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 top, and yet not become part of the industry that they so despised. It was a tall order, and a very noble cause. Elvis, Beatles, and the Rolling Stones—they all became product, packaged and sold. Could it be avoided? Joe wanted to try.”
In The Clash’s 1978 anthem “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” Strummer had written about other punk bands “turning rebellion into money.” If The Clash did break through, how could it evade that trap? Strummer wasn’t sure—but regarding Rhodes not only as a political catalyst but as a surrogate father, he trusted him to navigate the treacherous straits.
Jones was not as hopeful that Rhodes would bring commercial success, but he also was not as nervous about the idea of rock stardom. Indeed, he had groomed himself for just such a role, as a kid from a broken home, living with his grandmother in a tower block. Vinyl—who had been with Blackhill, but who continued on with The Clash after the return of Rhodes—explains, “Mick was one of those kids who locked himself in a room, listening to the Stones, Mott the Hoople, whomever, practicing his guitar, dreaming of living that rock star life.”
The Baker agrees: “Joe was from the squat scene, Woody Guthrie and all that, but Mick came from an old-school rock background, openly idolized bands like Mott the Hoople and the Stones.” When asked why “1977” declared, “No Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones,” by a fanzine writer in October of that year, Jones grinned and replied, “Well, you gotta say all that stuff, ain’t ya?”
Both Vinyl and The Baker hasten to add that this did not mean Jones was not committed to the Clash political vision, only that his attitude toward the fruits of success was much less fraught than that of Strummer or Simonon. Such differences meant little when the band was an underground punk phenomenon, but would become a flash point as its popularity grew.
* * *
As The Clash considered its next steps, Thatcher was recovering from a bruising year where her popularity had dropped to historic lows amid a deep recession. The contraction had been caused largely by her monetarist economic policies, bitter medicine intended to cure a rising cost of living.
Beyond inflation, Thatcher had ripped Labour for the high rate of unemployment. Yet joblessness had been rising ever since her election. It neared three million by 1981’s end. Her critics were hardly surprised when urban riots broke out in Brixton and other low-income areas. Yet Thatcher was undeterred, asserting, “The lady’s not for turning,” despite pressure from within her own Tory ranks.
The pain was immense and undeniable: over two million jobs were lost in 1979–81. Particularly hard-hit was British Steel, the government-owned enterprise headed by Thatcher-appointee Ian MacGregor. He had returned after decades of living in the US to serve in this moment of “creative destruction” with downsizing, privatization, and closures high on his agenda.
MacGregor had presided over similar wrenching cutbacks in places like Youngstown, Ohio. As factories were shuttered, only to reopen with cheaper labor overseas, this US region gained a new nickname: the Rust Belt.
Thatcher was determined to “privatize” industries such as steel that had been nationalized after World War II as part of building a socialist state that sought to protect citizens from the cradle to the grave. Seeing only inefficiency and waste in this method, Thatcher valued MacGregor’s hard-nosed approach to labor relations and improving profitability, and brought him on the team to do this specific job. But dismal poll numbers suggested that she risked being not only the least popular prime minister in UK history, but also a short-lived one.
Thatcher promised “a short, sharp shock” as her policies went into effect, with renewed growth and vitality to come. Many were not convinced.
As
