Night Beat (31 page)

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.”

punk: twenty years after

T
hough 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
un
popular) 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 pass 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 space 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 title 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 sexism, and social unconcern. But new wave pop quickly became a music of exotic sameness, cloying sexiness, and, to some degree, social denial. There was nothing meaningful or revealing in the success of such glitz-and-sex acts as Berlin, Missing Persons, or Duran Duran, even though they blazoned a “new” sound that personified modern trends and attitudes.

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 attitude and circumstance: 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 Sex 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 Sex 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 Japan” (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 albums 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 Dick 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 hell-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 assert 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 Hell, 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 ignoble that helped give L.A. punk its nasty streak. In his essay about British punk in
The Rolling Stone Illustrated 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 clusters and collided off one another like pool balls 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 class 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.”