Night Beat (30 page)

“The important thing about that song,” says Jones, “is that it isn’t any particular person who gets killed—it’s just
any
body. It’s funny, in some places we play, where people live in extreme poverty—like northern England—the audience seems to understand the line about
not killing
better. But in richer places, people understand the other part better, the part about ’Somebody’s dead forever.’ I think it’s their way of saying that, even though they might have money, they understand they can still lose it all—not just the money, but their lives. But the audiences are more mixed here in L.A., aren’t they?”

Jones starts to pick gradually at his breakfast, now that it’s good and cold. “A
mer
ica,” he says, a thin tone of distaste in his voice. “The people here never really took punk of our kind seriously—always treated it like some sort of bloody joke. It’s a shame that a group like the Sex Pistols had to come out here to the land of promise just to burn out. Come out here and act out their gross end—that Sid and Nancy play. America screwed them up. That’s what we’ve tried not to have happen to us, going the way of the Sex Pistols—getting swallowed up by America.”

It’s interesting, I note, that almost all of the Clash’s music since the first album has moved more and more away from strictly English topic matter and styles.
Sandinista!
seemed like a rampart of Third World concerns.

“Yeah, well it was,” says Mick, “and that didn’t particularly win a lot of hearts and minds at the record company. We knew it was going to be difficult, because we kept meeting resistance with the idea, but we were very stubborn and went straight ahead.
Sandinista!
is quite special to me. It wasn’t, as some critics say, a conscious effort to do ourselves in. Originally we’d wanted to do a single a month, then put out a double album at the end of the year, like
London Calling.
But CBS wouldn’t have that, so we thought, All right, three albums for the price of two it is. We probably could’ve gone without releasing another record for a year or so. I think people would’ve still been listening to it—there’s enough there.

“Combat Rock
is like the best of
Sandinista!—
a concise statement, even though it contains just as much diversification. There’s an art to making one album as well as three, you know.”

Yet
Combat Rock,
I tell Jones, seems shot through with the idea that death is an ever-present possibility. In fact, it almost seems a death-obsessed album, what with tracks like “Death Is a Star,” “Ghetto Defendant,” “Sean Flynn,” “Straight to Hell”. . . .

“All me favorite tracks,” says Mick with a broad smile. “No, I know what you mean. A lot of critics are saying this album reflects our death fascination, or the group’s own depression or confusion, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s clear that we know exactly where we’re at—we’re not confused at all. The problem is, a lot of people equate depression with reality, so they find the record depressing. I think it just touches on what’s real. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly optimistic, but I wouldn’t call it pessimistic either.”

But some critics, I tell him, have found the Clash’s brand of political rhetoric and realism just as naive as that jaunty romanticism of the pop bands.

Mick takes a sip of his coffee and regards me with a bemused expression. “You mean like the
Village Voice
calling us ’naive,’ and
Sandinista!
a ’pink elephant’? Well, we are, and it is. It doesn’t particularly discourage us, that kind of talk. It’s important we stick to getting our point across. Not just because people will try to discredit us, but because somebody has to counteract all the madness out there, like the bloody war fever that hit England over this Falklands fiasco. It’s important that somebody’s there to tell them that there aren’t any winners where there aren’t any real causes. It may appear that Maggie Thatcher’s won for the time being, but not because she’s made the British winners. Instead, she’s made them victims, and they can’t even see it.

“What’s interesting,” Jones continues, “is that the American critics don’t seem to like
Combat Rock
much and the English do, whereas with
London Calling
and
Sandinista!,
it was just the opposite: Americans
loved
them and the British critics really got down on us. But I think what they like about
Combat Rock
is that it’s one of the few things in English pop right now that bothers to be real. Most of the new pop doesn’t try to engage reality at all—which isn’t necessarily bad, because I like a lot of the new stuff too, like Human League. But sometimes you just have to get down to facing what the world’s about—and that’s not something all those party bands want to do.

“I don’t know,” says Mick, his voice soft and museful. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, we have our share of fun too, but these days . . . it’s just that all the parties seem so far away.”

I ask him: Do you think your audience understands that? Some of the people I’ve seen at the band’s shows—both the punk contingent, plus the mainstream crowd that have adopted them as the new Rolling Stones—seem to miss the Clash’s point by a mile. Slam dancing, not to mention spitting on and pelting opening acts like Joe Ely and Grandmaster Flash, doesn’t seem much different to me than any other mindless party ritual.

Mick bristles mildly. “They’re not really assholes, are they? They just don’t know how to act. I mean, at Bond’s it wasn’t actually racism. At first, we sat around backstage thinking, ’What jerks!’ But when we made it clear that we were having a rough time with the idea of them adoring us but hating the opening acts, it seemed to stop. I think it was just initial overexcitement.”

Still, aren’t there times when you wonder just who your audience really is, and if you’re really reaching them?

“All the time, all the time,” says Jones. “For every example you get of people who you think are really into it, who have really got the message, you also run up against the people who are completely misinformed. We just do the best we can to contain those contradictions, and hope enough of our meaning rubs off here and there.”

Mick glances at the wall clock. It’s nearly time to head out to the afternoon’s sound check. I pose one last question: “When Joe disappeared, did you think it might be the end of the Clash?”

Mick smiles wryly. “That Joe—what a bastard, eh? If he ever does that again . . . um, yeah, for about ten minutes I sat down and died. I thought the group might be ending, and I thought it was a shame, but I wasn’t about to let it stop me from getting on with living.

“It was bad timing on Joe’s part, but it was also an admirable thing. It’s very difficult to put your own needs first like that, but the only problem is, once you start doing it, it’s easier to do again. Still, it made us ask ourselves what we were going to do. It
certainly
made Topper ask himself what was happening with him. I even thought about getting into something else myself, but it will have to wait now.

“We all decided we could start over with this band—Joe, Paul, me—and now, some nights, it’s almost like we’re a new group out there onstage.

“We should change our name, don’t you think? How about Clash Two?” Mick mulls the idea over a bit more, then bursts into a titter. “No, wait, I’ve got it: How about Clash
Now
?”

HOW had THE CLASH managed to hold together? After all, punk never offered itself as a breeding place for enduring comradeship.

Paul Simonon, the group’s craggily handsome bass player (recently elected to
Playgirl
’s “The Year’s Ten Best Looking Men” list), ponders that question as he picks his way through a bowl of guacamole and chips (all the band’s members are vegetarians) shortly before leaving the hotel for that night’s show.

“You’re talking about things like corruption, disintegration, right?” he says in his thick Brixton accent. “I tell you what I’ve seen do it to other groups: drugs. I’ve been through all sorts of drugs; at one time I took them just for curiousity, and I
learned—
it’s not worth it. It’s like a carrot held in front of you, and it’s the downfall of a lot of bands we’ve known.

“We just cut it out—we don’t deal with that stuff anymore. I’d much rather use the money to go out and buy a record, or a present for me girlfriend, or phone me mum up from Australia.”

Does Simonon feel comfortable sharing that anti-drug concern with the Clash’s audience?

Simonon shrugs and gnaws another chip. “Sure. I don’t see why not. I think that’s part of what we’re about, is testing our audience.”

Does he ever worry, though, about leaving the audience behind—worry that the band might be growing in different directions?

“Well, I think it’s this band’s natural course to grow. When we did
London Calling
we got a lot of flak, but that was just a warm-up. I think the real turning point for us came when we recorded ’The Magnificent Seven’; it was the start of a whole new music for us. I thought, ’This is going to wake people up, especially the ones who keep expecting us to do the same old thing; maybe it’ll even make them chuck the bloody album out the window.’

“But we knew that’s what we wanted: to test the people who’d been listening to us. We didn’t want to be dictated by anybody else’s interests. That could’ve happened very easily after the first album, either way—we could’ve gone off in a more commercial style, because of what the record company people wanted, or gotten deadlocked into a hard punk thing, because of what the fans wanted. We didn’t do either one, and I suspect that’s hurt us as much as it’s helped. We certainly had an easy formula that would’ve carried us for a while.”

Does Simonon think the Clash still attracts much of a punk audience in America or England—the hardcore and Oi types?

“Yeah, a little, but by and large the music of those bands doesn’t interest me. I’ve listened to it, but so much of it is just noise for its own sake. Plus the things they deal with, things like racism and getting drunk and slapping your girlfriend around the face—I don’t have any use for supporting that kind of thing.

“You know, people ask me all the time if we’re still
punk,
and I always say, ’Yeah,
we’re
punk,’ because punk meant not having to stick to anybody else’s rules. Then you look around and see all these bands that are afraid to break the rules of what they think punk is.
We’re
punk because we still have our own version of what it means. That’s what it is: an attitude. And we’ll stay punk as long as we can keep the blindfolds off.”

“IS IT TRUE THAT Bob Dylan was in the audience last night?” Joe Strummer asks, as we settle down at the bar at the Clash’s hideaway hotel, a couple of hours after the next-to-last of their five-night engagements at the Hollywood Palladium. “Somebody told me that Sinatra came to one of the Bond’s shows, but I thought that was a bit far-fetched. But Dylan. . . . ”

I tell him that yes, Dylan did come out to see the Clash, and from all accounts, seemed to like what he saw.

Strummer just shakes his head, muttering in incredulity.

Would that have intimidated you, I ask, knowing that Dylan was out there?

“Well, yeah. I mean, somebody told us he was up in the balcony, watching us, but you always hear those kinds of rumors. But if I’d known it was true, I’m not sure how I would’ve felt. Playing for Dylan, you know, that’s a bit like playing for
. . . God,
ain’t it?” Strummer orders us a round of drinks—a Bloody Mary for himself; a rum and Coke for me—and continues his musings on Dylan.

“You know, me and Kosmo (Vinyl, the band’s road manager and press liaison), we’re the only real Dylan diehards around the Clash. In fact, when Kosmo came down to Paris to take me back to London after I’d split, we went out celebrating one night at a French bar, with me playing piano, pounding out Dylan songs, howling stuff like,
’When you’re lost in Juarez/And it’s summertime too . . . ’

“I realize it’s almost a cliché to say it,” he continues, “but we probably wouldn’t have done the kind of music we have if it hadn’t been for Bob Dylan. It’s easy for all these cynics just to write him off, but they don’t realize what he did—I mean, he spoke up, he showed that music could take on society, could actually make people want to save the world.”