We Are The Clash. Mark Andersen
Strummer’s relationship with his own parents was strained—having been consigned to boarding school, and losing his older brother to suicide—the immensity of becoming a father hit home.
Other members of The Clash were also experiencing massive changes in their personal lives. According to The Baker, “Paul had flown out to the US after we’d got Pete Howard and married his girlfriend, Pearl Harbour. Joe was now a father-to-be and was obviously feeling all the tensions that go along with that. Mick was fully ensconced at home with [his girlfriend] Daisy exploring new ground with his own alternative set of friends and their ‘creatures of the night’ scene which obviously flew in the face of the Bernie/Kosmo/Joe/Paul axis.”
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As Strummer absorbed the big news, and The Clash hurried to break in the new drummer, another momentous change had taken place. On March 28, Thatcher’s new National Coal Board director was announced: Ian MacGregor.
MacGregor had headed British Steel since 1980, presiding over a radical restructuring: 166,000 people had jobs when MacGregor arrived; by the time he left for the Coal Board, only 71,000 were still there. More than 60 percent of the jobs in this British industry had just . . . disappeared.
Enterprises sheltered by government subsidy could run deficits eternally, bleeding the coffers dry. But not everything worth having showed up in the bottom line, of course, and there was serious social value to the jobs created.
For Thatcher, it was not worth the trade-off. In the long run, all would be best for the most, as the market made its magic happen—or so went the creed of the neoliberal faith. The choice of MacGregor to head the Coal Board meant the same medicine that had been given to steel was now to be administered to another pillar of the British economy. Arthur Scargill—now union president, having won election in 1981 with over 70 percent of the votes—declared, “The policies of this government are clear: to destroy the coal industry and the NUM.”
Meanwhile, Reagan had taken his rhetorical confrontation with the Soviet Union to an ominous new level. Speaking on March 8 to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, Reagan extolled the power of prayer, and religion’s role in the founding of America. These paeans to the faith-based “greatness and the genius of America” were delivered while the administration was underwriting savage repression in El Salvador and beyond.
After denouncing abortion and supposed infringements on religious freedom by government bureaucrats, Reagan shifted to a new topic: the nuclear freeze movement trying to arrest the escalating arms race between the US and USSR.
Reagan claimed, “As good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution.” He then asked the crowd to oppose a nuclear freeze that would only serve “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire . . . and remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
Such terms made war seem inevitable. While nuclear conflict might appear unthinkable, Reagan had argued in 1981 that such a war might be contained to Europe—a grim prospect for those who recalled World War II’s devastation.
As the stakes were rising on both sides of the Atlantic, The Clash hit the road, doing a series of smaller-scale shows in Texas and Arizona, warming up for the US Festival. The band was rusty, but Howard was proving himself as the new engine of the machine, with the power of Chimes and the finesse of Headon. The Baker: “In a way, Peter was a mix of the two . . . he fit like a glove.” Vinyl: “There were issues, there always are, but it was clear he could do the job.”
Yet tensions in the band were simmering. As Howard recalls, “I was the new guy, so I wasn’t privy to everything, but I could tell that Mick and Joe seemed hardly on speaking terms.” The choice of “Garageland”—a “we won’t forget where we came from” anthem written in response to signing with CBS—to open the first shows seemed to acknowledge a growing disconnect. Strummer was keen to demonstrate that The Clash remained true to its original mission.
Playing shows seemed to help ease the strain. The Clash was starting to hit its stride by the final warm-up in Tucson, Arizona. Strummer confronted overly aggressive security from the stage and joked about “the MTV curiosity seekers” in the packed house, but the band was hot and the crowd rapturous.
With the warm-up shows successfully completed, The Clash was on its way to the festival with spirits high, when reality hit them in the form of a huge Budweiser billboard in the desert promoting the US Festival. Such sponsorship was hardly unknown in rock and was rapidly becoming much more pervasive. Having signed to CBS years before, The Clash was by no means innocent of corporate marketing. Yet the band sought a certain distance to avoid compromising their politics and art.
The ad showed exactly what the band had signed up for, and The Baker remembers the mood on the bus darkening palpably. Strummer had already been joking about the juxtaposition, taking jabs at the other headliner, heavy metal party band Van Halen—which was getting $1 million to play, twice The Clash’s payment—from the stage at the show in Wichita Falls, Texas.
Now Rhodes tried to help by going on the attack. The festival’s techno-hippie vibe made it an easy target, and the decision was made to test the organizers’ utopianism. Although Wozniak would end up losing a huge amount of money on the festival, at the time that wasn’t anticipated. Rhodes challenged him to pony up $100,000 for a camp for at-risk youth or The Clash wouldn’t play.
Wozniak resisted what he saw as blackmail, given that The Clash had already signed a contract to play. At a last-minute press conference, the band pressed its threat not to play unless Wozniak came through with the donation. The audience was left waiting for nearly two hours until a compromise was found: the festival would give a token $10,000 contribution, and the band agreed to go on.
The band members were scarcely relaxed as they ran onstage, taking places in front of a gigantic banner proclaiming, THE CLASH NOT FOR SALE! If this seemed to protest too much, Strummer nonetheless greeted the massive crowd with a sardonic, “So here we are in the capital of the decadent US of A!” as the band plugged in.
In an earlier press conference with numerous other performers—where Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth ribbed The Clash for being “too goddamn serious”—Vinyl had declined to comment on the festival itself, while making it clear “from the moment we hit the stage till the moment we leave, we will have something to say.” The band was no more than thirty seconds into the show, but the truth of Vinyl’s statement was apparent.
Perhaps thinking of his impending fatherhood, Strummer dedicated the Clash set “to making sure that those people in the crowd who have children, there is something left for them later in the century.” Then the band was off, igniting “London Calling,” followed swiftly by a fiery “Radio Clash” and a haunting “Somebody Got Murdered” with Jones on lead vocals. Strummer’s guitar was mixed higher than usual, providing an appealingly abrasive sound, with his ragged chording adding a raw edge to Jones’s more pristine tones.
Strummer had clearly come onstage intending to challenge the huge crowd as much as the event organizers. As soon as the third song died away, Strummer was back on the offensive: “Well, I know the human race is supposed to get down on its knees in front of all this new technology and kiss the microchip circuits, but it don’t impress me over much . . .” The singer hesitated, then launched another salvo: “There ain’t nothing but ‘you make, you buy, you die’—that’s the motto of America. You get born to buy it . . .” Leaping from critiquing consumerism to racial and economic inequality, Strummer continued: “And I tell you, those people out in East LA ain’t going to stay there forever. And if there is going to be anything in the future, it’s got to be from all parts of everything, not just one white way down the middle of the road!”
If the words were perhaps a bit incoherent, Strummer’s passion was plain. As the crowd tried to absorb the message, the singer tossed off one last exhortation—“So if anybody out there ever grows up, for fuck sake!”—and the band