Written by Author’s note: In early February 1979, The Clash played their first gig in Northern California. It was almost exactly a year, and a 20-minute drive, from where the Sex Pistols played their last show before breaking up in 1978. By sad coincidence, as the Clash’s tour bus crossed the California state line, on the other side of the country, Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose.
I had been at the Pistols’ last show, covering it for the UK rock weekly Sounds, and I did much the same with The Clash, travelling the 400 miles between San Francisco and Santa Monica with them on their bus. The Pistols and Clash shows had things in common – fans eager to actually see them in person; exhilarating performances – but the mood of the shows were quite different. The Clash’s were less ‘punk’ and in more upscale venues. The first, in Berkeley, had an audience of students, not spitters. In Joe Strummer’s words, “boring snobs”. It was one big reason why The Clash added a secret San Francisco show in a grungier San Francisco venue at half the price.
Yet for all the disdain in I’m So Bored With The U.S.A., which opened the show, by all accounts, they wanted to tour the States. Pissed off as they were with their US record company – CBS considered their first album too primitive to release and shipped them to America to make their second album with Blue Öyster Cult’s producer – The Clash looked forward to playing on the soil where rock’n’roll was born.
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For crying out loud, they took the legendary rock’n’roller Bo Diddley on the road with them! Mick Jones seemed to spend every free moment digging through record shop bins. Strummer and Paul Simonon would disappear to some private spot away from the circus when they weren’t being dragged off to interviews. They were no warmer with journalists than Johnny Rotten had been. But what concerned The Clash most was being in debt to a major label that was doing its damnedest to clean them up
There were no riots or outraged citizens when The Clash played the opening night of their first North American tour. The only report in the local paper’s music section was about the local symphony orchestra having gone on strike. Admittedly, the opening night was in Canada, not the USA, where there were plenty of people ready and waiting to be pissed off.
Word had it that the band’s US record label made them drop the original tour name – the Pearl Harbor tour – on the grounds that Americans would find it grossly offensive. Given that their album wasn’t doing as well as their US label hoped, the label was keen to avoid upsetting anyone. So it was renamed the Give ’Em Enough Rope Tour, the same title as their album. The posters pictured the Statue Of Liberty tied up in rope.
On February 7, 1979, The Clash crossed the border into the US to play their first show there. It was in Berkeley, California, across the Bay from San Francisco, where the Sex Pistols had played their farewell show last year.
An hour before the doors of the Berkeley Community Theater were due to open, a line of people stretched quietly from the front steps in a perfect shape of a walking stick. Two young security guards shone torches on the few rebels who didn’t want to wait in the queue for their numbered seat, but it was all so polite compared with the Pistols’ show.
Maybe these genteel fans had come to see the legendary Bo Diddley? The Clash had invited Diddley to open for them on the tour. This was most unexpected. The middle-aged usher who showed me to my seat felt the need to tell me who Bo Diddley was. Strutting on stage with his signature rectangular guitar, Diddley was brilliant. “This feels like 1965 all over again,” he growled. When he left the stage almost everyone in the place cheered and gave him a standing ovation. A DJ came on and played Buzzcocks songs and Sid Vicious’s My Way. Then there they were: The Clash! And everyone’s up on their feet, shouting.
The Clash had told the bouncers that they weren’t allowed to force people to stay in their seats, so the front of the venue was flooded with punks of the old-school bondage and safety-pins variety, pogoing like mad. Nothing had happened on this scale since the Pistols’ gig at Winterland at the end of ’77. Now the Pistols are dead, Sid’s dead, Winterland’s dead, and San Francisco is still the Grateful Dead. The Clash have got a lot of reviving to do!
There were some rock journalists I recognised in the room. When one called out that he couldn’t understand what Joe Strummer was saying, Joe said: “If you can’t understand the words, don’t worry, you’re not alone.” At the end he thanked us for bothering to come tonight.
Bothering? It was magnificent. Although I could see little more than the flag used as a backdrop and the top part of Jones and Simonon’s electrocuted leaps, it sounded great: a brain-battering Tommy Gun, an exhilarating Stay Free, a scorching Gun On The Roof. I can’t remember having seen a performance so shot with adrenaline – and it would be outdone by the next night’s show.
It was quiet backstage after the San Francisco show. There wasn’t much talking. In the past five days the band must have talked to just about everyone who wanted to listen. A press conference on Monday with a barrage of dumb questions led the band to turn it into their own personal comedy show. There were record store appearances, radio interviews and interviews for everything from Time magazine to Cashbox.
Someone asked Mick if he liked The Jam, to which he gave a suitably noncommittal answer. Someone else suggested that The Clash had some sort of pact going with Elvis Costello, whose tour bus was parked in Japantown near their next night’s gig. Apparently, Elvis was planning to have old rock legend Carl Perkins open for him on his tour, like the Clash and Bo Diddley. (Perkins turned the offer down). The band responded politely that if anyone was doing the copying it was Elvis (who doesn’t seem that popular with The Clash).
One thing that’s perked all of them up is tomorrow night’s gig – a show that hasn’t exactly left their US record company brimming with philanthropic joy. It’s a benefit concert for New Youth, a fledgling organisation that aims to keep ticket prices down, pay larger percentages to the bands and give new-wave artists a place to play. Since it was not part of the official tour, and bound to upset the promoters, the ads didn’t mention their name but referred to a ‘White Riot in the Fillmore with the best band ever direct from England’. Tickets were half the price of the Berkeley show, and the show sold out
The following afternoon at the Villa Roma bar, I find the band’s tour manager Ace, locked in a verbal battle with the red-faced, vein-popping motel manager. It’s a misunderstanding over a phone bill, which with the average guest would have evoked polite discussion at most. But not with The Clash. “The man’s an arsehole,” Mick told me by way of explanation. The manager had parked his little Pinto station wagon (one of the smallest American cars) in front of the tour bus to stop it leaving, and was threatening to call the police.
Ace was trying valiantly to keep his temper – not easy when a middle-aged man is screaming “You bums are freaks” in your face. The band left, and the manager swaggered over to the bar, loosened his collar and had the barmaid get him a double, boasting how he “wasn’t going to be taken for a ride by the like of those freaks”, and how “I blocked the bus with my little Pinto wagon. It couldn’t move”. A hero for a day.
The benefit concert was in an old, majestic venue. The punters were generally shit-stoned, falling over, dancing with strangers and having fun. There was some trouble in the line, a few bottles broken, but that’s all, mostly brought on by the slowness with which the punters were let in. This was New Youth’s first gig and they hadn’t quite got it together.
The Clash were electrifying, commanding attention and belief. They opened with I’m So Bored With The U.S.A. and the crowd went as wild as I’ve ever seen it go. No time to take notes, there were better things to do. One girl danced from someone’s head onto the stage and dived off headfirst into the solid mass of people.
America was getting off on The Clash, and New Youth was getting a good down payment for their organisation. Some hope yet. But the battle’s not won. British DJ Johnnie Walker was there. He’d just been fired by a San Francisco radio station for playing punk records.
On the tour bus after the show, Jones, Strummer and Simonon go straight to the front to conduct a private post-mortem on the North American tour. Verdict: Vancouver pretty good, Berkeley okay, the benefit in San Francisco the best so far. Topper and Mick and the rest are watching a video of Heaven Can Wait as fans mill around outside.
Before the gig, Topper had been sitting on the bus watching Star Wars when a guy came inside and struck up a conversation and took a lot of persuading to leave. He came back a few minutes later with a bottle of champagne, shook the drummer’s hand and left. The champagne was quickly consumed on the 400-mile trip to LA. Everyone looked half-dead by the time the bus reached Santa Monica.
While Ace is sorting out a beachfront hotel, an old man wanders up and asks if he can look around the bus. He thinks they’re a troop of wandering Bohemians, until the driver tells him it’s a rock band that’s playing at the Santa Monica Civic tonight. Unfazed, the septuagenarian announces that he and his wife go disco dancing every fourth night. There are smiles all round. “All you’ve got to do is get in there and do your own thing, feel the beat,” he tells this bunch of knackered-looking Brits. No one offers him tickets for tonight’s gig.
Los Angeles is less bohemian than San Francisco. It’s big streets, big cars, big billboards and big money. In LA, anything that doesn’t make a big profit is considered neither art nor desirable. Little bands are pretty much banging their heads against a brick wall. The so-called ‘new wave’ scene is barely holding its own compared to San Francisco. That the Clash sold out the 3,000-capacity Santa Monica Civic is a good sign, even if the numbers were padded out by press and posers and probably members of every quasi-punk band in town.
It’s a good show but not a great one. The sound was flattened, but the spirit and strength of the music and the wildly vibrating floor from all the frantic pogoing going on as good as compensated. Kamikaze punks made exultant swallow dives into the audience from the stage. The editor of Slash fanzine leapt up to join Strummer in an unofficial duet before being dragged off and, according to him, roughed up by the bouncers who seemed for the most part easy-going for America.
“We do as we can, we try to say to the guys: ‘Let them stand up, don’t bash them.’ And if we’re the headliners they’ve got to take some notice of us,” Mick said, but they don’t know all the security guards. Joe sounded pretty pissed off when the guy from Slash kept whining about his battle scars.
“We never said it was a Utopia,” says Joe. “Rock’n’roll is played on enemy ground. We never promised you when you were a baby that it was going to be roses all the way. But we stopped more than you can imagine. You can go on about getting the shit kicked out of you and you can go on about that guy being murdered by bouncers in London, you can go on as much as you like, and I’ll just sit here and listen and I’ll be thinking of the times I’ve stopped the blood when I had the chance to.”
Another press conference had been arranged for midnight, backstage, after the show – a rather depressed show as Mick described it. “It’s just been a strange day.” For 15, 20 minutes they just sat there. Topper got up to let in the members of The Germs, an LA punk band, and they talked for a while. Joe and Paul looked in a lousy mood. They were angry about how their US record company was marketing them. The Statue Of Liberty posters, as expected, had become an issue, too. “They’re fucking us up,” Joe said. “If they’re going to have ads and buy a big space and show how flashy we are, we’re going to pack information into it such as the lyrics.”
At the press conference, they gave sometimes half-hearted answers. Will they fill in the gap left by the Sex Pistols? “I don’t know,” Joe said. “I haven’t seen the gap yet.” Do they have problems being famous? “We can walk down the street in London, people recognise us and come up to us. It’s like having loads of friends,” said Paul. “We don’t even think about it.” Will they ever release their debut album in the US? (The record company didn’t put it out, judging the songs and presentation too crude for US radio.) “We might release it sometime as a historical document, a greatest hits album,” Joe said.
They tell the US press they came to America as soon as they could; that touring the old places at home was getting tedious; that they found a healthy new-wave scene everywhere they’d been in the US so far. They said they intend to come back to America and “finish off the job” in the summer and be “the best rock’n’roll band in the world”. If the Pearl Harbor ’79/Give ’Em Enough Rope tour continues its electrifying attack, they might well succeed.
“You think we lost the battle, then go home and weep about it,” Joe said. “Sometimes you’ve got to wake up in the morning and think fuck it, you’re going to win the battle.”
When it comes down to it, the battle is not about desecrating the Statue Of Liberty, it’s about defeating apathy in rock and making it matter.
When I left, they were boarding the bus. Next stop Cleveland, Ohio, nearly two and a half thousand miles away. Some people at the record company were privately expressing anxiety about letting the band drive halfway across the country. Who knows when and where they might turn up.
