THEY ARE THE CLASH

THEY ARE THE CLASH

You'd have to be crazy to want to be Joe Strummer. Rock the corporate casbah a little and you're a hero to the disenchanted middle class youth and hoary rock critics who are willing to accept anything—be it rhetoric, doomsaying or just plain dogma—in the name of good old rock 'n' roll. But dare to reach out to a larger audience by copping a cool half-mil playing the US festival or—God forbid— signing to a major record company in the firs* place and bingo: you're a hypocritical bum.

Jeez, even lefty funkateers like the Gang Of Four didn't suffer the slings and arrows of accountability, but then it's never easy being a martyr. The Clash's existence has always been more like a lifetime in the Garden of Gethsemane than a day in a blissfully innocent Eden. They've lived dangerously and done their name proud. Even if their body politic was infected from the very outset by the nasty germ of contradiction, the Clash tried harder than most to embrace the disparities and inject a little content into pro forma pop music. Quizzed by Us magazine at the height of Combat Rock fever, about "siding with the have-nots, yet being retailed for 58.98," Strummer surmised, "Yeah, that's a paradox, but it's one of the simpler ones I've had to deal with. I find doing 50 push ups and then smoking 10 cigarettes a more disturbing paradox, really. I wouldn't be doing this interview if I hadn't signed with a big label. You've got the music and they've got the vinyl."

"You've got the music and they've got the vinyl." —Joe Strummer

If the punk meltdown proved to be no more than a series of new gestures that dissolved into a new rock hierarchy—as some will argue until exhaustion—then the Clash's strident sociopolitical stance is surely the ultimate punk pose. But I say it isn't so. In the school of hard rocks they've always aimed for the highest Marx, and often found themselves sitting in the corner looking like dunces. The ultimate irony is that now these laissez-faire socialists are slugging it out in what are euphemistically dubbed "arbitration proceedings" to divvy up the cash and the right to use the band's name as q commercial entity. After years of taking it on the chin for alleged "sellouts," it now appears that in the end, the Clash have betrayed nobody but themselves.

It takes a foolhardy kind of courage to wave the tattered banner of punk all the way through to the year of Big Brother.

But the Clash have always set themselves up as the good guys in direct contrast to the take-the-money-and-run situationalism of McLaren's Sex Pistols. It was McLaren's compadre, one Bernie Rhodes, who provided the conceptual focus for the Clash shortly after their formation in London in May, 1976. If the Pistols advanced destruction as an art form, then the Clash were going to rebuild society from their rubble.

Founding member Paul Simonon (who could probably give the definitive Clash history, were he ever moved to speak to the press) was probably more bored than politically riled-up when the Clash repertoire began to take shape. He grew up in London's working class and spent time on the dole before joining forces with Mick Jones.

Jones had been grinding away in a proto-punk band called London SS (not a particularly responsible name for an upand-coming world diplomat) with drummer Terry Chimes and a floating cast who would pop in and out of classic punk groups like the Damned and Generation X. According to legend, Paul and Mick met up with Joe Strummer in the local unemployment office, rescuing him from a rather dreadful pub-rock group called the 101'ers.

It was Strummer, the middle-class son of a diplomat in the British Field Service, who articulated the ramalama-dole-queue politics that Rhodes suggested as lyrical content. Strummer was pretty much estranged from Dad by age nine, when he was shipped off to boarding school where he learned to hate the "thick rich people's thick rich kids" (sounds like a real soup he got himself into), and ended up getting expelled from art school and living in a condemned apartment building. When the cops started cracking down on subway busking, Strummer grabbed his acoustic guitar and Woody Guthrie songbook and headed aboveground.

The Clash began rehearsals in an old railway house in northern London with guitarist Keith Levene, who jumped ship after two of their homemade gigs, which typically took place in alternative venues like art galleries and Asian movie houses. The Clash second-fiddled it on the Pistols' much-canceled "Anarchy in the U.K." tour in December of '76, and signed a worldwide pact with CBS the following month—a move that many called The Death Of Punk.

"White Riot" was released in March of '77, a wholly incomprehensible amphetamine-rocker that was put over by sheer visceral energy. It was backed with the ironic "1977," which prophesied "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones" while setting the stage for the Clash to enter a similar pantheon—by the time that minor chord rant reached its choral climax by counting down to the inevitable 1984. It was ironically weird to hear the StrummerJones songwriting team compared to Jagger-Richards just a few short years later, and weirder still to see Mick Jones slip into his Keith Richards-style persona.

To buck up their good intentions, the Clash released a diatribe against London's leading commercial radio station, Capital Radio, on a flexi-disc distributed through the New Musical Express. The flexi coincided with the April release of The Clash, which was recorded over the course of three weekends. Shortly after its release Terry Chimes packed it in, to be replaced by Nicky "Topper" Headon, the 207th drummer auditioned for the spot. The Clash's first public battle with their label erupted over the unauthorized release of "Remote Control" during their "White Riot Tour," which exposed old Blighty to the Slits, Buzzcocks and Subway Sect.

Strummer and Co. retaliated with "Complete Control," their most musical statement yet, produced by Jamaican studio wiz Lee "Scratch" Perry. They had previously dipped into the wealth of island melodics with an apt cover of Junior Murvin's "Police And Thieves" and soon helped introduce dub recording techniques to the New Wave community. Songs like "Jail Guitar Doors" further advanced their rockin' outlaw image by lionizing jailhouse rockers like Peter Green, Wayne Kramer and Keith Richards (bet that was Mick's idea)—an appropriate response to the genuinely petty harassment they suffered on the road.

Although The Clash had sold over 100,000 copies to us Yankees, an incongruous marriage between the Clash and Blue Oyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman was somehow forged for their first proper U.S. release, Give 'Em Enough Rope (talk about ironic titles!). The boys also began work on a quasi-documentary film called Rude Boy, which centered on the activities of a would-be Clash roadie named Ray Gange. Though it offered some exciting live footage, the group dismissed it like an ugly child when it finally hit the screens in '79. They also jettisoned Rhodes and began a financially disastrous period of self-management.

1979 brought the American Invasion with the sensitively titled "Pearl Harbor '79" tour, featuring Bo Diddley. As with so many other New Wave bands before and after them, it took the release of a cover version—this time a rather heavy-handed metallized version of the Bobby Fuller Four classic, "I Fought The Law"—to crack American radio. Momentum built feverishly. Less than six months later, the two-for-theprice-of-one London Calling was released and the uncredited, Motownish "Train In Vain," (a.k.a. "Stand By Me") zoomed into the Top 40.

The Clash had arrived, but America was still hard-pressed to learn how to digest their seemingly inappropriate eclecticism.

So the arena-rockist fans did the usual thing when presented with unorthodox support acts like Sam & Dave, Screaming Jay Hawkins and Lee Dorsey in 1980 and a bevy of rappers and downtown artistes in 1981—they threw bottles and racial epithets. Sandinista! did little to clarify the situation; ambitious to a fault, it came off like a Clash vaudeville variety hour and was their first LP to receive less than unanimous raves.

Sandinista! was something of a Waterloo businesswise, too. CBS balked at the band's plans to release the three-record set at a single album price. Strummer admitted to the L.A. Times that "we found we weren't all that powerful. They showed us they could put something out on their label and then sit on it just to prove a point.

They didn't just not promote it, they demoted it." Still, the Clash were powerful enough to capture multi-format (that means black and white radio) airplay and sell-out 17 shows at a massive New York club, Bond's Casino, despite rioting for tickets and calls to the fire marshall.

With Bernie Rhodes back at the managerial reins, the stage was set for the platinum triumph of Combat Rock, their most successful yet internally divisive LP. Mick Jones's pop star behavior and Topper's drug abuse created such a pressure cooker that Strummer skipped to Paris on an unannounced holiday, causing 20 British gigs to be postponed. Upon his return Topper announced his "resignation" and the group headed off to America with founding drummer Terry Chimes. As something of a confirmation of their complete ascendancy, the Clash supported the Who on their "farewell" gigs at Shea Stadium and celebrated the Top Tenning of "Rock The Casbah."

Drummer Pete Howard was the new boy in the Clash gang when they headlined the May, 1983 US festival in southern California. With typical Clashian aplomb, the band refused to play until promoter Stephen Wozniak agreed to make a donation to local charities; by the time their set was finished, two members of their entourage got into a slugfest with members of the festival crew. By September, the Jones problem had escalated to the breaking point and a "Clash Communique" announced his dismissal.

By January of this year the Clash had added the punky-looking Vince White and Pete Howard on guitars and ploughed backwards to their roots. Jones and Topper Headon, meanwhile, were planning their revenge with a band they, too, called the Clash. A few days prior to the Clash's first show of the current U.S. tour, Jones allegedly called superpromoter Bill Graham and promised to bring "the real Clash" over to the States.

Strummer's new troops have evoked the most mixed of reactions; many feel that the group is clinically dead—one former employee of Epic Records went so far as to suggest I write this as an epitaph.

The chemistry between Strummer and Jones—who sang lead vocals on most of their biggest hits—has disappeared into the ether, but only time will tell which version of the beast can lay claim to the family title. Strummer, as expected, feels as idealistic and confident as ever. Among the new songs debuted on their recent tour, one anthem proudly proclaims "I ain't gonna be treated like trash/I know one thing and/We are the Clash!"