the clash: punk beginnings, punk endings

“Fuck that shit,” says Joe Strummer, the thuggish-looking lead singer of the Clash, addressing some 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 sleepy London town, during the murky Christmas week of 1978, rock & 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 swift on the heels of the group’s second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope, which entered the British charts at number 2. Together with the Sex Pistols, the Clash helped spearhead the punk movement in Britain, along the way earning a designation as the most intellectual and political punk band. When the Pistols disbanded in early 1978, 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 & roll band that, like the Rolling Stones or 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’ 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 & roll show I’ve seen since I watched the Sex Pistols’ final performance in San Francisco earlier in the same year.

I try to say as much to a reticent Joe Strummer after the show as we stand in a dingy backstage dressing room, which is 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, the 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 next 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 with a wide volley of charges, ranging from an English rock-press backlash aimed at what the critics see as reckless politics, to very real criminal charges against Headon and Simonon (for shooting valuable 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. Jones, in a recent interview, 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 frustrations and Jones’ rock ideals. Both claimed to have been abandoned at early ages by their parents, and while Strummer (the son of a British diplomat) took to singing Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry songs in London’s subways for spare change during his late teens, Jones retreated into reading and playing Mott the Hoople, Dylan, Kinks, and Who records. 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 Levene (later a member of Public Image Ltd.) and drummer Terry Chimes (brilliantly renamed as Tory Crimes) to form the Clash in June of 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 (originally unreleased in America; Epic, the group’s label stateside, deemed 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, and drummer Chimes, weary of ducking bottles, spit, and the band’s politics, quit. Months passed before the group settled on Nicky Headon (also a member of Mick Jones’ 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 & roll shouldn’t be cute and adorable; it should be violent and anarchic. Based on that, I think they’re the greatest rock & roll group around.” Mick Jones balked at first 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 & roll’s State 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, London’s grand art museum. 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 that 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 entirely 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 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 forty thousand 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.”

THE NEXT TIME I meet the Clash, over three years later, is in fact in America—in the city of Los Angeles.

By way of greeting me, Joe Strummer points at the roughhewn crop of Mohawk hair that flares from the top of his head, his thumb cocked back like a pistol. “You know why I did this, don’t you?” he asks, leaning forward, a conspiratorial smile shaping his lips. We’re seated in a dressing room backstage at the Hollywood Palladium, where the Clash are midway through a five-date engagement—their first appearances in the area since the group’s 1980 London Calling tour. Strummer and his bandmates—guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon, and drummer Terry Chimes (the latter, newly returned to the Clash’s fold)—are about to hit the stage for the afternoon’s peremptory soundcheck, but first Joe wants to share a little revelation about his newly acquired headdress.

“I did it,” he says, “to try to force some confrontation this time around. I wanted people to react to it, to ask me just what the hell I’m on about. I thought it might stir up a little friendly conversation, if you know what I mean.”

And has it? I ask.

Joe gets a look that’s part disappointment, part bafflement. “No, not much. Maybe people find it a little too scary, you know, too serious. Over here, you Americans never seem to know how to take matters of style. It’s like you view it as a threat, as rebellion. In England, style signifies, um . . . like identity. I would never equate something as simple as a radical haircut with a true act of rebellion.”

“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 passion 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 album 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 Sex 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 Sex Pistols could never have made a second album, 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 naiveté 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, documented 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 album 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 album, 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 Hell.”

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 Sex 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 bloody joke. It’s a shame that a group like the Sex 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 Sex Pistols—getting swallowed up by America.”

It’s interesting, I note, that almost all of the Clash’s music since the first album 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 album at the end of the year, like London Calling. But CBS wouldn’t have that, so we thought, All right, three albums 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 album 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 album, what with tracks like “Death Is a Star,” “Ghetto Defendant,” “Sean Flynn,” “Straight to Hell”. . . .

“All me favorite tracks,” says Mick with a broad smile. “No, I know what you mean. A lot of critics are saying this album 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 bloody 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 assholes, 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 bastard, 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 titter. “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 bass 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 bloody album 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 album, 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 attitude. 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 . . . God, ain’t it?” Strummer orders us a round of drinks—a Bloody Mary for himself; a rum and Coke 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 cliché 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 mass audience you now enjoy in America?

“No to both questions,” says Strummer. “First of all, we never took that ’World’s Greatest’ crap 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 mass 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 pissed 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 Hell.”

“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 nobody in the Clash thinks heroin or cocaine or any of that crap 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 bum, 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 bum—that’s why I’d started to play music, because I was a bum—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 bum 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 fuck’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.”