“Joe didn’t want to be a product”: The (near-)end of The Clash

Okay, so our endless monolith on The Clash’s Combat Rock in observation of Joe Strummer’s 70th birthday’s hardly over. Kill me! How The Clash went Top Ten and decomposed on America's arena circuit.

The Clash backstage at Shea Stadium: “Born on a mountaintop in Tenn-uh-seeee!”

“It was always a shambles waiting to happen.”

“We were so stupid,” Joe Strummer ranted at British rock journalist Gavin Martin years later, recalling just how the wheels began falling off the ‘til-now unassailable Clash chassis during Combat Rock’s making. 

“Things got jammed up again. The company needed another album, so we ended up recording on tour. At first, it was just us knocking it out in Electric Lady, trying to mix it, and it sucked. We toured Australia, and each night after the show in Sydney we’d go down and mix the album. But, of course, that sucked as well. So we got back home and then we just brought [producer] Glyn Johns in. We had to beg him, really, because he didn’t like producing stuff he hadn’t recorded. He gave it a go and got it into a listenable shape. He saved it at the 11th hour, really. 

“But otherwise no one knew what they were doing,” the singer/rhythm guitarist sighed. “They say record companies fashion shit, but in our case it was always a shambles waiting to happen.”

To understand how blinkered The Clash were about themselves and their situation, Strummer claims to have no idea how invaluable and versatile Topper Headon was.  The epiphany came when the drummer handed the group “Rock The Casbah” during the Combat Rock sessions, a few months before Bernie Rhodes cack handedly engineered his exit. Like his drumming didn’t clue you in, Joe?

“I saw it with my own eyes – Topper Headon’s great talent,” he ranted to Martin. “I swear in 20 minutes he’d laid down the whole thing: bass, drums, piano. He laid them all himself. It took other people by surprise. Jonesy really wasn’t into that tune when we released it as a single. We had to persuade him a bit. I think he thought it was a bit comedic.

“When you’re concentrating on the latest masterpiece you’ve carefully put together and someone comes up with something so fast, it can be a little…disorientating,” he sneered in conclusion.

Mick Jones’ “latest masterpiece” was, of course, “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” the two-chord garage punk pastiche that became The Clash’s other mainstream calling card as “Casbah'' descended from the US Billboard Top Ten. Paul Simonon recalls Strummer and Jones barely talking during “Should I Stay’s” tracking. It’s now accepted as the lead guitarist’s commentary on his future as a Clash member, despite Casey Kasem now being forced to regularly pronounce their name on American Top 40. It eventually topped the UK charts in 1991, after Levi Strauss revived it for a TV jeans commercial. Two months later, British garage punk polymath Billy Childish and his band Thee Headcoats renamed themselves Thee $tash for an answer single, revising the lyrics to “Should I Stay” and “I’m So Bored With The USA” in protest. “We’re Selling Jeans For The USA,” indeed….

But here they were, touring America’s sheds as “Casbah” multiplied their draw incrementally, its author gone, replaced by the bloke he replaced in 1977, Terry Chimes. 

“When the band sacked me, I promised them that I’d stop misbehaving and taking substances,” Headon recalled in Don Letts’ Westway To The World documentary. “They said, ‘Ok, we’ll go and do this tour, and when we come back if you’ve got yourself together, you can rejoin.’ But while they were away Joe did an interview and blew the whole story, said that I’d been sacked, and I went further downhill from there.”

“I don’t think, honest to God, we ever played a good gig after that,”  Strummer admitted, with brutal honesty. “Except for one night in New Jersey, we played a good one, but I reckon that was just by the law of averages. Out of a 30-gig tour, one night was OK – you’ve got to say it’s a fluke.”

Mick Jones staring at Joe’s new mohawk in Toronto: “Suddenly, I was in Discharge…..” (Pic: Jeremy Gilbert)

“Why didn’t you play ‘Rock The Casbah’?”

“On this night in 1965, on this very stage, Brian Jones stood there,” Strummer joked in the midst of the three night stand at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, NJ which commenced the US leg of the Casbah Club Tour.

“Bill Wyman stood there,” he continued, waving his hand across the stage. “Charlie Watts was back there…Keith Richards….”

Then grinning beneath his brand new hybrid pompadour/mohawk hybrid hairdo, he pointed at himself and announced, “And Freddie Mercury stood ‘ere!”

Was Joe aware The Clash were about to be wrapped in the very rock stardom he was skewering that evening in Bruce Springsteen’s backyard? Possibly. What is certain is their lives changed four days later, when in the midst of their two-night stand at Austin, TX’s City Coliseum, they cavorted for Don Letts’ cameras, lip synching Topper’s “Rock The Casbah'' in their pop star battle fatigues, oilfield pump jacks pistoning away behind them. When they played Armadillo World Headquarters down the street back in 1979, in the wake of recording London Calling, the opening acts were local punk royalty The Skunks and Lubbock-born-and-bred honky tonk master Joe Ely. This time, it was their newly ascendent CBS labelmates, local blues rock gunslingers Stevie Ray Vaughan And Double Trouble. But other Texas dates featured direct support from New Orleans’ Red Rockers, gaining attention for their rampaging political punk that was more than a little indebted to The Clash and Give ‘Em Enough Rope, down to spray painted shirts and an all-action stage show performed before hammer and sickle-festooned amps and giant American flag backdrop heisted from a truck stop and hung upside down. It was as if they let Red Rockers be The Early Clash, as they got on with Combat Rocking.

Soon enough, Letts’ footage was edited into a “Rock The Casbah” promo clip that tied up MTV playlists something fierce, forcing American radio programmers to begrudgingly play the single. “Casbah” peaked at Number 8 in Billboard’s Top 10 in November. And the crowds got bigger and bigger.

They returned to the UK in July, to make up for the dates canceled when Strummer pulled that runner back in May. It apparently did the trick: The Clash received a heroes’ welcome unthinkable two months earlier, playing to general good will and affection that must have felt like vindication after two years being pilloried in the rock weeklies and by a fickle public more enamored of Culture Club than rebel rock. They were back in the States one month later for the hastily assembled Combat Rock USA Tour, in the biggest venues they’d played Stateside to date. And they continued being righteous in their choice of opening acts: Kurtis Blow, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, and The English Beat, as well as Boston hardcore acts Jerry’s Kids and Gang Green.

Meanwhile, The Clash was not sure whether to embrack fame and fortune or not. 

“Joe was probably uncomfortable,” Chimes observed in Mojo’s recent Punk Icons: The Clash special edition. “He was a contradiction. He always wanted to be famous, in the biggest band in the world, but he didn’t want to sell loads of records and be a product. You can’t do one without the other, and that contradiction was always going to bother him.” 

Jones, who’d told Rolling Stone just the year before they “wanted to be as big as Van Halen,” loved it. However, fame didn’t suit him, Strummer observing in Westway that it made the guitarist behave like “Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood.” The rift between them deepened into a chasm, as Simonon just stayed silent on the sidelines. The public got a hint in little incidents, such as Strummer laying his hands on Jones’ guitar neck, urging him to stop as Mick again played more effects pedals than actual guitar. It echoed the tension between Mick ‘n’  Keef in the Rolling Stones’ camp.

Oct. 9th, 1982: The Clash made their third-ever American television appearance, on a Saturday Night Live episode hosted by Ron Howard, in between being Richie Cunningham and being one of Hollywood’s most beloved film directors. Performing a taut “Straight To Hell” and a loose, jolly “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” it was only perceptible that things were wrong in The Clash camp on the latter tune. Strummer scoots and jives around the stage like he hasn’t a care in the world, as Jones looks grumpy, ready to bolt. During the traditional cast-waving-goodnight closing, Jones later reported Eddie Murphy turning to him, asking, “Why didn’t you play ‘Rock The Casbah?’”

End Part Four

Article on The Krayolas in the San Antonio Express-News!

The Krayolas rock Houston’s Magnolia Room, 1982. (Pic: Bill Daras)

Indeed, indeed! Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2022, the San Antonio Express-News published my story on long-running local power pop institution The Krayolas, who just issued a remix/remaster/reimagining of their 1982 debut album, Kolored Music. This one tools under their working title for that record, Happy Go Lucky, and centers around what they call their “bubblegum soul” phase, involving r&b-flavored material featuring the legendary West Side Horns. The piece hits the print edition today, but you can read it online by clicking on all this highlighted text here.

End of Part Four. I DID NOT INTEND this multipart examination of Combat Rock to run for FIVE INSTALLMENTS. But being my own editor means I can tell stories for however long they take, so long as I can chop them up into digestible chunks for You, My Readers. Because NO ONE wants to spend an hour reading a damned article online! You got shit to do, places to go, etc., etc.

Join me Monday, as I tie this story up in a pretty little bow.  Please celebrate by sharing this piece, and supporting The Tim “Napalm” Stegall Substack with a free or paid subscription. And remember: You pay more for coffee each day than a five dollar monthly subscription to this site.

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