aligned himself on the “dance” side of the “dance vs. riot” polarity, illuminating what helped lead to the break as 1984 approached.
While The Clash disdained the club crowd, the band also had to account for its own misadventures—beginning with a confrontational appearance on America’s pop showcase, Entertainment Tonight (ET), filmed during the California tour.
ET cohost Dixie Whatley laid it out: “The Clash have returned to the concert trail for the first time in two years. In that time the politically outspoken group has lived up to their name both inside and outside the band. Two members left, with one of them embroiling the group in a bitter lawsuit. The Clash has also had to endure severe criticism stemming from . . . last year’s US Festival where they accepted a payment of $500,000 in the face of their stance as revolutionaries.”
A defensive Strummer first responded with a shot at Boy George and the new pop scene, then unleashed a passionate sermonette: “There are people out there [who] are sick to their souls. They have been at a party too long, they have been taking drugs too long . . . Drugs are over from this minute now!”
A skeptical Whatley shot back: “You don’t take any drugs at all?”
Strummer raised his hands as if to wave the thought away: “I stopped . . . Six months ago I wouldn’t have any more damn pot!”
Whatley: “Is that true for your whole band?”
Strummer: “They’re not into it either. And we’ve come over here and we are telling people if they want to listen.”
Simonon leapt in: “To get sharp, there is no use in taking a spliff or anything like pot, because it just clouds your mind up.”
Whatley shifted gears, but stayed on the attack: “You’ve been a very outspoken group, but some people say it’s a gimmick.”
Strummer: “Look, there is no time for gimmicks . . . There is only one thing that young people are listening to. They aren’t reading Sartre, poetry is a bore, in school they don’t listen . . . They are only listening to one medium, and that is rock and roll.”
The frontman’s vehemence, paired with live footage of the new band doing “Clampdown” and “I Fought the Law,” made a powerful statement, despite the interviewer’s skepticism. As a snarling Strummer said at the outset of the segment, with the rest of the band flanking him: “Something should be started. We are here to bring up reality and push you in the face with it!”
The Clash brought that confrontational attitude to seven thousand people at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. The set was not lacking for rough spots—“Safe European Home” opened as a discordant mess, grating feedback marred “Dictator,” guitars repeatedly went out of tune, and a Simonon-led “Police on My Back” came off flat. While Sheppard did a fine job taking lead on “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” the song’s inclusion struck a false note, even to its singer: “To be honest, I didn’t feel comfortable singing it . . . [I felt] a bit stupid, really.” The Jones-linked song would soon largely disappear from the set list.
Strummer was in fine form, bantering with the crowd. Not all was lighthearted; he introduced “Sex Mad War” by shushing the crowd and urging them “to focus all your minds on sex!” Perhaps anticipating racy rock talk, the crowd cheered.
Strummer cut savagely through the revelry: “Every boy in this world has gone sex mad, there ain’t no satisfaction. This is dedicated to all the victims of the sex-mad war—the women, the women, the women . . .” On cue, the song exploded to life, earning its place on a set list heavy with the band’s early anthems.
Likewise, Strummer segued from joking about the uncontrollable feedback—“We have no intention of playing avant-garde music that sounds like this . . . so we’ll just have to drown it out by some old-fashioned human and wood stuff”—to railing against “Ronald Reagan’s favorite hobby: smashing Central America to fuck!”
Having blitzed through the first show on “pure adrenaline, pure nerve,” Sheppard felt better about the outcome in San Francisco. So did White, whose opening-night jitters—“I didn’t know what I was doing onstage”—gave way to utter abandon: “I just threw caution to the wind. I remember cutting my hand to pieces . . . doing these Pete Townshend windmill things, just fuckin’ going mad.”
The intent was to present a rougher version of The Clash, with Strummer’s passion cranked up to cover the band’s raggedness. The patchy parts were to be expected, given that the five had been playing together for a month.
Some observers were unconvinced. In the San Francisco Examiner, Phillip Elwood argued that the “new Clash lacks some of the old fire,” faulting the new lineup for lack of identity overall, and Strummer for erratic onstage delivery. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Joel Selvin hammered Sheppard and White: “Neither proved exceptional . . . Even keeping their guitars in tune proved a problem for these two green additions to the world’s most famous punk band.”
The quintet continued on the road, playing spaces as out of the way as the Spanos Center in Stockton, California, and as massive as the Long Beach Arena—capacity 13,500—followed by Santa Monica’s Civic Auditorium. Mixed reviews continued, with Ethlie Ann Vare complaining that the new lineup “shows more energy than finesse.” Her verdict was stark: “Yes, the new Clash are taking off in a direction. Trouble is . . . that direction seems to be backward.”
Such slams didn’t discourage the new recruits, who hadn’t been tasked with replacing Jones as much as staking a new claim with punk bravado. Sheppard: “With hindsight, we went out very much challenging what The Clash had done before. [At this point] we weren’t being as musical. We were very in-your-face.”
Some critics reveled in the defiant energy. After seeing the San Francisco and Santa Cruz shows, Johnny Whiteside of Beano fanzine declared, “This is The Clash, with their beauty and firepower intact, albeit bruised and scabby . . . The [absence] of Jones makes barely a shred of difference.” The Los Angeles Times’ Richard Cromelin agreed, saying Jones’s loss “hardly seems as crucial as the departure of Keith Richards would be from the Rolling Stones.”
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