Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

This is American Morning,

- for Monday, December 23, 2002... - Legend of rock...

Sad and sudden news, founding father of punk rock,

- Joe Strummer, died yesterday. - Guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for

- the British punk band The Clash... - ...right here at his home in Sommerset,

apparently peacefully of a heart attack.

London Calling was named the best album of the 1980s by...

The times live in we need Joe Strummer more than ever.

I wouldn't be in a band had I not heard The Clash.

Joe, we're going to have your name on screen,

would you like anything under your name?

Would you like Mescaleros, The Clash? Anything like that?

I'd like you to write Punk Rock Warlord.

With "Warlord" being one word.

White riot - I want to riot

White riot - a riot of my own

White riot - I want to riot

White riot - a riot of my own

Black men gotta lot a problems

But they don't mind throwing a brick

White people go to school

Where they teach you how to be thick

Everybody does Just what they're told to

An' nobody wants

To go to jail!

White riot - I want to riot

White riot - a riot of my own

White riot - I want to riot

White riot - a riot of my own

All the power in the hands

Of the people rich enough to buy it

While we walk the street

Too chicken to even try it

An' everybody's doing

Just what they're told to

An' nobody wants

To go to jail!

All transmitters to full. All receivers to boost.

This is London calling, this is London calling.

First of all, welcome to the program, all peoples of the world.

This is Joe Strummer at the controls in Bush House, in the heart of London.

This land is your land, this world is your world.

We're gonna say the unsayable and we play the unplayable.

Broadcasting what needs to be cast.

If your radio's tuned here, your radio's tuned right.

My father was born in India.

He only became an English citizen two years before I was born.

And after the war he came to London and joined the foreign office.

He was very, very left-wing which we though was quite surprising,

because he spoke like a very pucker Englishman.

What on earth Ron was doing, being a diplomat,

was completely beyond me. He questioned everything.

My parents weren't musical at all,

and I think if I got any musical tradition it comes from my mother's side,

she was born on a farm, 50 miles south of John O'Groats in a town called Bonar Bridge

which is very Highland and very wild.

Anna was just this Scottish Heather and the great thing about Joe,

he's got those two combinations:

of the generosity of Anna, and the questioning of Ron.

My father was posted to Turkey and that's why I was born there.

He was screaming in Turkish when he was about three.

Throwing down the stairs some Turkish curse that he'd learned.

David was 18 months older than Joe. And they were just like chalk and cheese.

My father was then posted to Cairo for two years,

and then to Mexico-City for two years.

I went to a Mexican school where they spoke no English.

And then to Bonn in West Germany.

That's a great Elvis Presley and my favorite Elvis tune because

it's got a New Orleans flavor, and you can feel the heat on the street.

1960 I believe is the first time I saw him. Johnny Mellor he was called then.

He was obsessed with taking my sister's clothes off.

He said to me let's take your sister's clothes off

and hide them in his Uncle John's cupboard 'cause no one will ever find them in there.

David would just go along with us.

Even at that early age Joe seemed to be the leader of the two of them.

Then I came to England, to boarding school.

I often think about my parents, and how I must have felt about it,

'cause it was like being sent away, and seeing them only once a year.

It really changed my life because I just realized I had to forget about my parents...

...and deal with this.

It was a school where people hung themselves.

I quickly realized that you either became a power or you were crushed.

I had a gang 'cause I realized you had to fight fire with fire.

It was either bully or be bullied.

I was one of the principal bullies.

And there was no protection from anybody or anything.

I was happiest at school because I was in charge of my own world.

My brother was very shy.

He was a little bit older than me and the year above.

They used to say in school he hadn't said a word all term.

And I was the opposite, I was a mouthy little git.

Joe kept himself out of trouble very cleverly.

Or we'd all be in the shit.

Joe always...

...he knew how to handle people even the people that were trying to hurt him.

Reporting to Scouts was a good way of getting out of school for a weekend...

...I think was the reason that we joined.

We used to spend a lot of time putting camps and campfires into the land.

And that's Harry Belafonte with a reminiscent "Day-O",

takes you back to the old times.

In all the time they were at school, I never met his parents.

It was as if they didn't exist.

He'd go back for holidays.

Come in Africa, are you receiving us?

Now we've got Mzikayifani Buthelezi.

This is the sort of tune that's like honey to the soul.

Malawi made a big impression on him. He liked the people.

I think it just gave him a wider perspective of the world at a very early age.

He would always bring stories back at the beginning of each term.

Plus a new collection of records.

I can remember hearing The Rolling Stones

coming out of this huge wooden radio in the day room.

It sounded so different from what we were living

in our actual day-to-day reality. It was the sound of another world.

This moment I think I decided to only follow music forever.

That would be the way to live.

I was a lousy student.

I was always last in the class.

My reports would be really terrible, the worst you can possibly imagine.

My relation with my father was even worse.

I began to dread seeing him, even the once a year because

the reports would arrive in the post. And then all hell would break loose.

I would say from my upbringing that authority

was something to be avoided if possible, attacked if you could get in

and attack it and get away without being burned.

I would say that was high on the list of priorities.

Bastards!

In 1968 the whole world was exploding.

There was Paris, Vietnam, Grosvenor Square,

the counterculture. I think that gave me an edge to put into punk.

It was a great year to come of age.

I could see in a way why Joe was the way he was,

but I could never understand what happened to David.

Almost on one day, you walked into his bedroom,

it changed from being a normal boy's bedroom

into being black. Swastikas and fascism

and "Mein Kampf", ultra-ultra-right-wing.

David just went into Regents Park one day and took an overdose of pills.

And... finally went onto this little island.

He decided that things were unsatisfactory.

Joe being the first person to see him,

and then had to identify the body which...

...must have been a terrifying trauma.

He didn't talk about it.

I think he wanted to kind of keep a lot of stuff at bay.

Just keep it at a distance.

And that was the great Tim Harden, perhaps a lost genius of music,

with "Black Sheep Boy".

I just went straight out of this... dead strict environment

where you had to like really struggle to get out of the game.

And straight into this seeding LSD orgy.

There was only one answer to what you were going to do after school,

and that is art school.

The last resort of malingerers and bluffers and people who don't want to work.

Joe, whose name was John, said, "Oh, my name's Woody."

I said to him, "That's interesting, how'd you get the name Woody?"

and he said, "I just made it up on the spot."

I think because of Woody Guthrie.

I met him at art college on the first day, we lived together.

He was instantly charismatic, everything in the room focused around him.

He always had a different way of putting things,

a different, different angle on things.

He was thrown out because he did a collage of

used Tampaxes as art. I guess that was too much for them.

I decided to follow a musician around called Tymon Dogg, D-O-G-G.

He had this years before Snoop Doggy Dogg.

First collecting money for him in the London underground

like a Mississippi Blues Man's apprentice.

Tymon was the guy who taught and showed Joe that music was the root.

I bought a Ukulele, because I figured

that had to be easier than a guitar having only four strings.

But I managed to get some chords together. I was chuffed.

We went down to play at some tube, and I said,

"Joe, we can't go down and busk the one song that we know."

And Joe said, "Why, because nobody's ever going to pass twice."

Tymon and Joe were walking around in a park in Kilburn.

And they came across a guy who I think had probably just come out of mental home.

He was a bit strange and he had nowhere to go and he was very disoriented.

And they brought him back to live with us and he stayed with us for a while.

I remember the name of the guy, he was called Savory.

And Joe installs this tramp with huge generosity in my bedroom.

When the landlady and landlord found out about us having this black guy,

the woman attacked Tymon Dogg with a stiletto heel.

And they just went berserk.

They threw us out, chucked all our gear out the window,

and we called the police and said, "Look," and they said, "Fuck off, hippies."

I mean bloody impossible to live with, frankly.

You never knew where you were, when you were.

He lived day for night, he'd go off somewhere

to Glastonbury or to the Isle of Wight or somewhere.

And he'd turn up a week later

completely unaware that you might have actually expected otherwise.

They'd had their "Summer of Love", by '72/3 it was all over.

I always felt it was like coming on the field of a great battle

12 hours after the battle was over.

So the casualties were all lying on the field but the battle was gone.

He did have a very strong Boy's Own attitude to things,

he'd have this kind of spirit of adventure.

He'd sleep out under the stars when it was totally unnecessary.

And he said, "I'm gonna be a rock star." So, he was right.