My way

I SPENT SOME time considering the seminal Clash anthem "I'm So Bored with the U.S.A." This was years ago, and I was struggling to figure out a punk imperative that was somehow rigid and yet vague, in an annoying the-harder-you-try-the-less-you-know sort of way. I suspected that a test went with the territory and that when the test was given, I wouldn't know it. I had the clothes, the haircut, the sense to shut up around strangers, and a couple of bylines in Damage. But as a years-long dropout with no innocence to lose, I was an impostor. Fearing exposure, I lived in a state of punk paranoia – so it was no surprise to me when, in Don Letts's film The Clash: Westway to the World, Joe Strummer, tongue only halfway in cheek, says of the band, "We were Stalinists."

I knew about Stalinists, sort of, having come of age in a family of reds – Maoists, not the soviet variant, for what that's worth – who didn't much like Stalin (but didn't like Trotsky even more). When it came to revolution, punk or otherwise, I was given to close reading, and even if much of what I read – lyrics, interviews, conversations, you name it – didn't make sense, I wasn't about to tell anyone. The fact that the royal family of political punkdom had a Stalinist streak validated my paranoia but made me all the more chagrined when Westway showed that early on, the band's politics were as off-the-cuff as I suspected.

"I'm So Bored," a broadside against Yankee imperialism, soldiers, and cop shows, first saw daylight as "I'm So Bored with You," a Jones composition inspired by a girlfriend. Strummer heard it at the band's first official meeting and advised an immediate change to "Bored with the U.S.A." After token resistance, Jones gave in and later in the evening committed graffiti à la mode with Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon, writing the song's new title on an ice-cream shop window in cherry vanilla. The moment was captured on film – the Clash with cones in hand. Some people might ask why a trip to get ice cream by a band that was not yet a band was worth a camera crew, but not me.

You never can tell when it comes to art, as well as artists and almost everything else in life. Exhibit A: an old friend called when I was in the middle of watching Westway last week to say her longtime lover had left without a word. "I realize now," she confided, "that I never really knew him." That was something to think about: if an intelligent, intuitive woman didn't know the man she lived with for 10 years, did I know fuck-all about the Clash? On one hand, I had albums and local performances; I'd been backstage at Kezar Pavilion after the Clash, Cramps, and Dead Kennedys show, gotten low at Target Video, chilled with Simonon on Ritch Street and with Strummer in a Marina saloon. And in the previous 24 hours, I'd watched Westway, Rude Boy, and The Essential Clash DVD. On the other, my friend had 10 years sharing a bed. I paused the video and wondered how she could be so blind.

Why let facts get in the way when, to paraphrase a line from another film from the old days – Woody Allen's Annie Hall – I needed the eggs? The Clash I knew called the world to the barricades "Guns of Brixton"- or "White Riot"-style. I would've followed the band into battle no matter what the cost, or I felt like I would – which with only one admittedly big difference was the same thing. It wasn't my fault that stateside in the late '70s, there wasn't much going on except for the odd White Night riot – the March 1978 benefit at the Mab for striking coal miners doesn't count. When I didn't like the lyrics, I invented my own or listened to Give 'Em Enough Rope, on which they were inaudible.

Besides, it's about more than lyrics – and more than context, for that matter. Shit was flying right and left in 1969 when the Jefferson Airplane threw in with the revolution on Volunteers, with songs like the title track and "We Can Be Together." Looking back, Paul Kantner was a pretty radical guy, Grace Slick lived to offend, and Volunteers was probably worth listening to. I wouldn't know, because their radical diatribes sounded fake as hell. I sneered, and so did everyone else except earnest Weathermen, junior high anarchists, and kids from Kansas.

Last week, while reading Jeff Tamarkin's intricately detailed new Airplane biography, Got a Revolution, I was momentarily seized by guilt for not giving the band a chance. I kept reading, and the feeling disappeared – I trusted my guts then, and I trust them now; the Airplane were dilettantes, undercut by fame and fortune no matter what they did. Still, Volunteers nearly cracked the Billboard Top 10, and it probably did some good somewhere. Don't get me started, however, on Kantner's odes to Weatherman Diana Oughton – from his 1971 solo album, Starfighter – who blew herself up making a bomb in a Greenwich Village town house.

The Weathermen – featured in the soon-to-open documentary The Weather Underground – subsequently dignified their deadly amateurism by coining the term "town house politics"; there's nothing like a catchy phrase and a camera to fill up an empty well. The Clash were a different story or three, depending on who's talking. A friend of mine still refuses to take them seriously because Strummer, the band ideologue, was the son of a career diplomat. That never bothered me, because, well, ask me about Tompkins Square Park in New York sometime. Strummer, speaking in Westway some 15 years after the band broke up, explained that was then and this is now: The Clash was about four people at a particular moment in history. You can't recapture that; the moment is gone. Three years later, he's gone, too.