The Clash & Joe Strummer

[garth cartwright]

June, your post was fascinating - a few months ago there was a review of the Strummer biog in the Guardian by a female reviewer who opened her rev with a statement along the lines of "no girl ever got the Clash. Only boys could ever like them" etc. She didn't like the Joe biog much either. Let's have a think - shouty blokes who say they want a revolution yet accept CBS's shillings and will achieve it by playing reggae badly and singing in cod Jamaican accents and never being funny or tender or sexy. . . hmmm, wonder why the girls dont go for 'em.

As to my rhetorical statement of "most overrated" I meant as to the books and films and MOjo/Uncut articles that keep pouring out and treat Joe as some kind of latter day Woody Guthrie cum Lenin and the band as the best British band since the Stones etc. I consider White Man In Hammersmith and London Calling 2 of the greatest 45s of the late 70s. There's other good tunes too - unfortunately they tend to be only one or two per album (at most - Rope and Sandinista are berefit). The Clash were the band adopted by the music press - and promoted by their manager - as the "peoples" band and they were smart enough to play this up even when playing US stadiums etc. I'd agree that everyone mentioned by other forumistas is also overrated - British rock culture hypes everything terribly: did u see Kings Of Leon on Jools last nite? Jeeeez, who needs pub rock U2? But we've been told over and over that they're the future of rocknroll.

I'd personally suggest Led Zep, Pink Floyd, The Stone Roses, New Order, Blur as all being hugely overrated, more so than The Clash - but The Clash get dumb docos like Julian and Don Lett's efforts and all this other veneration and NO CRITICISM - beyond Charlie G, I don't think I've seen a critical word delivered towards em in decades. they are The Clash and they are saints. This is what really rubs.

[Dayna]

I'd rather not think of how old I was when they were popular, but I do remember going Roller Skating & hearing Rock The Casbah all the time. I liked that a lot. For some reason, around my area, they didn't play very many of their songs, so that's all I heard, I think. I couldn't really necessarily understand anything technical about their music, but the it always sounded great & different. That was how I listened to most of the 80s music.

I guess must be an unusual girl, then. Oh well... I just liked music that sounded different & still do.

One thing that has been stuck in my mind though, from more recently, was the image of Paul Simonon when he was touring here with The Good, The Bad, and The Queen & they were on David Lettermen for one night. At one point in the muic, Paul Simonon was just standing there holding his guitar with a big grin on his face. I thought, this guy's interesting! I just wish I would have watched videos of them when they were popular.

[Dayna]

I wonder who influenced Blondie? She certainly wasn't overrated.

[Adam Blake]

Dayna, lots of girls liked The Clash, don't take any notice of him over there. He just wishes HE'D been pogoing in London in the late 70s - ha ha!! But that would make him much older. (Well, actually, not that much older...)

Poor old Clash. They were doing so much speed and coke and booze and spliff and they were so feted by the media, they started believing all the bullshit that was said about them. To their credit they still managed to make quite a decent clutch of great rock'n'roll records and if you subscribe to my view that rock'n'roll was pretty much over by 1980 then they made some of the very last good ones. "London's Burning" meant more to me than "London Calling" but it's just a matter of degree. I love their version of "I Fought The Law" which was definitely the greatest Clash song they never wrote, likewise "Brand New Cadillac" (the second greatest Clash song they never wrote). "Rock The Casbah" is a Classic Rock standard but I'll go for "Career Opportunities" any day!

[Jonathan E.]

June, your post was fascinating - a few months ago there was a review of the Strummer biog in the Guardian by a female reviewer who opened her rev with a statement along the lines of "no girl ever got the Clash. Only boys could ever like them" etc.

Exactly what's wrong with so much journalism, whether paid or amateur blog. Overblown, unsupported statements. Never done it myself.

She didn't like the Joe biog much either. Let's have a think - shouty blokes who say they want a revolution yet accept CBS's shillings and will achieve it by playing reggae badly and singing in cod Jamaican accents and never being funny or tender or sexy. . . hmmm, wonder why the girls dont go for 'em.

You don't know much about girls then, either, Gar? Some girls like it rough.

As to my rhetorical statement of "most overrated" I meant as to the books and films and MOjo/Uncut articles that keep pouring out and treat Joe as some kind of latter day Woody Guthrie cum Lenin and the band as the best British band since the Stones etc. I consider White Man In Hammersmith and London Calling 2 of the greatest 45s of the late 70s. There's other good tunes too - unfortunately they tend to be only one or two per album (at most - Rope and Sandinista are berefit).

What was I just saying about "Overblown, unsupported statements."? In the rock field surely there's a viable argument to be made for the Clash "as the best British band since the Stones etc."? Perhaps not the best since the Beatles 'cos I suppose we have to acknowledge the Stones as the Stones. But, hey, "2 of the greatest 45s of the late 70s" — make up your mind.

The Clash were the band adopted by the music press - and promoted by their manager - as the "peoples" band and they were smart enough to play this up even when playing US stadiums etc.

Standard operating procedure. Get over it.

The Clash get dumb docos like Julian and Don Lett's efforts

Come on, Gar — be a little smart with your criticism and give up your personal crusade. Julian Temple and Don Letts were their mates! They'd been around together since more or less forever. It wasn't veneration; it was friendship — and there's nowt wrong with that!

and all this other veneration and NO CRITICISM - beyond Charlie G, I don't think I've seen a critical word delivered towards em in decades. they are The Clash and they are saints. This is what really rubs.

Perhaps you didn't actually see The Future Is Unwritten 'cos it was far from two hours of continuous veneration. Or maybe you just choose to ignore the bits that don't suit your attitude. There was plenty of footage and talkover that questioned Joe and his behaviour at times. Somehow you come across as having a feeling of betrayal or rejection (perhaps of your own teenage self) that clouds your judgment when discussing the Clash.

Face it, whatever their sins, they are and will always be an important band in the history of British music at a time of great upheaval whether you like it or not. Joe Strummer was an interesting and complex figure who made a number of powerful musical statements over a varied career. However, he was a human being above all else with faults and weaknesses as well as strengths. The Future Is Unwritten made that abundantly clear. I wouldn't go on about it so much if I didn't think you were being fundamentally unfair in your criticism — not only unfair but inaccurate and revisionist. Sometimes even critics need to cut the crap.

[Dayna]

She didn't like the Joe biog much either. Let's have a think - shouty blokes who say they want a revolution yet accept CBS's shillings and will achieve it by playing reggae badly and singing in cod Jamaican accents and never being funny or tender or sexy. . . hmmm, wonder why the girls dont go for 'em.

You don't know much about girls then, either, Gar? Some girls like it rough.

Too bad you guys can't get past the roughness & just hear music that was unique, with a good rhythm.

I've never gone pogoing. Just roller skating. :-)

[Dayna]

I read part of a book about Joe Strummer called Redemtion Song. I have to go back to the book store & read more, but I didn't know he was actually born in Turkey & that he tried a career following in the footsteps of his father, but couldn't do it. That is encouraging too me!

[Adam Blake]

Saint Joe was probably even more of a fake than Bob Dylan! He was still a lovely guy, though. When he was straight. A true music lover too.

[Jonathan E.]

Redemption Song is a book that could have used an editor — but I liked it well enough and parts of it were quite fascinating. It's open on my desk right now while I've been meaning to go back and check a thing or two in it for several weeks. Too much to do and here I am posting on SotW!

Adam, I'm curious about your use of the word "fake" to describe Strummer (let alone Dylan). Somehow it doesn't quite jibe for me with the "lovely guy" in the next sentence — but I suppose basically what makes someone "fake" in your view is my question. Care to explain?

PS Dayna, where do you get the idea that Strummer tried to follow in his father's career footsteps? Not from Redemption Song surely.

[Adam Blake]

Adam, I'm curious about your use of the word "fake" to describe Strummer (let alone Dylan). Somehow it doesn't quite jibe for me with the "lovely guy" in the next sentence — but I suppose basically what makes someone "fake" in your view is my question. Care to explain? .

You know perfectly well, Jonathan, you're just trying to stir something up!
Strummer presented himself as a streetwise working class guy when in fact he was a highly educated middle class chap who had chosen to re-invent himself as a latter day Woody Guthrie - much as Dylan had done 15 years or so earlier.

[Jonathan E.]

Adam, I happen to have a different opinion, indeed a philosophy, about what makes one real or fake — and it has about nothing to do with where one is from, the accidents or benefits of one's birth or background. Many of us, and I include myself, are either extremely conflicted about our backgrounds or simply feel that we were born in the wrong place to the wrong parents given the way we feel about ourselves or actually are. It's not stirring it up; I'm genuinely curious about how other people see things differently.

Strangely enough, my identification with Joe Strummer is perhaps a little too strong — but the facts are these. We're almost exactly the same age; he's all of five weeks older than me. We have very similar backgrounds, although not identical. Around 1970, we both became disenchanted with the straight world and set out to see what else was on offer. We might well have been within the same walls or across the street from each other any number of times. However, he had this burning desire to become a rock star and I didn't. Besides that, there were later similarities such as desire to reestablish contact with family and interests in a wide-range of music. Well, a bit of sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock'n'roll, too.

What really struck me about his life from reading Redemption Song, however, was just how desperate so much of it was. I don't think I'd have traded much of it for mine.

Anyway, I don't think the word "fake" fits. I think we all have the right to reinvent ourselves, although perhaps there's a limited number of times that it's seemly to do so. The job requirements of being a rock star, or even a fairly average artist, pretty much demand doing such a thing.

[Nigel w]

Never understood Strummer. He was inspired by Dylan and Woody Guthrie : then he turned into a sulphate-fuelled violent punk monster.

You don't believe me? Try these two quotes from different interviews in NME circa 1977:

''There's nothing better if you're having an argument which won't resolve itself in any other way than smashing somebody's face in.''

Or this, delivered while idly toying with a flick knife:

''Suppose some guy comes up to me and tries to put one over on me and I smash his face up. If he learns something from it, that's creative violence.''

I was a 23 year-old pacifist at the time and I despised him for talking such bollocks and couldn't take the Clash's music seriously as a result.

Strummer was a privately educated toff who grew up not on the 17th floor of a squalid tower block with a broken elevator but in a world of comfortable middle-class privilege. I found such talk unforgivable and his calculated dumbing-down not just idiotic and crass but cynical and dishonest. It was beneath contempt and every bit as bad as Elvis Costello calling Ray Charles a ''blind ignorant nigger''.

Years later I got to know a very different Joe Strummer, an avuncular family man with whom I had a very happy experience making an epk for the second Mescaleros album. But something in me still never forgave him his attitude in the mid/late 70s when he helped to make indiscriminate violence an acceptable way of life in youth culture. He knew so much better and he did it to further his career. Despicable.

[Dayna]

Redemption Song is a book that could have used an editor
PS Dayna, where do you get the idea that Strummer tried to follow in his father's career footsteps? Not from Redemption Song surely.

It didn't say that Strummer tried to follow in his father's footsteps like I thought, but this is what I was getting it from, on pp. 5:

Strummer's father's Profession of career diplomat didn't arise from any postion of privlege-quite the opposite, in fact. "He couldn't understand why I was last in every class at school. He was a self-made man & we could never get on", said Strummer. He didn't understand there were different shapes of every piece of wood,different grains to people. I don't blame him, because all he knew was that he pulled himself out of it by studying hard."

I think where I got the idea he tried was my own interpretation, because I related to this in my own life.

[Jonathan E.]

Nigel has certainly hit on the underside of the Strummer story. That was part of what I was referring to with my comment on his desperation — and I suppose what Adam was referring to as "fake." However, my experience of the punk world in San Francisco was similar with its emphasis on violence, bad drugs, negativity, and all-round nihilism — or pushing all the fuckin' limits in an attempt to escape the bounds of middle-class bourgeois propriety (in mine and Joe's case, others had different backgrounds and different reasons). It was somewhat required at the time, the spirit of age, whether you like it or not. In practice, I got pretty tired of it after a couple of years, maybe even less — and I was, after all, basically an old hippy, which I think Joe was also in many ways. But he'd gotten himself into this stupid rock-star system, was sort of super-punk, had lost himself as legend in his own mind, and couldn't really get out for awhile. Anyway, as far as I personally am concerned, people who live in glass houses shouldn't chuck stones even if they are without sin, which I am certainly not. Perhaps I shouldn't mix the proverbs up so badly, either.

But people do a lot of dumb things in their twenties and that is what I think Strummer did. So, his eventual emergence out the other side into a new life and redemption is encouraging, almost mythic in its quality of rebirth. Redemption from the darkness is one of the great themes of human experience. As I've said before, as much as the music, I think it's the quality of redemption, as displayed in Wim Wenders' film, that made Buena Vista Social Club the great success it is.

PS to Nigel: Forgiveness is reputed to be very good for one. Perhaps you should try it with Strummer!

[Jonathan E.]

And, if I might add, I don't think Strummer would have got the time of day from journalists in the seventies if he'd still been nice little middle-class twit. Certainly no two interviews in NME — so who's pulling the chain? Journalist? Or wannabe rock star? There's blame enough to go round.

In the hindsight of today, I think there was an element of theatricality to all the punk violence. It was a deliberate attempt to shock and outrage, épatez les bourgeois in the time-honored fashion of bohemianism in all its manifestations — and so perhaps should not be taken too seriously, although unfortunately there were many who did, who came to see "indiscriminate violence [as] an acceptable way of life in youth culture." But Strummer was hardly alone. I think TV, for example, should take a good part of the rap.

Again, the violence of the establishment always dwarfs that of any youth culture. Not that that excuses violence in any form, but it does put it into perspective. The very fact that the state reserves the exclusive right to commit violence through its agents against its own citizens or dissidents is, in itself, one of the strongest arguments for the use of violence. I think it easy to see why some would choose violent methods as resistance to state power, especially if they happen to be young men, whatever their class background. The 1970s were a time when the shit appeared to be hitting the wall in the UK; punk was pretty much the UK version of the youth revolt of the hippies (not all peace and love, man, as we all should know by now) in the US ten years earlier, to a large extent due to the same underlying demographic reasons.

Lastly, if I recall correctly, Dylan himself was rather well known for his own use of sulphate-type drugs — and I suspect there are many who consider him a monster of some kind. Donovan might have done for awhile. Let's face it, rock stars are always wrapped up in some kind of intense ego field. I'd hardly single Strummer out as the worst of the worst.