Clash Tribute Night! January 12, Sunday, at Juke Joint!!

At the Juke Joint
213 Bedford, Bellmore NY

Long Island bands Pay Tribute to Joe Strummer

January 12, Sunday

8 PM Door Ð only $5!

$1 of each ticket benefits UPSERJ the anti-racist/ anti poverty group active on Long Island.

with:

Jones Crusher
Sander Hicks
The Skants
Clarity


Doing These Songs:

Janie Jones, Clash City Rockers, White Riot, What's My Name, Police & Thieves,

Guns of Brixton, Clampdown, Stay Free, London Calling, Straight to Hell, Know Your Rights, Inoculated City, English Civil War, Bored with the USA, Spanish Bombs, Complete Control

Remote control, Career Opportunities, Safe European Home & Hateful

January 12, Sunday Juke Joint 213 Bedford, Bellmore NY

http://www.sanderhicks.com/strummer.html

 

Joe Strummer is dead. Long live Joe Strummer.

by Ben Harrison

 

While the Sex Pistols epitomized the nihilistic style and tabloid-baiting shock value of the Punk movement, it was Joe Strummer's band, the Clash, that made the most of the freedom punk professed to represent. It was an approach which lent them relative longevity over most of their peers, and saw them ride furthest with the Punk torch-a ride that took them across the world (including a guerrilla tour of Thailand) and even to the top of the pop charts ("Should I Stay Or Should I Go").

Beyond their righteous sloganeering, perhaps their most significant maneuver was to discard the perceived constraints of what a Punk band should sound like. Better still, these forays into other genres weren't just exercises in good intentions–they actually sounded good too. Fucking great, in fact. Beyond the snotty white riot agit-rock, any number of diverse elements might be incorporated into a Clash track: dub science experimentalism; rockabilly; rap; rebel folk; Spector walls-of-sound; Beat poetry mantras; Country namechecks; Ju-ju; High-life; tribal drums; the echoes of soul horns or even a passing mariachi band. The list goes on, but what's really worth mentioning is how the Clash weren't scared to take it to the disco. And how when they got dubby with their reggae, or down with the funk, it's hard to believe they were white Englishmen. One of the best white dance bands ever.

After the Clash's demise, Strummer remained true to the band's spirit as a solo artist, producer, composer, DJ and actor (see Jim Jarmusch's "Mystery Train"). His new band, The Mescaleros, were going from strength to strength and showed he still had much to offer. Whatever the case, Joe Strummer leaves behind an exciting and diverse body of music that will endure beyond the cultural significance of the Clash and the scene they emerged from.

Ben Harrison
   
 

 

Joe Strummer (August 21, 1952- December 22, 2002)

May Perpetual Light Shine Upon You.

Stay Free.

 
     

 

from: OVERPOWERED BY FUNK

How Joe Strummer rocked the world.

********************

From the San Francisco Bay Guardian

 

While their punk contemporaries flirted with Nazi imagery and ideology, they romanticized the Jamaican roots reggae rebels. When Strummer, Simonon, and manager/advisor Bernie Rhodes-three white males-were drawn into Black Britain's summer Notting Hill uprising against the police, the band found its footing. Rhodes had images to contextualize the band's defiance. Strummer found an opening to explore radical whiteness. "White Riot" distilled his awakening into a 2-minute breakneck, ear-splitting call for England's fair-skinned sons and daughters to join in striking back against the Empire: "Black people gotta lotta problems but they don't mind throwing a brick. White people go to school, where they teach you how to be thick."

The record also captured the essence of the Strummer's philosophy: "Are you taking over or are you taking orders? Are you going backward or are you going forwards?" These are the fundamental questions Strummer bequeathed his successors-followers like Bono, Chuck D, Ani DiFranco, and Manu Chao. Strummer epitomized the conviction that progressive politics ought to fire progressive music-neither flashy, indulgent prog-rock nor austere, didactic folk but progressive music of the most fevered imagination-big, risky rock that inspired less awe than love, more noise than silence, music that moved down the street with the people and knew when to toss a brick.

 

...From the ashes of the sixties, Strummer and the Clash moved toward a kind of musical multilateralism, consensus by connecting-the-dots. *Sandinista* marks the point where they sketch a map of the new musical and political world, where rock myth topples into hip-hop's corner soul, where the trumpets of polyculturalism collapse Jericho's imperialism. And Strummer characteristically kept moving. In a short July 2001 guest DJ set with WFMU (http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/321), he revealed where his expansive curiousity and compassion was still taking him. He moved from a scintillating collaboration between Ernest Ranglin and Baaba Maal through Algerian rai, Sudanese soul, South African mbaqanga, and Colombian cumbia, ending with Cornershop's Indofuturist pop. The prophetic stance he articulated in his life and music falls somewhere between Paul Wellstone and Jam Master Jay, a romantic, hopeful, inclusionary vision of progressivism and a cultural globalization that we've only just begun to see swelling in the streets at the turn of the century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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