noted a bit ruefully later, “The problem is, when you choose someone for their attitude, that’s what you get: their attitude.”
There was little time for reflection, for Rhodes was not allowing much time for the new platoon to solidify. His aim was to get back on the road quickly, returning to the vicinity of their embattled last show with a tour of California in late January.
The original idea had been to play a free gig to erase the lingering bad taste of the US Festival. That was now deemed impractical, given legal worries and the need to make money to fuel the retooled Clash machine, so a seven-date tour was planned instead. As White officially joined the band just days before Christmas, this gave them less than a month to get ready.
One further adjustment was needed. “Greg” was deemed an insufficiently punk name, so White was redubbed “Vince” in honor of early rock heroes Gene Vincent and Vince Taylor. White went along with the change grudgingly, seeing it as evidence of a controlling—and superficial—image consciousness. It was not the last time that he would be dissatisfied with life in The Clash.
The new Clash amid the worst joblessness since the Great Depression, early 1984. (Photo by Mike Laye.)
Less irksome to White was a rigid antidrug line, newly instituted within the band. The edict did have some omissions. “Since alcohol was not on the list of banned substances, it was no skin off my nose, really,” White later recalled with a chuckle. Sheppard: “We were set down early on as a group and Joe and Paul made it clear that we weren’t to be doing these things.” Dropping drugs beyond alcohol was also not a big issue for Sheppard: “I had been considering giving [pot] up anyway, for what it does to your short-term memory.”
This stand made sense, given the desire for a new start for the band. Yet the ban was striking because it included marijuana, a longtime Clash staple.
Some were skeptical, suspecting a Rhodes edict or yet another dig at Jones, whose fondness for pot and cocaine was well known. Perhaps these dynamics played a role, but more likely this was a natural evolution out of long-standing concerns.
Early punk had denounced drug-addled hippies and similarly impaired rock stars. Some in the movement like Rhodes and Vinyl saw such stances as serious and self-evident, but many punks simply seemed to disdain “other people’s drugs” while indulging in their own faves.
The Clash had long inhabited this ambivalent space. Strummer critiqued heroin in 1976’s “Deny,” and “Complete Control” took a swipe at “punk rockers controlled by the price / of the first drugs we must find.” Yet the singer referred to himself as a “drug-prowling wolf” in “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” Speed came up matter-of-factly in “London’s Burning” and “Cheat” had similarly offhand chemical references. Strummer’s relationship with drugs was clearly complicated.
During a spring 1977 interview with NME journalist Tony Parsons, Strummer even defended drug use, claiming he “can’t live without it,” yet admitting, “If I had kept doing what I was, I’d be dead.” This could have been just a bluff; Strummer is noticeably aloof during the interview, and letting down his guard with the media would have been off the Clash party line at the time. Still, there may have been more truth than sullen bravado in Strummer’s admission.
One of the few substances Strummer roused himself to critique to Parsons—who would later slam all drugs save speed in The Boy Looked at Johnny, the 1978 punk broadside cowritten with fellow NME writer Julie Burchill—was glue sniffing, then widespread in Scotland and various lower-income environs.
The new song “Glue Zombie” picked up that thread, reading almost as a belated rejoinder to the Ramones’ “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and “Carbona Not Glue.” Its riff mimics the unsteady lurch of a member of the living dead, with words sketching an unsparing portrait of addiction’s deadly grip: “I am the rebel with the stare of the glue bag / I lost my friend to the smell of gasoline . . .”
Headon’s crisis had pushed Strummer along the antidrug path, as had his own addictive tendencies. According to Chris Salewicz, on the same 1982 tour where Strummer confronted Headon over heroin, the singer—and Jones—had burst into tears upon arriving in Japan to discover pot would be nearly impossible to get.
This new Clash antidrug line joined with a “Sex Mad War” critique of the sexual revolution to bluntly challenge the common “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” mantra. This stance came from a deep if unexpected source.
In Strummer’s revealing chat with Mikal Gilmore in June 1982, he grounded his growing opposition to drugs in rock idealism: “Music’s supposed to be the life force of the new consciousness, talking from 1954 to present, right? A lot of rock stars have been responsible for taking that life force and turning it into a death force. What I hate about so much of that sixties and seventies stuff is that it dealt death as style . . . To be cool, you had to be on the point of killing yourself.
“What I’m really talking about,” Strummer continued, “is drugs. If the music’s going to move you, you don’t need drugs. If I see a sharp-looking guy on a street corner, he’s alive and he’s making me feel more alive—he ain’t dying—and that’s the image I’ve decided The Clash has to stand for these days. I think we’ve blown it on the drug scene. It ain’t happening, and I want to make it quite clear that nobody in The Clash thinks heroin or cocaine or any of that crap is cool.”
“I just want to see things change. I don’t want it to be like the sixties or seventies, where we saw our rock stars shambling about out of their minds, and we thought it was cool, even instructive. That was death-style, not lifestyle. Those guys made enough money to go into expensive clinics, get their blood changed—but what about the poor junkie on the street? He’s been led into it by a bunch of rock stylists, and left to die with their style.”
In the end, Strummer sounded humble yet committed: “I guess we each have to work it out in our own way—I had to work it out for myself—but The Clash have to take the responsibility to stand for something better than that.”
Simonon echoed this when Gilmore asked why The Clash had been able to persist: “You’re talking about things like corruption, disintegration, right? I tell you what I’ve seen do it to other groups: drugs. I’ve been through all sorts of drugs. At one time I took them just for curiosity, and I learned—it’s not worth it. It’s like a carrot held in front of you, and it’s the downfall of a lot of bands we’ve known.”
The bassist bluntly stated a new Clash directive: “We just cut it out—we don’t deal with that stuff anymore. I’d much rather use the money to buy a record, or a present for me girlfriend, or phone me mum up from Australia.” Asked if the band would share that position with Clash fans, Simonon was again direct: “Sure. I don’t see why not. I think that’s part of what we’re about, is testing our audience.”
Neither Simonon nor Strummer was addressing drugs here in a facile, practiced way, as if under orders. These parallel insights, shared separately in mid-1982, when Jones was still in the band, suggested why the duo continued on together.
This orientation could help to purify a Clash sullied by drugs and rock-star behavior, and provide solid footing amid the moment’s immense challenges. It suggested deep soul-searching about what The Clash was meant to be, for what it should stand. Of course, the spirit could be willing, but the flesh might yet prove weak.
The test was to begin when the new Clash met its old audience, beginning at the 2,000-seat Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara on January 19, 1984. To some, this California tour made little sense. Sheppard: “I thought it was ridiculous that we went straight onto big stages. I said, ‘Why don’t we do some small club gigs, unannounced, just to find our feet?’” Rebuffed, Sheppard was nonetheless excited to play live, which tended to wash away his doubts.
His equanimity was not universal. While the band had begun to click in practice, White was nervous about playing out. Sensing this, Strummer took the young guitarist aside. As White wrote