Of Schulz... and Strummer... and second acts.
(Just read this over; this is a pretty meandering post... but it gets to the main point soon enough. Just bear with me...)
I read a lot - that's my thing. I rarely if ever watch TV; I'd much rather spend the evening with a book in my lap and a drink at my elbow, especially on these warm and fleeting summer nights up here when I can do so on my front porch.
Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell and the American Experience In China (superb, although sometimes hard to keep track of all the Chinese names), Nathaniel Philbrick's Battle of the Little Bighorn history The Last Stand, and all three volumes of Edmund Morris' comprehensive biography of Theodore Roosevelt's life and presidency. While taking in these larger tomes, I usually read other shorter/less-serious books for "dessert", such as obscure Jim 
Thompson hardboiled crime novels I didn't get through the first time (like A Swell-Looking Babe and Pop. 1280), Wild and Crazy Guys (documenting the rise of comedy mavericks like Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy in the '80s and '90s), and a recent compilation of Shary Flenniken's raunchy and insightful Trots and Bonnie comics from the old National Lampoon magazine.I buy new books practically every other weekend, and have what I think is a pretty decent home library. But I rarely if ever buy books just to "buy" them - I read everything I purchase, because something looks interesting and informative to me.
With that being said, there's really only one series that I collect just to "have", due to one of my childhood obsessions - the Charlie Brown cartoon reprints. In 2004, Fantagraphics Books published the first in a series of books containing the entire 
print run of Peanuts, Charles Schulz's beloved, long-running and internationally famous comic strip. Starting with the first strip published in 1950, Fantagraphics released two volumes a year, each volume containing two years of strips. Over the next twelve years, the publisher put out what ended up being a total of 26 volumes
capturing every comic printed between 1950 and 2000, along with a final volume containing collection of Schulz strips,
cartoons, stories, and illustrations that appeared outside of the daily
newspaper strip.
It's my personal feeling that Peanuts, and Charles Schulz, peaked in the Seventies. By that time, the cartoonist had been drawing the strip for over two decades, and
had all but perfected the complicated interplay of relationships between
the characters. And most importantly 
during that period, the character Snoopy had yet to take over and
dominate the strip - the dog still interacted somewhat with the other characters, and his activities complemented those of (ostensible main character) Charlie Brown and the gang.
But by the end of that decade, Snoopy's fantasy lives (the WWI flying ace, Joe Cool, novelist, etc.) began to be the focus of the comic. He no longer needed any of the other strip characters to "be" - he just needed his imagination. In support of this new focus on Snoopy, Schulz began constructing a entire side life for him existing apart from that of the other Peanuts characters, beginning with the 1970 introduction of Snoopy's bird friend Woodstock... and in the years that followed with beagle members of Snoopy's immediate family, including Spike, Belle, Olaf and the like. In my opinion, this shift of focus dragged the entire strip down and completely screwed up the overall dynamic. I was a huge fan of Peanuts when I was a kid, but after around 1980 I ceased to pay very much attention to it.
With that said, over the years I've collected every volume of the Fantagraphics Peanuts series up through the first thirty years or so of the strip, through the early 1980s run - the initial fifteen books. But I've never felt quite "right" about stopping there. As you can probably determine from my music posts, I'm a completist, and I like having a full set, whether that's the total discography of a band I like or all the books in a particular collection. So last year I began a search for the remaining volumes, and found what I thought was the next in the series
for sale at a discount on eBay, The Complete Peanuts: 1981 to 1982. When it arrived the next week, I took the new book down to the section of my library containing the other Peanuts volumes... only to find that I ALREADY had a copy of that particular one, which I must've purchased unconsciously in years prior.
I couldn't return it, and I wouldn't just throw it out, so I did the next best thing; there's a really good used bookstore across town from where I live, which has thousands of volumes in various genres on sale and also runs a decent book-buying program. I figured I could take my unneeded tome over to the shop and get a few bucks out of it, or possibly swap it out for something on sale there that I might be more interested in.
That weekend, I went over to the bookstore and made a deal with the proprietor for a reasonable price for my book; it was in almost-new condition, so I did pretty well. Instead of taking the money and running, I took the time to look around while I was there, to see if there was 
anything that semi-struck my fancy. And I found it in the "Popular Music" section - Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, a 2007 biography of the Clash frontman, written by his longtime friend, music journalist Chris Salewicz. As I've mentioned before, The Clash are one of my all-time favorite bands, so I couldn't buy this book fast enough...
...And I found it well worth the acquisition. Salewicz's excellent book goes through Strummer's life in intricate detail. I found the following review on the GoodReads.com site - I heartily concur with every word, and can add nothing to this succinct and superb review:
The Clash was--and still is--one of the most important groups of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Indebted to rockabilly, reggae, Memphis soul, cowboy justice, and '60s protest, the overtly political band railed against war, racism, and a dead-end economy, and in the process imparted a conscience to punk. Their eponymous first record and London Calling still rank in Rolling Stone's top-ten best albums of all time, and in 2003 they were officially inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Joe Strummer was the Clash's front man, a rock-and-roll hero seen by many as the personification of outlaw integrity and street cool. The political heart of the Clash, Strummer synthesized gritty toughness and poetic sensitivity in a manner that still resonates with listeners, and his untimely death in December 2002 shook the world, further solidifying his iconic status.
Music journalist Chris Salewicz was a friend to Strummer for close to three decades and has covered the Clash's career and the entire punk movement from its inception. With exclusive access to Strummer's friends, relatives, and fellow musicians, Salewicz penetrates the soul of an icon. He uses his vantage point to write the definitive biography of Strummer, charting his enormous worldwide success, his bleak years in the wilderness after the Clash's bitter breakup, and his triumphant return to stardom at the end of his life. In the process, Salewicz argues for Strummer's place in a long line of protest singers that includes Woody Guthrie, John Lennon, and Bob Marley, and examines by turns Strummer's and punk's ongoing cultural influence.
One of the main areas of Strummer's life I was eager to get to in reading this book was the circumstances behind the dissolution of The Clash in late August 1983, when Mick Jones was summarily dismissed from the group. Over the years, there have been various conjectures, claims and counterclaims surrounding who exactly pulled the trigger on Mick and why - was it Bernie Rhodes, who reentered the band's orbit as manager in 1981, after being dismissed from that role three years earlier? Was it a decision by Joe alone, or a joint one with fellow band member Paul Simonon? The book is sort of wishy-washy in terms of definitively pointing the dirty stick at anyone in particular, and I won't spoil anything for those of you who haven't had the chance to read it yet... although reading between the lines, Strummer does not come off looking particularly well in this episode.
Mick reflected on the internal politics that eventually split up the group during an interview for the BBC 2 programme Def II, circa 1990:
“It all started going wrong actually when Topper left…Topper left and it was never really the same, but we could have carried on, but then I got fired (laughs)…but we’d really stopped communicating by that time. We just managed to maintain a grunting level of civility, you know, before, but it was kind of all set up as well, you know, I was set up really, and that was kind of political, behind the back.
People were moving and trying to be influential, and different people were coming between members of the group, you know, things like that. All the things that start happening, you know, when you become really successful… you become a different kind of asshole. I turned up the day I was fired and got me guitar out, you know, and I think it was Joe it was who managed to muster up the courage to say that he didn’t want to play with me anymore, and when somebody says that to you…I just packed my guitar…just whoa… hey, you know, OK bye, and that was it. I walked, and Bernie came running out after me with a cheque in his hand, you know like a gold watch or something…which added insult to injury, but I took it anyway, and about two days mourning, and I started on the next group.”
The timeline of Jone's immediate post-Clash work has always seemed a bit scrambled to me; memories of participants in that period that I've read are variously contradictory and confused in terms of time periods and activities. So I've tried on my own to come up with a plausible sequence, based on all of the information I could gather...
I'd always been under the impression/assumption that Jones formed Big Audio Dynamite in the weeks after his departure from The Clash. But apparently that wasn't quite true. Jones' initial 
post-Clash landing spot, within days of his dismissal, was as a member of General Public, Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger's new project formed in the wake of The English Beat's breakup earlier that year. With Mick on board as lead guitarist, General Public became a British New Wave/ska 'supergroup' of sorts, containing former members of Dexy's Midnight Runners and The Specials along with The Beat and The Clash. But Jones' tenure in the group was short-lived; by the late fall of 1983, less than three months after leaving The Clash and halfway through the
recording sessions for General Public's debut album All The Rage (where he contributed guitar to "Hot You're Cool", "Tenderness", "Where's The Line?" and many other tracks), he had already moved on.
Jone's next group, Top Risk Action Company (T.R.A.C) came together, it seems, in early 1984. The story, as told by saxophonist John "Boy" Lennard (ex-Theatre Of Hate - Jones was the producer on that band's only LP, 1982's Westworld), is a bit inaccurate in regards to time, in that Jones had departed The Clash six months earlier - perhaps the 'spliff' smoke mentioned below left him somewhat confused:
"T.R.A.C. came about when I was at Mick's place. He got up to phone the press to confirm he was leaving the Clash... He came back, rolled a spliff and said he wanted to start a band with Topper and I."
As mentioned above, Jones also asked former Clash bandmate Topper Headon and Basement 5 bassist Leo Williams to join the nascent band with Lennard and himself, and the quartet began rehearsing and recording demos in the early spring of 1984. But in hindsight, I don't believe that Mick was serious about prepping an actual album for release with this group. He appears to be just exploring and experimenting with different sounds at this time for his own benefit. In addition, Top Risk Action Company almost immediately faced some band turmoil; Headon's on-again/off-again heroin addition made a serious resurgence during this time. As per Lennard again:
"I think [Mick] didn’t feel confident Topper could hold it together and was feeling overwhelmed and [therefore] closed it down [by sacking Headon]."
After Headon's firing, rehearsals became more sporadic, and Lennard began drifting away to other projects. With that, T.R.A.C., as a viable enterprise, was over and done with before the summer of 1984 was out... not that this appeared to be any great loss for Jones. It seems clear now that Mick himself wasn't too keen on pursuing his evolving musical direction with that group of musicians, and all of the demos the band recorded were shelved.
Into what remained of T.R.A.C. (namely Jones and Williams),
Don
Letts and Greg Roberts were recruited in July/August of 1984... and from the ashes of that former band rose the phoenix that was Big Audio Dynamite. BAD's first gigs were in October %20(Disc%202).jpg)
1984, and their debut LP This Is Big Audio Dynamite was released in November 1985, sparking off a decade of successful and critically-acclaimed albums and gigs.
That isn't to say that what Top Risk Action Company came up with pre-BAD was a bunch of crap. What survived of the band's demos were recently recovered, remastered, and released on a bootleg CD. Stylistically, the songs on this disc are to me somewhere between Mick Jones' genre-hopping dance songs on Combat Rock (e.g. "The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too", "Atom Tan", "Inoculated City") and proto-Big Audio Dynamite post-punk dance/funk/reggae (indeed, the demo version of "The Bottom Line" here was reworked and released on BAD's first album).
Here's the full tracklist:
On the whole, this release may not be everyone's cup of tea. But at the very least, we can get a glimpse as to what was going in Mick Jones' mind at the time, and get a sense of his music creation process.
I'll leave John Lennard again with the final word regarding T.R.A.C.:
"I thought it was a creative period for him but Mick is slow to bring it up. Great memories!"
Here for your listening pleasure and to add to your musical memories is Nice Up The Nation: The First Demos, a bootleg compilation of Top Risk Action Company tunes recorded during the summer of 1984. Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.
