DB's Song of the Day (day 233): "JUNCO PARTNER" (1980) The Clash

Here’s someone I was sad to see go (in 2002). Joe Strummer, born this day in 1952 as John Mellor, was the main voice of The Clash and more or less its primary figurehead. Though, truth to tell, I preferred to see the band as a real band (and perhaps it was for a time) with Strummer and Mick Jones providing intertwined leadership. Strummer, though, was the one spouting most of the ideological stances that were part and parcel of The Clash view. But today I mainly want to pay tribute to him as a vocalist.

Which is why I’ve chosen a song, from the first of the six sides of Sandinista!, that was cribbed by Strummer and company from older versions of the song dating back decades. The song “Junco Partner,” or some variant thereof, is primarily in the voice of an inveterate down-and-outer—a familiar of prisons, drugs, shady deals, and, we might say, one helluva survival instinct. While not sporting any references to how politics is corrupt—both on the right and the left—or how our culture raises its airy head thanks to thugs and bombs that do our leaders’ bidding (areas The Clash generally liked to get into), “Junco Partner” puts out there—on the street—a vision of what it’s like to scrape by in the underclass. Both “subterranean”—as in The Beats—and subaltern, as in the indigenous anywhere the colonizers took all the best stuff for themselves. Which is why one feels a certain island style to the song—one suspects that the version The Clash is cribbing most closely comes with cajun flavoring. Indeed, the reference to “Angola” is the Louisiana State Penitentiary—one of the most dismal in the country—where Lead Belly was discovered by Alan Lomax.  The line “I was born in Angola / Serving 14 to 99” carries the grim realities of the song lightly. An early death—at 14—is contrasted with “a life sentence”—99 years. We might assume we’re dealing with the child of an inmate, literally born in prison, or, more metaphorically, imprisoned by the conditions of a life that might be cut brutally short or extend forever. Existential prison, in other words.

The song has long been my favorite Strummer vocal because he does things with it that are wholly unpredictable, sometimes unintelligible. He mutters, he gasps, he chortles, he rasps, he drawls and cajoles and dances about the beat, keeping his eye on the bouncing ball. The song, in The Clash version, is a strut, an in-your-face proclamation and confession (“I would’ve pawned my sweet Gabriella / But the smart girl, she wouldn’t sign her name”) that fantasizes raising tobacco (i.e., being a big plantation owner) and admits to pawning everything, having once “had me a great deal of money”—the implication is that the “junco partner” has lost everything for the sake of “junk.” Yet the speaker is unabashed—and Strummer provides him an amusing voice with asides like “take a walk, take a walk” and “don’t bother me.” He begins by denigrating what we assume is his most recent sentence—6 months to a year, “ain’t no time”—since the harsh realities of his existence are a far worse punishment.

The song concludes with a variation on lines found in various other blues songs in one form or another: Let me eat when I’m hungry, let me drink when I’m dry—though here the sentiment is altered to “pour me out a good beer when I’m dry / Just, just give me whiskey when I’m thirsty / Give me headstone when I die.” The play on “giving head” is deliberate as we might assume this last verse is the speaker demanding a list of pleasures for their own sake—drink and sex, fine. But instead the notion of the inevitable end, bound up with junk, provokes the notion that “headstone” better suits the occasion. Strummer trails off on a “down the road” that refers back to the opening (“down the road, down the road, came a junco partner”) but also comments on when the headstone will be needed: down the road, which is to say, eventually.

More than anything, the song is a groove, as The Clash present it, matching the dub and reggae aspects of the album to something that might be a more straightforward blues. This gives the song its oddly bright, sly, and grinning indifference to its speaker’s dereliction. Many songs on Sandinista! champion the underdogs and the outcasts, and “Junco Partner” infuses all that with a sense of mercurial possibility, if only because one is “knocked out loaded, loaded, loaded, loaded, loaded / Wobbling all over the street.”

Strummer’s vocals in The Clash are something I prize greatly, full of a performative edge that’s both passionate and amused, it seems to me. The stance is of one perennially outside the mainstream and enjoying the vantage, despite the shittiness of the surroundings. Those dealing the hand always have the upper hand, but you can always sing while you slave. Let Joe Strummer show you how.

DB's Song of the Day (day 177): "THE CARD CHEAT" (1979) The Clash

Today’s birthday boy is Mick Jones, formerly of The Clash. I’ve already posted about a song—“Lost in the Supermarket” from London Calling—with a Jones lead vocal. And today we have another Jones lead, though there aren’t that many of them with The Clash. Jones’ lead vocals tend to be found on Clash songs that got radio play, straight-out rockers like “Train in Vain,” “Police on My Back,” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” I considered all three, but why go with the most recognizable stuff?

The song I chose today features my favorite Jones vocal. It’s also the first song to make its way from London Calling onto one of my personal tapes, those tapes that comprise what I like to call “the saga.” Which is to say, this song struck a chord with me back in the spring of 1980 when I first got to know this album. And it might have to to do with the fact that it’s a piano-driven tune.

“There’s a solitary man crying ‘hold me’ / It’s only because he’s a-lonely / And if the keeper of time runs slowly / He won’t be alive for long.” At 20, that idea of not being alive much longer is meaningful. Possibly more meaningful than it is to me at soon-to-be 55. And that’s probably because any change I see coming my way now is likely to be filed under the heading “decline,” whereas, at 20, there’s no idea about how long life might be. It’s easy to imagine not making it to 30. In fact, it may even be romantically satisfying to not do so. Now, there’s nothing at all romantic about not making it to 60, or even 65. The longer you live, the less chance there is to die young.

“Half in love with easeful death,” Keats says, but, given the state of health of himself and those close to him, he had good reason. I’ve always been, constitutionally, pretty much strong as an ox, so such a love is born only of that love for the idea of ending one’s vassalage to time itself. I suppose that attitude made more sense to me, back then. It certainly made me respond to this song.

The song doesn’t really tell a story, but it gives little glimpses of illustrations, we could call them, for its thesis that we’re always trying to cheat death. And that, eventually, we won’t. “He only wanted more time away from the darkest door” is delivered with all of Jones’ ability to put a wail into a line. And isn’t that what we all want?

The song gives us a gambler who, a cheater, is eventually “seized / And forced to his knees / And shot—dead.” So much for that card-up-the-sleeve, Ace. The song leaps from the fate of this unfortunate to the situation of those who bravely face death in battle—we get a fast tour, with a wonderfully jaunty propulsion: “From the Hundred Year War to the Crimea / With a lance, and a musket, and a Roman spear / To all of the men who have stood with no fear / In the service of the king.” To all those dearly departed souls, the singer offers a caution: “Before you met your fate / Be sure you did not forsake / Your lover may not be around any more.”

I’ve always liked the way the lyric folds two statements into one. In one, “your lover” is the object: “be sure you did not forsake your lover.” In the other, “your lover” is the subject: “your lover may not be around any more.” Forsake requires an object, so “your lover” has to be both. The idea being, you men at war did forsake your lovers and she might not be there if you ever get back. Never a martial person myself, I took this, upon first hearing, to be a way of saying “make love, not war.” After all, Vietnam wasn’t that far behind us when this album came along.

The song then returns to the opening verse about that solitary man who won’t be alive for long. Which is sort of a “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” idea at this point. Go kill and die if you like, me, I’ll be back in bed with a girl.

And yet. The bit that was bugging me at 20, though in bed a lot, was the line that also shows Jones’ ability to fling desperation into his voice: “If he only had time to tell of all of the things he planned.” Y’know, like Hamlet says, “things standing thus unknown,” which we might change, in this context, to “things standing thus undone.” Not known, not done. Lost to posterity, lost to chance. That’s the notion that used to make me keep an eye on “the keeper of time.”

And now it’s 34 years later, and Mick Jones is 58. Happy birthday.

DB's Song of the Day (day 63):"LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET" (1979), The Clash

Today’s Kajsa’s birthday. Happy birthday, Kajsa! In honor of this date, I’m throwing my mind back to 1981, the year she was born. And today’s song conjures up that time better than anything else that comes readily to mind. The Clash released their triple LP Sandinista! in December of 1980. The previous December they’d released their double LP London Calling. I got London Calling probably around the time Sandinista! came out and the latter a little later. The night KDB was born, when I came back from the maternity ward, I sat about partying with some friends, and the LP we put on was London Calling.

“Lost in the Supermarket” was the easiest entry into The Clash. The song, if you were fans of theirs from earlier LPs, might be a bit of a disappointment. It’s not punk, that’s for sure. It actually sounds like a lot of stuff on the radio then, which is why it got airplay. But, in a way, that made the song even more effective. Something in its syncopated beat made it agreeable even as it made it a comment on the factory-produced goods that the singer can no longer shop happily for. For me, I suppose, it was pushing the notion of “The Big Country” into the very conditions of one’s existence. “I came in here for a special offer / A guaranteed personality.” That part always reminded me of something from Ray Davies like The Kinks’ Preservation II, or Soap Opera. Davies was always a major crusader against the forces of conformity.

“The hedge back home in the suburbs” was only too real to me, as was “I empty a bottle, I feel a bit free.” Much as I might consider myself—I was a Philly poet, y’know—outside the usual run of working stiffs, still, I was a guy as much in need of psychic relief on a Friday night as anyone. This song made that state of distress a more general condition: it’s the supermarket itself—the market forces, yes—that are making us all wage slaves and making even rockers part of the fodder. We buy the “big disco hits album”; we buy five vinyl-pressings by The Clash. Yeah, and so what?

As someone trying to write my way to something like an understanding of my own condition, I wasn’t fooled by the success stories of well-heeled writers or by rockstars climbing the charts. I knew well enough that all were mired in the system of selling. I was a minimalist. Minimal work for minimal pay; then I’d just as soon go on my way.

Still, sooner or later, we’re back in the market, hearing the muzak, watching the consumers grab for bargains, seeing ourselves as extensions of our wallets. Our tastes—urban, hip, sophisticated, or happily hippy—simply another marketing ploy. All lining up to be a target audience.

I gave The Clash credit for putting that message on the radio. When a band like The Beatles became dissatisfied with the status quo they were part of, they released “Revolution.” When it was the Stones, they released “Street Fightin’ Man,” and The Who put out “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” All were songs that already suggested that rock was a parallel universe to what was really going on. A place, protected and privileged, where the singer could look down on it all—made explicit on Talking Heads' “The Big Country.” Now The Clash were naming where that perspective was coming from: we sell ‘em what they want so we don’t have to work their jobs.

But for the singer of “Lost in the Supermarket” there’s a point at which the vicarious life via his musical heroes becomes not enough. He “can no longer shop happily.” The Clash are hoping, in their way, that such anomie in the marketplace will spread to all areas of consumption. Not bloody likely. The decade already developing would make markets the basis of every “real” value.

So, there I was, with a new kid on the block, thinking about “hearing that noise was my first ever feeling.” What would her “first ever feeling” be, and how far removed would it be from the hedge back home in the suburbs I hailed from . . . which, as it turned out, she’d become very familiar with too.

I’m not sure when I first gave Kajsa this song, but I think it was pretty early in the “education by mix tape” that began around 1993.  It’s a catchy little tune, too repetitive but for that very reason easy to get along with. The Clash had a lot more better songs. But this was the one that first got me interested.