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We're not just another wank rock group like Boston or Aerosmith," Joe Strummer said in 1979, the first time the Clash were profiled in Rolling Stone. "What fucking shit." Twenty-four years later, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler sat in the audience at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel ballroom, presumably applauding, as the Clash were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was a bittersweet, typically contradictory moment for the legendary punk band. Strummer, the group's primary singer and lyricist, had died suddenly of heart failure in late December. "We were all very proud," says Clash guitarist Mick Jones, "but it's just not nice to be at something like this without Joe."
"I had no intention of going to the Hall of Fame," says bassist Paul Simonon, the Clash's third founding member. "But when Joe died, I thought we should all go together, for his family, for all of us. I spoke to Joe briefly the evening before he died. He was trying to send me a fax regarding, funnily, the Hall of Fame. It didn't come through." Strummer and Jones had been trying to persuade Simonon to play in a Clash reunion at the ceremony. Simonon didn't even realize the Hall of Fame existed until he got a letter a couple of years ago from the museum, asking for a donation. (He sent the bass he famously smashed during a show at New York's Palladium; the iconic image became the cover of the Clash's 1979 masterpiece, London Calling.) Ultimately, Strummer's death dashed any hopes of a Clash performance. At the ceremony, Simonon and Jones received tributes from the Edge and Tom Morello, but no Clash songs were performed live. "I wish I'd had a chance to express my feelings to Joe," Simonon says now. "He tried to send me that fax again at eleven the next morning. It still didn't come through. I finally got it from his family, when I went to see him lying in state in the chapel."
Emerging from rough-and-tumble West London in 1976, the Clash quickly became, alongside the shorter-lived, far more outrageous Sex Pistols, the standard-bearers of British punk. But musically, the Clash took punk further than any of their peers, moving beyond three-chord primitivism to incorporate reggae, funk and even rap (the not-at-all-embarrassing "The Magnificent Seven") into an increasingly ambitious mix. The Clash drew on the same underclass disquiet as the Pistols, only instead of exorcising this rage through bratty nihilism, they channeled it into a righteous anger, from their first single, "White Riot," through later albums such as 1980's three-record set Sandinista!
"We've got loads of contradictions for you," Strummer said in that 1979 profile. "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." In case you think being inducted into the Hall of Fame means the band ultimately failed on the "not respectable" front, a few days after the ceremony, a British Web site printed an item about members of the Clash being asked in the restroom to stop taking the piss out of fellow inductee Sting. "I do remember smoking cigarettes in the toilet, and one of our road crew was talking about that cane that Sting had," Simonon admits, his thick English accent taking on tones of innocence. "I don't remember anyone taking the piss out of anybody. We might have been taking the piss out of ourselves. We were in the toilet."
(As for their other '03 classmates, Simonon speaks with as much tact as Donald Rumsfeld: "The Police and Elvis Costello, they were more like the softer option that turned up after the initial thing: the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Buzzcocks. They were a bit more easy to swallow, a bit more palatable, shall we say. Elvis Costello is a great writer, though.")
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Sipping a Sierra Nevada at a bar near the Waldorf, Mick Jones is far less ambivalent about the Hall of Fame. "We did it representing where we're from, and in honor of Joe's memory," he says. For the record, he also dug the all-star tribute to Strummer at the Grammys in February (a performance of "London Calling" by Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl and Steve Van Zandt). "I saw Tony Bennett having a clap at the end," Jones says. "That was nice. Joe may have chuckled."
In 1976, Jones and Simonon were art-school dropouts looking to start a band when they saw Strummer perform one night with his pub-rock band, the 101ers. A few days later, they spotted him queued up at the welfare office. Strummer grabbed his dole money and made off quick, assuming the thuggish-looking guys staring him down were planning to mug him.
Within weeks, though, they'd persuaded Strummer to join the band — after which the group worked more or less nonstop for the next six years. The Clash's musical achievements are all the more impressive considering the truly anarchic nature of the punk scene at the time — particularly in England, where the shows regularly got violent, and where fans decided dinosaur-rock practices such as "applauding" should be replaced with new-model endearments such as "gobbing," or spitting on the band. "The height of the spitting was, like, '77," Jones says. "We never liked that at any point. I used to carry a towel to wipe myself off. It was disgusting."
"The stage would be covered in broken glass by the end of a show," adds Simonon. "Me and Joe would tend to be the ones jumping into the audience and roughing up the people who were chucking the bottles. We did, at various times, ask Mick why he never got involved, and he said, 'Well, somebody's got to be in tune.' Which was a good point."
Then there was the pigeon incident. One afternoon, waiting for the perennially tardy Jones to arrive at the studio, a bored Simonon, along with the group's second drummer, Nicky "Topper" Headon, climbed onto the roof and began shooting at pigeons with a couple of air rifles. "Where Topper's from, in Dover, the countryside, the pigeons are considered vermin," Simonon says. "But there was a railway station nearby, and someone made a phone call to the police, saying 'the anti-establishment group the Clash' were shooting at a train. It was amazing. Helicopters showed up. Armed police came over the wall, told us to freeze and put our hands on our heads. All we were doing was shooting stupid pigeons! Although one or two of them turned out to be somebody's prized racing pigeons. They looked like regular pigeons to us."
A year after the band finally broke through on the American charts with 1982's Combat Rock, Jones was ejected from the band. (He recalls one show where he and Strummer left the stage at the end of the set, came to blows, then played an encore.) Jones quickly went on to form Big Audio Dynamite, one of the first rock bands to incorporate electronic music and sampling into its sound. "After I finished the first B.A.D. album, I was on holiday in Nassau, and Joe came out and found me," Jones recalls. "I said, 'I've just done this record, listen to it.' So I played it and said, 'What do you think?' He said, 'It's shit! Complete shit! Let's get back together again.' " Strummer, Jones points out, ended up co-producing B.A.D.'s second album.
Jones and Strummer reunited onstage one last time, in late November 2002. Strummer was performing at a union benefit for some firefighters in West London. Jones was in the audience; he had no plans to play with Strummer. But when his former bandmate launched into the opening strains of "Bankrobber," Jones says he couldn't contain himself, jumping onstage and joining in. "I just felt compelled to do it," he says. "The next song was one we used to argue about, 'White Riot.' I always got tired of explaining that song and so didn't like to play it, but Joe really did. That night, he didn't say he was playing 'White Riot.' He just put his fingers in the A position and said, 'This one's in A. You know it!' And before I knew it, we were into it. It was cool. We finished with 'London's Burning,' which was appropriate for the night. It reminded me of the old nights, you know? The show was in an old town hall, with union banners. We didn't prearrange anything. When Joe saw me get onstage, he was delighted. He said, 'So you've come to play guitar?' " Jones pauses, squints, then corrects himself. "No, he didn't. He just said, 'Play guitar.' Which is different."
[From Issue 920 — April 17, 2003]