The Exile of Joe Strummer

In which our vagabond hero roams the world, taking odd jobs and running from the memory of the terrible things he's done

During the years he led the Clash, Joe Strummer bared his soul at the top of his lungs. As principal singer and lyricist, Strummer's voice was the Clash's voice, and Strummer's philosophies - social, political, sexual and spiritual - got right in your face. So it's odd that since the Clash exploded in 1984, Strummer has written only in the voices of other people. In his soundtrack work for Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy,Straight to Hell and Walker, and in the songs he helped Mick Jones write for Big Audio Dynamite's No. 10 Upping Street, Joe Strummer has written from the perspectives of South American mercenaries, dying desperados, Sid Vicious and Mick Jones. The only person he hasn't sung about is Joe Strummer.

"That's true," Strummer says, rolling a smoke in his New York hotel room. "It's a dead giveaway." But ask him what he's giving away and he just laughs.

It seems that Joe Strummer reached a moment when he decided he'd spilled too much of himself in public, and didn't want to do it anymore. "Something like that," Joe says. "But more along the lines of 'Judge not lest ye be judged.' If you had to say what's the difference between maturity and adolescence, I'd pick something in that region. When you're an adolescent you're all go. When you get a bit wiser, you see things differently. I really enjoy the process of growing up. I don't want to be Peter Pan. I admire Paul Simon for writing to his own age group. Talking to his kid: 'Before you were born, dude, when life was great.' He's not pretending to be some rocker, some 15-year-old kid. I like that."

Meet the new Joe: father, actor, composer, mature adult. He has no band, he has no manager, for now he has no plans to record an album under his own name. He arrived in Manhattan at seven a.m. on the red-eye flight from L.A. He checked into the Gramercy Park Hotel, helped his friend Josh Cheuse study for a college exam and posed for some photos. When we met for lunch, Joe was in a great mood, although a couple of glasses of wine reminded him he hadn't slept. Now he sits at the hotel strumming a beat-up acoustic guitar. At five o'clock he will head to the airport, where he will fly all night to a gig in Scotland as rhythm guitarist with the Pogues - friends he's helping out while their usual strummer is ill. Joe has been stepping up to the mike during Pogues shows to sing the Clash's "London Calling" and "I Fought the Law." But for the most part he's happy as a sideman.

It's December. Officially we're meeting to talk about his soundtrack for Walker - a surprisingly strong mix of jazz, folk and Latin instrumentals, and three new Strummer ballads. But when Joe finds out the article won't appear until February he smiles: "It'll be in the cut-out bins by then!" Luckily, March will see the release of a two-record Clash greatest hits package, so we have an excuse to talk about the whole history of Strummer.

Like the fact that soundtracks give Joe the freedom to write songs that sound like McCoy Tyner ("Viperland") or James Taylor ("Latin Romance") - options not available in the Clash. "That has something to do with becoming wiser," he nods. "Because you're within the world of film, you're suspended for a moment from the rules of rock 'n' roll. I really like that. You can say 'Hey, the jazzy number fills a scene - that's why it exists.' You're not saying 'I think this is hip': That's a burden."

Strummer's withdrawal from the rock 'n' roll spotlight, his refusal to be a front man in any sense, is in sharp contrast with his old fire and self-assurance. A thousand bands aspire to be where the Clash were from 1980 to 1982 - at the center of the rock cummunity's consciousness. By the time '82's Combat Rock sold two million copies, the Clash were filling arenas and getting hit singles - making the transition from critics' favorite/cult heroes/influences to genuine stars. And then Strummer chucked it all. The prize was in his hands - he said 'no thanks' and gave it back.

"I wouldn't say it was that noble," Strummer demmmurs. "It's more like I dropped it on the floor and broke it." Yeah, well, maybe so. But unlike musicians who bust their stardom through drugs or greed or ambition, Strummer broke the Clash intentionally. "Uh-huh," he nods. "The Clash was always from the heart. No matter if it went down or up, it was always from the heart."

So how come in three-plus years since Joe went underground, history has been re-written? At a U2 press conference a rock critic asks Bono why his band succeeded while groups like the Sex Pistols, Jam and Clash never made it in America. And Bono says he loved the Clash, he doesn't know why they never succeeded here. That's not to put down Bono, who is not American and wouldn't know that the premise was wrong. But journalists have begun lumping the Clash in with cult bands and commercial failures. Maybe, as a character says in Walker, Americans don't remember anyone who doesn't win.

"See," Strummer offers, "there's two different planes. The modern '80's definition of Made It is filling the 100,000-seat stadiums. U2 do five a week. Back then there was still some vestige of a true underground feeling. The Clash had a surge in that area. You saw us in arenas, but we were at our finest with 3,000 people in an old theater. If I was to find a mean average of all the 10,000 Clash shows there ever was, I'd say that 3,000 rocking people in a dirty old theater in the bad part of town is the mean average. And that ain't even making it. You know what I'm sayin'? Who's made it? Madonna, Michael Jacko, Prince, U2: We're talking super stadiums. At the high level of the Clash's popularity we could fill the 10,000-seat hockey arenas or gyms. You only ever saw us in a big place if it was a festival or we where supporting the Who. And if you look at our record sales, nothing sold until Combat Rock and 'Rock the Casbah.' I'd say we sold a speck overall to what U2 sell now."

Not a bad speck, though: London Calling sold 1,200,000 copies, half in America. Even the grand failure Sandinista! did 800,000. The worst-selling Clash LP, Give 'Em Enough Rope, moved just under half-a-million units. The Clash were not in Whitney Country, but they had made it into the same neighborhood as Dylan, the Stones and the Who.

"We made it," Joe continues, "but in another way. We made it in the culture. We'll have our place. You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about shallow rock mags that'll just blow away in the wind next week, man. You cannot take Creedence Clearwater or the Doors out of the culture. So it doesn't matter. Our place in the culture will probably be even-steven with a lot of people who fill stadiums."

At Least the Clash avoided repeating their greatest hits until they became cartoons. "Yeah," Joe nods. "The choice to drop out could have been cleaner. But certainly the way I feel at the moment, that's the way to do it. Not do a Deep Purple."

Revolution Rock, the best of the Clash, follows chronological order, compacting the band's rapid evolution from 1977 to '83 into a breakneck sonic transformation. In the six years Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon made Clash records, they released six albums (nine LP's), many singles, and wrote and produced records for other artists. The Best Of collection opens with the explosions of "White Man in Hammersmith Palais," "London's Burning," "Janie Jones" and "White Riot." Boy, those were the days. There's a great scene in Rude Boy, the Clash movie made between the first and second albums, when the audience is going wild, threatening to tear downthe hall. The authorities are nervous, so Strummer asks the crowd to please calm down - and then launches into "White Riot" - sending the kids through the roof. Only Johnny Cash at San Quentin has equalled that moment for glorious recklessness.

"At the height of the White Riot tour," Strummer smiles, "an earnest political journalist asked me, 'What are you going to do with all the energy of your audience? How can you harness it? What do you think happens to it?' I said, 'It slides under the door and out of the hall.'"

That energy led to violence more than once. "We'd go back for punch-ups with the noble citizens of Hamburg. We had the return annual match. I was actually arrested by the second year. They suddenly got into punk two years after the fact and they went at it with a vengence to make up for lost time. We were seen as worse than the Eagles stylistically. They said, 'Right, we'll turn up and give 'em a good kicking.' We let 'em in the gig and then it was either have a pitched battle or attempt to play the set. In the end we had to get down and slug it out with them. It was like being a professional wrestler. The band and crew got down on the dance floor with the punks and started to battle en masse. Meanwhile the innocent burghers of Hamburg were standing around the edges on little raised tiers, still watching. As the fight was going on I was thinking, 'This is ridiculous! One minute you're in a band and the next you're slugging it out.' It seemed to make no difference to the people watching! I looked up and saw them standing there with the same expressions on their faces. I remember thinking, 'God! Where will this end?'

"The first time we went there this guy was undoing my Doc Martens all night as we played. About the fifth time I said, 'The next time you touch it I'll do you, 'cause I'm trying to sing.' He touched me again, so I kicked him in the head. After the show I was in the washroom and he was washing blood off his face. I said, 'Oh, I'm sorry about that.' 'It doesn't matter.' He was a little guy. The next time we went there, there was a real big riot. While I was waiting to be arrested this giant came backstage and said, 'You! You are ze one who last year you kicked my face! This time you don't get away with it! You started that riot! I'm gonna tell the cops!' I went, 'Oh my fucking hell! It's you!' Two years before he'd been a little shrimp and here he was Nordic Man himself!" Joe roars with laughter. "I was thinking, 'This is like a stupid short story.'

"Luckily I was stone-cold sober when they arrested me. The cheif of police came up to me in the cell and went, 'Is this the Englander who's accused of beating up punks?' They went, 'Yeah'. He came over to me and bent down and said 'Good for you, mate.' Then he straightened up and walked away. There was a review of the gig in the paper the next day. Instead of a picture of someone singing, it was two men running with a bloke with a bandage on his head on a stretcher through this riot-strewn area. And it said, 'Last night the Clash played.'"

The aggression and musical solidarity born of those wild nights found its way into the Clash's next album - their masterpiece, London Calling. A combination of joyous energy and tight playin, it stands outside its time as none of the other Clash albums do. Six London Calling tracks are on the new anthology. "We spent five months rehearsing London Calling and went and banged it off in four weeks. The horn parts were all done in one day by the Irish horns, who kind of made up their own arrangements and riffs on the spot. We'd suggest the way it should go, they'd fill it out and - bang - it was a part and we banged it down. They hit five tunes from scratch. That's the way we used to do it" - Joe affects an old man's cracked voice - "back in the old days. That album was mixed by Bill Price while we were on our first tour of America. We came back and Mick changed one or two tracks a bit, but in the main it's Price's mix. I remember a skinhead getting me in Berlin and saying, 'Vot is that? My grandmother like "Wrong 'Em Boyo"!' He was on the edge, he couldn't believe it. He said, 'How could you do something my grandmother likes!' For him the clean sound of that album was a travesty."

Another clean thing about London Calling: With tunes like the dealer indictment "Hateful", it was a very anti-drug album. "'London Calling' is peppered with anti-drug lines," Joe agrees. "'Ain't got no highs except for' - hepatitis right? - 'yellowy eyes.' The 'zombies of death' were shooters. 'Draw another breath' - start living again. 'I don't want to shout but I saw you nodding out.' A lot of people were getting down on heroin at the time."

Those who had the Clash filed under "political rock" assumed "Koka Kola" was an indictment of capitalist mutil-nationals. Fooled ya. "It's about cocaine," says Joe. "The other day I was thinking of Wall Street and I remembered that tune. It was all about yuppies and how they got into coke."

The apocalyptic visions of London Calling became even more pronounced on Sandinista!, the three-record follow-up. "The Sound of Sinners" actually found Joe crying out to be able to believe in God.

"That's not a piss-take, you know," Joe says (British for "it's not a parody"). "I was thinking of L.A. and the great quake and the tidal wave. I was working on it and I got, "After all these years to believe in Jesus.' I was trying to think of another line and Topper came by and said, 'How about drugs?' I went, 'What?' He said, 'After all these drugs I thought I was him.' I said, 'That's amazing!' All those people who take too much LSD end up in sanitariums, and a lot of them think they're Jesus. It was perfect. So we just jumped up and recorded it. I screamed it out. I relished every second of it. That's Elvis Costello's favorote Clash song."

Sandinista! is represented on the Clash hits album by only two tracks, "Magnificent Seven" and "Washington Bullets." The latter song - with the chant, "Sandinista!" - convinced some skeptics that the Clash were just anti-American commies. A rhyming history of U.S. / Nicaraguan relations cut just after the Sandinistas came to power, the tune is actually no more radical than Walter Mondale. It indicts communism for the action of Russians in Afghanistan and the Chinese in Tibet, then it praises Jimmy Carter (indirectly) for being the first U.S. president to allow a popular revolution in Nicaragua. Truly a weird pop song.

"I tried to spread it around instead of always banging the same head," Joe explains of the tune's anti-Red sentiments. "At the end it says, 'Human rights...from America?' I sang it in ironic disbelief. It was like that to me. I greatly admired that. Perhaps Jimmy Carter will be remembered with more respect than all the crooks and thieves that surrounded him." Joe's philosophical about the misimpressions songs like that generated. "That's the way of the world," he figures. "The three-second egg. Maybe we think of everything in our minds in that kind of New York Post headline cartoon type. Maybe there's too much information. We log it in bursts. There isn't time to go, 'Yes, but in the third verse at the end he says....'"

The new Joe Strummer sure is an easy-going guy. He turns the other cheek so fast it looks like his head's revolving. Strumming his acoustic guitar for hours, he announces that he's decided to head to Eskimo country with his Fostex and folk guitar to cut his mature solo album. "I'm gonna get some furry boots and go sit outside an igloo with a four-track. Cut it straight to CD. I'm gonna call it Alaska." Ba boomp.

Speaking of Bruce, many critics have pointed out that Springsteen appropriated an image from the film Night of the Hunter for "Cautious Man": the hero is a once-tough loner who struggles to stay married - with "Love" and "Fear" tattooed on the knuckles of his hands. Sound familiar, Joe?

"From 'Death or Glory'!" Joe snaps, suddenly alert. "What about it?" Bruce uses the same image on his new record. "See...." Joe snarls and then stops himself - turning that cheek again. "Never mind. He's a cool cat. Think I'll rip some of his stuff off. Alaska. The new four-track album with furry boots." Joe's cool is starting to slip. "What about 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World?" he demands. "Straight out of Sandinista!. Tears for Fears' number-one world-wide smash. I saw him in a restaurant. I'd never met him before. I said, 'You! Are you Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears?' 'Yes.' I said, 'You owe me a fiver!' He said, 'Why?' I said, 'Everybody wants to rule the world - "Charlie Don't Surf" - middle eight - first line.' He reached inside his pocket and got out five and gave it to me. That's the truth too."

It's good to know that old tough Joe hasn't completely disappeared.

Revolution Rock closes with three tunes from Combat Rock, the hits "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go," and the haunting "Straight to Hell" - which is of course where Joe went next. The last song is the suitably apocalyptic "Armagideon Time." There is nothing on the new compilation from Cut the Crap, the infamous album by Joe's second Clash that brought the lightning bolts of the gods down on him and sent him into exile where he sits today.

Joe's self-confidence reached Napoleonic proportions in 1983, when he fired first drummer Topper Headon and then Mick Jones - Trotsky to Joe's Stalin. Joe formed a new Clash and took them on an arena tour singing, without irony "We Are the Clash" and other new punk songs. Topper was said to have been fired because of a drug problem - he's now serving time in an English prison for supplying heroin to a man who died from it. Joe claimed that Mick had been seduced by bourgeois notions of stardom and glamour. Mick said at the time that Joe was being led astray by Clash manager Bernie Rhodes. Strummer's Cultural Revolution led to Cut the Crap. Produced and (according to the credits) co-written by Bernie Rhodes, even Crap's good songs were buried in awful production. The album was a failure , Clash fans were angry with Joe for destroying the old band, and by the time Joe admitted that Mick had been right about Bernie, the Clash was history.

Looking back on the whole mess now, Joe says, "Obviously in hindsight it doesn't seem like the world gained much cultural information from the episode, from that 18-month period ending about mid-'84. Perhaps it wouldn't have been missed." He brightens. "But we [the second Clash] did have a good time once in the north of England and Scotland on a sort of weird busking tour. It was the weirdest thing, I'll tell ya. Somehow it was more enjoyable walking around with one of these [folk guitars] than having all those trucks following you down the highway loaded with jigs and rigs and hundreds of lights strapped to pylons. We'd just walk into a bar and go, 'Right, we're gonna play,' and the bloke would go okay. We'd say 'Put the pints up, then.' He'd say okay and we'd pull out the boxes and jam down 10 tunes. Then we'd say, 'Where should we go next?' and catch the night bus to Leeds. We'd play anywhere, morning or night. We played under canal bridges, in precincts, bus stops, nightclubs, discos. In Edinburgh we played to 1,300 people without a PA.

"It was just us five and a few of these boxes. Pete Howard had drumsticks and he'd play a chair or a wastebin or a fence or the wall. It was a right laugh. We saw a big queue one day in Manchester and said, 'What's that?' They said, 'It's the queue for the Alarm gig this evening.' Pete said, 'Let's busk the Alarm queue.' It was nearly a riot! People were throwing red paint all over our bus, all over everybody. The road crew from Alarm came out. We were at the center of a surging throng. It got completely out of hand." White riots again. Strummer laughs at the memory.

But after that tour Joe did what he'd done before in times of stress - he headed for the hills. According to Strummer, manager Rhodes assembled unmixed tapes into Cut the Crap, crediting himself as producer and co-writer. "I went to the mountains in disgust at a certain point, and he finished the album, christened it and put it out." And Rhodes' songwriting credits? "Well, I'd say he sort of served as a sounding board for me, but I thought it was a bit cheeky all the same." Joe tries to force his own cheek to turn again. "That's not to say he didn't write anything, but I wouldn't have said that it was half and half. That's all. It ain't no beef."

He must have been pretty sure that your relationship was coming to an end if he would do that, Strummer laughs: "You don't know Bernie!"

What about Joe's old disappearing acts, anyway? Were they a way of sending a message about his discontent to the Clash? "I just enjoyed buggering about," he deadpans. "Being in a rock group as a way of life is not conducive to being responsible. You get treated like a kid."

Yeah, okay, fine. So when are we going to get to hear an album ny the adult Joe Strummer? Joe turns allegorical: "What if you're watching for the man to wave the flags - but they've flashed the light instead? Say we're on a bridge and you're watching for the signal, watching. But the man you're watching is just standing there having a cigarette. Meanwhile, the lampman at the top of the car is flashing his lamp. And he's got the same message. But you've missed the message that you were waiting for!" So who's picked up your message, Joe? "For example, Graceland - the whole nature of that music and the whole nature of the way he brought it to the attention of the world is the whole message. It's not, 'Hey, that's a hard bitching driving ax sound, Tommy' - but it's something else, and just as powerful. You seem to be waiting for the return of [Slade's] Noddy Holder!"

A nasty crack about "We Are the Clash" killing Slade forever leads to a moment of sulking all around. Then cheeks are turned and the present is finally addressed. Does writing these film songs in the voice of movie characters give Joe a freedom he didn't have in the Clash?

"Any change is a refreshment," Joe nods. "A change is as good as a rest. There's an old Tin Pan Alley saying that the best cowboy songs were written by Jewish blokes from the East. There's a lot to be said for pitching your imagination out there, y'know? That Jewish guy in New York so much wanted to be a cowboy that he wrote a better cowboy song than any cowboy could have. That's the pattern of the world. You put yourself into situations and use your imagination."

"Love Kills," the theme from Sid and Nancy, put Joe in the position of writing in the voice of a lost acquaintance: Sid Vicious. "It's more a dialog between Sid Vicious and a policeman," Joe says. "In the opening of the film there's a policeman looking at Sid and there's no communication. The complete difference between that cop and Sidney interested me. Only the chorus is singing in his voice, and he just says he doesn't know what love is. The verses are the cop. The chorus is Sid's answer." Joe pauses. "It was too scary to go in there. I really wanted to write a song about 'Why Was Sidney Vicious?' but I couldn't."

Even closer to home, Strummer helped Mick Jones write the autobiographical (for Jones) lyrics to B.A.D.'s "Beyond the Pale." When it came time to write in the voices of Walker's mercenaries, Joe had it made - he was in Nicaragua with the movie crew, playing one of the soldires. "What more could you want?" Joe smiles. "Carrying a musket in the same spot! I wrote about 20 attempts at lyrics. I thought, 'If you'd been from the Appalachians and found yourself in Grenada, southern Nicaragua, in a siege, you can't get out, the leader's gone mad - what kind of song would you sing?' They'd be yearning for home, they'd comment on what was happening. I just selected the best of the various lyrics and went with those."

Walker is about a crazed, charismatic conqueror who becomes so fixed on his vision, so sure of his purity, that he marches head-high into disaster and eventual destruction. As his men fail to live up to his increasingly impossible standards, he exiles or executes them. Kind of like Joe Strummer and the Clash: Up against the wall, Topper. Firing squad, Mick.

"That's impressive!" Joe smiles. To continue this somewhat strained but nonetheless irresistible analogy: Once Joe awakes in horror and realizes his ego and self-righteousness have caused the death of his original dream, he sends himself into exile. From now on he will not speak in his own voice, or put himself in the light, or make himself the center of any effort. He will serve others: Alex Cox, Mick Jones, the Pogues. He will do penance.

Joe shrugs: "Maybe I just got helpful all of a sudden. You don't always have to be in the same mood, you know."

Yeah, Joe, but this helpful mood's now in its fourth year! "Well, in all three cases - Cox, B.A.D., the Pogues - someone's asked me to do something. I just agreed to the offers as they came. I was kind of casting around and Alex said, 'Write a song.' Next thing I know we're doing [the film] Straight to Hell. Somewhere in between I met Mick on the street. He said, 'Oh, we're just around the corner; step in the studio.' I dunno, I just kind of did what was in front of me."

"After Walker I wanted to go back to London and think. Then the phone rings. I had just looked at my horoscope. It said 'You will receive an interesting call. 'It's the Pogues: 'Come to New York for three days! The Ritz! America! Canada! Frisco! L.A.!' So here I am." Joe Strummer sighs. "I'm getting to my thing, but things get in the way."

I'd just like to say that rhythm guitar playing hasn't been receiving enough attention in your pages," Joe Strummer announces. "I think you'll find it true that most lead guitarists have no idea how to play rhythm. In fact, none of them do!"

Rhythm king Joe favors a Takamine acoustic guitar and a black Fender Telecaster. "My favorite amplifier is called a Session," says Joe. "It's a small combo made in England." But what's that beat-up little acoustic job? "It's a Riley," Joe smiles, holding out the pock-marked guitar. "Made in Mexico." Joe checks the price tag on the back: "Twenty-five dollars!" The doorbell rings and in comes movie director Jim Jarmusch. He studies Joe's Riley and says, "It looks miniaturized."

"That's been a boon!" Joe enthuses. "It's great for airplanes. They can't say, 'Put that in the hold!' It's such a load off my mind. I used to walk toward every plane with my acoustic, ready for the bitch that would be standing there. When I went to Ireland with the Pogues for a TV show I nearly got into a ruckus on the way out. I was all fired-up from my first bit of performing in years, and someone tried to stop me getting on the plane with my acoustic. I wanted to start it there and then!" Jarmusch scrutinizes the instrument: "It's got a hole smashed in the back." Joe looks: "Yeah, behind the 'Fragile' sticker. It's not irreparable."

Although Strummer's new Walker soundtrack was recorded in San Francisco, he wrote all the material and recorded his demos while the movie was being made in Nicaragua. "I'm a kind of one-man operation," says Joe. "I knew I was going to go to Nicaragua and write stuff, but I could only take what I could carry on a plane - two suitcases, and the guitar I took in the cabin. So into these suitcases went my big four-track Fostex 250. That took up most of one suitcase. Never mind the weight of it. In the other suitcase I put a synth that would fit - a short Casio. Not one that had a nice spread. I used that to compose. If I wanted to start work on the trumpet parts I'd switch on the trumpet voicings and work them out. Same with the violins, the marimbas and the piano tone. Then I'd jam guitar on it, fool around with it, bounce until I had what I wanted. Then I took that and played it to the cats in Frisco."

So how come if Joe played everything on the demos he's not credited with playing anything on the Walker album - just singing? "I couldn't credit myself playing because I was afraid of getting sued by Sony, to be honest. I got permission from CBS/Sony to sing on it. See, I can write it, conduct it, produce it, okay? I can do all that and have it on any label quite freely. But should I sing on it or play, then some deal has to be made. So because Walker's on Virgin I made a deal for the singing with CBS/Sony. Then when I began to to compile the credits I thought, 'Anything I've done I better not put on there, 'cause for all I know there may be a separate deal for playing it. It could open a can of worms, right? So I just put down 'Vocals' but in fact I'm probably playing some rhythmic instrument on every track, whether it's piano, guitar or marimba."

Joe's piano-playing is undervalued. It added unusual rhythmic depth to Clash tracks like "One More Time." "If there was any simple piano-chunking way down in the mix, I might be doing it," he says. "On Charlie Don't Surf,' 'Junco Partner' - just simple off-beat vamps. I can only handle three-prong chords. I can stay in rhythm, but I can't handle any fiddly bits. Much like my guitar-playing. Fuck the Fiddly Bits! That's my motto."

"I think you should save that one for Guitar Player, Joe," Jarmusch suggests.