New West
By Greil Marcus
September 25, 1978
On version of rock 'n' roll: "We decided that for the ending of Sgt. Pepper
we should create a moment of spectacular movie magic," reads the "Official
Scrapbook" of the film, "and have Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees
joined by the collective starpower of scores of famed recording stars….Formal
invitations were engraved…The guests were treated royally-first-class transportation
to Los Angeles, limousines, luxurious hotels, the finest champagne and great
food---nothing but the best."
Another version: "Fifteen feet from the stage, " reads a Zig Zag report on a concert that took place in Belgium last year, "is the ugliest, most vicious-looking barbed wire fence you ever saw. Ten feet tall, effecting perfectly an arena within an arena, only this inner arena is where the privileged hand out, and behind this monstrosity of a fence the other arena, where the less privileged have been herded like cattle…
"…..Suddenly, Strummer leaps into the inner arena. He streaks straight to the fence, and with his bare hands he is pulling and tugging at the bastard as hard as he can. For a second nobody knows what to do, and then all hell is let loose. Security men try to grab at Strummer, other people leap from the stage and grab the security men…"
Joe Strummer, 25, is the lead singer of the Clash. Along with guitarist Mick Jones, 23---the two have written almost all of the band's songs together---he was in San Francisco this August to finish off the recording of the second Clash album, as yet untitled but due from Epic in October. It is a record a lot of people have been waiting for. An English punk band formed hard on the emergence of the Sex Pistols, the Clash is now so good they will be changing the face of rock 'n' roll simply by addressing themselves to the form-and so full of the vision implied by their name, they will be dramatizing certain possibilities of risk and passion merely by taking a stage.
Certainly, meeting Strummer, it's not hard to imagine him ripping down a fence separating his band from their audience; a joyful loathing of such elitism is part of what kicked off the English punk revolt, to keep its spirit whole, than the Clash. Built like Bruce Sprinsteen (a comparison that Strummer, who take Springsteen as a myth-addled, melodramatic softie, would not appreciate), with a James Dean haircut (no D.A.), black leather jacket, white t-shirt, suspenders attached with safety pins to buttonless black pegged jeans, and the kind of boots they used to say your mother wore. Strummer carried himself like a man who takes nothing for granted. A few hours around him left me sorting out suppressed rage from a quick sense of humor: As with the Clash's music, you recognize a wearied, bemused intolerance for frauds large and small, and a biting eagerness to wipe them out.
From the beginning, Strummer, Jones and bassist Paul Simonon (drummer Topper Headon replaced the wonderfully named Tory Crimes) have appeared as a gang of partisans bent on the defeat of all the right enemies. They've never hedged their hatred of Britain's racist, neo-facist National Front (some of Mick Jones's school friends are members, as was Strummer's brother),their disgust with what Labor and Tories have done with their power, or their flat-out identification with reggae and with that music's commitment to righteousness and Judgement Day. "London's Burning," "White Riot" and their stunning, rave-up cover of the reggae hit "Police and Thieves"- all from The Clash, the band's first album, never issued here because the sound was judged too crude, though its release under the title Garageland is pending---were part and parcel of a refusal of any version of the barbed wire fence.
Middle-class in background, working-class in their songs, the Clash has been "political" because, more clearly and more imaginatively than other bands, they saw in the punk revolt proff that apparently trivial questions of music and style profoundly threatened those who ran their society. That meant those people were afraid, which implied that their hold on power was not so certain as it seemed. Politics thus became an intensified, eyes-open version of real life, but if the Sex Pistols were frankly nihilistic, the Clash is out for anarchist community. Just as it was something punks lived out off stage, politics was something to dramatize on stage until the limits and contradictions of one's life could be revealed, tensed and broken through. This was the clash the band named itself for-and acted out, or played out on record, it was no act at all. The Clash didn't seek targets for protest songs-they have too much humor and irony for that---but a purchase on reality.
What's been extraordinary about the Clash is their ability to create a sound, an attack, that pushes beyond any British specifics of race, class or culture that might dim the power of their music for Americans. Their strongest record yet released, "Complete Control," is on paper nothing more than a denunciation of CBS, their British label, for releasing a single without first clearing it with the band. As a 45, it comes across not as a petulant complaint about "artistic freedom" but as a cosmic last stand: a definition of how much fury and determination are worth, and of how good they can feel. This is hard rock to rank with "Hound Dog" and "Gimmie Shelter"-music that, for the few minutes it lasts, seems to trivialize both.
Some of the almost completed tracks I heard at the Automatt studios in San Francisco were better. Producer Sandy Pearlman, a New Yorker brought in to make the Clash palatable to American audiences, has broadened the sound-"There are," he announced, "more guitars per square inch on this record than on anything in the history of Western civilization"---but he hasn't compromised the Clash's darkness or their force. "He couldn't," said Strummer. "Though he's been trying for six months to turn us into Fleetwood Mac, I think he just gave up last night."
The Clash has drawn on the rough, fuck-you sound of the New York Dolls, the Stooges, the early Rolling Stones and the Who, and on the populism of Mott the Hoople, but those influences long ago ceased to be more than footnotes. What one hears now in the storm of their sound is reggae, in the rhythm section, and, in Strummer's furious singing, Mick Jones's crossing guitar lines, and the twists and turns of the song structures, Captain Beefheart. Beefheart, one of many rock 'n' roll prophets-without-honor rescued from obscurity by English punks, is a Southern Californian who in the late sixties combined Delta blues, be-bop and the sprung rhythms of American speech into awesome, and awesomely difficult, music: caterwauling and clatter, revelations and revivals. There was an enormous freedom in the sound---more than most could handle. His masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, broke every rule in rock 'n' roll except one: move the listener. "When I was sixteen," Strummer mused when I mentioned the echoes of Trout Mask I was catching, "that was the only record I listened to-for a year." The Clash has taken Beefheart's aesthetic of scorched vocals, guitar discords, melody reversals, rhythmic conflict, and made it seem anything but avant-garde; in their hands that aesthetic speaks with clarity and immediacy, and it sounds like a promise rock 'n' roll has simply waited years to keep. The sense of confusion and uncertainty is still there, along with a sense of triumph; given what the Clash is singing about, nothing could be more appropriate.
It's the drama in the new music that marks the growth of the Clash, and it's that drama, I think, that will pull Americans right along the furious ride these songs offer. They are not quite like anything rock 'n' roll has produced before.
In "English Civil War," Strummer somehow takes over the voice of a twenty-year-old conscript who has stepped out of the trenches of World War I and into No Man's Land to speak his piece; in "Guns on the Roof," a song that began as an account of the arrest of two Clash members for shooting pigeons and turned into a song about terrorism, Strummer sings as a prisoner in the dock, and if the fear and pride he communicates mean anything, he'll never see the streets again. As the Clash uses the beat from the Who's "Can't Explain" ("Very traditional, don't you think?" said Mick Jones) to set off bombs in the courtroom, Strummer changes the bench: "I swear by/ALL MIGHTY GOD/ To tell the WHOLE truth/ And nothing but---the TRUTH!" Guitars rain down on every line: We're taken into the battle outside, back to the courthouse, and finally, in a grand, bitter fantasy of freedom, all across the world. "I'd like to be in Af-er-ee-ca," jibes the singer at himself. "I'd like to be in the U.S.A./ Pretending that the wars are done."
These songs take the hard, harsh, dangerous thrill of the punk sound kicked up by the Sex Pistols and the early Clash to it limits; "Safe European Home" shatters them. Inspired by a visit the Clash made to Jamaica, a pilgrimage that turned sour ( "I went to a place where every white face/ Was an invitation to robb-er-ee," run the key lines), it's a wild, self-mocking testament to how the attempt to escape from one's culture inevitably leads to one's being thrown back upon it. A high, keening up-and-down guitar line pushes Strummer's raging vocal; Mick Jones slaps him back with incessant harmonies, taunting: "Wherrrrre'd you go?" The music is almost too strong, and the pace too fast; finally it breaks, and the band changes into loud, metallic reggae while Strummer and Jones shift into Jamaican patois, the vocals drifting across each other, dub-style, until humor and betrayal share the song with anger and delight. The Clash makes it home-safe, until the next cut, when the wars start again in earnest.
The wars the Clash is turning into music---wars of race, class and identity---are all too real. How they turn out will determine what the Clash, and their audience, will make of their lives. But the war the Clash is fighting is, for better or for worse, mostly a rock war: a struggle to define, to seize, the essence of the music, to take over its history. The Clash seems eager to get on with it. Killing time one day before their nightly sessions in the studio, Jones and Strummer found themselves face to face with the result of all those engraved invitations and hired limousines: platinum-coated barbed wire. "It was unbelievable," Jones said of Sgt. Pepper's fabulous finale. "They had 'em all! Every ligger"---scenemaker---"in L.A.! Tina Turner, Alice Cooper, Dr. John-everyone with no better place to go." The experience at least provided a good idea for an album cover. "These are the people who've made rock 'n' roll what it is today, " Jones said later, "and I think we owe them some sort of tribute. We'll put every one of them on the sleeve, just like the faces on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, every one hanging from-"
"Gallows," offered Strummer.
"No," said Jones thoughtfully. "Lampposts."
The choice was not without meaning: Gallows are a sign of official authority. Lampposts are what the kids in the Clash's streets would use, if they had the chance, or took it.
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