5-14-84

(Editors note: Listening tonight to Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros "Global A-Go Go" sent me spinning off into a hopeless spiral of deadly nostalgia. Below are the results. Though I generally find serialized blogging to be wholly pompous and self indulgent, once this thing started running off my fingers, I realized it might go on for awhile. So, here's Part 1, and yes, this is a true story. The good news is, if you're tired of checking in on my blog, you can check out for a few days, because I suspect, unfortunately, that this tale will have at least one more entry, and possibly two. My apologies in advance. And now, on with the show! -NV )

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Kevin parked the rusting yellow Datsun in the public garage adjacent to the County Courthouse and pulled out a Mason jar half full of moon tea from behind the drivers seat. Some old hippie had told us that tea brewed outdoors, under the moonlight, was a seriously mind-altering elixir; a natural hallucinogen under the right circumstances.

These, we felt, were the right circumstances. To increase our odds on the deal, Kev pulled out a pint of cheap tequila from his coat pocket and added the full bottle to the putrid brown mix. He took a deep pull, grimaced, and wordlessly passed it over to me.

It was May 14, 1984. We were on our way to see The Clash.

From the day I purchased their first album (the imported UK version) in the summer of 1978, the Clash held me fiercely in their grip like no cultural phenomenon then or since. As the Beatles were to my sisters in the previous generation, so were the Clash to me.

These were the pre-Internet, fledgling MTV days when a band's mystique was as valuable as anything else they had going for them, and in this sense, the Clash were pure gold. Their music was white hot fury, over which Joe Strummer wailed about causes and politics that exposed me to a world so foreign to my sub-suburban American existence that they may as well have come from outer space.

Their live shows were legend, and with nothing but written accounts and amazing, battlefield photos from the punk frontlines for evidence, I was transfixed. They had come to Chicago a handful of times on earlier tours, an experience totally out of reach for a self-conscious 15-year old boy living among the tranquil, boring farm fields and split-level blandness that was (and still is) Hubertus, Wisconsin.

Strummer, the charismatic leader, singer, chief lyricist, and all-around rabble rouser, was my personal hero. Equal parts Che Guevara and P.T. Barnum, he barked, swaggered and sweated with primal intensity. He was a punk poet, the last honest man, howling as if the tides of injustice could be turned back through his words and sheer will. A crumpled centerfold from 'Circus' magazine of a perspiration soaked, sneering, snaggle toothed Strummer held a place of honor on my bedroom wall (replacing a pouty Mick Jagger. Every dog has its day....)

As years passed and the band flirted with mainstream success, my passion abated. By the time "Rock the Casbah" became an ubiquitous MTV and radio staple, I had abandoned pseudo-socialist politics and urban guerilla outfits in favor of obtuse poetry and the jangly guitars of REM.

By 1984, half of the original Clash quartet had been kicked out of the band, and the version that lumbered out on tour that spring was Strummer, bassist Paul Simonon, and three guys who may as well have been Larry, Curly, and Moe. They were supporting a dismal new album called "Cut The Crap," an apt title for what would ultimately be their last record.

Still, when it was announced that they were finally coming to Milwaukee, it was an opportunity I could not pass up. I headed to the Ticketron outlet at Sears the morning tickets went on sale, waited online for all of five minutes and for less than $20 apiece, secured second row seats for the show, to be held at the Milwaukee Auditorium.

A nondescript rectangular brick barn squat in the middle of downtown, the Auditorium was more often utilized as a venue for professional wrestling and the lumberjack log rolling contest at the annual Sport and Fishing Expo. It had notoriously terrible acoustics, and the ushers were exclusively sour-faced, aging volunteers from the Tripoli Shriners Temple up the street.

It was against this backdrop that me and 5,000 of my proto-punk brethren headed in from a warm spring night to see if our beloved Clash still had any gas left in the tank. And more importantly, I was, for at least ninety minutes, going to be in the same room as Joe Strummer.