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.

TIGER ARMY'S NICK 13

Tiger Army captain Nick 13 gets comfortable with country music

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 22, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Country Gentleman: Tiger Army's Nick 13

The original class of ’77 punks may have been looking to a new kind of future — or, “no future,” as the case may be — in their efforts to eliminate the excesses of the prog-rock and glam bands that ruled the day. But it’s no secret that groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were perfectly comfortable drawing on the past as they stripped rock and roll down to its raw and raucous essence. The Pistols famously amped up not one but two of ’50s rockabilly star Eddie Cochran’s hits, “C’mon Everybody” and “Somethin’ Else.” The Clash went so far as to rework “I Fought the Law,” the 1959 Sonny Curtis tune that the Bobby Fuller Four hit paydirt with six years later, on their second album. And long before he had his first mohawk, Joe Strummer was singing pub-rock r&b tunes with the 101’ers and greasing back his hair in the style of young punks from the ’50s, not the ’70s.
     What began as something of a happy or, perhaps, inevitable accident has, over the past four decades, coalesced into and persevered as a punk/rockabilly hybrid known to most as “punkabilly” (Think Reverend Horton Heat). And in the last 10 years, thanks to a coterie of LA bands centered around Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat imprint, punkabilly has morphed into the more colorfully outrageous “psychobilly,” although you could make a fairly persuasive argument that the Cramps invented the style out of whole cloth way back in ‘79 with the release of Gravest Hits. But that’s a whole other story.
     Tiger Army, a perennial Warped Tour favorite fronted by the dark, brooding, neck-tattoo’d Nick 13 (nee Kearney Nick Jones), have been one of the more accessible and successful self-proclaimed promulgators of psychobilly. They’ve toured with Social Distortion and Morrissey, and their 2007 album Music From Regions Beyond cracked the top 50 in the Billboard charts, in part because, excepting stand-up bass and just the slightest touch of twang, the single “Forever Fades Away” wouldn’t sound out of place on a Green Day album.
In fact, given Nick 13’s penchant for wearing black eye make-up and writing darkly romantic songs with titles like “Ghosts of Memory,” “Through the Darkness,” and “Incorporeal,” he may want to consider changing the band’s genre designation to “gothabilly” or “horrorcore.”
At least for now, Nick can put that decision on hold because his latest venture, a self-titled solo album on the country/folk label Sugar Hill, is about as far from punk as the Grand Ole Opry is from CBGB’s.
     With Nick playing cowboy chords, Lucinda Williams-sidekick Greg Leisz and multi-instrumentalist James Intveld co-producing and playing alongside legendary Nashville steel guitarist Lloyd Green (of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo fame) and a bunch of other studio pros, “Nick 13” isn’t just country, it’s old-time country or, as Nick himself has been calling it in interviews, “hillbilly music.” The disc, which made a surprise debut at No. 22 on Billboard’s “Top Current Country Albums” chart last week, opens with the walking stand-up bass line, pedal-steel flourishes, and downhome fiddle solo of “All Alone,” as Nick puts a contemporary twist on an old C&W theme with lines like, “A tattoo in pen and ink/Spells her name upon my arm/F-o-r-e-v-e-r/Her love was here but now it’s gone.”
     Singing in a high-and-lonesome voice that bears an eerie resemblance to Chris Isaak’s, Nick throws a bone to Tiger Army diehards by reprising two of the band’s songs here: “Cupid’s Arrow” turns up as a twangy ballad with a touch of Byrdsy jangle, and “In the Orchard” is slowed to a dreamy Roy Orbison slow dance. And his characteristic fascination with the morbid — a Tiger Army staple — rears its head in the plaintive “Carry My Body Down,” where, against weeping pedal steel and cowboy chords, he wonders, “Will they carry my body down?/Will they take it from the river/After I’ve jumped in and drowned?” Indeed, it’s a safe bet that at least a few of the tunes on Nick 13 will find their way into Tiger Army sets when he returns to the band after this successful country sojourn.
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