During their days in The Clash, it was Mick Jones who turned in the lyrical, heartfelt songs and they were few and far between. Stay Free. Lost in the Supermarket. Train in Vain. Should I Stay or Should I Go.
We mostly think of Joe Strummer pounding away in that staccato jackhammer on his Telecaster, shouting and barking at the microphone. Only the low crooning of Rebel Waltz and maybe the insistent whisper of Straight to Hell telegraph the range he’d show in his solo efforts. Or the spoken word interlude of Broadway.
I'm telling you this mister,
Don't be put off by looks.
I been in the ring and I took those right hooks.
Oh the loneliness
Used to knock me out. Harder than the rest.
And I've worked for breakfast.
'N I ain't had no lunch.
But those songs are all political without the lyricism of some of Mick Jones’ change-up pitches. That changes with the soundtrack to the Alex Cox film Walker in 1987, and then his first solo album Earthquake Weather in 1989.
The Walker soundtrack is a lost masterpiece. Alex Cox’s best film was also the one that ended his career after Repo Man made it and Sid and Nancy cemented his reputation for delivering solid tight-budget, off-kilter indie films. It was a film that almost nobody really got. You had to share Cox’s sensibility nearly exactly to enjoy. That’s not many people. Walker stars Ed Harris as William Walker, a vain, moralistic mercenary willing to extend Manifest Destiny anywhere someone would foot the bill.
William Walker is the most famous filibuster, having failed at multiple attempts to invade Latin American countries and establish a pro-slavery, American regime. He attempted to conquer Sonora and Baja California in Mexico and later invaded Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the Filibuster War. He was executed after seeding a rebellion in Honduras.
The film is a raw satire of American imperialism running on anarchic bathos, self-importance and narcissism propped up by ignorance and arrogance. The black comedy inserts anachronisms — a computer in the study, characters reading copies of Newsweek and Time — until a chopper and Reagan-era American troops are sent in to finally extract Walker from the failing chaos all around him at the end.
Strummer’s soundtrack is a gorgeous mashup of Latin and Caribbean themes and styles. Machete exemplifies his mastery of spaghetti Western soundtrack music.
Musket Waltz brings more of a Caribbean vibe, the piano and the percussion playing off each other beautifully.
With Tennessee Rain, he pulls off the feat that Bob Dylan and Shane McGowen seem to pull off effortlessly and no one else. He creates a campfire folk song with fresh chops that somehow seems to have been around forever.
1989’s Earthquake Weather was supposed to be a return to form after the calamitous Cut the Crap, Joe’s attempt to carry on the banner of The Clash without Mick and Topper (or even Tony Chimes for that matter). Jones and Headon were replaced by three unknowns: guitarists Vince White and Nick Sheppard and drummer Pete Howard. Maybe I was just hungry for fresh, new Strummer cuts to balance out Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite but I didn’t get the memo. I liked the album and downright loved a bunch of songs. The critics were less than impressed. Dean of rock criticism at the time, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice hated the album.
It’s true that Strummer’s writing could have used an editor, someone to pushback a bit when litanies of cultural references meant to convey an aesthetic throughline became clunky shortcuts for wrapping himself in the hipness of others, a problem that would persist and grow in middle age. But Christgau’s appraisal was uncharitable and unfair. There’s a lot to like on Earthquake Weather including some very decent funk powered by founding Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons on Boogie With Your Children (maybe a bit overly earnest and on the nose but a solid effort) and Sikorsky Parts. Both songs would have been at home on early RHCP albums Freaky Styley (1985) and Uplift Mofo Party Plan (1987). It’s a nice back and forth between the generations, The Clash being the band that invented punk/funk mashups.
Here I’m interested in Strummer’s turn to melody and more personal lyrics. The quiet songs on the album find Strummer in a bit of an elegiac mood, perhaps weighted down a bit by his role as an elder statesman of punk before middle age has even had a chance to set in.
In Island Hopping, we get a hypnotic meditation from a beach bum. It gives us a glimpse of what Jimmy Buffet might have become, busking in the French Quarter with Jerry Jeff Walker, but didn’t.
Chop down the cherry trees on Mango Street
That's the council for you every week
I'm just the kind of seafaring guy
Who waits for the tide and the town to get high
I don't like to do a drop of work
Drive in cab nor paint the church
It's been the same since I don't know when
So I'm going Island hopping again
Then there is the sweet funk reggae mashup of an old Tennors song, Ride Your Donkey. There are lots of little cinematic and dub bits mixed with the funk and rocksteady tentpoles of the song’s structure.
Leopardskin Limousines is a Dylanesque, wistful tour of mid-century America or the bits of mid-century that persisted into the 80s, accessible to a bohemian troubadour traveling off the beaten path byways and watching old movies in mid-priced motels on your day off.
People gonna wanna Xerox you baby
It's a good thing you ain't a Chickasaw
Or your soul would take the overnight train
To Pittsburgh calling Baltimore
People gonna wanna Xerox you baby
What will it do to your mind?
Hang gliding off the Grand Canyon
In a Coney Island for the blindWith me, it'd be Charlie Parker, Chevys
And late-night barroom brawls
With real or imaginary friends and enemies
Who strike their heads when they fall
On the chassis of a classic Bull Nose special
That adorned our living room wall
Nobody'd be disappointed if you're the one they wanted
Blazing out across the waterfall
Sleepwalk is maybe the most poignant song Joe Strummer ever recorded. Again, it’s a song about traveling alone. It acknowledges heartache but it isn’t about heartache. It’s about being lonely and being OK with that.
Matchbooks of lonely places I'll never find
Clocks on wall spaces, some piece of mind
I'll never find
What good would it be
What good would it be
If you could change every river
That ran through your life and mine?
From here to the country line
Counts one hundred and ninety-nine
Oh, the Scarsdale will be on time
You know the shoe shine costs a dimeHootenanny Annie had a party in the yard
You could smell the barby out on Ocean Boulevard
Where I went to find, some piece of mind
What good would it be?
What good would it be
If you could change every heartache
That ran though your life and mine?
'Cause from here to the country line
Counts one hundred and ninety-nine
Oh, the Scarsdale will be on time
Just like a shoe shine costs a dimeWith the washroom lights of a bowling alley in your face
You know your bar and your plates are really out of place
That goes for your soul
Some holy rock 'n' roll
What good would it do?
What good would it be
If you could change every heartache
That ran though your life and mine?
Twelve years after Earthquake Weather and untold struggles with obtuse record execs, Strummer delivers Rock Art and the X-Ray Style with the Mescaleros, the band that he’ll ride to the end of the line, just three years later. The album gets off to a start with a mid-tempo, highly Stummeresque anthem, Tony Adams, with signature shortwave radio effects sprinkled throughout, Joe asks the world if “Has anybody seen the morning sun?” This is quickly followed by my favorite song on the album and perhaps the world’s only song about woodworking, Sandpaper Blues. The song starts off with simple phalanx of bongos and broadens out to an arrangement that is both rich and spare in equal measures. It’s a song about craft and care in making things, something he knew a thing or two about. It presents as a commentary on making a living as a composer and performer of songs.
It's gonna boom Mariachi
This really fine piece of madera
And this will be the counter
Of the Pueblo TabacaleraShape, it up, shape it up, shape it up, shape it up
All around the worldOh, this keel could save a life
When the storms hit the Pacific
To make it really true
You really gotta be specific
Shape it up, shape it up, shape it up, shape it up
Shape it up, shape it up, shape it up, shape it up
All around the worldKeep the lantern bright
Keep food upon the table
If you shape it well tonight
As well as you are able
The song Nitcomb can only be heard as an exhausted but proud fuck off to the suits at Epic Records who thought they could wear him down but finally let him go to record solo for Hellcat Records after an eight-year dispute with the label. A nitcomb being the tool you use to get lice eggs out of your pubic hair:
Gonna take a nitcomb
To get rid of me
Cause I just realized
That it was meant to beAnd I'm singing
To all the torn betting slips
Flying around my feet
I'm talking to all the chewing gum
That's stuck everywhere on the street
Finally, we end with Joe Strummer’s sweetest, most sentimental song. Willesden to Cricklewood is an ode to two neighborhoods in northwest London far from the action. Our narrator is back in town and thinking about his grownup kids, he’s visiting old friends, and we get the kind of lovely detailed portrait of hometown London John and Paul gave us in Penny Lane.
From Willesden to Cricklewood
As I went it all looked good
Thought about my babies grown
Thought about going home
Thought about what's done is done
We're alive and that's the one
From Willesden to Cricklewood
From Willesden to CricklewoodOh, let's go down to Al Rashid's
All the Aussie lagers are on me
Now you've got the Absinthe out
Your old mother, she wants a stout
THE RABBIT HOLE:
Bonus: I’ve long loved this cover of Broadway by Mauri & Max. Just lovely.
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