Review by New York Times Review
JOE STRUMMER was born John Mellor in 1952, the mostly Scottish, part Armenian, part Jewish son of a self-made diplomat of socialist leanings. After several exotic postings, the family settled in London when John was 7. Scarred slightly by boarding school and immensely by his brother's suicide in 1970, Mellor slacked through art school, renamed himself Woody Mellor, wandered and squatted and scrounged, renamed himself Joe Strummer, and began his pursuit of stardom by singing in the pub-rock 101'ers. From that rather trad band, he was recruited by the theoretically left-wing schemer-manager Bernie Rhodes to join the punk radicals the Clash in 1976. Other members were the pop-savvy guitarist Mick Jones, the style-setting bassist Paul Simonon and, eventually, the deft power drummer Topper Headon. Strummer-Jones proved to be one of rock's great songwriting partnerships, and the Clash produced more exciting, durable music than any punk band except perhaps the Ramones, who didn't approach their ambition or reach. Recorded quickly and with little forethought, their eponymous 1977 debut LP - 14 fast, tough, hooky, furiously funny protest songs that last 35 minutes, including a six-minute reggae cover - is a masterpiece that defined a youth culture. Rolling Stone named their expansive, two-disc "London Calling" (1980), a loud stylistic mélange that revisits Strummer's rootsy 101'ers roots, the greatest album of the '80s. Neither the heavier, tighter "Give 'Em Enough Rope" (1978) nor the spacier, looser, three-disc "Sandinista!" (1981) gets the respect it deserves, and both get plenty. There was also a superb album's worth of singles and, oh yes, the best-selling "Combat Rock" (1982), which made the Clash almost as rich as they were famous - not to mention their intense live show, with Strummer's possessed theatrics the focus whether they were vanning through England or headlining Japan. Yet having achieved the renown he coveted on political terms he could tolerate, Strummer bollixed the deal, firing and then rehiring the devious Rhodes, ditching Headon for his heroin habit and then, fatally, forcing out the comastermind, Jones, for - what, exactly? Prima donna-ism? Stymieing Rhodes's delusional plot to take over the band's music? Whatever, the Clash was shot, and Strummer spent the rest of his life regretting his miscalculations. Over the 18 years preceding his death in 2002 from a congenital heart defect, he consumed prodigious amounts of cannabis and alcohol; raised three kids rather well anyway; dabbled in soundtracks and acting; cut a dreadful solo album; and, toward the end, led a young world-music band called the Mescaleros who weren't as bad as they might have been. The information above - but not its proportions or tone - is drawn entirely from "Redemption Song," Chris Salewicz's "definitive biography" of Strummer, whom Salewicz counted a friend for many good reasons, one of which is that Strummer was a very friendly guy. Most of it is also available in Clash biographies by Pat Gilbert and Marcus Gray, but this book is more passionate and detailed. Writing music bios is hard - even generous advances have a way of disappearing before the job is done right, with overresearched childhoods and rushed end-games common, especially if the writer has no academic salary to fall back on. But Salewicz, a veteran British journalist, clearly cared and took his time - 629 pages' worth. Which of course creates problems of its own. I've paged through music biographies far klutzier than Salewicz's and gratefully come away with what I needed. But for a labor of love, this one's a serious struggle. When I referred back to Jon Savage's Sex Pistols-centered punk history, "England's Dreaming," my eye was caught by the clause "the slow death by suffocation that is all too often the emotional experience of living in England." While this well-put truism is hardly the crowning moment of Savage's excellent book, not once had I encountered prose as striking in Salewicz. Then I looked for the kind of interview quotes that clutter "Redemption Song" and found, not to my surprise, that Savage's were sparer and briefer. A quick check of music bios I admire - of Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Sam Cooke, Sun Ra, Janis Joplin, Sylvester - revealed that not one used supporting quotations even as much as Savage. Disastrously, Salewicz builds his entire story on such material. Whenever a new bit player enters, he or she gets to generalize about Strummer for two or three paragraphs. Is this a tip of the hat to his sources? The habit of someone who came up churning out interviews for music weeklies? Doesn't matter, unfortunately, because it ensures that the book both crawls and jumps around. Had Salewicz written primarily in his own voice, he wouldn't have gone two-thirds as long. But then he would have been compelled to share more of his own thoughts, and they are not his strength. Mid-paragraph about a third of the way in, for instance, he declares, "A rush of pure energy and positive feeling, 'The Clash' was one of the best long-playing records that had ever been made, a stunning piece of art." Forgiving the flat language after the opening phrase, I think this is a crucial judgment, and that "positive feeling," which Salewicz expands on, has not been celebrated often enough. But why then isn't it a topic sentence? Why is "The Clash" described piecemeal instead? Doesn't Strummer's "stunning piece of art" merit substantial analysis? Instead, none of the Clash's albums receive the kind of close attention Salewicz later devotes to the Mescaleros' oeuvre or the solo "Earthquake Weather," now well out of print. (I panned it regretfully but firmly in a review Salewicz brands "sniffy.") And although Salewicz clearly laments Strummer's split with Mick Jones, he never fully explains why. A major reason for these lacunas must be that Strummer was historically important as an individual only because he once belonged to a group. The same goes for many rock 'n' rollers, including Jones, despite his post-Clash success leading Big Audio Dynamite, and it's hardly a given that the collaboration could have sustained itself - Strummer tells Salewicz that the turning point for him was a series of 1982 stadium gigs opening for the Who, a band he respected yet feared the Clash might turn into. But Salewicz is wary of emphasizing this. With the Clash's biography already written, he wanted to honor his mate's entire life, which continued for nearly twice as many years as his band lasted. So where perhaps a sixth of my précis above deals with Strummer's post-Clash life, that period gets more than a third of this book. Strummer's soundtracks are atomized. His pub-crawling and womanizing are recounted. To the "spliff bunker," a studio cave he would regularly construct to write, sleep and get high in, is added the "campfire," which is how the older Strummer nurtured neo-hippie communalism at festivals like Glastonbury and in his own rural backyards. Like Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Sam Cooke and Sun Ra, Strummer was simultaneously charismatic and hard to know. Though he shared substance addictions with Martin and Janis Joplin and sexual compulsions with Cooke, Joplin and Sylvester, and though he had enough money once the Clash started raking it in, he seems to have achieved a fair portion of the ordinary blokedom toward which his inchoate but sincere and inquisitive radicalism impelled him. Skillfully told, the story of his artistic triumph and long, inevitable twilight might be moving, even enlightening. Extracted from this well-meant but clumsy book, it's one more missed opportunity in a life that knew a few too many of them. In 1982, the Clash opened for the Who, a group Strummer respected yet feared his own band might turn into. Robert Christgau is a staff writer for Rolling Stone and a critic for "All Things Considered." His Consumer Guide column appears monthly at MSN Music.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Salewicz recounts the passage of John Mellor, aka Joe Strummer, front man for the iconoclastic punk band the Clash, who died in 2002 of a congenital heart defect. A diplomat's son, he was born in Ankara, went to boarding school in London, and later became a squatter before singing with a pub rock band. After he saw the Sex Pistols in 1976, he was invited to join the Clash, which immediately drew attention for its adrenaline-fueled performances and not overearnest protest songs. The band produced a number of critically acclaimed albums, London Calling being the best known. After ill-advisedly firing cofounder-guitarist Mick Jones, which he regretted for the rest of his life, Strummer entered his wilderness years, recording soundtracks and acting in a few movies before finding his way back to critical success in the Mescaleros. Salewicz reveals a brooding, self-medicating manic-depressive, blunt but charming, thoughtful but reckless, both family man and womanizer. Salewicz's scores of interviews with those who knew Strummer also reveal a well-loved, immensely talented man who died too soon. --Benjamin Segedin Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this biography of punk icon Joe Strummer, music writer Salewicz focuses on the heady days of the punk explosion and Strummer's long hiatus after leaving the Clash. Born John Graham Mellor in 1952 in Ankara, Turkey, to diplomat parents, Strummer enjoyed a peripatetic childhood before being parked at a British boarding school. An art school dropout, Strummer (who was known then as "Woody") lived a hand-to-mouth existence in London squats before rock impresario Bernie Rhodes selected him to head a new punk band, and Woody became Joe Strummer, the sardonic, gravelly voiced rabble rouser. For a long moment, the Clash channeled the most progressive elements in pop culture, blending punk anger, rasta vibes, bank robbers, cowboys and revolutionary traditions into music that remains compelling today. After the band's breakup in 1985, Strummer fell into a long depression that Salewicz attributes to heavy pot smoking and a family legacy that included his brother's suicide. Yet Strummer had revitalized his career and was making excellent music before his sudden death of heart failure in 2002. As a young writer in the punk years, Salewicz had plenty of access to Strummer, and does a good job of providing a blow-by-blow account of the tours and albums. However, Salewicz provides little historical context, thereby diminishing the importance of the Clash. Despite nearly 600 pages of analysis, Strummer remains an opaque figure. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A major music journalist resurrects Joe Strummer, the driving force behind The Clash and punk itself. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A laborious consideration of the life of the Clash's late front man. Salewicz (Reggae Explosion, 2002, etc.) covered the career of singer-guitarist Joe Strummer for years, as a correspondent for the New Musical Express and other U.K. periodicals. The writer grew very close to his subject, but that intimacy does not enhance this sprawling, messy authorized biography. Like his band, Strummer embodied the contradictions of the late-'70s punk-rock movement: Born John Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, to a British foreign-service officer and educated privately, he recreated himself as a squatter in London and got involved in the city's pub-rock and punk scenes. The Clash became punk's poster boys; cast as righteous rockers while signed to a major label, they were often accused, in the words of one of the band's own songs, of "turning rebellion into money." Strummer gets somewhat lost in the shuffle during the book's long central section, which recounts the Clash's triumphant, contentious history, though he does emerge as a conflicted character capable of equal measures of love and ruthlessness. (He expelled lead guitarist Mick Jones from his own band.) The book stops dead during a section about the musician's lost decade after the Clash's breakup; Strummer's film work, escalating drug and alcohol abuse and often aimless travel are enumerated in wearying detail. The tale comes back to life in the late chapters recalling Strummer's musical renaissance with the Mescaleros before his death from a heart defect in 2002. Only a true Clash devotee is likely to make it that far. Salewicz tells his story with the vanity of a court biographer, and he displays a confounding love for endless, unpruned quotes and tour itineraries; some chapters bear obvious evidence of their genesis as music-weekly pieces. He is relatively uncritical of his buddy's frequent meanness and chronic infidelity, and there is little insight into the sources of his long-term depression and alcoholism. Intelligent editing, less fact-churning and more analysis would have served this overlong tome well. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
