay, David, 75

Mingus, Charles, 275

Minogue, Kylie, 112

Minor Threat, 118

Mitchell, Adrian, 137

Mitchell, Tony, 105

Monkees, 65

Morality, 172

Morel, Daniel, 258

Morello, Tom, 189, 190fig, 241

Mos Def, 281

Mott the Hoople, 23, 28, 29, 41, 46, 47

Movimiento de la Nueva Trova (New Ballad Movement), 141–142

Murray, Charles Shaar, 39, 81

Murray, Frank, 90

Murvin, Junior, 101

Music

bebop, 119

Caribbean, 9

dub, 7, 124, 167

folk, 10, 141–148, 266

fractured pop, 7

hard rock, 10

heavy metal, 104

hip-hop, 97, 105, 140, 158–159, 199, 215, 216, 248

indie-rock, 104

jazz, 10, 91, 119

lounge jazz, 10

political, 139–141

pop, 7, 10, 119

protest, 4

R&B, 7, 10, 14, 37, 46

rap, 5–6, 104, 105, 308–309

reggae, 7, 10, 41, 43, 63, 101–102, 116, 124, 140, 167, 183–188, 216, 248, 264

rockabilly, 14, 73, 91, 92–93, 116

roots, 10

ska, 7, 10, 101, 120, 124

teen-pop, 104

See also Punk rock; Rock ’n’ roll

Music City News, 222

Music industry, 7, 9–10, 102–104, 201

Musician magazine, 80, 167

Mussolini, Benito, 234, 255–256

“My Way” (Sid Vicious), 54

Mystery Train (film), 73, 81–84, 265

The Nation magazine, 248

The Nightwatchman, 190

National Front, 5, 75, 126, 127, 174, 246

Native Americans, 223

Nazism, Nazis, 234–235, 284

Nelson, Willie, 223, 241

Never Mind the Bollocks (Sex Pistols), 149

Nevermind (Nirvana), 161

New Musical Express (NME), 50, 81, 108

New Orleans R&B, 10

New wave, 45, 55, 58, 296–299

New York City, N.Y., 5–6, 10, 130

New York Dolls, 47

New York Times, 162

New Youth, 55–57

New Zealand, 105

Newton, Huey P., 130

Nicaragua, 88, 89, 151

Nico, 131

Nihilism, 48, 61, 117, 150, 246

“1977” (The Clash), 23, 43

1988: The Punk Rock Explosion (Coon), 109

Nirvana, 119, 161

NME. See New Musical Express

No Doubt, 188

No wave, 111

Nobody Knows My Name (Baldwin), 128

NOFX, 131

Nolan, Jerry, 38

Notting Hill Carnival riots (1976), 100, 125, 184

“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” (Ramones), 17

Nuclear destruction, 245–246

Nueva Cancion (New Song) movement, 142, 145

Ochs, Phil, 142

Offspring, 120, 121

“One More Dub” (The Clash), 185

“One More Time” (The Clash), 185, 198

“1–2 Crush on You” (The Clash), 112

100 Club, 26, 27–28, 31

101ers, 18, 21, 35–36, 37, 47, 100, 111, 116, 138

O’Neal, Hank, 270, 273, 281

One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 235–236

Operation Ivy, 119, 120

Orlovsky, Peter, 162

O’Rourke, P.J., 89

“Overpowered by Funk” (The Clash), 212, 213

Ozomalti, 241

Pacheco, Raul, 241

Palmolive, 109

Parker, Graham, 46

Parliament, 6, 39, 156, 177

Patriot Act, 247

Pearl Harbor ‘79 tour, 53–60, 266

Pearlman, Sandy, 48, 51, 103

Penthouse magazine, 168

Perkins, Carl, 55, 82

Perkins, Ray, 223

Permanent Record (film), 81, 91

Perry, Lee “Scratch,” 102, 185

Perry, Mark, 17

Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (Kouvalakis), 97

Picasso, Pablo, 283–286, 291, 312–313

Pinochet, Augusto, 143

Poetry, 267–282, 302–303

The Pogues, 90–91, 93, 153

“Police and Thieves” (The Clash), 63, 75, 100, 101, 124, 187, 264

“Police on My Back” (The Clash), 198, 263

Politics

The Clash and, 22, 116–117, 139–140, 149–151, 157, 165

punk rock and, 3–16, 40, 95–105, 131

Sex Pistols and, 149

Pollitt, Tessa, 109

Pontecorvo, Gillo, 74

Poor Righteous Teachers, 209

Pop music, 7, 10, 119

Popular Unity Party, 142, 143

Postpunk, 118

Presley, Elvis, 82, 116, 117, 211, 223

Press, Joy, 111–112

“Pressure Drop” (The Clash), 43, 124, 187

Protest music, 4

“Protex Blue” (The Clash), 112

Provos, 300–301

Pryor, Richard, 301–302

Psychobilly, 91

Pub rock, 137–138, 149

Public Enemy, 15, 105, 209, 215–216, 265, 308–309

Public Image Ltd., 47

Punk dub, 102

Punk magazine, 113

Punk Productions (Thompson), 75

Punk rock

attitude of, 115–117, 168

collapse of, 64

DIY ethic and, 17, 115–116, 118, 119, 213, 274

film and, 74

hip-hop music and, 6

live performances and, 6

philosophy of, 3, 7

politics and, 3–16, 40, 95–105, 131

popularity and, 118–119

post-, 118

racism and, 123–133

radicalism of, 151

rap and, 105

reggae and, 63, 104–105, 183–188, 264

revolution and, 95–105

in United States, 45–51, 218

women in, 107–113

See also Rock ’n’ roll; The Clash

Punk Rock Movie (film), 76

“Punky Reggae Party” (Bob Marley), 102, 127–128, 183, 264

Quantick, David, 98

Queen’s Jubilee, 100

R&B, 7, 10, 14, 37, 46

Racial justice, 4

Racial purity, 234–235

Racism, 3, 7, 9–10, 50, 75, 123–133, 290

Radicalism, 45–46, 50, 74, 96, 151, 218–219

Radio, 27–28, 50, 167–168

“Radio Clash” (The Clash), 159

Raft, George, 74

Rage Against the Machine, 189

Raging Bull (film), 76

Rainbow Theater, London, 33–34, 43, 123–124

Ramone, Joey, 139, 180

Ramones, 17, 23, 54, 84, 117, 218

Rancid, 120, 153, 188

Rap music, 5–6, 104, 105, 199, 308–309

Rastafarians, 46

Reagan, Ronald, 4, 9, 12, 79, 98, 140, 239, 246, 263, 281, 305, 307

Rebel rock, 3, 9, 64, 67

Rebellion, 11, 30, 124, 150

Record industry, 8, 102–104, 105, 201–202

Red baiting, 11–12

Red Brigade (Brigade Rosse), 74, 75, 157

Red Wedge, 142

“Redemption Song” (Bob Marley), 84, 222

“Redemption Song” (Joe Strummer), 222, 224–225

Reding, Viviane, 233

Reggae, 7, 10, 41, 43, 63, 101–102, 104–105, 116, 124, 140, 167, 183, 183–188, 216, 248, 264

“Remote Control” (The Clash), 99, 102

Repo Man (film), 77 79

Reynolds, Simon, 111–112

Rhodes, Bernard, 37, 38, 39, 43, 47, 48, 63, 112, 125

Richards, Keith, 46, 181

Richardson, Sy, 79

Riley, Boots, 190

Rimbaud, Arthur, 124, 172

Ringo, 36

A Riot of Our Own (Green and Barker), 179

“Robber Dub” (The Clash), 185

Robbins, Tim, 202–208

Robinson, Tom, 50

Rock Against Racism, 5, 75, 101, 124, 127, 131, 142, 218, 265

Rock Against the Rich, 84, 142, 157

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 15

Rock Art and X-Ray Style (Strummer and the Mescaleros), 14, 78, 108, 138–139, 146, 153, 154, 187–188, 224

Rock en Español, 140

Rock ’n’ roll

aesthetics and, 45

class and, 45

glam, 4, 18

hard, 10

indie-, 104

love songs of, 99

musical style of, 137–139

pub, 137–138, 149

punk rock vs., 3–4

rebel, 3, 9, 64, 67

rebellion and, 30

See also Punk rock

“Rock the Casbah” (The Clash), 13, 14, 62, 65, 94, 104, 118, 151, 159, 213, 247, 248, 249

Rockabilly, 14, 73, 91, 92, 116

“Rocker Galore-UK Tour” (The Clash), 185

Rodriguez, Silvio, 141–142, 145, 147–148

Roessler, Kira, 110–111

Rolling Stone magazine, 89, 112

The Rolling Stones, 29, 35, 42, 43, 45, 61, 91, 108, 211, 236

Roma, 231–233, 235–236, 239, 240–241

Roots music, 10

Rotten, Johnny, 61, 96, 183, 214

Roundhouse, London, 18, 21, 28

Roxy Music, 117

Rubin, Rick, 222, 224–225, 242

Rude, Dick, 77, 79, 80, 85, 88, 89, 225

Rude Boy (film), 73, 74–76

Ruggerio, Vic, 184fig, 186fig, 187fig

Ryder, Shaun, 153

Sabin, Roger, 126–127

“Safe European Home” (The Clash), 101

Salinger, J. D., 179

Samoza, Anastasio, 12

San Francisco, Cali., 58, 63, 119

Sanchez, Poncho, 91

Sandinista! (The Clash), 12–13, 76, 79–80, 144, 150–151, 176, 185, 200, 206, 211, 269, 281

Sandinista revolution, 11–13, 80, 89

Sandoval, Miguel, 88

Santa Monica civic center, Cali., 58, 165–166

Santana, Carlos, 241

Sarandon, Susan, 206, 207

Sarkozy, Nicolas, 233

Satie, Eric, 291–292

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (film), 99

Schalit, Joel, Strummer, Joe, interview of by, 153–163

Schloss, Zander, 91

Schmutter, Paris, 39

Scorsese, Martin, 76

Scrieber, Liev, 239–240

Seeger, Peter, 142, 190, 236, 242, 309

Selvin, Joel, 63

September 11, 245, 248

sex, 100

Sex Pistols, 4, 6, 26, 29, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 47, 61, 63, 65, 74, 80, 84, 116–117, 218, 246, 263

101ers and, 116

Anarchy in the UK tour (1977) and, 6, 41

disbanding of, 45, 61

image of, 48

live performances of, 46

nihilism of, 48, 117, 150

permanent revolution and, 95–96

politics of, 149

popularity of, 118, 149

punk rock in England and, 45

reggae and, 183

reunion of, 214

rock ‘n’ roll and, 61

swearing and, 123

in United States, 53, 54, 56

The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Reynolds and Press), 111–112

“Shaktar Donetsk” (Strummer and the Mescaleros), 14–15, 146–147, 249

Sham ’69, 127

Shaw, Bernard, 54

Shea Stadium, New York, 13, 118, 152

“Shed This Skin” (The Clash), 211–212

Shehadin (Martyrs), 105

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 197

“Shepherd’s Delight” (The Clash), 185

Sheppard, Nick, 62–63, 69

Shields, Scott, 78

“Should I Stay or Should I Go?” (The Clash), 62, 152, 213

Sid and Nancy (film), 79, 88

“Silver and Gold” (Joe Strummer), 221–222, 225

Simon, Paul, 151

Simonon, Paul, 21, 41, 47, 49, 57, 152, 179, 181, 217

The Clash, decline of and, 62

The Clash, formation of and, 35–38

The Clash Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and, 192

influences on, 28

live performances and, 42, 55

Notting Hill riots (1976) and, 100

post-Clash career of, 152

racism and, 124, 125

reggae and, 183, 185

Walsh, Steve interview with, 22, 24, 28

Siouxsie and the Banshees, 127

Ska, 7, 10, 101, 120, 124

Skidmore, Alan, 176

Skinheads, 126

Skrewdriver, 126

Slash magazine, 58

Slattery, Martin, 78

Slaughter and the Dogs, 43

Sleater-Kinney, 112

The Slits, 108–110, 111

Sly and Robbie, 130

Small Faces, 41, 65

Smith, Patti, 39, 153, 274

Sniffin’ Glue and Other Rock ’n’ Roll Habits (magazine), 17–19

Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory (Perry), 17

Somoza, Anastasio, 89

Sonic Youth, 241

Sony, 80

Sosa, Mercedes, 141, 145

Sounds magazine, 39, 108, 263

South Africa, 176, 235

South America, 12, 140

Soviet Union, 51, 153, 237

Spaccanapoli, 140

Spain, 105, 204

“Spanish Bombs” (The Clash), 204–205, 213–214, 246

Springsteen, Bruce, 34, 45, 117, 147

Stanton, Harry Dean, 79

“Stay Free” (The Clash), 55, 103–104

Steiner, Rob, 92

Stepheny, Bill, 215

Stewart, Dave, 15

Stewart, Rod, 23

Stiff Little Fingers, 126, 127

Sting, 63

The Stooges, 47

Straight to Hell (film), 79, 88, 89

“Straight to Hell” (The Clash), 274, 277

The Stranglers, 218

Street Sweeper Social Scene, 190

Streetcore (Joe Strummer), 147, 221–222

Strummer, Joe, 57, 71fig, 82fig, 83fig, 197–208, 217

101ers and, 18, 36, 37, 47, 116, 138

The Clash, breakup of and, 61–67, 166–167

The Clash, formation of and, 35–38

attitude of, 165–166

background of, 40, 173–174

The Clash Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and, 191–193

“dark night” of, 74, 85, 207

death of, 3, 15, 138, 168, 192, 248, 249

DIY ethic and, 115–116

Epic, contractual issues with of, 120, 153, 160

filmwork of, 73–85, 88–91, 119, 153, 160–161, 166–167

inspirations of, 180

Jones, Mick and, 5–6, 13, 116

life and legacy of, 115–122

live performances and, 40

“Long Shadow,” legend of and, 221–228

marriage of, 91, 174–175

McKenna, Kristine interview with, 169–181

Mescaleros, collaboration with of, 13–16, 77–78, 120, 139, 168, 180, 200, 248–249, 252

political folk music and, 143–144, 145–147

politicization of, 5–6, 10

politics of, 84, 139–142

post-Clash career of, 119–121, 152–153, 166–168

punk attitude and, 115–117

racism and, 124–127, 129

reggae and, 63, 101, 183–188

Schalit, Joel interview of, 153–163

solo work of, 73, 119, 146–147, 153, 187–188

as songwriter, 4, 175–176

Walsh, Steve interview with, 22–31

women in punk and, 107–113

See also The Clash

Su, Cong, 81

Sublime, 188

Subway Sect, 29

Sugar Hill Gang, 6

Suicidal Tendencies, 211

System of a Down, 189–190

Talking Heads, 151, 218

Tankian, Serj, 189–190

Taxi Driver (film), 76, 267–268

Taylor, Steven, 271, 274

“Techno D-Day” (Strummer and the Mescaleros), 187

Teddy Boys, 65

Teen-pop music, 104

Tenacious D, 241

Terrorism, 49, 245–249

Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 66–67, 79, 95, 98, 131, 140, 150, 156, 157, 169–170, 246, 263, 265, 279, 281

The Third of May 1808 (Goya), 283–284

“This is England” (The Clash), 68–69, 152

Thompson, Hunter S., 274–276, 281

Thompson, Stacy, 75

Time magazine, 55

Time Out magazine, 149

“Tommy Gun” (The Clash), 55

Tonton Macoutes, 256, 257

Toots and the Maytals, 43, 130, 187

“Train in Vain” (The Clash), 62, 104, 185

“Trash City” (Joe Strummer), 93

Tribeca Film Festival (2004), 78, 99

Tropicalismo (Brazilian musical movement), 141, 144, 226

Trotsky, Leon, 36

Trouser Press, 37

Tse, Rono, 198

U2, 15, 165, 201

“Unicornio” (Rodriguez), 146

Unions, 98

United States, 141, 198

The Clash in, 9–10, 50, 53–60, 63–64, 151–152, 169, 170

culture in, 154

imperialism of, 8, 150–151, 153, 155

Native Americans, treatment of by, 223

punk rock and, 45–51, 218

rap music in, 5–6, 105

rock scene in, 50

Sex Pistols in, 53, 54, 56

Unpop magazine, 116

Untermeyer, Louis, 221

Up, Ari, 108–109, 112

Vanguard movements, 141

Vargas, Getulio, 141

Veloso, Caetano, 141, 144–145, 147–148

Velvet Underground, 131

“The Very Angry Clash” (Perry), 18–19, 21–31

Vicious, Sid, 45, 54, 96, 116, 263

“Victor Jara” (Mitchell), 137

Vietnam War, 152, 225, 275, 280

Vieux-Chauvet, Marie, 257

Village Voice magazine, 130, 238

Vincent, Gene, 65

Violence, 50

Virgin records, 80

Waits, Tom, 160

Waldman, Anne, 276

Walker (film), 80–81, 88–90, 93, 94, 167

Walker, Johnnie, 57

Walker, William, 80, 88

Walsh, Steve, 18–19, 21–31

“Washington Bombs” (The Clash), 89

“Washington Bullets” (The Clash), 12, 137, 213, 246, 281

Watts, Ron, 31

“We Are the Clash” (The Clash), 63

Weak Heart Drops, 38

The Weavers, 149

Weiss, Janet, 112–113

West, Kanye, 241

Westway to the World (documentary), 76–77, 187

White, Vince, 62–63, 69

“(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” (The Clash), 7, 43, 101, 103, 124–125, 145, 183, 184, 187, 246, 247, 264

The White Negro (Mailer), 128

“The White Noise Supremacists” (Bangs), 130

“White Riot” (The Clash), 42, 55, 56, 65, 100, 124–125, 127, 128, 130, 184, 192–193, 264

The Who, 46, 65, 151–152

Women in punk rock, 107–113

Working Class, 11, 98, 102, 126, 129

World War II, 124, 175, 247

“Wrong ‘Em Boyo” (The Clash), 101–102

“Yalla Yalla” (The Clash), 160

Young, Lester, 275

Žižek, Slavoj, 309–310

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Introduction to the First Edition: The Future Is Unwritten

Opening 1: Artists As First Responders

Opening 2: For, Not Against

Act I: MOVING OUT LOUD

Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer

Introduction to “The Very Angry Clash”

The Very Angry Clash

Greatness from Garageland

The Clash: Anger on the Left As Punk Leaders Set Sights on America

The Clash in America

The Last Broadcast

Act II: FIGHTING THROUGH THE NIGHT

The Rebel Way: Alex Cox, Jim Jarmusch, and Dick Rude on the Filmwork of Joe Strummer

Be Bop a Lula Here’s Joe Strummer

Clash and Burn: The Politics of Punk’s Permanent Revolution

A Brother in Revolution: Women in Punk Discuss Joe Strummer’s Influence

Always Paying Attention: Joe Strummer’s Life and Legacy

White Riot or Right Riot: A Look Back at Punk Rock and Antiracism

Act III: WALKING THROUGH THE CROWD

You Can’t Have a Revolution Without Songs: The Legacy of Víctor Jara and the Political Folk Music of Caetano Veloso, Silvio Rodríguez, and Joe Strummer

Clash of the Titan

A Man That Mattered

When the Two Sevens Clashed

Whatever It Takes

The Clash Legacy: Speech to Induct the Clash into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2003

Act IV: BETTER GET YOUR WEAPON READY

The World Is Worth Fighting For: Two Creative Activists, Michael Franti and Tim Robbins, Continue Joe Strummer’s Legacy

Culture Clash: From Brixton to El Barrio NYC

Strange Bedfellows: How the Clash Inspired Public Enemy

The Joe I Knew

Gettin’ Back to the Bad Seeds: The Legend of the “Long Shadow”

Act V: TRANSCONTINENTAL HUSTLE

Global Citizens, Dangerous Creators: Eugene Hütz

Joe Strummer, Terrorist?

Global Citizens, Dangerous Creators: Edwidge Danticat

“The Only Band that Mattered” . . . Still Does: The Story of the Clash as Told by the Clash

Evolutionary Street Poetry

Bend the Notes: A Creative Response Initiation

Acknowledgments

Notes

Future Listening, Watching, Reading, and Seeing

The Author

The Contributors

Permissions

Index