Joe Strummer died yesterday of heart failure at age 50. He was, for a short burning few years, the leader of The Clash. Not too long ago it was Joey Ramone, lead singer of The Ramones, who died from cancer at 49. So now the time people dread, when the bright lights of your youth start dying not from foolishness or accident but from the realities of life, illness and disease rather than drugs and car crashes.
I remember back in high school when some friends turned me on to The Ramones. The wacked out energy of Beat on the Brat was just so perfect for a 15 year old suburban boy. When, a few months later, the much more serious but just as unhappy Sex Pistols came along, I was hooked on punk. I had to buy it as an import but The Clash’s first album (Clash) seemed to fuse the two approaches: Johnny Rotten’s angry disruptive lyrics and the Ramones’ group ethic of making the music powerful yet fun.
A couple of years later, Strummer and Jones released their masterwork, London Calling–generally regarded as one of the top ten rock albums. 23 years on, mainly what one hears on the radio is the throwaway pop tune Train in Vain, a song that was barely included and not even noted on the album cover or record label. Much less often we might get the title tune, though Jaguar seems to have no difficulty using this forecast of apocalypse to attract consumers.
“The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error but I have no fear
London is drowning and I live by the river”
But the heat was white hot, too much for them to touch each other much longer. There were a couple more records released and they had hits with Should I Stay or Should I Go and Rock the Casbah from them but by 1983 Strummer and Jones were so caught up in their own needs that the guitarist was given the boot. New guitarists were brought in, the drumsticks changed hands as well, but things fell just about as quickly as you’d expect. Neither Strummer nor Jones ever made significant, substantial music on his own.
Some of my favorite memories of my own punk era are from 1979, when I was home from freshman year of college, and took the bus into Manhattan many nights with a rediscovered buddy named Brian Karlman. We’d been friends at age four or five, then lost touch until this time; we’d hang out at the Mudd Club, an after hours club called Atlantis, and a bunch of other punk dives in the City. Brian at least had the artifically bright blue and green hair but I refused to change my look just for the scene and continued wearing my plaid lumberjack shirts despite never getting anywhere with the women. It was the music.
The Clash finally made the 25 year mark and were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to be inducted in the ceremony next month. Strummer and Jones had apparently played a few gigs together and intended to reunite to play a few songs that evening, a shame but it won’t happen now.
BillSaysThis 