Long Shadow: Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros’ Streetcore at 20
Looking back on the British punk great’s final studio salvo
The late Joe Strummer’s crate-digging tendencies and his quenchless curiosity about disparate musical styles and scenes —from the reggae and early rock ‘n’ roll influences that flavored The Clash to his early embrace of hip-hop and his late-life love of world music— made him as much an ethnomusicologist as a punk pillar.
This element of Strummer’s brilliance stood out all along. After all, The Clash taught us about Junior Murvin, Futura 2000 and more that otherwise wouldn’t have ever gotten the major label rock rub, all while pushing three-chord punk into uncharted territory. Strummer created music without geographic or genre borders for the remainder of his life, from his post-Clash “wilderness years” to his run as the leader of the Mescaleros.
Indeed, the first two Mescaleros albums, 1999’s Rock Art and the X-Ray Style and 2001’s Global A Go-Go, reinforce our Strummer-as-an-ethnomusicologist argument no less than The Clash’s eclectic triple LP, 1980’s Sandinista!, does. Following Strummer’s Dec. 22, 2002 death, Mescaleros members Martin Slattery and Scott Shields led the way in piecing together finished and in-progress tracks for Streetcore, a collection that arrived on Oct. 21, 2003.
VIDEO: Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros “Coma Girl”
A ’60s pop culture fantasy, opening track “Coma Girl” lets telecaster-strumming fury have the hour. Six years later, Bruce Springsteen covered it at Glastonbury as a nod to Strummer, a noted fan of the Boss and a fellow Woody Guthrie aficionado. Another back-to-punk-basics ripper in “Arms Aloft” and the more Mescaleros-esque “All in a Day” provide equally compelling food for thought when speculating about what a Strummer and Mick Jones studio reunion might’ve sounded like in the early 21st century.
A poet of the people until the end, Strummer turns the protest hymn tradition on its head with “Get Down Moses.” On “Long Shadow,” he likens downtrodden punk rockers to railroad workers, hobos and other once-common folk song subjects. Rick Rubin produced the latter, which by most accounts was written by Strummer with Johnny Cash in mind. A bare-bones cover of “Redemption Song” that’s also credited to Rubin casts Strummer, Cash and Bob Marley as carrying the same truth-teller torch. Of course, Strummer and Cash cut a duet of “Redemption Song” around the same period. That collaboration appears on Cash’s own posthumous collection: the 2003 box set Unearthed, which came out a little over a month after Streetcore (on Nov. 25, to be exact).
Musically, the Mescaleros’ “no fences” approach to global pop and folk brought us the chilling funeral march “Ramshackle Day Parade,” a harrowing tour of London titled “Burnin’ Streets” and “Midnight Jam,” an instrumental incorporating samples from Strummer’s London Calling series of BBC radio broadcasts. The show ran from 1998 to 2001, and its playlists proved that Strummer had as much in common with John Lomax as John Lydon.
Streetcore ends with “Silver and Gold,” a retitled cover of Bobby Charles’ “Before I Grow Too Old.” It’s one final instance of Strummer pointing fans to something outside of punk rock lore. In this case, he teaches us about a Cajun singer-songwriter with at least one song that’s well-written and whimsical enough to pass as a deep cut by Americana godfather John Prine. At no point does Streetcore drop a single clue that Strummer knew he’d need to say goodbye or seal his public legacy anytime soon.
However, this song’s theme of chasing what makes you happy with a little more urgency (“I’ve got to hurry up before I grow too old“) punctuates the final sonic chapter of a life well lived.
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