Give 'em enough hope

San Francisco – the site of the Clash's first stateside musical experience – was one of Joe Strummer's favorite cities. We remember the late vocalist-guitarist

By any means necessary

Sandy Pearlman, San Rafael producer of the Dictators and Blue Oyster Cult, recalls Joe Strummer and the making of the Clash's Give 'Em Enough Rope.

WHEN GIVE 'EM Enough Rope came out in England, it was considered the greatest thing ever recorded; it was given five stars by Sounds magazine. I was in the U.K. at the time and it was on the front page of music papers, and went into the charts at number two, and was universally greeted as the second coming of French bread. Even though I actually don't think it was one of the best records I ever made, it was the best reaction I had ever gotten.

I didn't know it was controversial until there was a revisionist period in the Clash's history, and it was considered unholy or unclean for them to have worked with an American heavy metal producer. A retrospective mythology grew out of it that the Clash were forced to work with me by CBS and that we were trying to create something that catered to the American market. Actually they chose to work with me from a group of producers that CBS nominated as possibilities. The reason was they loved the sound of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and they loved "Godzilla." They were just fascinated by sound of those records, and they were also Dictators fans.

They were fascinated by the mystical side of what I did, the overwhelmingly power-mad side of what I did, and also the nasty, corrosive, very New York side of the Dictators. The first time I saw them was during the English firefighters strike of 1977. CBS had taken me up to Manchester to see them play; they had me on a tour of England where I got to see every new wave or punk band they wanted me to produce. They took me to Manchester, I walked into the hall, and I guess the sound guy signaled to them that I was in the room. As soon as I got up to the mixing position, they said, "We're dedicating this to Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and most of all, the Blue Oyster Cult," and they played "I'm So Bored with the U.S.A." With the first chord, I told the CBS guy, "Let's cut the tour short. This is fine. I love 'em. Let's do it."

Hardworking and disorderly

The Clash had an immense amount of energy and were willing to work as long as necessary to get done whatever needed to get done. They were extremely inventive and quick-witted – if we had to do other parts on the spot, there wasn't any whining or wincing about coming up with them. It wasn't a constant battle of impulse versus inertia like a lot of production often is. They had a tremendous amount of passion, which was fueled with resentment, which was fueled by dissatisfaction with the current order – no matter how the current order was incarnated. They were looking to revise how things sounded and revise how things worked and revise the way the metastructure worked, the order of the world at large. So that was all cool.

We were kind of on the exact same manuscript page as far as how the world should go. On the other hand, there were all sorts of weird things that would happen because they were completely irresponsible. They would go play in Paris, and me and the engineers would be sitting in the studio in London, and they'd decide to show up two days later than when they were supposed to. They were constantly fighting with Bernard Rhodes, their manager, and they were also filming Rude Boy at the time. Rude Boy was a problem for me because the film crew would show up every day for a month, turn on lights, and promptly ruin all the sounds we had worked to get. When you cook the drum head under lights or cook guitar strings under lights, things change. Sounds change. So that would kill most of the beginning of the day, and fighting with Bernard Rhodes would chew up a lot of time, so eventually we moved the production of the record to San Francisco. Most of the overdubs and vocals were done here at the old Automatt. The studio is gone, but it was across the street from Lulu's on Folsom. The Automatt, which used to be CBS's, was built for Simon and Garfunkle and Blood, Sweat and Tears, etc., etc., because they just couldn't work in New York. They had to be in a more creative environment.

Not so bored in the U.S.A.

When the Clash got here, the first thing they did was go out and see Animal House five times. They claimed to think Animal House was a documentary, and they thought John Belushi was the greatest living American. That was great. I think that actually created a lot of bizarro energy. The other thing they wanted to do was to see Michael Bloomfield play. So they went to see him a couple times and talked to him, and he sort of knew who they were or pretended to. That was their first couple days in San Francisco, doing that and discovering that the Holiday Inn they were staying at in Chinatown had probably been the place where a lot of Dirty Harry was shot. Belushi, Bloomfield, and Dirty Harry represented their trinitarian introduction to America. This was the summer of '78, and they didn't play here till '79 after Give 'Em Enough Rope came out.

But all the aficionados of the political English new wave scene knew exactly who they were. There were a whole bunch of people who showed up at the studio or hung out with them or discovered them, who all paid homage to them or collaborated with them or became friends with them. I think that's where Paul Simonon met Pearl Harbour, who he was married to for a while. When they played here for the first time in '79, they played at the Temple Beautiful, and the whole Jonestown apocalypse had already occurred, and still up on the marquee was "Temple Beautiful: Reverend Jim Jones." So they insisted that everybody, including me, get their pictures taken underneath so they could immortalize that particular conjunction. This was a particularly interesting time: Vietnam was pretty recent, a couple months had passed since Jim Jones, and there was one of the great periods of creativity in the recorded music world, one of those periodic blasts that shakes everything totally, reconfigures everything before the corporatization of whatever new and amazing trend line occurs.

The Clash's ideologue

Joe Strummer was the most rigidly devoted to his ideals of the lot of them, possibly because he came out of an entirely different environment from the rest. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon grew up in Brixton. Topper Headon was a middle-class guy from I don't know where. But Strummer, his father was a diplomat – that's why he was born in Ankara, Turkey. So I think he was the most self-consciously ideological of all of them, possibly because of where he came from and possibly not. If there was anyone closest to Robespierre that would certainly have been Strummer. And the person who was closest to Danton was probably Simonon. Strummer was a very disciplined person, and he would do a lot of insane things that I wanted him to do, sometimes not thinking he was doing as awesome a job as he was doing. We got amazing results on "Guns on the Roof," for example. He broke a blood vessel in his mouth because he sang with so much passion. The song had mutated from a song about the arrest of Simonon and Headon for shooting pigeons with air guns on the roof of a building in London to a really violent revolutionary anthem. At the end of one of those takes, he said, "I got blood in me mouth," and so I kept that and used it on the final mix of the song. At first he didn't think it was a good idea. I don't know why; I thought it was amazing. Given the revolutionary rhetoric that is the content of the song, I thought it was pretty cool to bust a blood vessel singing! The point is he worked so hard, taking things to the extreme, that there was a lot of extreme raw material to utilize, making the thing.

The whole experience was an interesting one. I never actually repeated a situation that resembled what went down in the making of that record because there was so much chaos, which I really appreciated; the more chaos the better. But it also created problems in stitching the whole thing together. There were constant fights with CBS; the band told Muff Winwood, who was the head of A&R for CBS in the U.K., that they knew where he lived and unless he got them film of the Battle of Britain they were just going to do something horrible. He wasn't afraid, but he thought it was cool, and so he got films, and they showed them on the studio wall while we were working. There were just things that never ever, even in some dream state, were going to happen again because they and the Sex Pistols kind of ruled Western Europe for, like, 18 months, and they could pretty much do whatever they wanted and say whatever they wanted. This was a time when artists actually had an ideology.

'Joe Strummer Tribute: A Night of Clash Consciousness,' with live Clash covers, Clash DJ sets, and writers mixing anecdotes with manifestos, takes place Jan. 18, 9 p.m., Edinburgh Castle, 950 Geary, S.F. $5 (benefits 2003 Castle Stage Productions). (415) 885-4074.