By David Fricke
New York City
If the Clash has sold out its original punk ethos for American success - as some British critics would have it - then why aren't the band's members rich? They swept 1980 critics' polls here with a breakthrough double album, London Calling, and a surprise hit single, "Train in Vain." And Sandinista!, their new three-record set, is a Top Thirty triumph. But the Clash - singer-guitarists Mick Jones and Joe Strummer, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon - is nearly bankrupt. Adrift without a manager, the band is at perpetual loggerheads with its record company, CBS, and trying to get by on individual weekly salaries of about $200 - which wouldn't cover Mick Jagger's limo bill. How can this be?
"Debt, debt, debt," groans Simonon, leaning across a conference table at CBS headquarters in Manhattan. The blond, twenty-five-year-old bassist knows whereof he speaks: he's had to handle the group's business affairs ever since the Clash split last year with Blackhill Enterprises - its third management change in as many years. "At one time, our debt was about 98000 pounds [approximately $235000], but we've got it down a lot; we've paid a lot of people back. As soon as the money comes in, we just pay them off."
Considering its dire financial straits, the Clash took a big risk in releasing Sandinista! as a triple album and retailing it for less than the price of a regular double album. (Bruce Springsteen's double set, The River, for example, costs a dollar more than Sandinista!, which lists here for $14.98) In order to do this the group had to rake a significant cut in royalty payments; it won't see any profits from the album until it has sold 200,000 copies in England alone - where the acclaimed London Calling sold only 180,000. "But that's the gamble we have to take," says Simonon. "We believe what we're doing is right. If we had to be dictated by what other people say, it wouldn't be the Clash."
And being the Clash, they do what they like. Mick Jones has recently produced albums for his American girlfriend, singer Ellen Foley, and his teenage idol, former Mott the Hoople leader Ian Hunter. Joe Strummer appears on a new English compilation album of mid-Seventies recordings by his old pub-rock band, the 101'ers. Topper Headon recently manned kettledrums with London's New Symphony Orchestra. (He also played with Jones and Strummer on the Foley LP.) Simonon stars as an English punk musician (along with former Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook) in a forthcoming Lou Adler film, tentatively tided All Washed Up; and the bassist is also planning an album with Jamaican reggae toaster Mikey Dread. On top of all this, the Clash is trying to organize a U.S. tour, which may include a show at New York's famed Roseland dance hall.
So this is success. But where are the punks of yore on Sandinista!, an album that owes more to black roots and reggae than to the classic thrashing of the Clash's 1977 debut album? "People don't understand," says Simonon. "Punk was about change - and rule number one was: there are no rules."
Article contribution by Steve Mereu
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