Joe Strummer: A Riot of His Own

Joe Strummer crammed a lifetime of greatness into a brief 42 months. The debut album from The Clash wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1979, more than two years after the English kids went bonkers for it. And for those of us in the Midwest who’d been reading about The Clash and anxiously awaiting the recorded results, this meant we had to absorb a dizzying five releases and eight albums’ worth of material in a short three-and-a-half years. By 1982 it was all but over, although the band limped on with a new and inferior lineup for a while. The Sex Pistols had imploded even earlier, and The Clash disbanded amidst bitter recriminations and rumors of drug abuse that were euphemistically passed off as “artistic differences.” Punk—or at least the marvelous first U.K. wave of a genre that has proven remarkably resilient—was dead almost before it began. But there was life—raw, vital life—in the unwieldy brat while it lasted.

There’s no great mystery here. Detonating amongst the flaccid pop-and-disco doldrums, The Clash’s sonic bombardment was the best thing to happen to music in the late 1970s. To put it in context, Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” topped the pop charts in 1977, the same year Joe Strummer and his contentious mates recorded “White Riot” and “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.” Around the same time, John Travolta and Olivia Newton John were putting a disco sheen on ’50s nostalgia, and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was well on its way to shipping 25 million units. Joe Strummer could’ve cared less about shipping units. He had more important things on his mind, like changing the world.

Critics have called The Clash a political band and Strummer a political songwriter, but in reality he was simply a humanist songwriter who cared more about individuals than ideologies. He was a resident of Planet Earth first and foremost, deeply suspicious of class and race and national distinctions. And he was a howling zealot who championed the downtrodden, the little guy, the working stiff who just wanted to be left in peace and to come home to his comfy chair and his pint. It’s why he explored not only punk but reggae and Celtic music and rockabilly and New Orleans R&B during his restless and eclectic career. It was all music for the people and about the people as far he was concerned. Joe Strummer started out as a punk, but the label and the genre couldn’t hold him. More than anything, he was a citizen soldier, one of the shock troops who ripped down the façades of decorum and respectability to expose what really matters. The clothing changed every year, and so did the hairstyles. And Joe Strummer knew that what didn’t change couldn’t be circumscribed by an image. “Know your rights!” he spat out. “You have the right to food and money / Providing of course you don’t mind a little investigation, humiliation / And if you cross your fingers, rehabilitation.” In this era of government wiretaps and piously sanctioned torture, those words sound more prescient than ever.

I’m not a punker; couldn’t play one if you tied me down, costumed me in a Mohawk and a ripped T-shirt, stuck safety pins in my ears and gave me pogo lessons. I’m a middle-aged suburbanite who has spent most of his life in corporate America. But you don’t have to wear the fashions to understand the outrage that fueled Joe Strummer’s greatest music, or to grasp that the best of this music extended a middle finger to the studied indifference that allows human beings to disenfranchise and marginalize one another. Joe Strummer understood that the best manifestos have a beating heart. I listen to songs like “Clampdown” or “London’s Burning” and the urgency and desperation still cuts through the complacency, and still makes me want to change the world. You had yours, Joe, and a rowdy, enlightening insurrection it was. Now I want a riot of my own.

Joe Strummer keeled over of a heart attack five years ago this month. He was doing his best work in 20 years at the time of his demise, and his last album Streetcore rivals anything The Clash recorded. It’s raw, angry, smart, compassionate and replete with Clash-like guitar blasts that push the meter way into the red. Punks are supposed to burn out; they don’t fade away. That’s the way the mythology works. But screw the mythology. Joe Strummer died way too soon, and I miss what he would have to say about the decorous, respectable and desperate times in which we live.