In a dissection of The Clash, death or glory becomes just another story
by John Sewell
The rebel pose is an integral facet of all things rock 'n' roll, most especially in the case of English punk's first wave of "anarchists" of 1976/1977. Of the class of '77, the British band with the most enduring legacy is The Clash, not the Sex Pistols. Sure, the Pistols' sneering negativity still sounds great. But The Clash was a much more adventurous band, daring to meld disparate music styles and a range of emotions. The Pistols created the perfect punk archetype and then instant-aneously imploded, while The Clash hung around to expand their palate of expression before eventually falling prey to the predictable snares of artistic self-indulgence, ego, commercial demands and the ceaselessly grinding gears of the rock machine.
Marcus Gray's The Clash: The Return of the Last Gang In Town (Helter Skelter/UK edition and soon to be published in the States by Hal Leonard/$17.95) provides Clash fans and pop culture theorists with an interesting deconstruction of the band's mythology. Originally published stateside in 1996 as Last Gang In Town, the UK paperback issue offers up some additional information that does little to expand the assertions of the first edition.
Gray obviously invested quite a chunk of time in researching this book. He was perhaps too thorough, or could have at least used an editor's help in paring down the text. The author spends entirely too much time relating the minutiae of each and every business deal the band ever made and the precise history of all of the members' earlier musical careers. The endless stream of mundane details only detracts from an otherwise engaging account.
Rather than focusing on the expected fable of how the band came together and made some rough-and-tumble rock 'n' roll, Gray's focus is on the building of the Clash image and how the band later chose to edit their history in order to maintain their credibility. Much attention is paid to how Clash auteurs Mick Jones and Joe Strummer tried to mask their middle-class roots and come off as street toughs.
Rock is indeed about rebellion (and sex, lots of sex), but when dogma and political grandstanding are thrown into the equation, a band's believability often suffers as a consequence. Billed as "the only band that matters," The Clash freely spouted off about class struggles, race relations and terrorism, painting themselves into a corner in the process. The band's heartfelt conviction is obvious in its music, but Jones and Strummer might have been better off keeping their big mouths shut; the chasm between their carefully constructed working-class image and the reality of their globe-trotting, coke-snorting, bedding-down-fashion-models kind of lifestyle was undeniable.
Gray offers a relentless redux of earlier Clash quotes and compares them to the concessions the group made later in their career. When the band erupted on the scene in 1976, making bold statements about bloated, dinosaur rockers was de rigeur. But as The Clash became rock stars themselves, the old rhetoric came back to haunt them.
When you're in your early 20s (as Strummer and Jones were when the band first found fame) and just making your way out of the underground, it's easy to proclaim that you don't want money and will never sell out. But fame and money are like cocaine: just a little invariably leads to wanting much more. And The Clash wanted to be rock stars all along.
This leads us to the primary flaw of the book. It seems that Gray swallowed the Clash myth (and the supposed ethos of punk) hook, line and sinker. With an axe to grind, the author continuously chips away at the band's image, which was no more than an artfully wrought façade to begin with.
Gray's crusade to debunk the Clash myth seems a bit over the top. And after a while, the continual comparison and contrast of "they said that, then they did this" seems mean-spirited.
I mean, what should you expect of rock stars—sainthood, or good music? The Clash produced great rock 'n' roll, three or four albums' worth.
The sheer volume of the book (512 pages) is prohibitive. For Clash fanatics and students of the '77 punk scene, it's a fine read. But the average audience would probably find more interest and entertainment in other works about the same era such as Legs McNeil's excellent Please Kill Me or Jon Savage's scholarly tome, England's Dreaming.
Gray would have also been better off by ending the book with the demise of the band. The extra material about post-Clash projects Big Audio Dynamite and Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros is for completists only.
Mixing leftist/anarchist politics with rock music has always been an iffy proposition (see Rage Against The Machine) and The Clash definitely talked a big game from square one. But 20 years after the demise of the band's core lineup, their braggadocio all seems forgivable. And Marcus Gray seems unable to give the band any slack. What a drag it is getting old.
June 13, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 24
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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