JOE STRUMMER

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AFTER CLASH

Joe Strummer’s Resurgent Hellcat Years

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: October 22, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

PAN-CULTURAL POPULIST: Strummer style.

One of my favorite Joe Strummer stories – and there are more than just a few – goes all the way back to the formative days of the Clash, when he and guitarist Mick Jones were working on the incendiary material that would become the band's groundbreaking 1977 self-titled debut. According to Jones, who played Paul McCartney to Strummer's John Lennon in their songwriting partnership, he’d come up with the makings of a tune called "I'm So Bored With You," a perfectly solid foundation for angry punk cannon fodder. But Strummer had a more provocative salvo in mind: he changed the title to "I'm So Bored With the U.S.A.," and quickly turned it into a searingly prescient, politically-charged indictment of some of the less savory aspects of the same country that had given the world the r&b music he'd cut his rock-and-roll teeth on.

       Conflict, contradiction, and controversy are just a few of the volatile elements that fueled Strummer, who died of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect at the age of 52 on December 22, 2002, and helped make the Clash the first truly mainstream punk band. It's also equally fair to credit his penchant for provocation with the premature demise of the Clash: After releasing five albums in five years, the band imploded when Strummer famously "fired" Jones in 1983. In a misguided move he'd come to regret, Strummer kept a back-to-basics version of the Clash sputtering along for a few more years. And then he more or less dropped out of the game for nearly a decade and a half, showing up from time to time on film soundtracks, dropping the mediocre solo album Earthquake Weather in 1989, and filling in as the frontman for the Irish band the Pogues on a couple of tours in the early-’90s.

       It took the punk-rock resurgence of the ‘90s, spearheaded by the Clash-revering California bands Green Day and Rancid to lure Strummer back to the fold. Indeed, it was Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, a singer with a Strummeresque snarl and a very Clash-like affinity for marrying the raw roar of punk guitars with the rock-steady rhythms of reggae and ska, who helped facilitate Strummer's late-career return. In 1999, Armstrong signed Joe Strummer and his newly christened band the Mescaleros to his Epitaph imprint Hellcat Records and released their debut, a remarkably inspired return to form titled Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. Strummer followed up with the equally impressive Global A Go-Go two years later. And, in 2003, Streetcore, a disc Strummer had been recording at the time of his death, came out posthumously on Hellcat. All three discs have been remastered and reissued with bonus tracks by Armstrong's label. And all of that material, along with an additional 16 live tracks recorded at London's Acton Town Hall at a benefit the Mescaleros played in support of striking firemen on November 15, 2002, are part of The Hellcat Years, a downloadable, comprehensive "digital box set." 

       Although he never recaptured the commercial ground he reached with 1982's platinum-selling Clash classic Combat Rock during his Hellcat years, Strummer regained his artistic footing as a scowling yet soulful punk prophet, a pan-cultural populist who expanded the very notion of rebel rock to include everything from growling guitars to supple dub grooves – from simple folk-rock and r&b, to reggae, funk, hip-hop, and beyond. The static that begins the broadcast that is "Tony Adams," the first track from Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, signals that Strummer's plugging right back into the same sonic frequencies he explored back in ‘81 on the "This Is Radio Clash" single, a furious fusion of rap and rock that was rather well ahead of its time. As insistent guitars settle into a syncopated groove, the white noise clears and Strummer begins his broadcast: "Late breaking news, this just in. . . Tonight there was a power cut in the city of madness/And all the conversations died in the burst of a solar flare. . . And all the neon blew down funky Broadway/And shorted out the Eastern shore."

       The reggae-inflected drum fills and saxophone squalls that color the apocalyptic visions of "Tony Adams" may be a long way from the strident simplicity of the early Clash, but they're right in tune with the kind of subtle atmospherics Strummer and Jones were exploring on a deep Combat Rock track like "Straight to Hell." Freed from the basic guitar/bass/drum structure of a trad band, Strummer went further with the Mescaleros, appropriating sounds from Spain, Africa, and the Middle East without losing his rockist center on tracks like the relatively upbeat and laid-back "Sandpaper Blues" and the eerily unsettling reverie "Yalla Yalla," a funky, techno-tinged track that opens with an undeterred Strummer crooning, "Well, so long liberty/Let's forget you didn't show/Not in my time/But in our sons' and daughters' time/When you get the feeling/Call and you've got a room."    

       Not everything here is a multicultural mash-up. The largely acoustic "X-Ray Style" is, at heart, a campfire folk tune that finds Strummer counting stars and giving a sly shout-out to one of his heroes, rockabilly legend Eddie Cochran. And, "The Road to Rock 'n' Roll" is a straightforwardly soulful if somewhat sorrow-filled reflective track Strummer wrote for Johnny Cash. But, over the course of the 33 studio tracks from The Hellcat Years, which include a starkly solemn cover of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," you get the sense that Strummer, vindicated and revitalized by ‘90s neo-punks like Rancid, was more determined than ever to push the stylistic envelop of a brand of music he helped to conceive. As for the two-dozen live tracks tacked on at the end, three of which feature Mick Jones sitting in on some Clash tunes, they're a somewhat wistful reminder that the fun Strummer had a special way of making songs as disparate as the Ramones' "Blitzkreig Bop," Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come," and the trad blues tune "Junco Partner," feel like they all belonged together in a place I'll call Strummerville.