Night Beat Post 175 – The Clash Part 5: “We’re Never Gonna Cry No More”

ON THE CLASH’S FINAL WORK, Cut the Crap, Joe Strummer found himself sharing writing credit with a new partner, Bernard Rhodes, who also claimed to do much of the album’s mixing. Arriving in late 1985, Cut the Crap proved a tough listen. Many of its songs had a false bravado about them, delivered like stomp-rhythm chants at a football stadium. The work’s best moment, “This is England,” perhaps implied meanings that Strummer had never hoped for: “This is England/What we’re supposed to die for/This is England/And we’re never gonna cry no more.” Strummer considered taking out ads in music magazines denouncing the album, but instead he convened the band at Paul Simonon’s house—before Cut the Crap’s release, according to one account—and told them it was over. Bernard Rhodes wanted to keep the group going with Simonon as the front band, but it didn’t happen. “I’ve got a bunch of assholes,” he said, “and I’m going to see it as a bunch of assholes.”

Strummer now knew what he had lost in his firing of Mick Jones. He would later blame the decision on Rhodes, saying, “It’s easy to manipulate people like me.” (At the Clash’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, after Strummer’s death, Simonon confided to Jones that the firing hadn’t been Rhodes’ doing; it was Strummer’s incentive.) Now, after disbanding the new Clash, Strummer decided on a course of redemption. He hunted down Mick Jones in the Bahamas, where his former partner was recording, and apologized for what he had done two years earlier and for the unkind things he’d said in the press, and asked Jones if they could reconstruct the Clash. Mick was grateful for the apology—he had always liked and respected Joe—but he said he did not want to renew the band. Jones played Strummer tapes of the music he’d been recording with his new band, Big Audio Dynamite. “It’s the worst load of shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” Strummer told Jones. “Don’t put it out, man. Do yourself a favor.” (Jones went on to enjoy a long period of creativity with Big Audio Dynamite.)

Strummer spent several years in a malaise, regretting how he had ruined the Clash. He moved to various cities, drank a lot, turned volatile in a flash. He acted in, and provided good music, for some films, but his one solo album, Earthquake Weather (1989), felt unfinished and sold only a few thousand copies. To many of those who knew or tried to work with Joe Strummer in those years, he appeared to be a deeply depressed man. “I had to disassemble myself and put the pieces back together,” he said in 1988. “I’d lost my parents, my group. You want to think about things. You become a different person.”

Gradually, Strummer worked his way back from what he called his “years in the wilderness.” He had two daughters with one woman, Gaby Salter, and when that relationship ended, he entered a happy marriage in 1995 with Lucinda Henderson. Eventually, beginning in 1999, Strummer made great work again with a new band, the Mescaleros—rhapsodic and forlorn music that seemed to begin from a place of repentance and then searched the world for new meanings. It was Joe Strummer’s way of keeping faith with the values he had set forth years before. “I believe that mankind is inherently good,” he told Lucinda, “and that good will always triumph.”

But Strummer also always kept hope that he could bring the Clash back together again. According to Chris Salewicz, it was at times an obsession. After learning that the Clash had been elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—for induction in 2003—Strummer tried to persuade Mick Jones and Paul Simonon to regroup for the occasion, but Simonon demurred; he thought the high price of the tickets for the event was a tough fit with the Clash’s ideals. In the early afternoon of December 22, 2002, Strummer tried to fax Simonon a letter making his case for the Hall of Fame, but he was having trouble getting the fax through. He put on a jacket, took the family’s dog for a walk in the cold English air, then returned home about 4 p.m. and collapsed in a chair. When his wife Lucinda found him, his body was already cold. He had died of a heart defect he had carried throughout his life without knowing it.

IF THERE IS A TRAGEDY in the Clash’s story, it is not that the band members lost faith in one another. Nor that the band’s central voice, Joe Strummer, regretted sundering that faith and suffered for it. What the Clash created together remains remarkable, and it was not undermined by how their adventure came to an end. Their aspirations were always a risk, but better than any other band that 1970s punk produced, the Clash faced their risks and kept going back for more. By doing so, they didn’t so much change what rock & roll could be but rather they fulfilled a promise that had always been in the music: That it was a disruption about liberation, about giving voice and courage—and pleasure—to people who were too often denied voice. The Clash went further with this vision than anybody—than the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan or Public Enemy—because they revisited that ideal, in one form or another, every time out without settlement. The second time I met the Clash, in Los Angeles in 1982, I asked Joe Strummer what he thought true rebellion was. “It’s not giving up,” he said. “Rebellion is deciding to push ahead with it all for one more day. That’s the toughest test of revolt—keeping yourself alive, as well as the cause.”

Despite their interpersonal failings, it wouldn’t be fair to say that the Clash gave up. Even in the last music made under the band’s name, Joe Strummer was still on the trail of questions about power and justice, and who gets to wield these things: “Law and order,” he declaimed, “is a baton in the rib.” In the years after the Clash, both Strummer and Jones continued to address essentially humanist concerns, albeit without the glorious notoriety they had achieved together. The best ideals can still fall subject to temperament—to pride, vanity, suspicion, to aesthetic differences, competitive impulse, to physical endurance, and to the ravages of depression—but that doesn’t refute the ideals themselves. In the last few years of his life, Joe Strummer told filmmaker Don Letts: “We were trying to grope in a socialist way towards some future where the world might be less of a miserable place than it is.”

That sort of vision—of using popular sounds and styles to advance bold, freethinking change—feels like something from a long time ago, another story of death and glory. Popular rebellions seem smaller now; popular fears loom bigger. The tragedy of the Clash isn’t about the Clash itself—that they fought for something honorable yet defeated one another. The tragedy of the Clash is that we can tolerate not having their sort of voice now

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