The Ghost of Joe Strummer

It’s a crazy riddle and it’s our job to make some meaning out of it

That moment, and that day, is frozen in my mind. I’m 27 years old, with a bass guitar in my hands, recording a punk rock song with a bunch of guys in a small studio, and Joe Strummer had just died at 50 years old. Understand that punk rock was basically the closest thing I had to religion and The Clash songs were like spirituals, you know? I remember I actually cried a little in the studio, I felt some weird transmission coming through me. It was like my dad had died or something. What the fuck does it even mean to be alive or dead in this world? We’re here for such a short time. Hopefully we leave things for others to make sense of, and we’re just working with whatever we’ve got. People leave their mark and then they’re gone. Even the language we use to communicate with each other is like dead men’s bones, we didn’t write any of it, it’s an ocean of death and rebirth and we’re in the middle somewhere. It’s a crazy riddle and it’s our job to make some meaning out of it if we choose to.

I wrote this in 2020 on the anniversary of Joe Strummer's death.

In 2002 I had just moved out of my house in Oakland, California and I had made a chunk of money doing the weed harvest up in Humboldt. I was 27 and I had a 1982 Toyota pick-up truck that I was driving across the country to settle on an organic farm in the Hudson Valley of New York, about 2 hours from NYC. Along the way I was visiting friends.

I drove south to Los Angeles and was staying with family and I met up with my old friend Scott Sturgeon. When we were teenagers Scott and I played in a punk rock band called Choking Victim. He reached out after many years and asked me to play bass on a song he was recording for some compilation. Say what you want about Scott, and there are plenty of things to say, he likes to get his people together to play music. I hadn’t picked up a bass in a long time but I’d been practicing.

I picked Scott up in Hollywood and we drove around and he told me stories about all these people who had died that were part of our travelers scene, people I hadn’t thought about since the mid-90s. So many dead people. Me and that guy had really gone our separate ways, I never played in another band after I was 19, I got really involved in social justice activism and writing stories. Scott seemed like he had lived really hard and done a lot more drugs than me. He’d also managed to be very focused and write songs and keep bands together and travel all over the world.

One of the stories he told me while we were driving around was about the night he was at a club in Hollywood called the Viper Room and Joe Strummer from The Clash came up and started talking to him. “What? He just came up and started a conversation?” I was wide eyed. “Yeah. I mean, the first Leftover Crack record had just come out on Hellcat and there was a song called Crack City Rockers that was a riff off that Clash song.” Scott loved to tell me stories like this, probably because we were teenagers listening to the same records, and he was getting to hang out with people like Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys and Dick Luckas from Subhumans. I understood what a big deal it was, I could be a witness and the teenagers inside of us could be proud of how far he’d come.

“So what did you talk about with Joe Strummer?” I asked. “It was funny, actually. He wanted to know what I thought of Bob Dylan.” “Seriously? Dylan? What did you say?” “I told him I liked some of his early stuff. That was pretty much it. I think I was really high, I didn’t have much to say.” I just sat there driving down the freeway, shaking my head. Joe Strummer comes up and talks to you and you don’t have anything to say?

So the next day we go to a recording studio and Scott introduces me to his guitar player friend Brad and this amazing drummer, I don’t remember his name, but he was super talented. Scott teaches me this pretty simple bass line and we record a song together that later got called Super Tuesday. It was a pretty catchy song, it had a really good build up, it was very gratifying to play. On our lunch break we all got in someone’s truck and went to a drive through burger place. Scott and I were in the back of the truck heading back to the studio. I remember we were eating our burgers and he says: “Hey, ‘member how we were talking about Joe Strummer yesterday? I heard on the radio this morning that he died.”

That moment, and that day, is frozen in my mind. I’m 27 years old, with a bass guitar in my hands, recording a punk rock song with a bunch of guys in a small studio, and Joe Strummer had just died at 50 years old. Understand that punk rock was basically the closest thing I had to religion and The Clash songs were like spirituals, you know? I remember I actually cried a little in the studio, I felt some weird transmission coming through me. It was like my dad had died or something. What the fuck does it even mean to be alive or dead in this world? We’re here for such a short time. Hopefully we leave things for others to make sense of, and we’re just working with whatever we’ve got. People leave their mark and then they’re gone. Even the language we use to communicate with each other is like dead men’s bones, we didn’t write any of it, it’s an ocean of death and rebirth and we’re in the middle somewhere. It’s a crazy riddle and it’s our job to make some meaning out of it if we choose to.

For years after that experience I would imagine what it would have been like if I was in Scott’s place and Joe Strummer had come up to me in the Viper Room and asked me what I thought about Bob Dylan. I’d bust out with some quotes to impress him:

“You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” and then we could have a conversation about 60/70s counterculture and radical politics.

“Now, a very great man once said/That some people rob you with a fountain pen.” We could talk about Woody Gutherie and the American radical tradition of folk songs.

“She wears an Egyptian ring/That sparkles before she speaks/She's a hypnotist collector/You are a walking antique”

You know, if I just wanted to be impressive and obscure.

Anyway, Bob Dylan became a born again Christian and he was a total rock star, not punk rock at all from the way I understand it. But we’re all hypocrites and assholes in our different ways. Over the years I’ve seen the way Dylan lyrics influenced Strummer’s songs, and understood a conversation between writers in the music. I think it’s beautiful to make those kinds of connections, I live for that shit. My guess is that Joe Strummer was trying to get a sense of how deep Scott was and, well, I guess he found out. Joe Strummer has been dead for 18 years and I’m still carrying that guy’s spirit around with me.

FIN