Let Fury Have the Hour Page 13

  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, Kleene
x/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 main
stream 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.