Night Beat Post 174 – The Clash Part IV: “THE CLASH NOT FOR SALE”

WITH BERNARD RHODES GONE, things proved better for a time. The Clash had the victory of London Calling under their belts—it sold well in both England and the U.S., though for years British critics didn’t like the album—and it gave the band confidence and a new openness to making music in styles outside punk’s sonic regimen. When the Clash assembled to make a record in 1980, they were more flexible and more curious about what they could pull off than at any time before or after. Mick Jones had developed an interest in New York’s nascent hip-hop scene, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon had a mind to explore reggae’s dub abstractions more deeply, Topper Headon dipped into jazz-informed rhythmic patterns—and collectively they kept exploring rock & roll forms, though with uncommon textural elements. “We were open about stuff,” Strummer said, “We could just do that.” At the project’s end, after what Strummer described as non-stop sessions over a three-week stretch, the Clash emerged with thirty-six tracks, encompassing a staggering stylistic diversity that ranged from mellifluent pop and soulful folk and gospel to experimental tape collages, cutting-edge funk and a poignant children’s choral group, all arranged in uncommon structures. It was enough material, Mick Jones insisted, to justify the release of three long-playing vinyl albums in a single package, as Sandinista! (The title—also Mick Jones’ idea—came from the song “Washington Bullets,” and was a tribute to the Nicaraguan revolutionary movement that had overthrown corrupt and brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. For the next many years, the administration of President Ronald Reagan worked, both openly and covertly, to undo the Sandinistas. In 2006, former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was freely elected as Nicaragua’s president. Then he became steadily more authoritarian, and in July 2026, Ortega declared an end to elections in Nicaragua.)

CBS Records was furious with the Clash—not because of the album’s implicit Marxist sympathies, but because the band insisted on releasing so much music at the price point of a single album. (The Clash had also compelled CBS to sell London Calling, a double album, at a single-album price.) Mick Jones declined any suggestions to cut back on the material, which led to a dividing point in the band’s history. Over the years, Sandinista! has been viewed as both a magnificence of riches and as a bounty of disorder and indulgence, as either the Clash’s best or worst album, though it would prove a bulwark of originality that played even more beautifully in the years after. In response to the Clash’s unwillingness to edit the package (or raise its price), CBS refused either to promote the record or tour the band, and Sandinista! did poorly in sales. Wounded by the lack of acceptance—and by British reviews that accused the album as being too American in its sounds and concerns—Joe Strummer began to suspect that Mick Jones’ freewheeling production style had been the collection’s fatal flaw. In years that followed, Strummer renounced the album as a mistake, though later in his life he would become a fierce champion of Sandinista!

Strummer decided that he should use the album’s failure as an opportunity to correct what he saw as a wrong in the first place. In early 1981, he gave the others an ultimatum: If the Clash wanted him to remain in the band, they would have to rehire Bernard Rhodes. (”I made Joe great,” Bernard Rhodes told Chris Salewicz. “I knew how it worked.”) Mick Jones was stunned. He despised Rhodes, and he felt the band had flourished creatively without him. The thought of being subject again to the manager’s dictums and egotism unnerved and angered Mick, but he felt Strummer had left him with no options. “I could quite easily have walked out then,” Jones later said, “But it’s like a marriage or the people you love: you cling on hoping it’s going to work.” It was during this period that those around the Clash began to notice Jones growing distant within the band, keeping his own hours, enjoying live performances less. It was also a time in which drummer Topper Headon was running into serious difficulties. Headon had found his stride with the Clash, and his extraordinary drumming had been essential to the band’s musical growth. But early on he had taken to reckless drunken behavior, and along the way Headon developed a heroin habit. In 1979, following a Clash show with country singer Joe Ely in Lubbock, Texas, the drummer nearly overdosed, and in late 1981, he was arrested at Heathrow Airport for narcotics possession. Joe Strummer was growing disheartened over Headon’s intractability, and over his fluctuating beats onstage.

Meantime, Rhodes came back to the Clash with big ideas—but also bigger assertions. When a British reporter later asked him how his place with the band had changed after his return, Rhodes snapped back: “I OWN THIS GROUP!” To offset CBS’s unwillingness to fund a tour, Rhodes conceived the idea of putting the band into a series of seven dates on Broadway in New York City at Bond’s Casino, beginning in late May 1981. Things seemed to misfire almost every inch of the way—fire marshals forced last-minute closures of the club, a disrespectful audience heaped abuse on the show’s openers, rap groups the Treacherous Three and Grandmaster and the Furious Five, and the Clash themselves delivered off-center performances (owing in part to Headon’s drug use). “Doing that fifteen nights in a row, it nearly killed us,” Strummer said. Yet overall, the event had a tremendous effect: It hoisted the Clash to headline news repeatedly, in one of the most important cities in the world.

BACK IN LONDON, STRUMMER insisted that the band should make a more accessible single album—no more sprawling grab bags—with a sound closer to their first effort. Meantime, Jones wanted the band to return to New York, in order to pursue a more technological and funk-infused direction. Communications between Jones and Strummer became so uncomfortable that, according to some reports, the songwriting partners took to collaborating through the mail, and at one session Strummer drew a chalk line on the floor, dividing himself from Jones. In early 1982, after Mick Jones thought he had a final version of the album, Strummer rejected the results. “Mick, I don’t think you can produce,” he said. “You bastard,” Jones replied. “I thought you were my friend.” Realizing it was taking too long to arrive at an album that made anybody happy, Bernard Rhodes brought in Glyn Johns—who had worked in the war zone of the Beatles during their Let It Be sessions—to edit and mix tapes. When the Clash’s fifth album was finally released in May 1982, as Combat Rock (not a joking title), it was pretty much Strummer’s vision that had prevailed. Surprisingly, it proved a fairly commercial one, and had the effect of finally delivering the Clash to the masses. Two singles—“Should I Stay or Should I Go” and “Rock the Casbah” (the latter a tour-de-force by Topper Headon, who also played the track’s inventive bass line) placed high in U.S. singles pop charts, and the album itself became the Clash’s best-selling. CBS was, for once, eager to put the band on the road.

But after some early 1982 Scottish dates failed to sell out in advance, Rhodes panicked and approached Strummer with a plan for an exploit that might boost the tour. “You’ve got to disappear,” he said, figuring that a missing Joe Strummer would make headlines and stir interest. But when Strummer truly vanished, without telling Rhodes where he had gone, the manager panicked again. He hadn’t told the other members of the Clash about the disappearance stunt, and after Strummer stayed remote and silent, missing the tour’s first date in Amsterdam, Rhodes appealed to him via the press to come back. When the singer returned nearly a month later (he had been in Paris), he used the occasion for a big move: He had grown exhausted with Topper Headon’s promises to overcome his drug problem, only to relapse time and again. He called a meeting of band and management and told the drummer: “You’re sacked.” Headon tried to bargain a way back in, but it was too late. “I admit I lost track of what was going on, but I think we all did,” Headon said later. “Everyone was fucked up, whether it was drugs or drink. Joe was singing anti-drug lyrics and I was nodding out on the drum kit behind him.” Headon’s problems grew steadily worse for years—he was threatened and beaten by drug dealers more than once; injured himself when he fell through a motorcycle garage skylight (breaking his leg and incurring amnesia), during what police initially suspected was a robbery attempt; and in the late 1980s he served a fifteen-month sentence for supplying heroin to a man who overdosed and died. In 1988, Headon was so severely injured in a car accident that he was declared dead on arrival at the hospital; he recovered, to learn he had hepatitis C. Strummer would later admit that losing Headon had been a severe blow to the Clash. “I don’t think we played a good gig after that,” he told Chris Salewicz. Mick Jones had never liked Strummer’s decision. “I wouldn’t have sacked anybody,” he said.

The Clash persuaded Terry Chimes to rejoin them for their 1982 tour—an expedition that culminated in the band opening for the Who at several autumn stadium dates. As The Clash Live at Shea Stadium attests, the Clash—even without Headon—was still a superb performing band. At the same time, conflicts between the group’s ideals and the reality of their mass success, plus internal rancor, was taking a steady toll. In May 1983, the band (which now featured Pete Howard on drums) appeared before their largest audience—an estimated 200,000 people—at the Us Festival, a three-day event staged outside Los Angeles by Apple Computers co-founder Steve Wozniak. Before Bernard Rhodes would allow the band to play, though, he goaded the band into unnecessarily admonishing Wozniak for greed (the Clash received $500,000 for a performance that lasted only a little more than eighty minutes, under a banner that read THE CLASH NOT FOR SALE). As the Clash left the stage, the day’s ill will culminated in a fistfight between band members and the festival’s stage crew. It was the last show the original members of the Clash—Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Joe Strummer—played together.

STRUMMER HAD CONTINUED TO FEEL that Jones was somehow failing the band—that he was acting arrogant and petulant. “Mick was intolerable to work with by this time,” he said in Westway to the World. “I mean, no fun at all. He wouldn’t show up. When he did show up, it was like Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood.” In August 1983, Strummer called a band meeting. “How have you enjoyed the last few years?” Strummer asked Jones. “Because we want you to leave the group.” Mick was sure this was really Rhodes’ doing. “I asked the band who they really wanted, Bernie or me,” Jones later said in NME. “The group said they wanted Bernie, and then just looked at the floor. I couldn’t believe my ears. I stood there for about ten seconds, stunned. Then I just picked up my guitar and walked out.” Perhaps even Bernard Rhodes had been unprepared for the finality and brutality of the moment. He rushed after Jones and offered him a check. “Like a gold watch—which added insult to injury,” Jones recalled. “But I took it anyway.”

On September 10 1983, Strummer and Simonon issued a press statement, asserting that “Jones had drifted away from the original idea of the Clash. In future, it will allow Joe and Paul to get on with the job that the Clash set out to do from the beginning.” The same day, Mick Jones responded: “I would like to make it clear that there was no discussion with Strummer and Simonon prior to my being sacked. I certainly do not feel that I have drifted apart from the original idea of the Clash, and in future I’ll be carrying on in the same direction as the beginning.”

THE EXPULSION OF MICK JONES from the Clash came as a shock to many, but an even greater shock was that the Clash lumbered on. Rhodes and Strummer recruited new members (Pete Howard stayed on drums; Vince White and Nick Sheppard joined on guitars and vocals), but there was no equanimity in the resulting line-up. Rhodes wouldn’t allow the new players to speak to the press, or when they did, he berated them. For that matter, Rhodes berated them regularly anyway—in what Nick Sheppard described as “dehumanizing sessions.” When Strummer was around, he failed to intervene or he supported Rhodes and joined the bullying. Observers thought Joe seemed not just deferential to Rhodes but intimidated by him. “I went into the situation thinking the Clash is a humanitarian band…,” Vince White later said. “But the reality is quite the opposite. There was a lot of bullying and it was run more or less like any kind of corporation, with a very rigid political hierarchy.”

Strummer’s commitment to the Clash now seemed sporadic. When he appeared on stage with the new line-up, he sometimes didn’t play guitar. (Fans in the audience would yell, “Where’s Mick?”) For the most part, Strummer was dealing with more preoccupying matters. His father, Ronald Mellor, died of a heart attack in early 1984, and then his mother fell ill. When Strummer would appear for rehearsals or performances, he said nothing about any of this to others in the band. Some things he just wouldn’t discuss. “There was a point,” Mick Jones told Chris Salewicz, “when you got right down to it and you couldn’t quite go past…. Years later I casually asked one day, ‘How’s your mum?’ We’re in a loo somewhere, having a piss, and he says, ‘She’s got cancer.’ There was stuff like that all inside. Really shocking even to look at.” Even as his mother was dying, Strummer took her to task for leaving him and his brother at boarding school all those years before. Anna Mellor died in December 1986.

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