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Feb. 8, 2018 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
45:45
Get Off My Lawn #79 | Car Trek
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I chose that jam.
Well, I chose that jam because it's International Clash Day here on Earth.
But I chose that particular one because of the beginning, because it's an intro song, right?
Elevator going up on the gleaming corridors of the 51st floor.
The barrel can't snore, it can shatter on the floor.
Elon Musk sent one of his cars into space.
Isn't that awesome?
Car trek.
Elon Musk is a billionaire because of tax scams and the myth of alternative energy.
So every time you talk about paying more tax, just know it goes to billionaires.
It doesn't go to your stupid cause.
We're like Africa.
The more money you give it, the more money the despots get.
Elon Musk is the Mugabe of America.
He doesn't massacre people.
He just takes your money.
But yeah, The Clash are an incredible band because they sort of sum up your life.
They sum up regret, betrayal, commitment, entrepreneurialship, capturing the zeitgeist.
You know, I've always said to be successful in New York, all you got to do is when you get that moment, and you will get that moment if you hustle, ram a crowbar into it, pry it open, and just cram as much stuff as you can in that moment.
And then you'll be successful.
The example I like to use is Ryan McGinley, photographer, friend of mine, who, by the way, in his recent book, neglected to mention I discovered him.
I noticed this.
I'm so hated that when there's books about the early oughts in the New York scene, I'm left out of the history books.
But I was the early oughts in New York City.
I created Williamsburg for f ⁇ 's sakes.
But what Ryan did is he got a gig at the New York Times magazine very early in his career.
He rammed the crowbar in.
It was to shoot Olympic swimmers.
And he rented all this equipment.
He'd never done underwater photography before.
And he took like a thousand photographs and used lenses and filters and all this amazing stuff.
So they got the pictures.
I went, holy shit.
I thought you were just going to take a couple photos of some guy swimming.
You did an incredible job.
Oh, I like that, Dave.
This is how I want you to do it from now on.
I don't care if it's sloppy, but pull up pictures while I'm talking.
Yeah.
And this is what the clash did.
There was a zeitgeist.
There was a moment in the late 70s with punk rock, and they wrote it.
You know, you have to understand Britain to understand punk rock.
They had two classes from the beginning of time, from the Romans, basically, until the 70s.
There was the rich and the poor, and they liked it that way.
That's what pisses me off about Britain.
Why'd you want to be middle class?
They enjoyed their classes.
They still do to a certain extent.
They're still obsessed with those dumb accents.
But Maggie Thatcher is the personification of a growing tide that was happening in the late 70s.
She wasn't prime minister until 79, but the moment was already there.
And the moment, let's just play this in the background while I talk.
We don't need the audio.
We'll have a little clash mix.
She was the embodiment of this privatization that was going on in Britain at the time.
And that's inspiring.
That's American.
It took them that long.
America figured out they want freedom and liberty in, what, the 1700s?
It took Britain until the 70s to figure that out.
But the great thing about it was that it empowered, you know, this middle class.
And for the first time ever, there was a way that poor people could come rich people, could become rich people.
You know, the great thing about America, the reason they vote Republican all the time is because they don't hate the rich.
They think, I'm going to be rich one day.
And the Brits were finally considering that.
And that was also visible in music.
I know I'm talking a lot about the intro song, but I think it's very important.
And we'll get to the news of the day shortly.
But for once, I want to go off on the intro song because it's indicative of a much bigger thing.
And it is International Clash Day.
I think that's Paul Simon in right there, the most stylish man in music.
Daddy was a bank robber and he loved the way it was going.
He just loved to live that way and he loved to steal your money.
So the dinosaur rock was big.
You know, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
And punk rock came along and said, yeah, you don't need to do, you don't need to be a top musician, although that drummer, Topper Heddon, was a top jazz musician.
But you can just rattle it out.
It doesn't need production.
Just make it.
DIY.
Do it yourself.
Mass capitalism, really, is what it was about.
And so these young punks came along and said, I want to be a band.
I don't have any money.
The Sex Pistols stole all their equipment, and they just banged out music with no professional training.
Sid Vicious was the bassist for the Sex Pistols before he ever played bass.
They just figured it out.
The Clash, Back then, bands were organized by managers, and they were sort of like models.
I mean, they were fashion projects.
I think the clash were chosen as much for their looks as they were for their talent.
And Bernie Rhodes was the manager at the time, and he said, let's get these guys together.
And then they just basically locked them in a room and said, practice.
Now, simultaneously in America, there was a funny thing going on with basically the same revolution.
A lot of people say London copied New York.
No, they were both going on simultaneously.
The Ramones played, was it the 100 Club in 1977, I think it was, or 76.
At that moment, then after that, you started seeing all these punk bands.
You go, oh, it was the Ramones.
No, no, no.
You saw the punk bands play like within a day of the Ramones.
Clearly, they already had a set ready.
They already had songs.
The clash had been locked in a studio by Bernie Rhodes, practicing again and again and again, trying to get their sound right.
So the Ramones didn't create punk.
The funny thing about the Ramones, by the way, is I don't think they were going for what they ended up with.
Back in the 70s, there was a big resurgence of 50s culture.
We had American graffiti, Fonzarelli, Happy Days.
Everyone wanted to be a 1950s greaser, especially in New York, especially in Queens.
So they tried to do rockabilly music.
Hey, we're booting up the back streets, doom to do, generate thin heat.
A Blitz Creek bop, bum, ba, doom, ba, dab, doom, ba, dum, bop, ba.
Sounds like Eddie Cochran.
But they played it really fast.
And the Ramones are just dumb people.
They're just, they're, they're retards, basically.
Dumb guys doing 50s music.
They go to Britain.
Britain over-intellectualizes everything, so they go, oh, I see what's going on.
It's an empowerment of the working classes.
All right, let's see what happens.
Are they going to make me watch a commercial?
Or are they just going to go right into the video?
Yeah, they're going to make me watch a commercial.
That's not cool.
I guess we'll be, this will be our little commercial breaks.
So, yes, the Ramones did inspire a lot of people in punk rock by playing that show in 77.
They didn't invent it, though.
What invented it was this new feeling of DIY, do it yourself, we can do it.
And so it already had huge momentum.
All the Ramones did was add to the momentum.
And so The Clash started their shows 1977.
Now, the record labels, the mainstream, didn't understand this.
You know, from zero till 1976, it was just the best musicians formed a band, you signed them, they played shows, sold a million records, you made your money back.
You understood everything about them.
Now, there's this cacophony on stage.
How do I monetize that?
So the record labels were just running around like chickens with their head cut off, trying to figure out what this next wave is.
And The Clash took advantage of that.
They were signed by CBS almost immediately and came out with this record.
The Clash, their epitomeous debut.
You'll notice, by the way, it says on it, to Gavin, open your eyes, I said to the crowd, but no, Joe Strummer, 1999, that's when I met him.
We were bros, me and Joe's.
The inside joke he's talking about here is he was with his family, Joe Strummer was, and his kids, and he realized, oh my God, we're right by the alleyway where we shot the cover of our album.
And so he told his wife and his kids to close their eyes.
And then he led them to the alley.
And then he stood in the alley exactly like that.
And then once they were positioned, he said, all right, open your eyes.
And they open their eyes.
They recognize the alleyway and they go, Joe, can we go, please?
Come on.
And he likes that story because it's so anticlimactic.
His family doesn't care.
His family are not Clash fans.
They're his family.
So they were not impressed that they happened to be in the alley.
This is an alley outside their recording studio where they did the album.
They just pounded that out.
And that album, by the way, was on CBS, their debut album.
They had never really played a solo show when they were signed.
And this video is distracting me.
I'm not sure I'll be able to do this.
We'll have to put it in post.
Oh, Nicaragua.
They're really into the Sandinistas.
They named an album Sandinista.
But that album, CBS, didn't like it.
They didn't release it in the States.
It was too noisy.
It was too raw.
See what I mean?
It's sort of like my dad.
When he emigrated to Canada, he hated me being punk in high school because he thought education is the most important thing in the world.
You're jeopardizing your education.
I want to get the communists out of here.
And I said, Dad, you're popular in Canada if you have good grades and weird hair.
It doesn't jeopardize your standing.
And also, you're from Scotland.
Why are you importing 1940s Scottish culture?
It's weird, there's all these Chinese ads.
Why are you importing 1940s Scottish culture into Canada?
That's bizarre.
Adapt, move on.
And the record labels were the same way.
They couldn't adapt.
They couldn't handle the clash.
So all of this is in a very short time span.
And the clash were immediately ostracized for signing to CBS.
Joe Strummer was kind of reklempt about it himself.
He was very distraught because he had come from a pub band scene.
And there was a band called the 101ers.
They were named after the squat they lived in.
And they were kind of rockabilly-ish.
That was Joe Strummer's background.
But Joe Strummer, by the way, is a rich kid.
He's not even middle class.
He's upper middle class.
And he had traveled the world, you know, as a young boy, going to private schools.
And he was slumming it.
A lot of punks were like that.
I was like that.
They were slumming it because it was cool.
So he was living in a squat, really, as a joke.
And so he claims he had to sign a CBS because he was, you know, he was sick of worrying About where his next meal is coming from.
But I'm not buying that.
And you'll see that, by the way, this is a little mini tangent.
You'll see that in the lyrics, all this glorification of multiculturalism and the Sandinistas, and I love Nicaragua and I love freedom fighters.
It's based on rich kids traveling the world and sampling just the elite part.
Like you go to Indonesia, you don't see, you know, the fact that they have no, they can't drink from a tap because there's so many brutal parasites because it's such a backwards country and they're murdering people for drinking alcohol.
You get caught with a joint in Indonesia, you're looking at life in prison.
But he'd go there as a rich kid, go to some beautiful restaurant, see some ladies, and he'd go, Indonesia's beautiful, man, you gotta check it out.
You know who else has that exact same background and life philosophy?
Pinch.
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. from the New York Times, the editor of the New York Times, the impetus for the New York Times' multicultural pandering.
Their whole diversity is our strength garbage, comes from a rich kid traveling the world, going to private schools, seeing the very, very top elite best of each country.
Which is why, by the way, when you talk to the left about multiculturalism and diversity, they always talk about restaurants.
Even with Trump, when Trump says he wants to get rid of, he wants to build a wall, he wants to get rid of illegals, they go, you might want to try the taco.
Vincente Fox, too, he was asked, have the Mexicans ever invented anything of note?
And he goes, yes.
And he talked about the Aztecs, and they go, no, no, no, within the past 50 years, 100 years.
And he goes, the taco?
Food, food, food.
Diversity is different servants in different outfits feeding me.
That's what it's about.
Anyway, The Clash, their debut album, Incredible Album, Incredible Energy.
Joe Strummer was coming from a world of pub bands where you just sort of, you're in the background, you know, and you play some covers and you amuse people and they want you to turn it down, actually.
And then he saw the Sex Pistols and Joe Strummer was stunned to see that you can be a band and say, these are our songs, and f ⁇ you if you don't like them.
The Sex Pistols kind of invented that, which again was really Malcolm McLaren.
These are the managers.
They were the puppeteers.
And I'm against that.
I like the idea of a show.
I like the idea of you all dress the same and you have sort of an ethos.
You have a message.
You're a cohesive unit.
But the band can handle that themselves.
This idea that you're at the beck and call of a manager, it's just wrong.
And we'll see why it's wrong in a minute.
So the clash, find a song from that album.
Oh, how about this song?
Police Santi.
Now this is a reggae classic.
This is on a punk album.
Terry Chimes, I think, is drumming before they got Topperhead and the jazz guy.
Scott.
This is an interesting trend, too, going on simultaneously within punk is this Jamaican influence.
I think it was brought in by a guy named Don Letz, a Jamaican.
And by the way, that's also a fascinating side story where, you know, you talk about smash the patriarchy, smash capitalism.
Jamaica did it.
They got rid of those evil white men in 1969.
And what happened after that?
Jamaicans went, ah, this vexed me so, this independence, you know.
I got Babadon closing in on me, man.
And so there was a massive influx of Jamaican immigrants into Britain in the 70s, shortly after they had declared independence, shortly after they had eradicated the patriarchy, capitalism, the evil colonists, Britain.
This is why I fight for it here in America, all this ethnomasochism and we have to kill ourselves and we hate the patriarchy and we hate capitalism.
I've seen what happens when we eradicate all that.
And it's not pretty.
Jamaica has sucked since independence.
Haiti has sucked since independence.
South Africa, Mugabe, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, all blow chunks.
I don't know what it is about us colonists, us Westerners, but we're great at systems.
So don't kick us out.
In America, they don't want to kick us out.
They want to replace us with feminists, which real bad idea.
But anyway, the clash, as they did these punk songs, they also did a lot of reggae songs.
And that's the one I was playing for.
Let's play a little bit of that here on international.
What is with these Chinese ads?
He has the same microphone as you.
Oh yeah, he's got the same mic.
See you, Mike.
See you, Mike.
Just up so the Clash were ostracized for signing to CBS.
I don't blame them.
Who cares?
As long as they don't tell you what to do.
And they did tell them what to do.
They put out an album after that debut called Give Them Enough Rope that was overproduced by some mainstream producer.
It was still a good album because they were a talented band.
But after that, they said, you know what?
We can give you high production and all that, but we want to do it our way.
And they came out with London Calling.
And I think it came out in 1979.
Rolling Stone called it the greatest album of the 80s, even though it was not released in the 80s.
And that's like saying the best movie of the year on January 1st.
Actually, no, it's like calling a movie the best movie of the next year on December 29th.
And London Calling is an absolute masterpiece, and it was about their new life.
They sort of, they got pushed out of punk for sinning.
You know, the Crass, my favorite band, they had a song, they said that we were trash, but a name is Crass, not Clash.
They can stuff their punk credentials.
It's them that takes the cash.
They won't change nothing with their fashionable talk.
RAR badge with their process walk.
RAR was rock against racism.
The clash were really against racism.
Back before that was, you know, the norm.
And crass were saying loads of white men standing in the park.
Objecting to racism is like a candle in the dark.
Black man's got his problems and his way to deal with it.
He doesn't need help from you white liberal shits.
If you take a closer look to the way things really stand, you'll see that we're all just n ⁇ s to the rulers of this land.
Punk was once an answer to years of crap.
So that's how the clash were perceived.
And instead of accepting that, they adapted.
This is the key to why I'm talking about the clash so much today.
You have to adapt.
The cover of the post yesterday was this guy who killed himself because he lost his job as a limo driver.
What?
That's your identity?
I mean, I understand a soldier like Terry Shapert who's in the trenches and that it's over and he has PTSD because his identity is with his boys.
A limo driver?
A pardon?
You love traffic that much?
And the clash were always about adapting and they were about remaining true to each other, but they were also about kicking each other out.
I mean, Topper Hedden, the drummer, his heroin addiction was getting too brutal.
It's like Albert Hammond with the strokes.
The addiction gets to the point where you go, well, you're screwing us over.
The same with the proud boys.
If one of them is pictured with a swastika, even as a joke, I go, you're just helping other people get fired.
You're out.
I got to cut you loose.
With Vice, we'd see that all the time.
Guys would get so addicted to cocaine that they'd take money from the company or go somewhere in a business trip to open up a store and then spend it on themselves.
And I go, I got to cut you loose.
So you're constantly as an entrepreneur, and that's what a band is.
It's a business.
It's a company.
You're constantly as an entrepreneur volleying between loyalty and being a good person and having honor and character and standing by your boys and cutting people out who are a danger to the company.
I'm sure with my advice, one side would say that you were cut out because you were a risk to the company.
Others would say I left because the company is going in a different direction and I didn't want to be part of it.
And others would say I was betrayed.
History is written by the winners, and it's all open to interpretation, but this is my interpretation of the clash.
They were always adapting, always moving, and really, like, musically they peaked with London Calling, right?
But culturally, I think they peaked when they came to New York, which was around the same time, but immediately after that, around 1980, they came to New York.
Oh, yeah, that's a good video.
This is them.
So they played a show in New York.
Again, the mainstream labels couldn't figure them out.
The promoters couldn't even figure them out.
They thought, they're playing a bunch of shows in a row?
That's too many shows.
I don't think anyone's going to come.
So they just kept selling tickets.
And they oversold it to the tune of thousands.
The capacity for this venue was like 1,700, and they sold 3,500 tickets opening night.
So the fire department shut it down.
And then the clash said, no, no, no.
We're going to stay.
We're going to play.
I think they played something like nine shows in a row.
People kept coming to the same show, too.
And while they were there in New York, they recorded a hip-hop song.
Now, hip-hop is also an amazing cultural event at the time because the Bronx, thanks to Roger Moses, he had built a highway through the Bronx.
The Bronx was a beautiful suburban neighborhood.
Lots of Italians there.
Roger Moses wants to get, I don't know, I don't understand this.
You want to get out of New York faster?
You're just going to, that doesn't work when you do that.
When you build a wider bridge into Manhattan, it's not like traffic ends.
More people go, oh, I can get into Manhattan.
So it's smoother for like a week.
That's what Roger Moses didn't get.
He dealt in five-year spurts.
That's the way politicians work, too.
They're only worried about their term.
So he goes, oh, it's overcrowded.
We need affordable housing.
Let's build projects.
Now poor people go, I'm just going to live in Manhattan and have a view of the river.
So they just get filled up.
Same with open borders and immigration.
You give amnesty to 1.8 million people.
You incentivize illegal immigration.
So how does this relate to the clash again?
Oh, yeah.
So when Robert Moses built that highway, the Bronx was decimated.
You build a highway through the middle of a suburb.
It's no longer a quaint little suburb.
The Italians left.
It became blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, with rubble everywhere.
It looked like World War II.
There's a famous moment Reagan went in there and just said, you guys got to get over the fact that your neighborhood got ruined and pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.
So murder was rampant there in the 70s.
And there's a good documentary about it.
I think it's called The Rubble or something.
And there were so many gangs.
You know, the movie The Warriors was based on that time.
There was that many gangs, the Ching-Alings, who are still going, actually.
I forget all their names, but the Baseball Furies were a ridiculous gang.
But there was tons of actual gangs back then.
And then hip-hop came along.
And all of a sudden, you could settle the score with a rap battle.
And the rap battle, too, wasn't like, I'm going to kill your mother.
It was like, I'm the best, then the girls love me, and the chicken tastes like wood.
And it was a really cool solution to a serious problem.
So in 1980, you had this incredible energy in New York where it was like the warring is over.
The death is done.
So punk rock and hip-hop collided in this sort of cultural epoch of elation.
And that is precisely when the clash had arrived.
Play that trailer about that time, 1980 in New York with The Clash.
Well.
I was so gone with it that the others used to call me whack attack and you know I walk around with a beat box.
WBLS was like blasting all over the city and we just hooked on to some of that vibe and made our own version of it.
We made an instrumental mix of Mag 7 and WBLS played it to death.
You couldn't go anywhere in New York that summer without hearing that.
And that was us.
weirdo punk rock white guys doing the kit Brings you back to this awful place.
That was when hip-hop was just starting, you know, and that was like another signpost of what was to come.
We sort of fell in with some graffiti artists and they made a big banner for us.
Now I like these sites from New York Maybe dark but I wanna talk It might rain, it might snow Alright, you can just play that in the background and we get it.
You know what's interesting about that too is the clash were able to adapt because of all their different cultures.
Kevin, I thought you always crap on multiculturalism.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
The clash were able to adapt because of their different Western cultures.
Joe Strummer has his rhythm and blues, Topper Hedden has his jazz, they have classical training, they have all these different Western influences, which makes them Western chauvinists, and it makes them an incredible band that could adapt.
So don't try to trick me by thinking I'm talking about multiculturalism in a global sense, because the West is the best.
The other countries suck.
The Clash were fantastic because they were so educated.
You know, they were so musically educated.
Anyway, so the 80s is going great.
And they have mainstream hits.
They put out combat rock that had Rock the Kazbah.
I think that was their biggest mainstream hit.
If you dig that up, David's got a cool video.
But Bernie Rhodes, the manager, is still getting in there, trying to influence these people, trying to manipulate them.
And in Glenn Beck's book, Miracles and Massacres, he says, you know, I'm going through all these historical events and I'm realizing that, yeah, that's Rock the Casburg.
Let's hear it for a second.
You'll notice lots of beatboxes in The Clash's visual imagery, which is probably why I have a ghetto blaster to introduce the show.
But yeah, Glenn Beck's book says, either the good guys won or the good guys lost because they listened to the bad guys.
They lost their liberty.
So, you know, you had Paul Revere and in the book, he's got someone else who prevented the assassination of George Washington by taking it upon himself to go and warn George that an assassination was imminent.
That could have, you know, that could be the reason why we won the war against Britain right there.
And then he talks about wounded knee in it, and he says, those prisoners, it was Indian prisoners who were massacred by soldiers, right?
But before the top brass showed up, before they arrived on the scene, the Indians who were prisoners were, you'll see this in the movie Hostiles, a similar story.
The Indians who were prisoners had their own guns.
And they're saying, look, guys, we've got to take you here.
We're going to get attacked by tribes on the way.
So here's your own guns.
And let's just all get there together.
We all want the same thing.
We all want to stay alive.
And then the top brass showed up and said, Hillel, wait a minute.
Why are you allowing these Indians to have guns?
Absolutely not.
No, no, no, no.
Confiscate the guns immediately.
So they go, we've got to confiscate your guns.
And they go, no, no, no, no.
My gun is my life.
This is back when it was as expensive as a home and as valuable as a home.
So they start fighting back.
And the next thing you know, they're shooting people in the back, killing women and children.
That was the authoritarians that started that.
And by the way, to this day, the reason we know about this story is because the American soldiers were so horrified by this that they wanted, it was well documented, you know?
And it's also why to this day, you have a lot of military people who, those guys won medals for Wounded Knee.
They want those medals revoked.
And this is what happened to the clash in the 80s.
Bernie Rhodes decided that rap thing went really well.
Let's get more rappy.
And Mick Jones said, yeah, I got it, Bernie.
And he goes, no, no, you don't got it.
And they kicked out the Topperhead and the drummer for doing heroin.
And Bernie started to get more involved.
And then Joe Strummer, who, you know, wanted the business to succeed, erred on the side of the manager.
A crucial mistake.
Just like Wounded Knee, he erred on the side of the authoritarians.
He erred on the side of big business.
He erred on the side of making more money.
He erred on the side of what the boss says.
What am I going to say about the police?
The police says the boss.
Joe went with the boss.
And that meant that Mick Jones was out.
Now, Mick Jones, coincidentally, went on to do Big Audio Dynamite that was a rappy band.
Exactly where they were going.
The direction was fine, Bernie.
Do you have some Big Audio Dynamite?
Just see what the biggest hit is.
They've got like three big hits.
They're an acquired taste, but I really enjoy them.
And then Cut the Crap came out, the Clash's last album.
We're now up to like 1981, I guess.
Merry Cool Duty!
Really friendly.
I like to play this when the kids are around, because they don't like punk.
and they'd say, Hey, Dad, this sucks.
Robert Wagon, let it show you.
That's Mick Jones.
Take it to a place where the healing falls off.
And then Cut the Crap was the same kind of album.
That's enough of that.
There's a great song on Cut the Crap.
So after Mick Jones was cut out, by the way, Mick Jones today, you've got to see this guy.
Do you have that footage of him?
He's running for Labour.
He's running for the Labour Party as an MP or something in Britain.
And you just think, wow, Joe didn't get over it.
You haven't gotten over it.
Look at him.
That's Mick Jones today.
Play some of that footage.
Okay, so I'm sending in this Rushcliffe selection because I think I'm the only candidate who can beat Ken Clark.
I'm passionately pro-European.
I'm passionately pro-European.
I enforced a general election this year on that subject.
Dude, it was just a band.
It was a quarter century ago.
Move on.
I'm just kidding.
That is a hideous trans woman who looks like Mick Jones.
Mick got over it.
He started Big Audio Dynamite, I think, in 1982 or something, a year after he was kicked out of the clash.
And they did Cut the Crap.
And Cut the Crap is like a disco-y-rappy kind of a thing.
Lots of like soccer chants, but lots of beatboxes and drum machines.
I think the band, Bernie Rhodes hired all new people in the band.
And I think the new members suffered a kind of a psychosis because getting to be in the clash was disturbing.
And Joe Strummer wouldn't hang out with the band anymore.
The thing about Joe, you have to understand, is he sort of got this punk mentality that was sort of stolen from the glam scene in the 70s, Matt the Hoopal.
And that was that scene I was talking about at the beginning of the show, which was this, we're for the people.
Like Mat the Hoopal were a glam band.
And glam was the precursor to punk.
That's why you can prove it didn't start in New York.
It's an evolution of glam.
Slade and these bands and Matt the Hoopal.
And they had a thing where the fans would just come backstage.
Like there was no sort of groupies or let me see, I choose you and I choose you, like with the dinosaur rock bands.
It was just everyone's fun.
Everyone would get on the stage with these bands and they'd be friends with them.
And Joe Strummer took that on too, to a fault, by the way.
When I would hang out with Joe, he would, I say when I, it was like two or three times, to be honest.
But some kid would show up.
Like there was a bar on 10th and A. What the hell is it called?
There was Three of Cups and there was A bar, 2A?
No.
Anyway, some bar I'm forgetting the name of.
And like this guy would go, holy shit, are you Joe Strummer?
And he'd go, yeah.
And he goes, can I get a picture with you?
Again, selfies.
By the way, people who want selfies, I don't have any selfies with Joe Strummer.
Joe fucking Strummer.
So you don't need a selfie with me, okay?
I'm never doing selfies again.
Don't ask me.
And Joe would go, yeah, no problem.
I got an idea.
Come on.
And you take me to the bathroom as the photographer, because he'd like give me the kid's camera.
Then he takes off his shirt and he puts it on the kid, who's like 21.
And then he puts the kid's shirt on him.
And we do a whole photo shoot.
That's the way Joe Strummer was.
He was a man of the people.
Fun guy to hang out with.
I wrote about this in my book, In Death of Cool.
You know, we're walking down the street and he starts going through the garbage.
I'm like, did you just get out of jail?
And he goes, that's the way it is with guitarists.
We're obsessed with little bric-a-brac.
Ask, who was it, like, Buddy Guy or some classic guitarist that invented rock and roll.
Ask Buddy Guy.
He's going through the garbage.
We went and got drinks.
Fun guy, really like huggy and effusive.
And his friends and his wife would always be like, Joe, we got to go.
We got to keep moving.
Come on.
He's always like, let's talk to this guy.
What's happening?
Hey, you got some bongos.
Let's play them like in the New York subway.
I want to be part of it, man.
He really acted like he had died and then he went to heaven and they said, you know what?
You have one more day.
Go back down.
All right.
Hey, I got one more day.
What's happening, man?
Hey, what's your name?
You got moustache.
We went up for dinner with him with one of the worst people ever, the singer of the Black Crows, Chris Robinson, I think his name is.
And a really annoying guy, kind of a southern wigger in that he wanted to be a cool black guy, not a rapper, but like a blues dude.
Yeah, he's got his bandana on, his beads and stuff.
Just a really sh ⁇ person.
And everyone hated him, including his girlfriend at the time, or his wife, whatever she was.
And I noticed as he got more and more drinks, he's probably nervous because Joe was there, so he was drinking.
And then he started getting a little more sullen.
Well, yeah.
Oh, I'm from the South.
And I was like, you sound like a plantation owner.
What's going on?
And then his girlfriend slash wife, I don't know what she was.
She goes, yeah, Chris gets progressively more black the more he drinks.
And then he goes, Hey, you like pigfoot?
I like every part of the pig.
And then he goes, I eat a pig's ass.
Did they cook it right?
Which reminded me of the Chris Rock line where Chris says, I ate a pig's ass.
Did they cook it right?
Ew.
Yeah, and also when you're going home, Joe's like, where are you going?
I'm like, it's four in the morning, dude.
I'm tie-tie.
No, we're going to go over here.
Let's do that.
I guess he died of Coke.
I never saw him do Coke.
He had some sort of heart palpitation.
I don't think he was the best dad in the world, for the record, because he was so into the band and touring.
And that brings me back to this betrayal.
So he didn't adapt correctly and follow his character and legacy.
He screwed up and he betrayed his friend.
And that broke his brain.
He went away for a while.
He came back.
He wrote This Is England, which is on the last album, Cut the Crap, which is find that song.
Is there a video for it?
No video?
No, no video, but yeah, I got it here.
This song was pan.
Oh, I shouldn't be playing the air drums.
It's a drum machine.
This is how you play the air drum to the drum machine.
I hear again somebody walking.
A great movie too, about the 80s and punk and the skinheads.
There's a great line in that song where it goes.
I got my motorcycle jacket, but I'm walking all the time.
This life will change me.
This is it.
This is how we feel Teaching my kids how to play air guitar the other day.
You've got to remember that it's a straight line.
Never go like this or bend your hand.
And also, when you're playing air guitar, occasionally look at your fret hand.
Because no one has the song perfectly memorized.
So you should be just double checking.
Maybe even like tweak the A if it's going out of key.
So he went nuts and he literally went to live in a cave.
Joe Strummer went to live in a cave in Barcelona, I believe.
Mick Jones went off, had a successful music career.
He got over it.
He's a big boy.
But Joe could never get over the fact that he betrayed his friend Mick Mick, who wrote all the Clash's hits.
Mick Jones was really the brains behind The Clash.
Joe was the heart.
Mick was the brains.
And eventually Joe Strummer, there's a documentary about this that's really good.
Joe Strummer started having bonfires.
He started getting all his friends together and they would play acoustic guitar.
And he also did a great movie called Love Kills.
Oh, he did a good song for Sid and Nancy, Love Kills.
See if you can find that.
So he did have moments.
They did a cool Western, if I recall, I forget what it's called, Hell something.
And yeah, Joe, which is that?
Is that Love Kills?
Yeah, Love Kills.
Rage!
You're watching Rage and I'm a VJ.
Walking out of the window, can you hold a king to die all this world?
When I bust and go to Mexico, we'll kill her all the fine to sleep next.
Oh, I get it!
The plot of this is Sid wasn't killed, he's alive.
He's living in Mexico.
I'm gonna cry if I'm going back a little bit.
Whew.
I'm down and into you, crying for me.
So many of my friends died because they wanted to be a legend.
And they got stuck in that epoch at that time, at Xena.
And they didn't understand that.
It's just a phase.
Just a chapter.
With heroin, it's like you went to Jamaica for a vacation.
And then the vacation's over, and everyone's got their suitcases.
And you look back, and there's your friend wearing this Hawaiian shirt.
And you go, what are you doing, Sid?
And he goes, I'm going to stay here.
You go, it's a resort.
We're just here for a vacation.
No, I love it here.
I'm going to stay in heroin teenage punk rock rebellion.
You go, no, no, no, no.
That's just a vacation we're in.
We're getting married now.
We're having lives.
We've got to go to the airport.
No, bye.
And you go, okay, bye.
Have fun on a resort by yourself.
It's about to be rainy season.
It's going to be pouring with rain here.
It's not that fun.
But that's what they did, and they died there.
Dash snow, Sid Vishes.
Lots of people.
Anyway, sorry.
A little nostalgic there.
Getting emotional.
And so Joe Strom would have these bonfires.
They'd play around, they'd have bongo parties, whatever, and they'd make music together, and it sort of revitalized him.
And he came back to earth in his later years.
I would say this is like the 90s, early, you know, mid-90s up until the 2000s.
He had been restored.
Him and Mick made good.
But the reason I just wasted an entire show talking about the intro song was not just because it's International Clash Day, but because the Clash is a great example of how, as a man, as an entrepreneur,
as an adult, you constantly have to distinguish between what is me being a grown-up, saying goodbye to the past, saying goodbye to clutter, saying goodbye to things that are hurting me, and what is me sticking by something valid, something real, like a family, and being true to myself, having honor and character.
I think Joe screwed up.
It damaged him forever, But I don't blame him because all his previous decisions were great and they made one of the greatest bands in the world.
A band where if someone was standing on your property and they said they suck, you'd say, you know what?
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