Stop the World

Photo by Rankin If you were paying attention to popular culture during the '70s, you don't need an introduction to Joe Strummer. Front man for the Clash, Strummer was one of the heroes of punk rock's first generation and served as a spokesman for the more enlightened faction of that community. Where the Clash's colleagues the Sex Pistols adopted a scorched-earth policy for their brief march through the media, Strummer and company encouraged the Blank Generation to wake up to their own lives, to know their rights, to know their neighbors, to know what their country was doing in foreign lands in the name of democracy. Strummer was able to deliver this rather weighty message credibly because he has an impeccable understanding of the rock & roll form, and is what's known as a leader of men. Smart, unpretentious, and uninterested in wealth and power, he's a guy who inspires feelings of loyalty and trust.

After the Clash flamed out in 1985, Strummer spent several years struggling to reinvent himself, and when his debut solo album of 1989, Earthquake Weather, tanked, he turned his back on the music business. It wasn't until 1999 that he regained his balance and formed his current five-man lineup, the Mescaleros, whose debut album, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, came out that same year. Their second album, Global A Go-Go, was recently released to glowing reviews. A rockin' multicultural stew, it sounds for all intents and purposes like a Clash record. This isn't surprising, given that Strummer was the heart and soul of that group.

L.A. WEEKLY: What was the great achievement of punk rock?

JOE STRUMMER: It gave a lot of people something to do.

What was its great failure?

That we didn't mobilize our armies when we had them and focus our energies in a way that could've brought about concrete social change — trying to get a repressive law repealed, for instance.

I saw the Clash several times during their U.S. tours of the late '70s, and I remember the sense that something profoundly important was at stake at those shows, that they were about something much larger than pop trends. What was at stake?

In the rush of youth, you assume too much, but we felt that the whole machine was teetering on the brink of collapse. Some amazing things went down in Britain during the '70s — the government decided they could disempower the unions by having a three-day week, for instance. Can you imagine that? Everything felt unstable, and looking through youthful, excitable eyes, it seemed the very future of England was at stake.

Given that your music grew out of a situation specific to England, did it strike you as odd that it was embraced in America?

No, because everybody feels the same way on a certain level. The Zeitgeist is a real force of nature, and although we don't know how it's transmitted, it's like an invisible tidal wave.

How would you characterize the Zeitgeist now?

A feeling of shock. Experts on international affairs might've seen the events of September 11 coming, but I don't think the rest of us did. We considered canceling our U.S. tour, because we wanted to do the respectful thing, but after a few days I called my friends in New York and got information about what's going on there, and the feeling was yeah, come on. I love New York, and life's gotta go on — otherwise it's like giving in. Now that this catastrophe has happened, we've got to see the optimistic side of it, which is that five years ago it was inconceivable that countries like Iran, Pakistan or Libya would want to join the circle of nations and not be outlaw rebel states. The important thing now is to keep a cool head. Finding the perpetrators of this attack is like finding a needle in a haystack, and though lots of people are saying blow away the bloody country of Afghanistan, that would be a disaster for everyone in the world.

An overriding theme of your new record is personal and political conflict. Why can't people get along?

I think fear is the corrupting agent, and I don't know how we can eliminate that. Maybe if every child in the world was really shown a good time, a new breed of human beings would appear. On the other hand, I believe some people are just born bad — I've met a few of them, too. Whether they were born bad, what happened to them was bad, or it was a combination of the two, by the time they're teenagers you can see they're gonna flip. No matter who loves them or what happens, they're gonna smash the room up.