We Are The Clash: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Last Stand of a Band That Mattered
378
We Are The Clash: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Last Stand of a Band That Mattered
378Hardcover
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Overview
“This is an inspiring take on the rock-band bio format, as much a political history of the 1980s as it is a look at an influential band in its final years.” —Publishers Weekly
The Clash was a paradox of revolutionary conviction, musical ambition, and commercial drive. We Are The Clash is a gripping tale of the band’s struggle to reinvent itself as George Orwell’s 1984 loomed. This bold campaign crashed headlong into a wall of internal contradictions and rising right-wing power.
While the world teetered on edge of the nuclear abyss, British miners waged a life-or-death strike, and tens of thousands died from US guns in Central America, Clash cofounders Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon, and Bernard Rhodes waged a desperate last stand after ejecting guitarist Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon. The band shattered just as its controversial final album, Cut the Crap, was emerging.
Andersen and Heibutzki weave together extensive archival research and in-depth original interviews with virtually all of the key players involved to tell a moving story of idealism undone by human frailty amid a climatic turning point for our world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781636140490 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books, Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2021 |
| Pages: | 378 |
| Sales rank: | 822,191 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.88(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
DROWNED OUT BY THE SOUND
In 1976, a good many people in the West thought Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, many of them no longer considered that it had. What exactly had happened in the meanwhile? Was it simply that these people were now buried under a pile of toddlers?
— Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers in Soviet Russia spent long hours helping the camera to falsify reality ... The physical eradication of Stalin's political opponents was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence.
— David King, The Commissar Vanishes
The air was sweat-soaked and electric. Five musicians could barely be glimpsed amid a mass of humanity. Three men flayed acoustic guitars, while a fourth pounded drumsticks against the metal and plastic of a chair.
The fifth — a flame-haired singer in a green T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves — exhorted the crowd from a slightly elevated perch. Dog tags jangled as he sang without a microphone, his head nearly touching the low ceiling of the cave-like space.
The vocalist provided a visual center to the happening, but his voice was lost in the din. The unamplified guitars were similarly submerged, with only the rhythm cutting through to the back of the small room.
Such technological shortcomings seemed to matter little. Hundreds of voices howled as one: "Breaking rocks in the hot sun / I fought the law / and the law won / I needed money 'cause I had none / I fought the law / and the law won."
The song echoed poverty's desperation, its doomed protagonist reduced to "robbing people with a six-gun." If evoking a mythical American West, its theme also fit with the present locale: Sunderland, a port city in northeastern Britain.
Once Sunderland had been "the largest shipbuilding town in the world," according to the BBC. Now, the ships were gone, factory gates padlocked and rusty, with the area also hemorrhaging mining and other industrial jobs. A battle waged over the past two years to forestall an even bleaker future had not ended in victory.
Yet if the lyrics were grim, the spirit in the Drum Club discotheque on this evening in May 1985 was anything but. Joy met defiance as crowd and band became one giant chorus, spitting in the eye of a cruel fate.
We may have lost, the voices seemed to say, but we are not defeated.
A British rock band called The Clash was the catalyst for that rousing Sunderland night. By the time the group performed this audacious impromptu concert, they had become the single most popular unit to rise out of the UK punk explosion, thanks to their 1982 breakthrough album Combat Rock, with its hit singles "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go."
Over the ensuing decades, The Clash's stature has only grown, with commentators regularly placing them in a rock pantheon next to an earlier generation's demigods such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This development — including their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — is not without irony, given the band's populist, antistar stance. Nonetheless, as an Arabic version of the antifundamentalist "Casbah" by Algerian rocker Rachid Taha suggests, The Clash's global cultural influence is vast and spreading, as befits a band that consciously strove to think in planetary terms. In the fall of 2013 — nearly thirty years after that Sunderland show — The Clash released Sound System, a massive box set. While the long-defunct unit had been the subject of several such compendiums, this one was clearly meant as the final will and definitive testament of one of the twentieth century's most important rock groups.
Described by Rolling Stone magazine as collecting "all of its albums," Sound System was a vast and weighty document. Designed to resemble that 1980s urban icon — the boom box cassette deck — the set also contained unreleased music and videos, a poster, a book, magazines, badges, stickers, even Clash dog tags. "I'm not even thinking about any more Clash releases. This is it for me, and I say that with an exclamation mark!" band cofounder Mick Jones told Rolling Stone at the time.
Yet, for all of Sound System's vaunted completeness, there was a striking omission: the band's sixth studio album, Cut the Crap. Although the record cracked the UK Top 20, with a similarly high-ranking single, "This Is England," it was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any mention that a final version of The Clash, without guitarist Jones and drummer Nicky "Topper" Headon, had played 120-plus shows, nearly 20 percent of the band's total gigs.
Perhaps this shouldn't have been a surprise. The film Westway to the World and its companion tome The Clash — the other two volumes that, with Sound System, effectively comprise the authorized Clash canon — also omitted the same for all intents and purposes. None of the final two years of concerts — such as the Sunderland show — were included in the comprehensive list in the big pink coffee-table book, which credited "Strummer Jones Simonon Headon" as its authors.
It's true that two of those four — Jones and Headon — were absent from Cut the Crap. Nonetheless, the record's exclusion was extraordinary, only justifiable from a narrow perspective that has hardened over the years. This view not only dismisses the album but the band's last version itself — popularly known as "The Clash Mark II" — as lead-footed punk pretenders unworthy of serious scrutiny.
According to one Clash biographer, Marcus Gray, The Clash Mark II was drilling out "heavy metal" versions of the unit's classics, "reducing every tune to a primitive staccato stomp ... with its original melody, subtlety, texture, and meaning hammered into the ground." They are deemed "a Clash cover band" by another, author/ filmmaker Danny Garcia. One wag even recorded a reworked version of their latter-day anthem "We Are The Clash" as "We Aren't The Clash."
A few brave souls have dissented from this chorus of dismissal, most notably writer Jon Savage, who described Cut the Crap as a "moving state of the nation address." Savage even singles out "This Is England" as "the last great British punk song" in his magnum opus, England's Dreaming. Such voices, however, have largely been drowned out by the sound of a naysaying echo chamber.
Over time, the ripple effects of this critical razzing have taken a toll. Ironically, Cut the Crap's roundly panned "electro-punk" production is often held up as proof of the group's lack of talent. Consider this Saturday Review summary: "Pathetic stabs at updating the sound with multiple layers of overdubs and synthesized drum machines only point out the limitations of the group's playing abilities." A damning take — yet, as it happens, the record was hardly created by The Clash Mark II as such, and didn't fairly represent their skills or live sound.
Thirty-odd years after the album's release, such attitudes also persist in critics' bibles like the All Music Guide, which writes off Cut the Crap as "formulaic, tired punk rock that doesn't have the aggression or purpose of early Clash records, let alone the hardcore punk that the new band was now competing with."
Going one step further, Rolling Stone entirely dismisses the neo-Clash in a November 2012 "Flashback" column titled "The Clash Say Goodbye at the 1983 US Festival." While admitting that a new lineup continued to play live after Mick Jones's exit, the magazine sneered, "But that's like a Rolling Stones tour without Keith Richards. It doesn't count, and the whole thing has basically been erased from history. The Clash as we know them ended at the 1983 US Festival."
Case closed; roll the credits and be done with it. For many of the band's chroniclers, this post–Jones/Headon version of The Clash is to be classified alongside other egregious artistic faux pas of ego-addled and/or cash-hungry rock pioneers — the Doors going on for two albums without Jim Morrison, the Velvet Underground sans Lou Reed, John Cale, or Nico.
This disdain is heightened by a new reality: in the twenty-first century, zombie versions of once cutting-edge bands stumble on for years after death — Dead Kennedys without Jello Biafra, the Misfits without Glen Danzig, Black Flag without anybody but Greg Ginn ... the list goes on and on. Except for an occasional compilation appearance of its blazing twilight-era anthem "This Is England," The Clash Mark II has seemed similarly undead, fated to remain one of rock's great untouchables, unfit for public consumption. Mick Jones famously described his ejection as "the greatest mistake in rock and roll history" — but that might be expected. More curious is the fact it has been hard to find defenders of The Clash Mark II even from those who played in the band.
In his later years, Joe Strummer hardly uttered a kind word about the unit that he more than anyone else created. Clash Mark II axman Vince White wrote Out of Control, a blistering exposé of the behind-the-scenes chaos and dysfunctional machinations in the band; in Danny Garcia's book The Rise and Fall of The Clash, final drummer Peter Howard bemoans a foregone opportunity to join hard rockers AC/DC in order to stick with the doomed neo-Clash. While far less vitriolic than White or Howard, guitarist Nick Sheppard has jokingly allowed that this unit might be seen as "the only cover band I've ever played in."
By contrast, Clash cofounder Paul Simonon has reaffirmed the motivation behind the expulsion of Jones, and asserted the worth of the final songs. However, even he doesn't defend Cut the Crap, faulting manager/cofounder Bernard Rhodes for undoing the album with his dictatorial ways. Quipping, "If The Clash was the Communist Party, Bernie was our Stalin," bassist Simonon now casts Rhodes as essentially pulling off a musical coup d'état in the studio.
Indeed, in an interview for the Big Issue with Jones and Headon after Sound System's release, Simonon claims Cut the Crap is "not really a Clash record ... It hasn't got Mick or Topper on it." Jones then delivers the coup de grâce, joking that "for the benefit of Stalinist revision, [Cut the Crap] has been expunged."
Given all of this, it might fairly be asked: should one notice, much less mourn, the exclusion of this one record from this one box set?
The short answer is that the purging of Cut the Crap — and a concurrent excision of the neo-Clash era — matters. It not only leaves out a crucial chapter in the story of an entity that has been described as "the only band that matters" but it helps subvert what made the unit much more than simply another pop group.
In fact, the Clash Mark II period is a fascinating window into a band of immense vision and passion — as well as fundamental contradictions — as they wrestle with the meaning of success. In addition, this tale plays out against a backdrop of extraordinary sociopolitical drama, the passing of one era of modern history into another: a vibrant epoch that, nonetheless, is fundamentally more cold and cruel.
The Clash Mark II songs that Simonon defends not only document this moment when the world turned, but can also illuminate a possible better future. Contrary to the many voices that ridicule this Clash era, there is a powerful — if sometimes heartbreaking — story here, together with profound moments, words, and music, including works worthy of standing next to the best that The Clash created.
While we will defend this position with exhaustive, painstaking documentation and tightly constructed arguments, this book began with our own experiences as longtime followers of The Clash. Both of our lives were radically changed for the better by our encounter with the band, its music, look, and ideas, including those on display in its last incarnation.
Of course, personal experience, however profound, can only go so far to provide convincing historical evidence. Another crucial bulwark for this project is more broadly based and impossible to dismiss. As the Internet has enabled sixty-plus bootlegs from the band's final period to be widely circulated, a counterpoint to the "critical consensus" — and The Clash's own rewritten history — has risen. In a striking example of grassroots resistance, a whole segment of Clash fandom now refuses to allow the band's last two years to be "expunged."
These live tapes give the lie to those who dismiss the post-Jones Clash. In short, the passion is palpable, and the performances are compelling, with many of the new songs rivaling the power of the Strummer-Jones classics. These raw documents constitute a lasting rebuke to those who would write The Clash Mark II out of history. They provide not just the foundation of our narrative here; they — as much as live tapes from the earlier Clash years — are also crucial fuel that animate our ongoing personal, creative, and activist endeavors.
Without denying the seamier side of the period, or whitewash- ing the dysfunction that doomed this last stand, we will strive to take the artistic accomplishments seriously, while also trying to place the failures — or even betrayals — in context, with relentless pursuit of truth and sympathetic assessment of human frailty.
This begins with an honest appraisal of the band's origins. The Clash was mostly assembled from relative strangers by manager/ agitator Bernard Rhodes and given a challenging set of orders: in the words of Strummer, "to be bigger than anybody else but still keep our message." That their mission of freedom and anticapitalist revolution was somehow to be brought to fruition via the corporate rock world only serves to highlight what longtime Clash roadie/confidante The Baker has called the band's "unanswerable dilemma."
This profound tension is the taproot of the band's final quest. If The Clash's aims were perhaps doomed from the start, they nonetheless made for an exhilarating ride, one that resonates still, not only for aging fans, but also those discovering the band today. Far from being an embarrassing mistake best forgotten, this neo-Clash era is actually a fascinating and instructive conclusion to their trajectory as a band.
The final phase of this story begins in revolt against basic commercial common sense: the ejection of the authors of two and a half of the band's three hit singles. Even so, it was not insanity. Without a risky course correction, The Clash could easily have become just another gaggle of rock stars lost in an antiseptic bubble, becoming the very thing that they claimed to despise. This final, desperate effort to bottle lightning yet again, in the end, lends an even greater depth to The Clash's saga.
Obviously, "the Clash franchise" — the phrase of Mark II guitarist Sheppard — doesn't believe this. The fervor to scrub away traces of these years is perhaps understandable, given the pain involved. After all, Jones was denounced and summarily purged from a band he helped assemble, Headon's heroin addiction led to his heart-wrenching expulsion, and Strummer then had to live with guilt over what he came to view as his ego-driven betrayal of close friends.
However explicable, the stance is still disappointing. If The Clash exemplified punk's "give us some truth" impulse, then facing reality to find the lesson beyond the pain seems essential. To rewrite history, erasing key players from the scenario in a way not so different than Stalin's falsification of the past — documented in David King's haunting book, The Commissar Vanishes — seems unworthy of a band as ambitious, principled, and gifted as The Clash.
Finally, we will place this tale squarely in its sociopolitical context, with the result that figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher will be nearly as central as The Clash. This approach may not be popular with some more music-centric readers. Indeed, a growing number of people now tend to view The Clash as simply a great rock band: a tendency that, at once, is both obvious and odious.
No less a figure than Topper Headon has suggested that only The Clash's music has stood the test of time, not its politics, which might be acceptably forgotten. With all due respect to Headon's immense contributions, The Clash without its politics is a wretched ghost, for its greatness lay in a willingness to push the envelope on all levels. Its music and its message together made it a band that truly mattered, significant in a way few other musical outfits could hope to rival.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "We Are The Clash"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by The Baker 9
Introduction: Drowned Out by the Sound 15
Chapter 1 Rebellion into Money 29
Chapter 2 What Is Clash? 64
Chapter 3 Ready for War 101
Chapter 4 Turning the World 136
Chapter 5 Out of Control 168
Chapter 6 Got to Get a Witness 203
Chapter 7 Gonna Be a Killing 236
Chapter 8 Movers and Shakers Come On 265
Chapter 9 Knife of Sheffield Steel 298
Chapter 10 Ain't Diggin' No Grave 333
Acknowledgments & Sources 366
About the Authors 372