Joe Strummer |
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Fri. January 03.2003 5:54 PM EST |
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Joe Strummer: Death And GloryClash leader epitomized combat rock and corner soul. by Bill Flanagan |
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Joe Strummer (Josh Cheuse/Retna) |
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Joe Strummer lived life right up. Before he was 30 he had forever changed rock 'n' roll. And that turned out to be the easy part. In the twenty years
between the end of the Clash and Joes death this Christmas at age 50, he
turned away from
There have been whole books written about the Clash; what they accomplished cant be summed up in a few paragraphs. Both disparagers and zealots often describe the bands rhetoric as leftist, Marxist, revolutionary - which is true to a degree. But that sort of easy labeling can make you miss a key fact: Joe, their principle lyricist and strategist, was first and foremost generous. He was one of the most open-minded and least prejudiced people I've ever known. Joe was more concerned with justice than with politics. The Clash made an album called Sandinista! and critics assumed they were anti-American. But the song with the "Sandinista!" refrain, "Washington Bullets," was actually praising Jimmy Carters human rights initiative in Latin America. Likewise, "Koka Kola" was taken to be an indictment of global capitalism and the Coca-Colonization of the third world. It wasnt. It was an indictment of cocaine. Read our interview with Joe Strummer from April 2001. Im not suggesting Joe was not a progressive. He was, right down to his bones. But I think the popular image of him as a raging polemicist - Che with a Fender Telecaster - has obscured just how smart, how subtle, and how rare Joes insights were. He didnt count anybody out until their actions convicted them, and he would be the last person to judge anyone - a politician, a cop, a critic - by his job description. Drunks in bars, bums on the street, the rich and the poor, the famous and obscure - Joe took every person he met as an individual. He stopped, he looked them in the eye and he really listened to what they had to say. The phones been ringing all week and everyone says the same thing: "I cant believe Joe died of a heart attack!" Corny as it is, you cant get around thinking it: How much heart can one man have? How much could he give before it finally gave out? Joe would be the first to tell you that he messed up by breaking up the Clash. While any objective observer could make the case that the blame should be shared by Mick Jones ego, Topper Headons drug problems, and the manipulations of the band's manager, Joe would say none of that mattered. When the Clash started having Top Ten hits and selling platinum and filling arenas, Joe freaked out. Ultimately he became so intent on being polemically pure and not compromising his principles, that he broke the very thing he was trying to protect. But in a way, that turned out to be okay. In the years after the Clash, all four members rebuilt their friendships. As their legend grew and their imitators made millions, some of Joes reluctance to re-form the band was more a matter of protecting those friendships than it was misplaced punk purity. About five years ago he told me he thought that if the former Clash members ever needed the money, it would be fair enough to go out and play. They'd simply tell people that was why they were returning to action. But since they were all getting by - some years were better than others but no ones kids were going hungry - it was more respectful to let the thing rest. Whats heartbreaking is that Joe definitely looked forward to playing with a re-formed Clash at their Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame induction this coming March. He said he couldnt see the four of them sitting there watching some other band play Clash songs. The Clash, the Police, and Elvis Costello and the Attractions were all going into the Hall together: three groups from the same place and time who had traveled in very different directions but shared more respect than rivalry. That, of course, was a party everyone was looking forward to. And before anybody mouths off about how the Police (or for that matter Costello) werent real punk rockers, I'll tell you how Joe felt about that sort of snobbery. Hed say, "Hey, I remember seeing Sting giving his all in a little punk club for a tiny audience who really dug it. He has as much right to punk as anybody." Hed say something similar when people would try to goad him into putting down Green Day or the other second-generation bands who owed something to the Clash. Joes attitude was, "Good for them, I hope they do something positive with it." Thats how Joe Strummer was. He was rooting for everybody. He assumed your heart was in the right place until proven otherwise. He was Johnny Appleseed spreading inspiration and encouragement wherever he roamed. He turned up everywhere: flying coach, bumming cab fare, picking up someone elses tab, and rolling through a community of friends and co-conspirators that recognized no borders. Personally, it has taken me ten days to get up the guts to sit down and type even this small, disorganized tribute. I have not wanted to think about his really being gone, and I have not wanted to organize the parade of Strummer memories that have been flashing through my head. Im not ready to put Joe in any box. I am very, very grateful that in the last three years he was again touring and recording full-time. I do wish hed taken it a little easier on himself. He was always staying up all night in a van, driving hundreds of miles to the next gig, keeping himself and his band on the edge. I thought his recent albums on Hellcat were superb. "On the road to rock and roll, theres a lot of wreckage in the ravine," he sang. Anyone who thinks his new music was not up to the standards of the Clash should check out "Nitcomb" on "Rock Art & the X-Ray Style," or the song "Generations" that he did under the name Electric Dog House for a human rights benefit record released on the Ark 21 label. As a live band it took the Mescalaros a couple of tours to jell, but by the time of their multi-night stand at St. Anns Warehouse in Brooklyn last spring they were fantastic. I thought Joe had finally achieved the sort of multi-ethnic musical marriage he had been pushing toward since Sandinista! and "Bankrobber" and "Straight to Hell." I thought hed finally got it exactly right. And without wanting to shrink his big life down to the little parts I was lucky enough to share, there is among all the images in my head one recent picture he wouldnt mind my showing. A couple of months ago Joe came up to the MTV/VH1 offices. We had hornswoggled him into starring in a pilot for a series for MTV2: "Joe Strummers Global Boom Box." We wanted to see if our viewers might be open to a little bit of world music, and we knew Joe was the one guide who would make it seem like fun - less like social studies class and more like a wild weekend. Joe was not at all sure he wanted to be a TV host, but he dug the music and was always game for a new adventure. He and his pal Dick Rude rolled up to MTV Networks HQ in Times Square and met everyone and talked through the show and had some laughs. When it was over I said, "Hey, Joe, come here. I want to show you something." We went to the big windows overlooking The New Times Square and I pointed out the massive Toys R Us - the Worlds Largest Toy Store - and said, "Do you remember that place?" He didnt. "Its Bonds!" The building had been the site of the Clashs most famous gigs, the multi-night 1980 stand that stopped New York in its tracks and became a film, an album, the high tide of punk rock in America. Given that opening, how many self-important Hamlets would have lamented the Disneyfication of Times Square, the Gulianid New York? But Joe just started laughing. He thought it was fantastic. He begged us to take a camera crew and shoot him riding around on the Toys R Us Ferris wheel while he shouted, "Return to Bonds!" in full "London Calling" dudgeon. The next night we had a blast, rolling around the city in a vintage Cadillac convertible while Joe improvised copy and stopped to talk with every punk, rasta, hippie, and panhandler in lower Manhattan. Joe had a cigarette lighter with "Work" on one side and "Hard" on the other. He said it was to remind him to always work hard and always do hard work. Time was fleeting, you had to keep going, you do as much as you can, you had to try to get it all in. I left him the last night still wailing, still going strong at 3 a.m. in a Chinese restaurant in the company of his usual allies - the photographer Bob Gruen, the director Jim Jarmusch, the actor Dick Rude. As usual, Joe teased me for leaving too soon. He should talk, Im now thinking. I think I have known, at least a little, every major rock musician of the last thirty years. Since Joe died I keep thinking that of all of them, he was the closest off stage to what you heard on the records, what you got from the songs. If you knew his music, you knew Joe Strummer. And man, werent we lucky? Wasnt he the greatest guy to know? |
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