Wreckless Eric News Page January 2003

JOE STRUMMER

    Obviously I was very sad to hear the news about Joe Strummer. I’ve taken some time before putting anything about it on the site because I didn’t trust myself not to come out with a lot of maudlin shit like some of the email "tributes" that have been going around. I had one that said that music was crap now (apart from Strummer and the Mescaleros of course). But that was never Joe’s attitude. The Clash were one of those rare bands like Led Zeppelin who were ready to embrace and absorb all forms of music. That’s the attitude that has kept Strummer vibrant, relevent and happening while other artists that came out of the punk thing have turned into fat old dinosaurs just like the ones they professed to despise in the first place.
    Last year, twenty-five years and a couple of months after I first saw the Clash, I had the absolute pleasure of doing a gig with Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros. It was a great night – we played loads of new stuff and so did he. While we were playing I suddenly realized that he was watching us from the side of the stage. He came round to our dressing room afterwards, specifically to tell me how much he liked it and to thank me for playing Reconnez Cherie which was one of his old favourites. Most people wouldn’t bother, but he did and I’ll never forget that.

    Their set was utterly fantastic, and after the first hour or so nobody was bothering to shout for old Clash numbers anymore. It’s rare to see somebody who’s so genuinely into what they’re doing – who can put themselves so completely into an actual moment in time – so that for a moment, this moment, this event is the most important thing in the world.

    I said I didn’t want to get maudlin so I’m not going to say how much I’ll miss him because Joe Strummer was unmissable - unique and irreplaceable.

    I first saw the Clash in September 1976, a few weeks before I signed to Stiff and made my first record. They left a deep impression. Here’s an extract from my book. It’s not a plug for the book, it’s meant as an illustration of the kind of impact the Clash, and particularly Strummer, had at the time. I’ve left some stuff around either side of the Clash event to give a bit of social context or whatever:

LONDON 1976

    We didn’t know anybody in London and the projected nightly visits to hip, groovy places like the Marquee, the Nashville, Dingwalls and the legendary home of pub rock, the Hope ‘n’ Anchor, just hadn’t materialised. The Nashville was about the nearest place so that’s where we usually went. We had to think in terms of proximity because last buses to Wandsworth seemed to leave about half an hour before the pubs shut. We usually had to walk home. Sometimes we got a District line tube to East Putney and walked from there, or, if we were lucky there was a 28 bus as far as Wandsworth Bridge. Taxis were out of the question - they seemed to cost an awful lot of money, and anyway you’d be lucky to find a driver who was willing to go all the way out to Wandsworth at closing time.
    We’d never been to Dingwalls or the Hope ‘n’ Anchor - Dingwalls might as well have been in another town, and the bands didn’t go on till about midnight. It wasn’t possible if you had to attend a bottling plant at seven o’clock the next morning. But we did see the Clash at the Roundhouse, supporting the Kursaal Flyers. Why we went to see the Kursaal Flyers I don’t know - probably because they came from Southend which gave them a tenuous Dr Feelgood connection. The Clash were a life-changing experience. Most of the bands I saw around that time were totally harmless, but not the Clash. It was one of their first gigs - September 5^th 1976. Keith Levine was still in the band, so there were three guitar players. They were the most confrontational thing I’d ever seen. They looked like stick insects in their tight, straight-legged jeans and short, home-made haircuts. Strummer wore a black shirt with the legend Chuck Berry Is Dead bleached into the back of it. From the moment they came on there were adverse comments and snide remarks about the regular Sunday At The Roundhouse audience sitting on the floor in their smart seventies apparel, smug in their cosmopolitan self-complacency:

    ‘I like your jeans - didja get them at the Jean Machine?’

    After a few numbers Joe Strummer said, ‘I suppose you think you can pay your one pound fifty and just come in here and sit down like it was a fucking TV set…I mean, you could get off your denims in case you wear ‘em out’

    Then they played a song that I later found out was called Janie Jones. Their sound was an aggressive cacophany of slightly out of tune guitars and ragged vocal chants. I wasn’t sure that I liked it but I found it very attractive. They weren’t going down at all well, and after a few more numbers Strummer addressed the audience again:

    ‘…well now it’s time for audience participation, right? I want you all to tell me what exactly you’re doing here.’

    Somebody shouted, ‘…to drink beer.’

    There was a silence. You could hear the amplifiers buzzing...

    ‘Well listen,’ replied Strummer, ‘I don’t know what size you are around the waist but I guess it’s in advance of thirty-six, so if you want to carry your corpulent body out to the bar and stuff it with a few barrels of whatever you fancy then go ahead.’

    I was impressed, even though it was only about five o’clock and the bar didn’t actually open until seven, and despite the fact that I could’ve done with drinking some beer myself. I had a moment of difficulty reconciling my need for beer with the messages that the Clash were sending out, but when seven o’clock rolled round I saw Joe Strummer propping up the bar with a dangerous looking individual who I later realised was Sid Vicious. I would have liked to have talked to Strummer but I was too shy. I almost felt that I should make some pledge of allegiance - there was something going on. I wasn’t sure what it was, but this air of dissatisfaction was something I could identify with.

     ‘Get on with it!’
     ‘Get on with what, you big twit – haven’t you got any brains at all? All right then, so you might’ve got five A levels - what do I care? That’s just a dirty trick.’

     I answered an advert in the Melody Maker. The Flying Tigers needed a rhythm guitar player - that could be me, I like tigers. The bloke on the other end of the phone was an American pretending to be a Cockney. He sounded like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins - cor blimey mate. The number was a Kebab shop in Clapham. The American was the singer in the group, and that was where he worked, in the Kebab shop.
      The Flying Tigers played garage music - the Standells, the Chocolate Watch Band, and threw in a mixture of R ‘n’ B and Chicago blues - Hoochie Coochie Man by Muddy Waters and Killing Floor by Howling Wolf. The singer was called Mike. He liked the sound of me, said I should come to an audition they were holding on Sunday in Baddersea - I should bring my Axe, and an Amp.

     I went there on the bus with my Hohner Orgaphon 40 watt accordian amplifier with jukebox speakers, and my Top Twenty guitar in a floppy blue plastic case. Their lead guitarist arrived with a brand new Selmer combo in red vinyl finish, and unpacked a Gibson from a professional looking hard case. He had a gingery beard and long blonde hair. He was wearing a green velvet jacket with enormous lapels and high waisted denim flares. I found out later that he was a school teacher in real life. He looked somewhat dismayed when he saw me - my hair was very short, badly cut, and I was wearing an ancient pair of straight Tesco jeans, old plimsoles with no socks, and a blue and white striped long sleeved T-shirt. I was thin, spotty and very possibly drunk. As I said hello a speaker fell out of the front of my amplifier, as though it was winking at him. I was just what they weren’t looking for.