self-made straitjackets.
With London Calling—released only six months after Thatcher’s election—The Clash began to stake its claim on the broader arena of mainstream rock and roll. The musicians abandoned their early disavowal of prepunk sounds for a fervent embrace of the many forms and faces of rebel music. Spurred on by a catchy but lyrically lightweight hit single, “Train in Vain,” the album rose almost into the American Top 20, an unprecedented level of success for a left-wing punk band.
The band’s ambitious vision was made even clearer by the following triple-album set, Sandinista! It sought to articulate—with wildly varying degrees of success—a world music that spanned jazz, salsa, reggae, funk, rap, folk, steel drum, disco, and rock, united only by a common grassroots focus and radical politics.
The latter was announced by the album’s title, an approving nod to Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). Popularly known as the Sandinistas, they were Marxist revolutionaries who had overthrown a US-backed military dictatorship in a popular insurrection in 1979.
Strummer first learned about the Sandinistas from an old friend, Vietnam veteran/activist Moe Armstrong. Later he recalled, “Moe [gave us] info that was quite hard to find out. A bunch of teenage Marxists oust your favorite dictator? The establishment don’t want to know!” Impressed by the quasi-punk spirit of the youthful revolutionaries, as well as initiatives like a mass literacy campaign and health care advances, Strummer and the band took up their cause.
The song “Washington Bullets” provided the album’s title, rebuking the US—as well as the UK—for supporting dictatorships. It was no simple anti-American screed, for it also celebrated Jimmy Carter’s commitment to human rights that had led the US not to intervene to stop the Sandinistas’ victory. Articulating a consistent anti-imperialist stance, Strummer also skewered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chinese occupation of Tibet over a bubbling salsa beat.
Augusto César Sandino, who fought against the US occupation of Nicaragua, 1927–33.
Massive crowd in the main square of Managua, Nicaragua, after the Sandinista victory, July 20, 1979.
By the time Sandinista! was released in the US in January 1981, however, the Carter administration and its human rights policy were on its way out. In its place was the newly elected Reagan administration, whose more muscular approach was driven by a rabid anticommunism that viewed conflicts around the world through the prism of superpower competition with the Soviet Union.
“Dictatorships and Double Standards,” an essay by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat turned neoconservative hawk, informed Reagan’s Central American policy. Kirkpatrick argued that Carter’s human rights emphasis was fatally misguided. By abandoning authoritarian allies like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua or the shah of Iran, the US was naively opening the way for the expansion of Soviet-backed totalitarianism, and thus not only injuring our strategic interests but also, ultimately, the cause of human rights and democracy.
Reagan’s decision to make Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations—an institution that she largely held in contempt—sent a clear message that human rights was no longer a priority for US foreign policy.
While the Sandinistas had ample reason to worry about this shift, an ugly preview of bloodbaths to come first materialized in neighboring El Salvador. Kirkpatrick had already identified that country—which bordered Nicaragua, and was in the throes of its own nascent civil war, with Marxist-led guerrilla groups fighting a military-backed regime—as the next battlefront in a global war against Soviet communism. With Reagan’s 1980 victory, his spokespeople made it clear that there would be no hands-off approach in El Salvador as with Carter in Nicaragua.
According to Robert White, Carter’s ambassador in El Salvador, Salvadoran elites took Reagan’s victory as a green light for a murder spree shocking even for a country where Archbishop Oscar Romero had been assassinated only eight months before. In swift succession, the leadership of the peaceful opposition was abducted, tortured, and killed, followed by rape and murder of four North American churchwomen, and, finally, the execution of the head of the Salvadoran land reform agency and two US advisers in the lobby of the Sheraton hotel.
When White spoke out against these horrors and subsequent efforts to cover up the role of the Salvadoran military, he was summarily dismissed. Reagan swiftly put forward a request for millions of dollars of military aid for the government. The conflict intensified and the body count mounted, rising quickly into the thousands.
The Reagan administration’s savage debut could hardly be expected to pass unnoticed in the Clash camp. A response would be forthcoming, but the band was then preoccupied with other matters.
The Clash had created headaches for its corporate sponsors as early as 1977 with “Complete Control,” which lambasted company machinations in brutally direct terms. Likewise, the band won few friends at CBS with its insistence on first putting out the double-LP London Calling for the price of a single album, then upping the wager with the three-for-the-price-of-one Sandinista!
CBS had grudgingly agreed. But Sandinista! held no breakthrough singles on any of its six sides, had received mixed reviews, and sold no better than London Calling. The band had foregone royalties in order to get its bargain price. Now debts to the record company were mounting.
As pressure built, a management shake-up pushed by Strummer and Simonon brought Bernard Rhodes back in early 1981. It would prove to be a fateful shift.
Rhodes was hardly a typical rock impresario, and his approach was anything but diplomatic. According to Clash insider The Baker, “The fundamental mistake everyone makes is in viewing Bernie as just the manager. But it was Bernie’s vision that inspired the entire concept of The Clash. He crafted them, fathered them, pulling them one by one from their respective situations and putting them together like ingredients in a grand recipe. Their early political ideologies, fashion concepts, and total image were a statement of Bernie’s thought processes.”
If Rhodes was central to The Clash, his roughshod manner had alienated most of the band—especially Jones—and led to his firing. The Clash flourished artistically and commercially during his exile, with first Coon and then sixties holdover Blackhill Enterprises in the managerial role. Yet the growing tension between radical intent and commercial ambition left Strummer in particular feeling uneasy.
In Rhodes’s absence, Jones had assumed control in the band. Strummer felt sidelined and—after the critical savaging of Sandinista!—concerned for the band’s direction. As The Baker recalls, “The excesses of Mick’s musical domination resulted in angst-ridden turmoil within Joe. Certain that The Clash had deviated badly from their intended goals, he turned to the only person that he felt was still championing those original political and cultural ideologies: Bernie Rhodes!”
At the same time, band mouthpiece Kosmo Vinyl argues simply, “Bernie was brought back to break The Clash in America, and I worked with him to make that happen.” However counterintuitive this may seem, The Baker agrees: “Bernie was given a mandate: make the band huge, sell as many records as possible, get the message out to as many people around the world as possible—but do that without having the band’s message watered down to puerile pop nonsense.”
This seems an unlikely role for the abrasive radical. But Strummer believed Rhodes could accomplish this breakthrough while somehow keeping the band true in a revolutionary sense more than could the “professionals” at Blackhill.
In 1982, Strummer would explain to journalist Lisa Robinson, “It’s like having a split personality. I want The Clash to get bigger because you want people to hear your songs, you want to be successful . . . But on the other hand, I’m pretty wary of that, of having it get too big to handle. You always think you can handle it, but you never know.”
The Baker elaborates: “Joe wanted The Clash to reach the