THE CLASH ON TOUR

THE CLASH ON TOUR

by Stephen Demorest

During the ten days between February 7 and 17, 1979, the people of Iran toppled the Shah; the American ambassador was assassinated in Afghanistan; President Carter was publicly reprimanded by the president of Mexico; Rhodesia launched air strikes against Zambia; a nervous China invaded Vietnam; and Britain's premier punk band, the Clash, played their first tour of the United States. All around the globe, the underdogs were snapping at the heels of the fat cats, making them very jumpy.

The Clash, who obviously mean to seize the time, slammed out songs titled "Hate and War," "White Riot," "London's Burning" and "Tommy Gun". Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simenon, and Topper Headon are civilized, but their songs aren't. They represent the disintegration of civilization resulting from class oppression. A Clash set is as immediate, unsettling, frustrating, desperate, boring, tumultuous— and uncivilized—as the evening news. Take it as a warning, a threat, or a promise. If you close your eyes it will not go away; you have to deal with it—it is the currency.

Tuesday — February 6:

San Francisco is deceptively comfortable, a little city that's as cockeyed as all those Bullitt hills and ring-a-ding trollies. Everyone here lives on a slant. You get that soft, rich California air that sugar-co§ts your thoughts. You get those quaint ramshackle houses with stoops where the natives sun themselves facing uphill. And across the bay in Sausalito you get a hippie waitress swaddled in white gauze handing you a psychedelic menu that looks like an old Fillmore poster.

"It's too friendly," mumbles Paul Simenon (pronounced like "cinpamon") before downing another slug of Heineken. "Got a fag?" The Clash bass player is wearing black—all the band dress like leather boys offstage; studded, strapped and buckled up against balmy old San Francisco—but Paul's voice is gentle, even shy. He's a former art student who "didn't want to spend half me life sittin' in front of a bloody canvas dabbin' away," and his publicist calls him "gorgeous" with some reason. I pass him a cigarette.

I'm always polite. -Mick Jones

"We call this our Pearl Harbor tour because we're takin' people by surprise," he says of the band's seven city mini-tour. It's a trial run designed to stir up interest and airplay, and sort out the right halls, promoters, hotels, and friends for their major American assault in the spring. Whenever possible, they will play halls with no seating. (The only gig they played last year that had seats was the Manchester Apollo, and the kids smashed 400.)

Not everyone is caught unawares. Already, there's a sense of destiny surrounding this hardest hitting of new bands. The kids know it, snapping up 5,000 tickets to two shows in San Francisco alone. The press know it too; the group has a fine collection of triple-A raves, and even Time has put them on its Ten Best list.

Radio remains unconvinced, though —yesterday's hipsters are today's boring old farts—with rare exceptions like the KSAN deejay who risked getting fired for playing more Clash than the station allows. The band's own record company don't seem convinced in their hearts either, even after the second Clash LP, Give 'Em Enough Rope, zoomed to **2 in the British charts this winter. (The first Clash album, considered by many to be a landmark, wasn't even released in this country, so perhaps lukewarm support should be regarded as a big improvement.) For the hard-rock vanguard, though, the Clash are already the big jolt of 1979.

Heart-throb Simenon is said to be the most sensitive to feminism of all the Clash. "When we play in England," he says, "we generally like to have a girl-group with us because it's better than having just blokes up there all the time. I like the Slits. There should be more girl-groups to encourage more girls to go to concerts. There aren't enough of them." In America, the Clash are supported by women in the Dishrags (Vancouver), and Pearl Harbor & the Explosions (San Francisco), among others.

"We were really surprised, especially when the beer cans started cornin'," says Simenon of the rowdy reception they received at their first North American concert in Vancouver on January 31. "That's like spittin' for them I suppose—makes us move a lot anyway." While in Canada, the band bought silver spurs that now jingle on their black engineer boots—a bit of fun for the boys, a bit more terror in the hearts of the meek. On the ride down to the U.S., their bus was pulled over by state troopers for speeding, but their Texan drivers whispered that they had Dolly Parton aboard, and the law stepped aside.

The Clash are travelling by bus down the West Coast before cutting over to Oklahoma, where they'll catch a plane to Cleveland and points east. Partly this is so they can see America up close. Also, confides Simenon, flying hurts Mick's and Joe's ears.

"I run on and try to be the first to dump all my stuff in the back, 'cos it's got a thing where you can slide in your cassettes and play music. I play reggae, rockabilly, and bits from English radio programs. Everybody else wants to go up front and watch telly."

"One of the good things about the road is you have time to read. At school they force you, and it's a stupid way of doing it because it puts people off books for life. It's only in the last year I started picking up a book and having a read. Now I think they're useful, much more than television. I've recently got into George Orwell; there's so much in it you need to read the books a couple of times. Like 1984 is quite true, the way it talks about television. I worry about it in London, but here it seems really over the top. I don't trust it. There was a show on World War II about Goebbels that really got to me, the way he took over the radio. Even though the things he saidwere untrue, all Germany believed what they heard on the radio. I think people have got to be real careful of television."

When I first met Mick / couldn't sing. All I could do was break things. •Paul Simenon

Yankee detectives are always on the TV,

Cos' killers in America work seven days a week.

("I'm So Bored With The USA")

Broken homes. Frustration. Boredom. Simenon and I scratch another match and order two more green bottles. "There's nothing done for youth in England—schools don't really help. They hire a coach and take us on journeys, like to Portsmouth where they take us on this merchant navy ship. They show you around and then take you to the canteen, and because all the kids get at home is probably just chips, when they see this load of baked beans and everything it seems so magnificent half of them go off and join the navy. There's another coach that takes you down to the tank museum, and these instructors try to get you to join the army. They're deliberately recruiting.

"I went on seven or eight of these trips. They took us down to Battersea Power Station and it was awful, like a men's toilet, with tile everywhere. You could see so clearly the way they're tempting you. There's a factory down the corner from the school which most of the kids end up working at—or working in the bookies on Saturdays to get some money, and they end up doing it the rest of their lives. They end up Friday nights just gettin' themselves juiced, they've got nothin' better. So I was one of the lucky ones gettin' away from that.

"I used to go around to football matches with me mates from the street and be a nuisance. In South London everyone had cropped hair, braces fsuspenders], and boots, and you'd do things together. I remember once we'd just come from a football match and about 60 skinheads crossed over to where we was. We were skinheads as well, but we crossed over to the other side, and then they crossed over again, and we ended up running up this road with them chasing us. In some ways it's what 'Last Gang In Town' is about. Stupid.

"I used to fight a lot, but it got pretty boring after a while, so I started going out with girls. It's more fun—you couldn't get in trouble anyway. I didn't use the time to listen to rock 'n' redly it was only later I started going down to clubs where the skinheads used to listen to reggae and that stuff. It's only since I've been in this group that I've been discovering music. I.get my records at sedond-hand stores", and me and Joe swap albums.

"I always wanted to be a guitarist, he's the one looks really excitin', but when I'first met Mick I couldn't sing, I couldn't do fuck-ajl—I was useless. About all I could do was break things. But he encouraged me; I used to go 'round his house and he played records to^e. Then I bought this old bass from a friend of his—Tony James, Generation X—and I started working with Mick. Then I met Keith Levine [a guitarist who soon split], and eventually we met Joe."

A Strummer sampler:' "London's burning with boredom now . . . Kids fight like different nations . . . Monday is coming like" a jail on wheels."

Simenon says: "The English people are pretty strange in some ways. I redd there was a time around 1900 when everybody was going to strike and meet on Hyde Park corner and have a revolution. But it rained that day, so nobody showed up."

"We don't like to be called a new wave band, " drummer Topper Headon states firmly in his rapid-fire delivery as he stretches out on a motel bed with his spiers angled harmlessly to the side. "We're a punk band and proud of it—we ain't gonna change."

Nieky Headon was dubbed "Topper" when he turned up at his Clash audition with a comic book sticking out of hisback pocket and Paul thought he looked like one of the characters in it. He got the job by understanding what the Clash needed—"something really straight and solid," rather than a lot of flashy fills. He had four days' rehearsals before playing his first gig with them in Paris. Original drummer Terry Chimes was frightened out of the group in 1977 when a Royal College of Art concert drew a hail of wine bottles and left the whole stage littered with broken glass.

We don't like to be called a new wave band. We're a punk band and proud of It. •Topper Headon

"I joined about a week after they finished the first album, so everyone thought I was Terry, which was a bit of a bummer. Then there were only three people on the album cover, and everyone thought I was a session bloke." > j

Simenon says: "We were going to do a tour of Italy, but one place is Communist owned, another is Fascist owned—it's a bit crazy."

Topper says the Clash have already organized their first film, to be released by Columbia Pictures. "It's about a 70% true story. There's film of actual gigs and incidents as they happened, like our court appearances, but rather than being a documentary it's a story of the group as seen through the eyes of this bloke named Ray who we hang around with. He's a young kid about 20 and he's a piss artist,, y'know, he's alcoholic. He wanted to get a job with us and.couldn't, and the whole story is about his hangin' around with the group, tryin' to get girls on the band's name and that.

From Joe Strummer's proletarian lyrics to the way the band handles its business, no group in England is considered more populist than the Clash, and their story involves those who support them as much as the four musicians. (They have been known to linger for two hours after a show signing autographs and chatting with fans.) "It's really sort of personal," says Simenon. "I meet people on the tube in London and they tell me how they're going off to bricklayer's college, and that's pretty good. It's like having loads of friends. That's how I want it to be always.

"Some people follow us and d6 posters, like these two guys in North London. Johnny Green, our tour manager, just turned up from nowhere. Ray's got the opportunity to be in the film. It's fair—everybody who contributes gets something to do. '

Caroline Coon, the restless blbnde borzoi who is perhaps the self-managed band's closest adviser, is a former journalist who followed the band until she was hooked. Sandy Pearlmah, a garrulous Long Island native, became producer of Give 'Em Enough Rope ("despite his Blue Oyster Cult connections") mostly by hanging out with them until his selection became obvious.

The same personal approach works on the grass-roots level. (Of course your degree of access depends on how approved you are.) In San Francisco, where Mick and Joe worked on guitar overdubs last year, KSAN deejay and keeper-of-the-faith Howie Klein acts as Mick's liason to the local community, chauffeuring and briefing on local manners. T-shirts are worked up by the jovial, bespectacled artist and masterforger Hugh Brown, who helped design the eye-popping "Rope" album cover.

On the other hand, those who gain access by hanging out can lose it by not hanging out, as in the case of former manager Bernard Rhodes. "When we first started he was great," says Simenon. "^n some ways he's a bit of a genius. He was good td talk to because we'd get ideas flashin' between us. But I think abgut the time we signed with ,CBS he lost a bit of contact with us, and if eventually faded out."

Wednesday —February 7:

The first Clash concert in America is staged at the Berkeley Community Theater, an uncharacteristically posh place. ("First timd I ever pogoed on a carpet," mutters one fanj The' aptly named Pearl Harbor opens the show, and she's followed by the Clash's regular tour-mate Bo Diddley. The graceful way this old pro shimmies his considerable bulk while coaxing polyrhythmic back-talk out of Inis guitar is a geniune treat. Like any aging athlete, what he gives away in speed and power he makes up in sly savvy.

Intermission features a collection of English punk singles spun by Bam/ Myer, ? British deejay who is traveling with the band. I drift out to the lobby and scan the geek parade—conclusion: there aren't many delicious girls into punk-rock—until Barry winds up with "Riot In Cellblock #9". Suddenly the Clash are onstage in front of scores of • sewn-together international flags (one small step for solidarity). The shocking brightness of these colors is intensified by the band's shirts—Mick in red, Joe in white, Paul in blue, Topper in yellow— a freshness totally contrary to the expected scruffy leathers.

They kick off with a spate of English singles unreleased in America, but San Francisco, up on its feet from the opening chords, knows them well. "Complete Control,"\" 1-2 Crush On You," "Jail Guitar Doors" and the reggae-ish ^'White Man In Hammersmith Palais" mix in with "Safe European Home,'r "Tommy Gun", "Stay Free" and—a surprise—Bobby Fuller's "I Fought The Law". Paul slashes ferociously, leaning back deep on his heels for leverage, while Mick leaps and § prances, obviously the best dancer in 5 the group. The lighting system flashes I furiously like a constant explosion.

Peak of the show for me comes when | Strummer incites the entire audience to "■ whistle at the top of its lungs, a huge shivering sound echoing all over the hall, until the band crashes into a jarring "Police And Thieves." They play four encores, including a frantic "White Riot", before leaving to standing ovations, Actually, no one was ever sitting in the first place.

Backstage a group photo session is being set up with radio people and record executives—until the Clash suddenly stalk out of the picture before the first flashbulb can pop..Seems the band feels slighted by the company's failure to release their first, ecstatically reviewed album, by the poor quality of some of the Rope pressings, and by a lack of advertising here while groups like Molly Hatchet get the big push. (On the other hand, the publicity department's heart is in the right place: they got me here.) As the baffled execs smile uncomfortably, I admire the band's righteous anger, but wonder how much this bit of petulance will cost them. Oh, well. I head off with Simenon, Howie, Sandy, Hugh and Susan Blond to a Gay Nineties joint called Tommy's, where Paul samples his first taste of buffalo stew.

Next day the critic for the august San Francisco Chronicle dumps all over the show—I'm told his taste for new music extends as far as Blondie and no further—and I figure it's a good sign: Ye be rated according to thine enemies, as well as vis-a-vis thy buddies.

Simenon: "When lYfick and Joe went to Jamaica on holiday, I didn't have enough mpney, so instead l went on a tour of Moscow and Leningrad. They have this carriage in a museum that's all packed with fur inside—but it could only go straight. It had no axle to help you turn, so they had to have about 50 slaves running behind who had to pick it up and twist it around every time they wanted to turn down another street. They say Russia's different now because there's no czars, but it's just the same really. It lopks pretty marvelous with all these big posters everywhere, but it was really grey—it's not very happy."

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 50

Thursday — February 8:

The Villa Roma is a donut-shaped motel faintly resembling the "Close Encounters" mothership except it doesn't fly—or have Room Service. It's overpriced (presumably because it's near Fisherman's Wharf, a tourist trap the Clash party never once glances at) and in three days it has flunked its little part of the Pearl Harbor "test".

Mick Jones is jingling across the lobby like the Ringo Kid to turn in his key when the grey suited, grey haired manager—looking every inch the high school principal—asks him to step outside. Mick is puzzled: "What for?"

"So I can tell you what I think of you, man-to-man." ✓

A pained look of comprehension begins to cloud the guitarist's face: "Oh, don't be silly; I don't have time for that."

Turns out the Model Citizen thinks Mick has insulted his wife.

"Look," fumes Jones, visibly wrestling with his temper , "I'm always polite with everybody. The only time I made a noise here was when I complained to the maid about the cockroaches three days ago."

"Yeah? Wei) I think you're a creep."

"Oh yeah? Well I've been all around the world and I've never dealt with such rude people as you have here." [Indeed they were.]

"Yeah? Where'd you stay—the Salvation Army? Step outside!"

Mick's look ranges from annoyance to disbelief: "You mean you want me to fight you?" [Christ, I think, where's a photographer!]

"No, I just want to tell you I think you're a creep."

"You're the creep."

"You're a creep!"

The absurdity of this deep philosophical interchange finally clicks in Mick's brain; he shakes his head, tosses his key on the desk with a rueful laugh, and ambles out to play rock 'n' roll. I rather enjoyed the display, and fall to musing that without intolerance rock 'n' roll would be no challenge at all. I remember being told Jones is a vegetarian, and I recall something Caroline Coon said earlier: "Mick's got the shortest temper, but he wouldn't cause that much damage—he's the least physical on that level. Paul is the one who would just go 'Smash!', the most capable of being really bad.'*'

Simenon says: "We just don't like to be pushed around. Too many times I've been pushed around at school and at work. We think violence is really stupid, it's a waste of energy, but some kids who oome to our concerts are real tough cun ts and they really enjoy it. There's fuck-all else for them to do. But following us around the country and trying to get other bands together, they're doling something instead of just smashing Things up. Breaking things up gets a bit boring after a while."

Word t ravels fast that the Clash have agreed to play an unscheduled benefit concert' tonight for the New Youth movement. Like many such spontaneous gestures (for Sid Vicious and Rock Against Racism amopg others) the good in Mentions also generate unanticipated s our vibes.

San Francisco's punk headquarters has be en the Mabuhay Gardens, a Filipino restaurant that took a chance on new music and thrived. Enforcing local drinking regulations less than strictly, and providing bail for kids who have '(been busted, the Mabuhay is a somewhat communal operation run by those it serves. New Youth are a splinber group, however, and one mem'ber, a friend of Strummer's, has convinced him that the Mabuhay is deadi and kids now need an alternative place. The Clash commit themselves to the benefit—taking the middle slot in a thre e-act bill so they can depart early on thei r all-night bus ride down to L.A.— ahdl by the time they hear the scuttlebutt that the Mabuhay is still going strong and the dissidents are a minority of iirtewly-arrived malcontents unable to pe netrate the Mabuhay social structure, it's]* too late to back out.

The Geary Street Theater is an abandoned synagogue in the Fillmore ar ea. Right next door, Rev. Jim Jones' n ame still looms on the marquee of his infamous People's Temple. The synagogue's hallway is impressively ini scribed in gold leaf with the names of countless Jewish heroes probably dating back to the time of King Solomon, %ut the assembly area is a great high-vaulted rock room, a vast open wooden floor—no seats—rimmed by a spectator's balcony on three sides. The whole San Francisco clan seems to have forsaken infighting for this gathering with the Clash, and local luminaries like the Readymades, Avengers, and I Versus mingle while Off open the I show. (Closing the show will be Negative Trend, allegedly chosen by Malcolm MacLaren to open for the Sex Pistols here because they were the worst band in the city.)

Aided by a special equalizer not used in the Berkeley show, the Clash rip through an inspired set that Sandy Pearlman calls "the best Clash show I have ever seen." Despite the suspicion that the benefit is a bit of a mistake, all the agitation is suddenly irrelevant.

When the Clash return to London (with Topper moving into Sid Vicious' old place, which he admits is "a bit weird"), they spend two weeks working on their film soundtrack. After a major tour of Europe, they return to the USA, probably in June for something like 28 dates. Them a big British tour, maybe Japan, another American tour in the autumn, and of course they've got to record the third album.

Paul Simenon: "Our contract gives us artistic freedom to do what we like. We'd rather chuck it in and work in a factory than let the record company tell us how to make a single. I'd feel ashamed if-we did whaf they told us. I wouldn't be able to look at anybody. I'd hide." m