Word: strummers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...disaffected from the smug, cushy sounds of most contemporary pop. Stateside, the audience is different: students, trendy punks, artists and camp followers who cruise the punk periphery like tourists looking to score a season box for the apocalypse. No wonder that, after only the first American date, Joe Strummer was already sounding a little homesick...
...play is scarce. Easy enough to figure that stations programmed for the lulling sounds of California rock or the dull throb of disco might not take to a Clash tune like Tommy Gun. There is even some civic concern about violence at the concerts, to which Strummer replies, "There's as much violence at our concerts as any bar" -or, he might have added, at your run-of-the-mill Aerosmith concert. Even with this uncertainty and resistance, the new album has sold upwards of 50,000 copies so far, indicating that there is still an audience...
...fleet, bleak vision of the immediate future with London deeply riven by intramural combat between "rockabilly rebels," "skinhead gangs," "soul rebels" and "zydeco kids," is in part a smart parable about musical rivalries. Even more to the point, it is a shrewd reflection on class and generational warfare, as Strummer sings, "The sport of today is exciting/ The In crowd are into infighting/ . . . It's brawn against brain or knife against chain/ But it's all young blood flowing down the drain...
Mick Jones, who writes most of the Clash repertoire with Strummer, hopes that their music can be "an il lumination." Such an ambition might seem unsuitably lofty but for the fact that the group comes from a tradition that uses music not only as an outlet but as a force, an effective instrument of social change. "The record company's making out we're politicians, and that's a load of stuff," sneers Strummer, but Jones may cut a little closer when he recalls the title of his school song, Servants of the State...
Jones, Headon and Bass Player Paul Simonon are all 23; Strummer is the band's senior citizen at 25. Two come from broken homes (Jones: "I stayed with me gran and a lot of wicked aunts") and have logged long hours doing manual labor and running the streets. Even Headon, whose father was a headmaster and whose mother was a teacher, says, "I used to steal a lot and run with a gang," and figures he would be in stir today if he had not beat out 205 other drummers at a Clash audition. Out of the pieces...