DECEMBER 22, 2022 Twenty years ago today I caught a cab to the airport at 4 AM for a flight to spend the holidays with family. At that hour just after the severe night owls have packed it in and before the early risers’ alarms have gone off, my cab driver asked if I liked The Clash. “Like them? I love them, they are my favorite band.” “I just found out that Joe Strummer died.”
“WHAT? Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
A full minute passed.
“I just wanted to tell someone.”
“Thanks for telling me that. I’m glad you did.”
We shared the ride in shared, bonded silence.
After a few minutes I offered, “The world seems just a bit smaller. A bit dumber.”
“Yeah.”
I wouldn’t have wanted to share that moment with anyone else. A cab ride to the airport at 4 AM seemed to perfect place to learn of Joe Strummer’s passing.
The passing of a vanishingly small number of well-known people left me feeling like that. Spalding Gray, Tony Bourdain. Great, big-hearted artists with a deep politics of solidarity. Never preachy, just always on the right side.
I was thirty-five at the time, making me fifty-five now. Five years older than Joe when he died of a heart attack due to an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. Two years ago, I had open heart surgery to repair a barely-caught-in-time congenital heart defect.
I first fell in love with the Clash in 1979 as a twelve-year-old listening to my best friend’s older brother’s albums on his HiFi when he wasn’t home, his tastes copped from the hipper corners of WBCN in Boston. When Sandinista came out the next year, I barely understood a word of what Magnificent Seven was about, never mind Something About England. but I knew it was smarter than what I was getting from the local classic rock station and a lot more fun to dance to. I knew When Ivan Meets G.I. Joe had something to do with the Cold War and it was irreverent. That was good enough for me.
Freshman year in college I painted the cover of The Clash (1977) in the hallway of our dorm suite at UMass Amherst. Whenever you shaved in the common bathroom, Paul Simonon was there, glaring at you in the mirror, over your shoulder. Those three have been on my left flank ever since. I appreciate the accomplishments of Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Topper, and Don Letts that much more now that no one has risen up to take their place. I feel bad for campus leftists who don’t have The Clash or Big Audio Dynamite to power and brighten and sharpen their righteous fury. I suppose they are timeless and belong to everybody the way Bob Marley, Gil Scott Heron, and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? belonged to us even though we missed them the first time around. I suppose they listen to Algiers and Theon Cross as I do.
2022 has been a good year for Clash and Joe Strummer fans. First, we had a 40th Anniversary edition of Combat Rock with The People’s Hall recordings dropped in the spring. That disc contained twelve cuts which were recorded in …
London following their pivotal 17-show residency at New York’s Bond’s Casino in 1981, the band rehearsed and recorded at The People’s Hall in the squatted Republic of Frestonia near Latimer Road in London. From there they embarked on a tour of the East and South East Asia, during which the album sleeve image was captured by Pennie Smith in Thailand. The tracks on ‘The People’s Hall’ chart the period from what was their last single, Radio Clash, right up to the release of Combat Rock, including unheard, rare, and early versions of tracks. The disc highlights a new version of Know Your Rights which was recorded at The People’s Hall on the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, and the previously unreleased instrumental He Who Dares Or Is Tired. Other notable tracks include Futura 2000, an unreleased original mix of The Escapades of Futura 2000, Mikey Dread’s Radio One, and the outtakes The Fulham Connection, previously known as The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too as well as Idle in Kangaroo Court.
In parallel to the release of The People’s Hall recordings a two-track EP of English Beat frontman Ranking Roger chatting in rare from over Rock the Casbah and Red Angel Dragnet. While working on this playlist project, which I will describe momentarily, I learned that Roger became an official member of Big Audio Dynamite during the recording of the band’s final album A New Ride in 1997. Their label refused to release the album and in typical Mick Jones fashion, always in tune with the intersection of technology and music, they released the album as MP3s on their own website, one of the first musicians to do that.
Then late in 2022, we got the release of Joe Strummer 002: the Mescaleros, a box set of 7 LPs of the discs he recorded with the Mescaleros including lots of b-sides and rarities. By the end of 2022, Clash fans had a lot of fresh material to pour over.
Wonderfully pieced together the new, official video for the track Fantastic really got me choked up and I thought, “How wonderful, how … fantastic that we have these postcards forwarded to us across two decades to make Clash fandom freshened up anew.” It occurred to me that I could piece together what would be essentially a new Clash album. Or close enough if we make the boundaries of The Clash as broad and porous as they should be.
DECEMBER 23, 2022 One thing lead to the next and the project had completely gotten away from me and I’d dug up dozens of deep cuts, then decided to include the highlights of No. 10 Upping Street which were, after all, Written by Joe and Mick and produced by Joe. And of course, the best tracks off of Paul Simonon’s Havana 3AM album. Then I was including the big Mescaleros hits, which aren’t my favorite, so I had to balance them out with my favorite deep cuts. then those had to be balanced out with the Big Audio Dynamite tracks that I feel have been unfairly forgotten. And besides, now that I had a box set’s worth of tracks, they had to be organized into coherent new albums. The number of tracks grew again as those albums absorbed more deep cuts from The Clash ecosystem. Now I have more discs’ worth of tracks than I know what to do with. I started writing this on the 22nd and it’s midway through the 23rd so I need to pull the trigger and introduce the first disc.
You can listen to this “box set” as what it actually is, some late-breaking Clash deep cuts and newly released rarities bundled with the best of the post-Clash recording of Joe, Mick, and Paul. OR, you can close your eyes and imagine that there are newly found Clash albums from a universe where instead of breaking up they took the pressure off the fraying relationships by expanding the band to include long-time friends of the band Don Letts and Ranking Roger (did you know that Roger was a guest vocalist on the B.A.D. ska cut Harrow Road and become an official member of the band in 1998 as General Public broke up and Big Audio was recording their last album. It was news to me.) To further keep things fresh there were collaborations in this universe with Mikey Dread, Camper Van Beethoven, the soul singer Stew, Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens, Lily Allen, M.I.A. and the youthful British hip hop duo Rizzle Kicks all playing around with old Clash standards.
What’s written below are liner notes from the alternate universe box set where all these songs were recorded by a Clash that never broke up and instead expanded to include Don Letts and Ranking Roger and kept recording through 2011. (With apologies to Leo ‘EZ-Kill’ Wiliams, Dan Donovan, and the Mescaleros.
Disc One: RAMSHACKLE DAY PARADE
Shout for all the people who have nothing to say!
We start out with Tony Adams and Tony Adams starts off with static and the suggestion of radio being tuned in as we begin to receive a radio dispatch beamed in by Joe Strummer. “Late news breakin', this just in …” It puts one in mind of the London Calling radio shows that Joe did for the BBC. “All transmitters to full. All receivers to boost.” Somehow the song also has the vibe of the song London Calling but with the polarity inverted from the dread of the Doomsday Clock counting down into the hopeful rays of the morning sun.
Right out of the gate we get the cosmopolitan outlook of the kid born in Istanbul and raised in Egypt, Cyprus, Mexico, Iran, Mozambique, and Germany; the son of a diplomat in the foreign service. The scene is decidedly ramshackle but infused with an upbeat propulsive forward motion.
The whole city is a debris of broken heels and party hats
I'm standing on the corner that's on a fold on the map
I lost my friends at the deportee station
I'll take immigration into any nation
Things come a little closer to home as Mick Jones and Don Letts lay down the gauntlet as well as more cowbell in Union, Jack to British unions and the Labour Party to get up off their backs after being laid out by Margaret Thatcher.
Mondo Bongo finds Strummer in an elegiac mood and tropical style. The narrator, some sort of Latin American double agent floats around town, gathering intel and doing deals with maybe a bit of romance in the mix. For all the poetic wordplay, in a Clash song, the politics is always ground-truthed in reality.
Down at the bauxite mine
You get your own uniform
Have lunchtimes off
Take a monorail to your home
The Fulham Connection is a song that would have been right at home somewhere in the middle of Sandinista. A little mambo with group harmonies. Something about kicking heroin and class politics. This track was kicking around for years under the title The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too.
Looking for a Song is a solidly sweet Mick Jones melody with rave overtones. The video is Monkees-level silly.
In When I Was a Youngster, we find the band backing up the young British hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks with Revolution Rock. It works like a charm with echoes of Ranking Roger. Shame that the Rizzle Kicks didn’t have the staying power of their elders.
The AIDS-era anthem Stone Thames doesn’t come across as quite as progressive as it did when it first came out. At least not lyrically. Sonically, it took hip-hop almost five years to catch up with Jone/Letts.
Speaking of hip-hop, next we journey BACK five years instead to a track the boys cut with Fab Five Freddy and the graffiti artist Futura 2000. Smack dab in the middle of the old skool hip-hop they discovered when they came to conquer NYC with their epic 17-night run at Bonds. … and ya don’t stop! Escapades of Futura 2000
Songwriting for Limbo the Law is credited to Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, and Dan Donovan and produced by Strummer. The arrangement has Don Letts’ fingerprints all over it. The song packs in imagery from the movie Scarface and paints a picture of Miami in the wake of the Mariel boatlift, awash in immigrants and more crime than the jails can deal with but somehow rebounding to the powers that be and nothing to disturb the sleep of right-thinking liberals.
Colombians with yayo think they got it made
Chopping 'em out with a chainsaw blade
Go down to Limbo, Limbo the law
Mama say don't come home no more
Ice cool killers copy what they see
Welfare check, lottery fantasy
Uzi nine millimeter speak
High tide leaves clean money on the beach
Society needs boys like this
Liberal minds sleep with ease
When the shooting starts, turn a blind eye
Adios to another bad guy
James Brown was a ripped-from-the-headlines romping tribute to the Godfather of Soul. Not long before, Brown had come up short in a high-speed chase with the cops and ended up in the slammer for a lot more than a weekend. Free James Brown!
Lily Allen comes in to put a fresh coat of paint on an old classic. Mick on background vocals. The story goes that Joe was tight with Lily’s dad Keith and she grew up with him around as a friend of the family.
Kokolo: Afrobeat Orchestra puts more than a new coat of paint on Magnificent Seven. Better than the original? You said it, not me. they definitely get deep inside the song and wear it lightly as their own.
What do we have for entertainment?
Cops kickin' Gypsies on the pavement
Now the news - snap to attention!
The lunar landing of the dentist convention
Italian mobster shoots a lobster
Seafood restaurant gets out of hand
Was there ever more bathos packed into six lines?
Shout for all the people who have nothing to say.
There are a lot of great reimaginings of classic Clash songs. Broadway by Stew is my favorite. Stew brings the lowlife pageant painted by Joe Strummer into vivid colors of funk and soul. Strike for the hills, boys!
Fantastic is a better, longer version of the previously released Ramshackle Day Parade. The video is freshly made and well .. fantastic.
Tune back in for disc two.