denouncing abortion and supposed infringements on religious freedom by government bureaucrats, Reagan shifted to a new topic: the nuclear freeze movement trying to arrest the escalating arms race between the US and USSR.
Reagan claimed, “As good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution.” He then asked the crowd to oppose a nuclear freeze that would only serve “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire . . . and remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
Such terms made war seem inevitable. While nuclear conflict might appear unthinkable, Reagan had argued in 1981 that such a war might be contained to Europe—a grim prospect for those who recalled World War II’s devastation.
As the stakes were rising on both sides of the Atlantic, The Clash hit the road, doing a series of smaller-scale shows in Texas and Arizona, warming up for the US Festival. The band was rusty, but Howard was proving himself as the new engine of the machine, with the power of Chimes and the finesse of Headon. The Baker: “In a way, Peter was a mix of the two . . . he fit like a glove.” Vinyl: “There were issues, there always are, but it was clear he could do the job.”
Yet tensions in the band were simmering. As Howard recalls, “I was the new guy, so I wasn’t privy to everything, but I could tell that Mick and Joe seemed hardly on speaking terms.” The choice of “Garageland”—a “we won’t forget where we came from” anthem written in response to signing with CBS—to open the first shows seemed to acknowledge a growing disconnect. Strummer was keen to demonstrate that The Clash remained true to its original mission.
Playing shows seemed to help ease the strain. The Clash was starting to hit its stride by the final warm-up in Tucson, Arizona. Strummer confronted overly aggressive security from the stage and joked about “the MTV curiosity seekers” in the packed house, but the band was hot and the crowd rapturous.
With the warm-up shows successfully completed, The Clash was on its way to the festival with spirits high, when reality hit them in the form of a huge Budweiser billboard in the desert promoting the US Festival. Such sponsorship was hardly unknown in rock and was rapidly becoming much more pervasive. Having signed to CBS years before, The Clash was by no means innocent of corporate marketing. Yet the band sought a certain distance to avoid compromising their politics and art.
The ad showed exactly what the band had signed up for, and The Baker remembers the mood on the bus darkening palpably. Strummer had already been joking about the juxtaposition, taking jabs at the other headliner, heavy metal party band Van Halen—which was getting $1 million to play, twice The Clash’s payment—from the stage at the show in Wichita Falls, Texas.
Now Rhodes tried to help by going on the attack. The festival’s techno-hippie vibe made it an easy target, and the decision was made to test the organizers’ utopianism. Although Wozniak would end up losing a huge amount of money on the festival, at the time that wasn’t anticipated. Rhodes challenged him to pony up $100,000 for a camp for at-risk youth or The Clash wouldn’t play.
Wozniak resisted what he saw as blackmail, given that The Clash had already signed a contract to play. At a last-minute press conference, the band pressed its threat not to play unless Wozniak came through with the donation. The audience was left waiting for nearly two hours until a compromise was found: the festival would give a token $10,000 contribution, and the band agreed to go on.
The band members were scarcely relaxed as they ran onstage, taking places in front of a gigantic banner proclaiming, THE CLASH NOT FOR SALE! If this seemed to protest too much, Strummer nonetheless greeted the massive crowd with a sardonic, “So here we are in the capital of the decadent US of A!” as the band plugged in.
In an earlier press conference with numerous other performers—where Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth ribbed The Clash for being “too goddamn serious”—Vinyl had declined to comment on the festival itself, while making it clear “from the moment we hit the stage till the moment we leave, we will have something to say.” The band was no more than thirty seconds into the show, but the truth of Vinyl’s statement was apparent.
Perhaps thinking of his impending fatherhood, Strummer dedicated the Clash set “to making sure that those people in the crowd who have children, there is something left for them later in the century.” Then the band was off, igniting “London Calling,” followed swiftly by a fiery “Radio Clash” and a haunting “Somebody Got Murdered” with Jones on lead vocals. Strummer’s guitar was mixed higher than usual, providing an appealingly abrasive sound, with his ragged chording adding a raw edge to Jones’s more pristine tones.
Strummer had clearly come onstage intending to challenge the huge crowd as much as the event organizers. As soon as the third song died away, Strummer was back on the offensive: “Well, I know the human race is supposed to get down on its knees in front of all this new technology and kiss the microchip circuits, but it don’t impress me over much . . .” The singer hesitated, then launched another salvo: “There ain’t nothing but ‘you make, you buy, you die’—that’s the motto of America. You get born to buy it . . .” Leaping from critiquing consumerism to racial and economic inequality, Strummer continued: “And I tell you, those people out in East LA ain’t going to stay there forever. And if there is going to be anything in the future, it’s got to be from all parts of everything, not just one white way down the middle of the road!”
If the words were perhaps a bit incoherent, Strummer’s passion was plain. As the crowd tried to absorb the message, the singer tossed off one last exhortation—“So if anybody out there ever grows up, for fuck sake!”—and the band was off into their hit single “Rock the Casbah,” followed by the hard-hitting numbers “Guns of Brixton,” “Know Your Rights,” “Koka Kola,” and “Hate & War.”
Slowing the pace, Strummer introduced “Armagideon Time” as “the F-Plan Beverly Hills reggae song,” referring to a fad diet popular at the time. This quip turned serious as Strummer evoked the famine building in the Horn of Africa by extemporizing about “the Ethiopian Diet, lose five hundred pounds, success guaranteed, or your money back—yes, your money back” over a spooky dub groove. As he returned to the “a lot of people won’t get no supper tonight / a lot of people won’t get no justice tonight” refrain, the band—led by Jones—brought the song to an ominous close with splashes of dissonant guitars and drums.
If the music was strong, the singer found the audience response wanting. As applause washed over the stage, Strummer retorted, “Bollocks, bollocks! Come on, you don’t have to fake. You spent twenty-five dollars to go out there, so do what you like . . .”
The puzzled crowd responded uncertainly. Strummer upped the ante: “A lot of you seem to have speech operations, can’t talk or shout back or anything.” Balling up his fists, seeming desperate to somehow touch the distant mass, the snarling frontman baited the audience: “Come on, I need some hostility here . . . RRRRAAAWRRR! I need some feeling of some sort!” Then his tone lightened: “As it’s Sunday tomorrow, I hope you will join me . . .” The zinger led into a rollicking version of Sandinista!’s “The Sound of Sinners,” an amiable—but eminently forgettable—bit of gospel rock and roll. Self-deprecation, spoof, and sincerity mixed freely in lines like, “After all this time to believe in Jesus / after all those drugs / I thought I was Him,” before concluding, “I ain’t good enough / I ain’t clean enough / to be Him.”
It seemed something of an odd choice. Strummer, however, had a spiritual side, with radical bits of Christianity coming in largely through the Rastafari faith that imbued the band’s reggae covers. His past
