Marcus Gray
The last time the original Clash played Chicago–at the Aragon on August 12, 1982, to be exact–I couldn’t tell whether I was at a rock ‘n’ roll show or basic training. Berets, army boots, and camouflage pants were big that summer, and the Clash had played no small part in this paramilitary fashion craze, decked out in the flashy togs an English journalist had dubbed Pop Star Army Fatigues. The band’s new album, Combat Rock, was rife with images of war (the working title had been Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg) and had yielded the Clash’s biggest U.S. hit, “Rock the Casbah.” The song was a comment on Iranian fundamentalists having banned pop music, but the video, in heavy rotation on MTV, suggested something far less specific–it cut shots of the band performing in front of a Texas oil well with comical vignettes of a feuding Arab and Israeli. The video pushed “Rock the Casbah” to number eight on the pop chart and widened the band’s audience to include a multitude of burr-headed kids who either failed to note or willfully ignored the Clash’s left-wing politics. Eight years later, when the U.S. began sending in troops to punish Saddam Hussein, Marcus Gray reports in Last Gang in Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash, “The first record played on the allied forces radio network was ‘Rock the Casbah.’”
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Irony, if even slightly off target, can leave an artist’s work wide open to misinterpretation and misappropriation, and the Clash had its collective tongue planted only halfway in cheek when it came to military imagery. Its politics were always a little ambiguous, meant more to create a sense of urgency than to achieve any clearly defined goal. While numerous fan biographies have chronicled the Clash’s glory, Gray tries to explode the myth propagated by adoring rock journalists that Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon were working-class yobs who became a sort of musical red brigade but failed to save rock from international capitalism. His book is deeply flawed: stonewalled by the musicians and their management, Gray quotes an interminable series of former cronies and hangers-on to document the Clash’s origins, and he records the band’s career largely by synthesizing and critiquing other published accounts. The end result is too long by half, yet still seems speculative and incomplete. But it did force me to reappraise the legacy of a band that, while well intentioned, happily exploited the glamour of armed combat. As the Clash would later discover, images recaptured by the enemy can be lethal.
Apocalypse Now, with its terse narration written by Michael Herr, led Strummer to Herr’s brilliant Vietnam book Dispatches, but the Clash’s understanding of the war generally went no deeper than Hollywood’s. The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver both informed Combat Rock; so did The Road Warrior, according to Gray’s reporting. By that time Strummer had brought Rhodes back into the fold, and the band inaugurated a second wave of paramilitary chic, this time more directly inspired by U.S. battle fatigues. “We were all dressed in black combat gear,” a roadie for the band’s U.S. tour told New Musical Express, “and everybody got out of the way when we came through; everybody.” As Gray points out, Strummer shaved his head in a Mohawk, just like Travis Bickle, the Vietnam vet who becomes a self-styled vigilante in Taxi Driver, and Combat Rock’s “Red Angel Dragnet” quoted Bickle: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.”
