"So, Joe, then what is true rebellion? Because cultural revolt seems to be the signal thing the Clash stand for in a lot of people"s minds."
Strummer regards the question in silence for a few moments, then fixes me with a level stare. "Cultural revolt . . . I"m not sure that"s it exactly. But I"ll tell you what I"ve come to think real rebellion is: It"s something more personal than that-it"s not giving up. Rebellion is deciding to push ahead with it all for one more day. That"s the toughest test of revolt-keeping yourself alive, as well as the cause."
PERSEVERANCE as revolt: The notion may seem a far cry from the brand of immediate, imperative, insurgent pa.s.sion that made Joe Strummer"s early exclamations seem so fearsome and world-wrecking-the youth-prole sentiments, stricken terrorist manifestos and iconoclast allegations that stoked incendiary rally calls like "1977," "Guns on the Roof," "White Riot," and "Safe European Home"-but at the same time, no other band in recent history has made stamina stand for as much as has the Clash.
Indeed, over the lightning distance of six years, four U.S. tours (and at least twice as many U.K. treks), and five alb.u.m sets (comprised of eight LPs and a hundred songs), the Clash have managed to stake a larger claim on questions of cultural, political, and moral effect-place greater weight and liability on the purposes of rock & roll-than any other band since the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or the Who. Probably the only other band that compares with them in terms of social and aesthetic force these last ten years is the s.e.x Pistols-and their design, it seems, was simply not just to raze popular culture, but also to level the world around it, themselves included. The s.e.x Pistols could never have made a second alb.u.m, and chances are they always knew it-but then making records wasn"t their long suit. For the Clash, making music is a way of making further possibilities of life, a way of withstanding inevitable defeats-a way of "not giving up."
Yet trying to live out revolt as daily ethos can be a steep act; for one thing, it means no doubling back. Since 1977, each new Clash release has sought to outdistance its predecessors in bold and irrevocable ways. Give "Em Enough Rope (1978) magnified the band"s musical force, while also broadening their sociopolitical focus, from the narrow obsessions of U.K. punk sedition to the fiery reality of the world outside-a world mired in tyranny and aflame in blood and mutiny. London Calling, at the close of the following year, carried revolt over to the means of style and the object of history-resulting in the band"s most sharply crafted, popularly accessible effort to date. It also resulted in a resounding statement on how to live heroically and honorably in a world where such notions spell certain disillusionment and probable subjection ("Clampdown," "Death or Glory"). And then, in 1980, the group issued their uncompromising, bulky masterwork, Sandinista!-an opus that tried to expand the vernacular and sensibility of popular music by melding rock"s form with remote cultural idioms-like reggae, gospel, Euro-pop, American funk, and rap-and unflinching social realities; in other words, by mixing dread with innovation, for matchless effect. Overall, what has emerged is a body of work that has upped the ante on punk-forced it to reach outward, to risk compromise, to embrace conflict, even if it means conflict with punk"s own narrow presentiments.
What also results, though, is a kind of self-imposed state of contradiction that can, on occasion, seem to undermine the group"s grandest designs. After all, it"s one thing to start out to upend rock convention, and quite another to end up proclaimed as "The World"s New Greatest Rock & Roll Band." Yet the physical impact of the Clash"s live shows, and the stimulative force of London Calling-incorporating, as it did, British symbols and symptoms as text, and American rock & roll as context-had just that effect: It made the Clash appear as the last great hope, if not preservers, of the very tradition they had set out to thwart.
Yet the Clash have also tainted some of their best gestures with a maddening flair for miscalculation and self-importance. Sandinista! falls under that charge for many critics and fans ("Imagine," one writer friend told me, "the audacity, the waste behind believing that everything you record deserves to be heard: who do these guys think they are-the Keith Jarretts of punk?"), though for my taste, it"s the Clash"s strongest, best enduring work, an unrepressed paradigm of creativity.
Less successful, I think, was the previous year"s late spring series of concert events at Bond"s Casino in New York (eighteen shows in fifteen days), that seemed to indicate on one level the Clash"s startling naivete about audience prejudices and business concerns, and on another, their inability to adopt Sandinista!"s range and depth to a live format. (In true scrupulous fashion, the Clash, along with friend and filmmaker Don Letts, doc.u.mented the whole debacle in movie form: The Clash on Broadway, though it never received wide release.) More recently, there are the problems of Combat Rock-a heavy-handed, strident, guileful, muddled alb.u.m about artistic despair and personal dissolution that derives from those conditions rather than aims to illuminate them-and, of course, Joe Strummer"s widely reported defection-or "hiatus," as the group calls it-in the early part of 1982.
Not surprisingly, the Clash worked those setbacks to their favor. Strummer returned to the group after a month-long sabbatical in Paris (though by that time, virtually their entire U.K. tour had been blown out of the water), appearing stronger and more resolved than ever before. What"s more, Combat Rock proved to be the band"s most critically and commercially successful record in England since 1978"s Give "Em Enough Rope (not bad work for a band that had grown painfully, almost fatally, unfashionable in their own homeland).
Not even the loss of Topper Headon-the prodigious drummer who had reportedly held great influence on the band"s recent musical progressivism, only to bail out five days before their current American tour for reasons that may never be publicly explained-not even that could disarm the Clash"s resurging spirit. Manager Bernard Rhodes (also newly returned to the fold) and road organizer Kosmo Vinyl simply recruited original drummer Terry Chimes on a work-for-hire basis, and sequestered him, along with the group, for three days of relentless rehearsals. Forty-eight hours later, the Clash, the very same Clash that had recorded the group"s resplendent 1977 debut alb.u.m, were on tour once again in America-a bit battle-scarred, more than a little uncertain at moments, but playing with more mastery, unity, and momentum than they ever had before.
In fact, oddly enough, it"s the hardcore potency of their current shows that may be the only thing to fault the Clash for this time around. From the opening edict of "London Calling" to the closing salvos of "Complete Control," "Clash City Rockers," and "Garageland," these are urgent, clamorous, throat-throttling shows-as if the band had just jumped out of Black Market Clash and onto a stage, replete with ferment and sweat. But in that, they"re also surprisingly prudent affairs. Missing are all the adventurous touchstones from Sandinista!, or even the off-center filler pieces from Combat Rock. The lamentable "Know Your Rights" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" were the staples here, with occasional game stabs at "Rock the Casbah," "Car Jamming," or the beautiful, mournful "Straight to h.e.l.l."
And yet . . . and yet, though this is the Clash"s unabashed greatest-hits concessional tour, these were also the most moving, powerful and meaningful shows I"ve ever seen from this band. To watch the Clash in their early English jaunts or their first couple of U.S. tours-with the group issuing "Safe European Home" and "Guns on the Roof" as life-threatening and world-saving calls to truth-was to watch a rock & roll band (the strongest since the Who; the most vaulting since the Rolling Stones) stake a larger claim on terror, revolution, and deliverance than any pop culture force before it (the s.e.x Pistols fell just short of the deliverance part-that is unless you equate deliverance with self-dissolution). But to watch the Clash in 1982-as they mount the pace of "Somebody Got Murdered," or seize the pulse of "Clampdown"-is to watch a band that has learned how costly it can be to try to live those claims, a band that"s learned that to redefine the intent and weight of pop culture isn"t enough: You have to make a new definition with every new gesture; you have to keep the designs behind those gestures sharp and unsparing; and you have to be willing to risk the refusal or flattening of those gestures, if not your own failure. Above all, it"s to watch a band that"s learned that they will probably lose far more than they"ll ever win, that someday, if they really care enough, they"ll probably lose it all.
"I"LL TELL YOU what makes these shows so strong," says Mick Jones, one late afternoon, over eggs and hash-browns at a popular Santa Monica Boulevard diner. "It"s a celebration: We"re out there celebrating that we exist-we made it this far, we made it another night."
Jones pauses for a few moments and pokes idly at his still unexplored breakfast. "Still, I wonder," he says. "Don"t you think people just like it because they think they"re getting the old Clash this time around-the Clash the way it should be? I bet that"s what it is."
No, I answer, I think they like it because it seems like an explosive, unyielding show. Also, to be frank, because the band"s never sounded more confident or better unified.
Mick ponders that for a moment as he watches the flutter and traffic of the boulevard. "I think we are playing pretty good . . . I feel all right about the shows, but I don"t feel it"s as much fun as it used to be somehow. We used to kind of explode. We play better now but for me personally . . .
"I"m in a place now where I"m working onstage in accompaniment to what Joe"s doing with the words. My part of it is to hold it all together, help keep the rhythm section locked. Joe stops playing the guitar a lot, you know, and those are moments where the instrumentation could use a bit of embellishment, so me hands are going all the time. But also, I"m just not going over the top as much these days, leaping about and all that. I"m trying to control myself a bit more."
Yet, I point out, Jones has some of the most commanding rock & roll moments of the show-in particular, his galvanizing performance of "Somebody Got Murdered." Every time they perform that song, a large segment of the audience shouts along on the line: "I"ve been very hungry/But not enough to kill."
"The important thing about that song," says Jones, "is that it isn"t any particular person who gets killed-it"s just anybody. It"s funny, in some places we play, where people live in extreme poverty-like northern England-the audience seems to understand the line about not killing better. But in richer places, people understand the other part better, the part about "Somebody"s dead forever." I think it"s their way of saying that, even though they might have money, they understand they can still lose it all-not just the money, but their lives. But the audiences are more mixed here in L.A., aren"t they?"
Jones starts to pick gradually at his breakfast, now that it"s good and cold. "America," he says, a thin tone of distaste in his voice. "The people here never really took punk of our kind seriously-always treated it like some sort of b.l.o.o.d.y joke. It"s a shame that a group like the s.e.x Pistols had to come out here to the land of promise just to burn out. Come out here and act out their gross end-that Sid and Nancy play. America screwed them up. That"s what we"ve tried not to have happen to us, going the way of the s.e.x Pistols-getting swallowed up by America."
It"s interesting, I note, that almost all of the Clash"s music since the first alb.u.m has moved more and more away from strictly English topic matter and styles. Sandinista! seemed like a rampart of Third World concerns.
"Yeah, well it was," says Mick, "and that didn"t particularly win a lot of hearts and minds at the record company. We knew it was going to be difficult, because we kept meeting resistance with the idea, but we were very stubborn and went straight ahead. Sandinista! is quite special to me. It wasn"t, as some critics say, a conscious effort to do ourselves in. Originally we"d wanted to do a single a month, then put out a double alb.u.m at the end of the year, like London Calling. But CBS wouldn"t have that, so we thought, All right, three alb.u.ms for the price of two it is. We probably could"ve gone without releasing another record for a year or so. I think people would"ve still been listening to it-there"s enough there.
"Combat Rock is like the best of Sandinista!-a concise statement, even though it contains just as much diversification. There"s an art to making one alb.u.m as well as three, you know."
Yet Combat Rock, I tell Jones, seems shot through with the idea that death is an ever-present possibility. In fact, it almost seems a death-obsessed alb.u.m, what with tracks like "Death Is a Star," "Ghetto Defendant," "Sean Flynn," "Straight to h.e.l.l". . . .
"All me favorite tracks," says Mick with a broad smile. "No, I know what you mean. A lot of critics are saying this alb.u.m reflects our death fascination, or the group"s own depression or confusion, but I don"t think that"s true. I think it"s clear that we know exactly where we"re at-we"re not confused at all. The problem is, a lot of people equate depression with reality, so they find the record depressing. I think it just touches on what"s real. I wouldn"t say it"s exactly optimistic, but I wouldn"t call it pessimistic either."
But some critics, I tell him, have found the Clash"s brand of political rhetoric and realism just as naive as that jaunty romanticism of the pop bands.
Mick takes a sip of his coffee and regards me with a bemused expression. "You mean like the Village Voice calling us "naive," and Sandinista! a "pink elephant"? Well, we are, and it is. It doesn"t particularly discourage us, that kind of talk. It"s important we stick to getting our point across. Not just because people will try to discredit us, but because somebody has to counteract all the madness out there, like the b.l.o.o.d.y war fever that hit England over this Falklands fiasco. It"s important that somebody"s there to tell them that there aren"t any winners where there aren"t any real causes. It may appear that Maggie Thatcher"s won for the time being, but not because she"s made the British winners. Instead, she"s made them victims, and they can"t even see it.
"What"s interesting," Jones continues, "is that the American critics don"t seem to like Combat Rock much and the English do, whereas with London Calling and Sandinista!, it was just the opposite: Americans loved them and the British critics really got down on us. But I think what they like about Combat Rock is that it"s one of the few things in English pop right now that bothers to be real. Most of the new pop doesn"t try to engage reality at all-which isn"t necessarily bad, because I like a lot of the new stuff too, like Human League. But sometimes you just have to get down to facing what the world"s about-and that"s not something all those party bands want to do.
"I don"t know," says Mick, his voice soft and museful. "I mean, don"t get me wrong, we have our share of fun too, but these days . . . it"s just that all the parties seem so far away."
I ask him: Do you think your audience understands that? Some of the people I"ve seen at the band"s shows-both the punk contingent, plus the mainstream crowd that have adopted them as the new Rolling Stones-seem to miss the Clash"s point by a mile. Slam dancing, not to mention spitting on and pelting opening acts like Joe Ely and Grandmaster Flash, doesn"t seem much different to me than any other mindless party ritual.
Mick bristles mildly. "They"re not really a.s.sholes, are they? They just don"t know how to act. I mean, at Bond"s it wasn"t actually racism. At first, we sat around backstage thinking, "What jerks!" But when we made it clear that we were having a rough time with the idea of them adoring us but hating the opening acts, it seemed to stop. I think it was just initial overexcitement."
Still, aren"t there times when you wonder just who your audience really is, and if you"re really reaching them?
"All the time, all the time," says Jones. "For every example you get of people who you think are really into it, who have really got the message, you also run up against the people who are completely misinformed. We just do the best we can to contain those contradictions, and hope enough of our meaning rubs off here and there."
Mick glances at the wall clock. It"s nearly time to head out to the afternoon"s sound check. I pose one last question: "When Joe disappeared, did you think it might be the end of the Clash?"
Mick smiles wryly. "That Joe-what a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, eh? If he ever does that again . . . um, yeah, for about ten minutes I sat down and died. I thought the group might be ending, and I thought it was a shame, but I wasn"t about to let it stop me from getting on with living.
"It was bad timing on Joe"s part, but it was also an admirable thing. It"s very difficult to put your own needs first like that, but the only problem is, once you start doing it, it"s easier to do again. Still, it made us ask ourselves what we were going to do. It certainly made Topper ask himself what was happening with him. I even thought about getting into something else myself, but it will have to wait now.
"We all decided we could start over with this band-Joe, Paul, me-and now, some nights, it"s almost like we"re a new group out there onstage.
"We should change our name, don"t you think? How about Clash Two?" Mick mulls the idea over a bit more, then bursts into a t.i.tter. "No, wait, I"ve got it: How about Clash Now?"
HOW had THE CLASH managed to hold together? After all, punk never offered itself as a breeding place for enduring comradeship.
Paul Simonon, the group"s craggily handsome ba.s.s player (recently elected to Playgirl"s "The Year"s Ten Best Looking Men" list), ponders that question as he picks his way through a bowl of guacamole and chips (all the band"s members are vegetarians) shortly before leaving the hotel for that night"s show.
"You"re talking about things like corruption, disintegration, right?" he says in his thick Brixton accent. "I tell you what I"ve seen do it to other groups: drugs. I"ve been through all sorts of drugs; at one time I took them just for curiousity, and I learned-it"s not worth it. It"s like a carrot held in front of you, and it"s the downfall of a lot of bands we"ve known.
"We just cut it out-we don"t deal with that stuff anymore. I"d much rather use the money to go out and buy a record, or a present for me girlfriend, or phone me mum up from Australia."
Does Simonon feel comfortable sharing that anti-drug concern with the Clash"s audience?
Simonon shrugs and gnaws another chip. "Sure. I don"t see why not. I think that"s part of what we"re about, is testing our audience."
Does he ever worry, though, about leaving the audience behind-worry that the band might be growing in different directions?
"Well, I think it"s this band"s natural course to grow. When we did London Calling we got a lot of flak, but that was just a warm-up. I think the real turning point for us came when we recorded "The Magnificent Seven"; it was the start of a whole new music for us. I thought, "This is going to wake people up, especially the ones who keep expecting us to do the same old thing; maybe it"ll even make them chuck the b.l.o.o.d.y alb.u.m out the window."
"But we knew that"s what we wanted: to test the people who"d been listening to us. We didn"t want to be dictated by anybody else"s interests. That could"ve happened very easily after the first alb.u.m, either way-we could"ve gone off in a more commercial style, because of what the record company people wanted, or gotten deadlocked into a hard punk thing, because of what the fans wanted. We didn"t do either one, and I suspect that"s hurt us as much as it"s helped. We certainly had an easy formula that would"ve carried us for a while."
Does Simonon think the Clash still attracts much of a punk audience in America or England-the hardcore and Oi types?
"Yeah, a little, but by and large the music of those bands doesn"t interest me. I"ve listened to it, but so much of it is just noise for its own sake. Plus the things they deal with, things like racism and getting drunk and slapping your girlfriend around the face-I don"t have any use for supporting that kind of thing.
"You know, people ask me all the time if we"re still punk, and I always say, "Yeah, we"re punk," because punk meant not having to stick to anybody else"s rules. Then you look around and see all these bands that are afraid to break the rules of what they think punk is. We"re punk because we still have our own version of what it means. That"s what it is: an att.i.tude. And we"ll stay punk as long as we can keep the blindfolds off."
"IS IT TRUE THAT Bob Dylan was in the audience last night?" Joe Strummer asks, as we settle down at the bar at the Clash"s hideaway hotel, a couple of hours after the next-to-last of their five-night engagements at the Hollywood Palladium. "Somebody told me that Sinatra came to one of the Bond"s shows, but I thought that was a bit far-fetched. But Dylan. . . . "
I tell him that yes, Dylan did come out to see the Clash, and from all accounts, seemed to like what he saw.
Strummer just shakes his head, muttering in incredulity.
Would that have intimidated you, I ask, knowing that Dylan was out there?
"Well, yeah. I mean, somebody told us he was up in the balcony, watching us, but you always hear those kinds of rumors. But if I"d known it was true, I"m not sure how I would"ve felt. Playing for Dylan, you know, that"s a bit like playing for . . . G.o.d, ain"t it?" Strummer orders us a round of drinks-a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary for himself; a rum and c.o.ke for me-and continues his musings on Dylan.
"You know, me and Kosmo (Vinyl, the band"s road manager and press liaison), we"re the only real Dylan diehards around the Clash. In fact, when Kosmo came down to Paris to take me back to London after I"d split, we went out celebrating one night at a French bar, with me playing piano, pounding out Dylan songs, howling stuff like, "When you"re lost in Juarez/And it"s summertime too . . . "
"I realize it"s almost a cliche to say it," he continues, "but we probably wouldn"t have done the kind of music we have if it hadn"t been for Bob Dylan. It"s easy for all these cynics just to write him off, but they don"t realize what he did-I mean, he spoke up, he showed that music could take on society, could actually make people want to save the world."
There are many of us, I say, who have put the Clash in that same league as Dylan, or for that matter, as the Rolling Stones. We see you as spokespersons, as idealists and heroes, as a band who are living out rock & roll"s best possibilities. In fact, we"ve even called you, time and time again, the World"s Greatest Rock & Roll Band. Did those kinds of claims ever confuse the band"s purpose-after all, you"d set out to play havoc with rock & roll-or did they instead help you secure the kind of ma.s.s audience you now enjoy in America?
"No to both questions," says Strummer. "First of all, we never took that "World"s Greatest" c.r.a.p seriously. That"s just a laugh. What does it matter to be the greatest rock & roll band if radio won"t even touch you? I mean, let"s face it: We don"t have the sort of ma.s.s audience in America that you mentioned, and it"s because radio won"t play our music. If you listen to the airwaves in this country, we don"t matter-we haven"t even made a dent, outside "Train in Vain."
"The last time I talked to you," he continues, "that time in London, just before our first tour here, I think I p.i.s.sed off the idea that America might really matter to us. But now I understand just how important it is: You can reach more people here than anywhere else in the world, and I don"t mean just record buyers. I mean reaching real people, making them wake up and see what"s happening around them, making them want to go out and do something about it."
But does Strummer think that"s what"s really happening? What about all the time-warped punks who merely want to act out the surface images of revolt? Or that broader mainstream audience that"s taken to the Clash as the new Rolling Stones, and want little more than the commodity of vicarious sedition, or bombastic euphoria, for their money? Aren"t there times when Strummer looks out there and wonders who the band"s audience actually is at this point, if their ideals are really the same as the Clash"s?
"Every night we play," Strummer says, "I wonder who our audience is. But you have to figure you"re reaching some of them. Maybe we"re only entertaining most of them, but that"s not really so bad when you think about it-look what it is that we entertain them with. I reckon each show we reach some new ones, really reach them. It"s like fighting a big war with few victories, but each of those victories is better than none."
Joe tosses back the rest of his drink and signals for a fresh round. The liquor"s starting to do its work. We"re both feeling voluble. "Let me tell you," he continues, "if you can"t find cause for hope, then go get some somewhere. I mean, I"ve had some bad times, dark moments when I came close to putting a pistol to my head and blowing my brains out, but . . . " Strummer lapses into a private silence, staring fixedly at the remains of the drink before him. "But screw that," he says after a few moments. "I think if you ain"t got anything optimistic to say, then you should shut up-final. I mean, we ain"t dead yet, for Christ"s sake. I know nuclear doom is prophesied for the world, but I don"t think you should give up fighting until the flesh burns off your face."
But Combat Rock, I note, sounds like the Clash"s least optimistic record.
"Combat Rock ain"t anything except some songs. Songs are meant to move people, and if they don"t, they fail. Anyway, we took too long with that record, worried it too much."
Still, it does have sort of a gloomy, deathly outlook, I tell him. All those songs like "Death Is a Star," "Straight to h.e.l.l."
"I"ll tell you why that record"s so grim," says Strummer. "Those things just have to be faced, and we knew it was our time. Traditionally, that"s not the way to sell records-by telling an audience to sober up, to face up. The audience wants to get high, enjoy themselves, not feel preached to. Fair enough, there ain"t much hope in the world, I don"t want to kill the fun but still . . . "
Strummer hesitates in thought for a few moments, then leans closer. "Music"s supposed to be the life force of the new consciousness, talking from 1954 to present, right? But I think a lot of rock & roll stars have been responsible for taking that life force and turning it into a death force. What I hate about so much of that "60s and "70s stuff is that it dealt death as style, when it was pretending to deal it as life. To be cool, you had to be on the point of killing yourself.
"What I"m really talking about," he continues, "is drugs. I mean, I think drugs ain"t happening, because if the music"s going to move you, you don"t need drugs. If I see a sharp-looking guy on a street corner, he"s alive and he"s making me feel more alive-he ain"t dying-and that"s the image I"ve decided the Clash has to stand for these days. I think we"ve blown it on the drug scene. It ain"t happening, and I want to make it quite clear that n.o.body in the Clash thinks heroin or cocaine or any of that c.r.a.p is cool.
"I just want to see things change," he continues, hitting a nice stride. "I don"t want it to be like the "60s or "70s, where we saw our rock stars shambling about out of their minds, and we thought it was cool, even instructive. That was death-style, not life-style. Those guys made enough money to go into expensive clinics and get their blood changed-but what about the poor junkie on the street? He"s been led into it by a bunch of rock stylists, and left to die with their style. I guess we each have to work it out in our own way-I had to work it out for myself-but the Clash have to take the responsibility to stand for something better than that.
"Like I say," Strummer continues, "I don"t want to kill anybody"s fun. But certainly there"s a better way of having fun than slow suicide." Strummer takes a long sip at his drink, and an uneasy expression colors his face. "Suicide is something I know about. It"s funny how when you feel really depressed, all your thoughts run in bad circles and you can"t break them circles. They just keep running around themselves, and you can"t think of one good thing, even though you try your hardest. But the next day it can all be different."
I"m not sure what to say, so I let the mood hang in the air, as palpable as the liquor. Finally, I ask if Joe"s sudden disappearance to Paris was a way of working himself out of a depression.
"It sure was," he says quickly. "It"s very depressing in England these days-at least it can get that way, it can get on top of you. But I had a personal reason for going to Paris: I just remembered how it was when I was a b.u.m, how I"d once learned the truth from playing songs on the street corner. If I played good, I"d eat, and that direct connection between having something to eat and somewhere to stay and the music I played-I just remembered that.
"So I went to Paris and I only got recognized once, but I conned my way out of it. I"d grown a beard and looked a bit like Fidel Castro, so I simply told them I was my hero. I didn"t want to be recognized."
While he was gone, I ask, was he worried it might mean the end of the Clash?
"I felt a bit guilty, but . . . " Joe pauses and looks toward the bartender for one more round. It"s already well past closing hour, Strummer and I are the last customers in the bar, but the barkeep obliges. "I felt guilty," Strummer resumes, "but I was also excited, feeling I was bringing everything to a head. I just contrasted all those pressing business commitments with that idea that I used to be a b.u.m-that"s why I"d started to play music, because I was a b.u.m-and I decided to blow, maybe just for a day or two.
"But once I was in Paris, I was excited by the feeling that I could just walk down the street, go in a bar and play pinball, or sit in a park by myself, unrecognized. It was a way of proving that I existed-that I really existed for once for me. This was one trip for me. We make a lot of trips, but that one was for me.
"I"ll tell you this," Joe adds as a parting thought, "I really enjoyed being a b.u.m again. I wish I could do it every day, really. But I can"t disappear anymore. Time to face up to what we"re on about."
And what is that?
"Well, if I wanted to sound naive, I guess I"d say it"s something like trying to make a universal music for a world without governments. Or a better way of putting it is to say for a world under One World Government. All this nationalism, these border wars, they"re going to erupt into the death of us."
It does sound a bit naive, given the state of things.
"Let me tell you," he says, "I"d rather talk to a naive person than a cynic. Sure, there are a lot of young naive people out there, but at least they can be moved, their ideals can be inspired. That"s why, even though a lot of the critics have been very kind to us and love us, we never aim our music at them. We"re writing for the young ones, the audience, because they carry the hope of the world a lot more than a few critics or cynics. Those young ones can go away from our show with a better idea of a better world. At least they haven"t written it all off yet. Their ideals can still be inspired."
The liquor"s run out and so have the bar"s good graces. We gather our jackets and get ready to leave. "I know it sounds simple, says Strummer, but I believe in naivete. It"s a good breeding idea for rebellion. It"s a bit like believing in survival, you know-I mean, surviving is the toughest test, and we had to find out the hard way. I had to find that out. But in the end, I realized it"s the only rebellion that counts-not giving up.
"It"s like I said: We ain"t dead yet, for f.u.c.k"s sake. If you ain"t got hope, you should get where there is some. There"s as much hope for the world as you find for yourself."
punk: twenty years after.
Though none of us knew it at the time, when the Clash finished their Combat Rock tour in 1982, they were very near their own end. The band split in 1983, with Mick Jones going on to form Big Audio Dynamite (also known as B.A.D., which turned out to be an unfortunately clairvoyant nickname), and Strummer going on to something less than a solo career. Still, the Clash"s trek had been glorious-they made a larger and more meaningful volume of great punk music than any band before or since (that is, unless you count Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra as punks-which perhaps you should), and compared to most late 1970s punk acts, their seven-year career seemed downright protracted.
In the last twenty years, there was no single movement in popular (or in this case, semipopular, even unpopular) music that I cared or argued more about than punk, no movement I tracked more closely. But to be a fan of punk was to resign oneself to many uneasy realities-including dealing with a great deal of derision. It also meant accepting that many of punk"s best artists and best music would pa.s.s you by faster than a bullet-train. Remember the Au Pairs, the Vibrators, the Avengers, Magazine, X-Ray Spex, Wire, the Adverts, Young Marble Giants, Marine Girls, Liliput, the Raincoats, Kleenex, ESG, Gang of Four, the Germs, Y Pants, Penetration? If you do, you know they all made great music, and then they were gone almost before you knew it. It was as if a troop of ghosts had laid mines across the field of modern-day pop. If you were lucky, you stepped on those mines, and their explosion could be epiphanies that might change your life.
Though I wrote about punk more than any other theme since 1977 (especially during my years as pop music critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner), the subject receives only a limited amount of s.p.a.ce in this present volume. In part, that"s because there are other writers who have done wonderful and thoughtful jobs of delineating punk"s history and meaning (see Jon Savage"s England"s Dreaming and Greil Marcus" Lipstick Traces and ranters & crowd pleasers-the latter published in the United Kingdom as In the Fascist Bathroom). It"s also because there were ways in which I became disillusioned with how punk eventually was received, and how some of its best meanings were robbed. I remember a film from a few years back, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The t.i.tle referred to the commercial and generational breakthrough represented by the success of Nirvana-which indeed was a wonderful (though for the band, horribly costly) event. But the truth is, anybody paying attention had heard that same claim-that punk had broken through, been accepted by a hidebound American audience-for at least a decade, ever since the Clash hit big with London Calling in 1979. It was heartening, of course, that music like the Clash"s and Nirvana"s reached many people, for these victories meant far more than commercial success; they also gave hope, voice, courage, and fun to many people whom the traditional pop world was reluctant to accommodate, or even to recognize. At the same time, I"m afraid that-at least in the mid-1980s-what many people meant when they claimed that punk (also known by the more generic, "acceptable" designation of "new wave") had broken through in America was that the music-and even parts of the punk movement itself-had finally been incorporated into a thriving commodity form. As far back as 1983, certain elements of punk style were already ubiquitous: quirky music, tough-posing fashions, and sharp, insouciant stances permeated much of American radio (on stations such as Los Angeles" trend-setting KROQ-FM) and television (the horrible Square Pegs series and, of course, MTV) and international film (Diva, Star Struck, Liquid Sky, and others), as if the whole creative expression of domestic pop culture suddenly had realigned itself. It was as if punk and postpunk had finally won the pop wars only to surrender its ideals.
Which is to say, it was as if nothing had changed: Yesterday"s pop-which new wave set out to upend-was largely a music of relentless sameness, kneejerk s.e.xism, and social unconcern. But new wave pop quickly became a music of exotic sameness, cloying s.e.xiness, and, to some degree, social denial. There was nothing meaningful or revealing in the success of such glitz-and-s.e.x acts as Berlin, Missing Persons, or Duran Duran, even though they blazoned a "new" sound that personified modern trends and att.i.tudes.
What went wrong? How did a music of such unruly origins end up so trivial and diffused? It helps to remember that punk began as a genre born of att.i.tude and circ.u.mstance: In the airlessness of British society and aridity of American rock music in the late "70s, outrage or desecration seemed the only animating, even rational, course-a way of staking distance from all the sameness of those scenes, and also affronting, provoking them. Sedition-minded acts like the s.e.x Pistols and Clash played their music as if the corruption of British values had forced the noise from them, while their early American counterparts-Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones, and Television-didn"t comment on social forces so much as make new claims for the way vital modern music must sound. To the media, much of this brutal, apocalypse-informed modernism seemed merely silly or incomprehensible, while to radio-which stood to break or make punk with a large audience-the music and its style-makers loomed mainly as a loathsome, noncommercial force. What hits radio allowed-the B52s, Cars, Blondie, the Vapors, the Police-seemed elected mainly to quell the music"s insurgency.
Maybe this was a reasonable action, because the best new wave, punk, and postpunk records were actively fierce, profane stuff. Consider the evidence: "Anarchy in the U.K." and "Bodies" (by the s.e.x Pistols), "White Riot" and "Guns on the Roof" (the Clash), Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts (the Adverts), "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" (X-Ray Spex), "Don"t Dictate" (Penetration), "At Home He"s a Tourist" (Gang of Four), "Shot by Both Sides" (Magazine), Fear of Music (Talking Heads), "Discovering j.a.pan" (Graham Parker), "She"s Lost Control" (Joy Division), Broken English (Marianne Faithfull), "Ghost Town" (Specials), Metal Box (Public Image, Ltd.), This Year"s Model (Elvis Costello).
All of these songs or alb.u.ms were attempts to force popular culture-and a young, developing segment of pop at that-to accommodate visions of social horror, private dissolution, and plain old willful rancor. That they were among the most truthful and important music of their day was largely a missed fact; that they were virtually unheard outside of a community of (anti-) pop activists was certainly a disservice, though to radio"s way of (non-) thinking, more a necessity than choice. This was music that meant to rend the pop world in half-and that"s an ambition that radio (which has since divided the real world into unnecessary black and white factions) figured it could never survive.
But punk always had a built-in defeat factor, and that was basically the way the music would be enervated as it was adopted by a gradually larger audience. Many fans presumed that to adhere to new wave music and its fabricated fashions was to become a part of its culture. In fact, British art and social theorist d.i.c.k Hebdige devoted the better part of a book (Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Methuen, 1979) to the idea that this adherence to a collective style gave British punks and mods a "genuinely expressive artifice"-a sense of "Otherness" that set them apart from the beliefs and values of the dominant society. To a degree, this is true: To crop one"s hair into a bright-dyed, spiky cut, or dress in vivid vinyl colors, is to make a choice that sets one apart in new social alignments. Of course, like the initial uniqueness of long hair or short hair, it"s a short-lived difference. One doesn"t necessarily become a punk by fashion and musical choices alone.
In America in the 1980s, the whole new wave shebang amounted to even less than a change in weather-more like a change in flavor. That"s because in America, new wave was largely a music of surfaces and faddism-a sound that became as increasingly self-conscious as a chic dance-floor pose. What this meant was that the emerging dominant American new wave audience didn"t necessarily share social or even aesthetic values in the same way that the initial art-informed New York and street-bred London punks and postpunk crowd did. Instead, the MTV and KROQ audiences-which were smack dab in the middle of new wave"s rise-simply shared a fondness for the immediate look and feel of the music, without much driving concern over the ideas or responsibilites implicit in their musical choices. (How else might a thinking audience embrace, on the same bill, bands as diametrically opposed as the Clash and Men at Work?) What this also meant was that both punk music and its culture could now contain as many political and aesthetic incongruities as the dominant society around them.
IN THE EARLY and mid-1980s, if punk meant or proved anything vital in America, then it was in Los Angeles, more than anywhere else. In the sprawling webwork of riches and dread that was Los Angeles in those days, few people lived out their caprices more colorfully or more fiercely than the punks-as if they were h.e.l.l-bent on defacing the city"s pacific gloss, or simply underscoring its balled-up artistic and ethical climate. In a sense, punk in California was always something of a paradox: The city"s self-possessed stylishness and cold-blooded opulence are so steady, so pervasive, that anyone who attempts to a.s.sert rage or ugliness as aesthetic values can"t help seeming a bit misplaced, if not just plain pretentious. But there was an inescapable rightness about what the punks were doing in Southern California: In a place where one of the most widely held ambitions is leisure, and the most commonly respected product of art is prosperity, some of the few voices that made much moral difference at all were the ones that blazoned hostility.
In any case, punk-as a digression in culture or community, more than an adventure in music or art-flourished in Los Angeles as it had in no other place outside of London. In fact, Los Angeles was the one place where punk has come closest to living up to its name-the one place where, as David Byrne noted, "you find punks who really are punks: mean as h.e.l.l, and not just the creators of an interesting persona." It was as if all the spike-haired, skin-headed, self-styled guttersnipes you saw haunting the streets and clubs in L.A. were devoted to carrying out what they perceived as punk"s first and foremost possibilities: namely, artful nihilism and studied primitivism.
It"s that fondness for the ign.o.ble that helped give L.A. punk its nasty streak. In his essay about British punk in The Rolling Stone Ill.u.s.trated History of Rock & Roll, Greil Marcus noted: "By far the most violent in appearance and rhetoric of any musical movement, punk was probably the least violent in fact-though by far the most violence was directed against it." Los Angeles was the place where the punks evened the score.
For the most part, L.A."s punk violence was confined to a thuggish little ritual called, quite aptly, slam dancing: dancers gathered into kinetic cl.u.s.ters and collided off one another like pool b.a.l.l.s caroming around a snookers table. To most observers, it resembled a microcosmic version of pandemonium. (The music for these melees-a rabid, samely version of early monorhythmic, nonmelodic punk, usually dispensed by Fear, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks-was both prompting and incidental: merely a relentless agitating soundtrack or backdrop for the real performers, the audience.) Sometimes the dancing turned into communal violence. What might begin as a shoving or jeering match between some punks or punks and outsiders could turn hurriedly into a mob action, with half a dozen or so partisans leaping into the fracas, drubbing their hapless target into a bloodied, enraged wreck. Often, scrambles swept across the whole breadth of a club or ballroom floor, touching off eruptions of chaos like a chain-blaze in a dry timberland.
Some observers I know described these flare-ups as essentially the celebrative rites of a community defining itself; others charged that the media hyperbolized the whole scene. I don"t think either of those claims is entirely true: Punk violence was far from being the most troubling form of violence in Los Angeles-a place where the police force was almost never censured for its shootings of citizens and suspects-but what went on in the clubs here wasn"t anything particularly festive or transcendent. It was simply a demonstration of would-be miscreants trying to make a shared style out of accepted notions of alienation and despair.
So what is it about the promised land that inspired so much enmity among its children? Craig Lee (a late Los Angeles-based journalist who played drums and guitar for Catholic Discipline and the Alice Bag Band) did a nice succinct job of summing up the partisan"s point of view in an article about surf punks for L.A. Weekly: "The English press has often snidely alluded to punk in L.A. being a farce, not like the London scene that grew from a revolt against a life of lower cla.s.s drudgery. But facing a sterile, anonymous life in suburbia is as depressing to some kids as facing a life of dull labor and low wages is to the English punks."