It is 9pm on Christmas Night, December 25th, 2002. ‘Happy Holidays’ to y’all. I sincerely hope this time of year is good to you and those you love. However, I’m sorry to say that my holiday season has begun on a profoundly sad note. Two days ago I awoke to some heartbreaking news that by now I’m sure many of you are aware of.

On December 22nd, one of the brightest shining lights of my life, singer/guitarist for The Clash, Joe Strummer, was suddenly dead at the young age of fifty. Now, I understand that Joe Strummer may mean very little to you but as you’ve no doubt noticed above, I’ve chosen to begin this Juno Update with a quote by him. The man and his music meant a great deal to me. The quote comes from something he said during an interview with a U.S. newspaper this past July. This same quote was reprinted in the obituary article I read on the day of his passing. His own words very concisely express how I’d always imagined the man, his music, and his lifelong mission. To a tee, his humble words deftly sum up everything I (and a great many other people I’m sure) have ever felt about music, and about the power of punk rock in particular. On the morning after his death, I read this quote over and over, feeling like I needed to find some way of saying something about The Clash and the significance of Strummer’s life on my own.

"I will always believe in punk rock, because it's about creating something for yourself…."
–Joe Strummer

Some people have families. Some people don’t. Some people do but they no longer want to. And sometimes it’s the other way around- some families don’t want their people. A lot of folks find themselves with complicated situations suggesting something in between. Families are combinations of flesh and bone, specific places, random joyous events and tragic consequences- all seemingly interconnected but often without foresight and well beyond anyone’s control. People are born. People die. People abandon. People vanish. People go mad and fall apart. People move on. Sometimes people do good things with the time they’re given, fulfilling their life’s purpose while nurturing and loving their kin to the fullest. Though this isn’t often the case, it does happen, I’ve seen it a time or two. Drawing from my own life experience I can truthfully say I have no idea what ‘The American Family’ is correctly supposed to look like. It’s all a muddle and to be honest that’s exactly the way I’ve come to like it. The world is a predictable chaos. Being born is easy but figuring out what to do with it all once you’re here- how to navigate family, food, finances, work, art, sex, love, loss, good times and bad fortune… well, that’s always the difficult part. Sometimes it’s fascinating. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it’s soul crushing. Sometimes it’s just a whole lot of days blurring into one another.

Beyond and/or often in-place-of blood ties, some people find creative projects and then establish communities within their artistic pursuits, (music and touring, writing, skateboarding, photography, knitting, painting, blah blah blah…) For some of us there is little else that gives such comparable value or purpose to our lives. From the combined raw materials of experience, intuition and absolute terror- we create art in an effort to make sense of where we came from, and in an effort to define who and what we are today, and in an effort to hopefully feel good about our contributions to this world as we move through life. Some people are born into a world of turmoil with a whole lot of nothing around to guide them, a world where things routinely get much worse before they occasionally get better. This I suppose is the way I, and a whole lot of other kids in the punk rock community, grew up.

But this is no ‘woe is me’ bullshit. I make this observation with little sadness anymore. Because though my earliest years were filled with a lot of decay and confusion, it was during these years that I also discovered music and writing, (probably in an effort to escape that very same decay and confusion). That these gifts somehow found their way into my life and held on so tenaciously still leaves me baffled and grateful.

From time to time I wonder how in the hell music has become such a huge part of so many of our lives, specifically punk rock? I suppose for me it all began with The Clash. Which is precisely why Joe Strummer’s death feels like it’s leaving such a massive hole in my chest. I’m interested in the work that people do: the words, the songs, the films, the novels, the paintings, and the photographs…. I’m interested in the creative stuff that makes a person worthy of comment and consideration. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lot of output or a little. An individual’s creative contribution to our collective human experience is what fascinates me. It could be one song or four hundred, doesn’t matter- as long as whatever it is it hits me like a ton of bricks and then stays on my mind.

Joe Strummer has always gripped me, not for his celebrity but for the ingenuity of his songs, the humanity of his lyrics, and the power with which he conveyed that material on stage. Even when The Clash was the biggest, most important band in the whole goddamn world, there was an admirable vulnerability and humility he always seemed to possess. Clearly, he was in awe of what punk rock had done for him, he was grateful for where it had taken him in life. And though he very aware of how he’d helped to evolve the genre, he was always humble about it, which is truly beautiful considering how much The Clash accomplished during their short existence. More so than any other band of the late-1970’s, The Clash pulled punk out of the gutter and put it onto the radios and turntables of every breed of music lover imaginable around the world.

By the mid-1980’s, The Clash brought punk to my house. This was no small fete; at the time I was just one more poor, horrifically angry, desperate kid living in one wasted rental home after another, getting my ass kicked, watching people die too soon, bouncing from school to school, and reeling from one family crisis to the next. To say the least, I didn’t come from an artistically encouraging household and I sure as hell didn’t know anything about music or politics. Tired as it sounds, punk changed all that.

From the time I was little more than ten years old I had songs like “Train in Vain,” “Guns of Brixton,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “Straight To Hell,” and “Know Your Rights,” swimming around in my head. But how? For a while I had two older sisters. One of which helped my father raise me until her sudden death, and the other who I was only vaguely acquainted with during my earliest years. After my sister passed away, the other came to live with my father and I to allegedly ‘help out.’ She was nineteen. Prior to this I’d never really known much about her other than she liked to chain-smoke and draw cartoons. She could drink and swear like a merchant marine. All through her adolescence she’d had problems with the cops and was frequently a runaway. When I was about 8 years old the Green River Murderer killed one of her best friends. What can I say? Clearly my sister was trouble. Even at nineteen, she was already a pretty good conman. She grew into one hell of a violent, small-time hood. And then she eventually made herself into a master criminal and vanished without a trace. Just gone. Poof!

To my knowledge she’s alive somewhere, could be a penitentiary down south or it could be a motel somewhere in Bloomington, Indiana. Fuck if anyone can say for sure where she is now, only she and the winds know the address for certain. She’s reared her head only twice in the last dozen years, both times briefly coming up for air under seriously dubious conditions and then quickly vanishing again. There have been more than a few people who’ve speculated that this is more a blessing than a curse. Depending on which day you ask, I’m not one of them. In some oddball way I know she loved me. To her credit, before leaving she turned me onto rock and roll. Most significantly, she turned me onto The Clash’s triple LP, Sandinista.

Flipping that thing six times over on a turntable felt like an act of God to a kid like me. I was AMAZED that a punk band would have the balls to release an album on three pieces of vinyl. Even after the death of my sister, I saw Sandinista as a sure sign that life could be worthwhile. I took an otherworldly comfort in that album. Despite chronic depression, network television and life’s generally dodgy odds, those songs showed me that every last one of us could make things that were fun, inventive and special. It made me believe that all of us, (not just mega-stars like Frank Sinatra or Led Zeppelin), could make valid, worthwhile creative contributions to the world. It gave me hope that through such work all of us could find community and build lives worth living.

Joe Strummer didn’t pick up a guitar until he was in his early twenties. He never had any sort of formal education in music theory. Nor did he give a flying fuck about popular songwriting conventions or artistic social traditions. He simply decided to do it. He was born in Turkey and raised the son of a British foreign diplomat. He attended elite public schools (equivalent in the US being private schools) and like many of his schoolmates he appeared on track for a life of boring privilege. Given his upbringing he could have very easily become just one more self-serving, Thatcher-approved Upper Class jackass. But he had a different kind of spirit; he had an artistic sensibility and the convictions of an iconoclast. He may have started out with musically sloppy hands but he had good ears and he poured his heart into his music. He had an interest in politics and wanted to affect change in the world he lived in.

For these reasons Joe Strummer and The Clash were incredibly inspirational to a kid like me. Because given the way I was growing up I saw no future for myself. I didn’t feel naturally talented at anything. I was uncoordinated and shy. I was furious that my sister was dead. I was terrified to feel my father and I so broken, so devastated by her loss and everything that came in its wake. In every way I was an outsider fuck-up. When punk came into my life I was still an outsider fuck-up but I felt like an outsider fuck-up who could develop a passion for music and writing. This made all the difference. It gave me a purpose. It made me want to get up and out, to see the world, to discover new places, to meet people and share ideas. Punk rock made me want to do things with people and for people, rather than shut myself off in depressed isolation.

Fortunate to discover this music at an early age, it showed me that even though life was decidedly cruel and often made zero sense, it could still occasionally be a state of grace; a place where wonderful things came along every now and again that made the whole thing worth sticking around for. At 10 years old, that was what The Clash represented to me.

In later years I met friends who turned me onto bands like Devo, The Stiff Little Fingers, Minor Threat, The Who, Beyond Possession, Sham 69, The Buzzcocks, Soulside, The Jam, 7 Seconds, X, Talk Talk, Fugazi, Subhumans, Elvis Costello and The Attractions, Bad Brains, on and on and on. We found a common passion, a common purpose- punk rock. Through it we created a community for ourselves. In the songs of different bands and artists, and in the lives of my friends I found a new kind of family, a family that in many ways became more real and comforting than the one I’d be born into. Strummer was right- punk rock is about creating something from yourself. It’s not a rulebook. It’s not a fashion. It’s not a ‘sound.’ Rather, it’s an idea. It’s an ethic. It’s a creative license and an open doorway to the rest of your life.

HO HO HO HO HO HO…..

So tonight as I sit here thinking about Joe Strummer and The Clash, it is Christmas 2002. And once again in true Northwest tradition it is cold, raining and very windy here in Seattle. My friends have loaned me their home for a few days while they’re out of town. I’ve gotta give all thanks and praise to my pals because back at my house the basement’s been flooding for the last three days. Since it’s the holidays our slumlord isn’t too keen on sending his handyman over to fix things right about now. Classy. Oh well, so be it. I love right where I’m at tonight; this is the same home in which I did a lot of the initial four-track recordings and vocal arrangements for Juno’s album, A Future Lived In Past Tense. This evening I’m writing and listening to music in comfort, and there isn’t single hemorrhaging sewer line in sight. Such comfort really is all one can ask for in the dead of winter. I have access to orange juice, a fireplace and sixty channels of near worthless cable television. Life is good.

Flipping through the channels I was PSYCHED to find that MTV was airing the Clash documentary: The Clash: West Way To The World. And much to my surprise every time the network would go to a commercial break they’d run a segment of that same Joe Strummer quote across the bottom of the screen:

"I will always believe in punk-rock, because it's about creating something for yourself….”- Joe Strummer

Now you may feel the knee-jerk desire to bust on MTV for being a pack of morbid opportunists but c’mon, fuck it. Tonight we will cut them some slack. They hang themselves the other 364 days of the year but tonight it’s Christmas and they’re playing a Clash documentary in honor of Joe Strummer. It could be a lot worse. They could’ve aired anything. They could’ve handed us one more “All-Star Jam” filled with every modern day pop radio jackass currently making the Top 10 on TRL. But they didn’t. They’ve given me exactly what I want and precisely what the rest of this goddamn country needs: an unsentimental look back on one of the greatest band’s in punk rock and mainstream music. Tonight, especially coming from MTV, I was pleasantly surprised and truly grateful. Because The Clash wasn’t just a band, they are and always will be something worth studying, something worth learning from, and even something worth believing in as a model for how a band, (maybe your band tomorrow?) can in some small way change music, change the world, and influence the politics of generations to come.

Toward the end of the documentary Joe Strummer looked back on the life of his band. He said, “We had the suss to embrace the world and all its varieties…. You need to have everybody firing on all cylinders. You can’t have any passengers on board because it slows the whole thing down.”

Though by that point in the film he was talking about the demise of The Clash, he was speaking a language I could relate to; he was speaking the language of punk. I felt a lot of solidarity with him. He was talking about setting goals, doing things yourself, seeing the world and trying to create something in your life, on your own terms and sharing it with others. He wasn’t talking about “the music biz,” or fashion, or the all too often self-defeatist elitism that goes on within the punk scene. Not at all. He was talking about the music that he and his band mates had made together, where it fit into their lives and how they dealt with touring, recording, and managing the life of their combined efforts (sometimes revealing that they did it well, and sometimes not so well at all).

Ultimately, by working hard at something they believed in, The Clash were able to create all those astonishing songs. Among other material, they gave us the albums, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, London Calling, and Sandinista, which are all fucking amazing. Period. Their music embraced and united so many disparate musical genres and global movements. All at once The Clash was a cross-pollination of political analysis, rock and roll transcendence, punk fury, grass roots activism, anti-fashion fashion, rock steady rhythm, hip hop exploration, and reggae homage. This was a band that championed global community building, charitable works and social justice.

Despite the obstacles and occasional contradictions, The Clash had supreme focus; for a time their collective efforts meant everything to them. From that focus came a wealth of important, timeless music. And even though I was just a little kid who really didn’t understand anything, I intuitively trusted that their efforts made the world a better and more interesting place. At the very least it made it a better place for me. Their music gave me hope that there really might be something interesting out there for all of us. The Clash helped a lot of fucked up kids believe that being alive might work out okay after all.

Juno leaves for Japan in a few days, and for that I will be eternally grateful to Joe Strummer. We couldn’t have gotten there without him. Joe Strummer, Rest In Peace (1952-2002). Thank you for reading, and thanks again for sharing in the life of our music. Happy Holidays, Arlie/Juno