Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #80654

When:

Short story:

Joe Strummer of The Clash runs in the Paris Marathon in Paris, France, Europe.

Full article:

This is an expanded version of a feature by Johnny Black which originally ran in Classic Rock magazine.

INTRO

On April 21, 1982, while The Clash were rehearsing for their upcoming Combat Rock tour, their guiding light, Joe Strummer, mysteriously vanished from view. Apparently, neither the band's manager, Bernie Rhodes, or their record label, knew where he had gone and even the other band members professed ignorance of his whereabouts. With a new album and a major tour imminent, the rumour mill went into overdrive. Was it a publicity stunt? Had Citizen Joe quit the band? Was he lying dead in some back alley gutter? The truth turned out to be stranger than any of those possibilities and the first clue to his disappearance came to light from a chance encounter with a music journalist on the night train to Paris in the early hours of the next morning...

----------------------------------------------------------------

Steve Taylor (The Face) : Joe was looking tired, wearing shades, travelling light and consulting a cheap paperback guide to Paris. It looked like he was planning to stay in the city.

Richard Schroeder (Parisian photographer) : When Joe and his girlfriend Gaby Salter got to Paris, they immediately lost their passports and all their other documents. The only person they knew in Paris was a friend of Gaby's daughter who had a small flat in Montmartre, so they stayed with her.

Fortunately, she knew I was a big fan of The Clash, and of Joe, so she called me and said, 'Come over tonight. I have a surprise for you.' Then, when I got to her flat, there was Joe and Gaby and we got along very well from the start. We were the same age, so it was great.

Topper Headon (drummer, The Clash) : Mick, Paul and I were completely in the dark, no idea where he'd gone, but I have to say it wasn't a very happy band at that time. It was dreadful for Joe to have to be in a band that was becoming so successful, but I was addicted to drugs, out of my head all the time. I can only imagine that it must have been hell for Mick, Paul and Joe to be in an aeroplane with me, then in a hotel, then a bus, all the time. It must have been hard work. It was so intense.

As well as that, Mick Jones was behaving like a rock star, and we'd all lost sight of what we'd set out to do in the first place.

Kit Buckler (Head Of Press, CBS Records) : I'd known Joe for years, from the days before he was even in a band, when we shared a squat in Kilburn, but when he vanished, none of us had a clue where he was.

Joe Strummer : It was something I wanted to prove to myself: that I was alive. It's very much like being a robot, being in a group. You keep coming along and keep delivering and keep being an entertainer and keep showing up and keep the whole thing going. Rather than go barmy and go mad, I think it's better to do what I did, even for a month. I just got up and went to Paris without even thinking about it. I might have gone a bit barmy, you know? I knew a lot of people were going to be disappointed, but I had to go.
Richard Schroeder : Joe and I saw each other almost every night for the next three weeks, because I was usually working during the day. We did sometimes meet during the day. I took them to the Chateau Of Versailles, for example, and some other sights of Paris.
Most of the time, what he preferred to do was just cruising around from bar to bar. We would meet, have dinner somewhere, and then we'd visit maybe ten bars every night, drinking, and talking, talking, talking about how to make the world better. It was very simple.
Most of the places we went were in the Pigalle district because it was close to Montmartre. We went, I think, a few times to The Noctambule. Joe liked that place because, in the back room, there was an old guy who sang French chansons from the old days, and Joe loved that, but really we didn't have any favourite bars.

We didn't go to any gigs at all, because he didn't want to run into people he knew from the music business.

One thing that surprised me was that no-one recognised him. The Clash were huge in Paris, but no-one came up to him. He was growing a beard, so maybe... in later years people were always stopping us on the street, but in 1982 I don't remember any fans coming up to him.

Joe Strummer : I only intended to stay for a few days, but the more days I stayed, the harder it was to come back, because of the more aggro I was causing that I'd have to face.

Kit Buckler : Once word got out that he'd vanished, it became a huge front-page story in the media, which we had to deal with quickly because the album was about to come out. We were dealing with two main people in The Clash camp - their manager Bernard Rhodes, who was always trying to poke the hornet's nest, and their other right hand man, Kosmo Vinyl, who was the one who poured oil on troubled waters.

Topper Headon : The story that went out was that tickets for the tour were not selling well in Scotland, so Joe and Bernie hatched this plan for Joe to disappear to Paris. It never made any sense to me. If Joe went missing, how was that going to sell tickets in Scotland? Everybody knows we always had a big walk-up...

Joe Strummer : A walk-up means people who don’t buy tickets for your shows up-front. You mightn’t sell a huge advance. But with a walk-up you’ll sell out, piss easy. For me, it’s a real honourable thing to have. It means you’ve got hipsters in the crowds who don’t plan things in advance. That’s the crowd you want.

Richard Schroeder : The official version was, like, they had to make an event to create publicity which would help to sell more tickets, but Joe never mentioned that to me. What he told me was that it was mainly the drug problem with Topper. And, of course, soon after he returned to England, Topper was out of the band.

So it was more about the problems with the band and Joe wanted to be out of that for a while, to have a chance to think about it properly.

Bernard Rhodes (manager, The Clash) : Joe going to Paris had nothing to do with ticket sales. He had a lot of personal problems, OK? And I told him, 'Take a break.' Where the ticket sales thing came in, I do not know. He was gonna go on a big tour and I didn't want that hanging... I told him to go and sort it out.

Kit Buckler : Absolutely. There had been a bit of an atmosphere within the band. They weren't talking to each other during rehearsals and so on. Bernard was always irrational, difficult to work with, the master of post-rationalisation, and my take on it is that that's where the scam/publicity story thing came from. Bernard saw what was going on and realised he could make something out of it.

Paul Simonon : We knew he was all right, because he phoned his mum. He'd told her to keep schtum, but I think Kosmo wore her down.

Kit Buckler : After the furore had started, and there were even rumours that he'd committed suicide, I remember Joe ringing me in the CBS press office and saying, "Don't worry, I'm all right. I just felt I had to get away." I think things had got on top of him, he was finding the pressure suffocating. Joe didn't like using the phone, so it probably took a lot for him to call me, and he intimated that he wouldn't be gone forever.

Topper Headon : I found a letter that I wrote at the time to Joe about his disappearance, and in the letter I say, 'I understand your unhappiness with the way the band is." I admitted I wasn't getting on with Paul, and it was all pretty chaotic. I was saying that, if he came back, I'd get my act together. But, of course, I never sent it to him, because we had no idea where he was.

Richard Schroeder : Near the end of his time in Paris, Joe bought a French newspaper, because he wanted to learn French, which he never actually did. We met in a bar and he was reading in the newspaper about the Paris marathon. "Oh, there's a marathon on Sunday! Do you think we can do it?" I told him I didn't know how to enter it, but he said, "Yeah, but if we just turn up on the day..."

I told him he was in no shape to run the marathon, but he said that being on stage was like sport.

Kit Buckler : You'd never know it to look at him, but Joe was a reasonably heathy guy. We used to play five-a-side football in between Clash recording sessions at Westbourne Grove, and he was pretty good. He had previously run at least one marathon, and he ran others after Paris.

Richard Schroeder : He made no preparations for it. He didn't do any training. The day before the marathon he was completely drunk.

Joe Strummer : You really shouldn't ask me about my training, regime, you know? Okay, you want it, here it is: Drink 10 pints of beer the night before the race. Ya got that? And don't run a single step at least four weeks before the race … But make sure you put a warning in this article, 'Do not try this at home.' I mean, it works for me and Hunter Thompson, but it might not work for others. I can only tell you what I do.

Richard Schroeder : So, anyway, we borrowed some shorts and running shoes and I took them to the start. I left them there and told them I would meet them at the end, which was about three hours later. Gaby didn't do the whole marathon. She abandoned before the end.

So I met her at the end, and we waited together for Joe to complete it. He always said he took about three hours twenty, but I think it was more like four hours. Hundreds of people came past and then we just suddenly saw Joe. He was completely exhausted.

There was a big table with water and orange juice and sugar cubes and this sort of thing, for the runners. Joe fell into my arms and I asked him, "Do you want some orange juice?" but he said, "I want a cigarette and a beer."

I took a few photographs in which he's wearing my jacket and you can see the beer in his hand, and he has the medal round his neck. Everyone who completed the marathon got the medal, and he was really proud of it.

So I took them back to the flat and I assumed we wouldn't see each other that night because he'd need to sleep, but he called me at midnight and said, 'Hey, d'you want to have another few beers?'

The next day, Joe couldn't move. He was walking around like a 90 year-old man.

Frank VanHoorn (promoter, Lochem festival) : A journalist I knew spotted Joe in Paris and rang me up because he knew I was anxious about whether The Clash would make it to my festival. So I rang The Clash office in London and told Bernie.

Joe Strummer : They hired a private detective to find me.

Richard Schroeder : The story I heard was that there was a private detective who was called in who tracked Joe down, and then Kosmo was sent over to Paris.

Kit Buckler : That's right, it was Kosmo who was sent to track him down in the end. Kosmo was great during this time.

Richard Schroeder : I think it was two days after the Marathon that Kosmo arrived and found him and convinced him to go back to London. Joe called me up and said, 'They found me!' but he was laughing about it.

Kit Buckler : I think he was ready to come back. There was this dichotomy with Joe ... he did have these periods over the years where he would cut himself off and become quite isolated, but the next time you saw him he'd be the wonderful warm guy that he usually was. I think he'd have come back even if Kosmo hadn't gone and found him.

Richard Schroeder : He already knew he would have to come back, because the tour was coming up in just a few days. He said, 'We have to go back, but let's meet up because there's someone I want you to meet.' That's when I met Kosmo, who was not very nice to me at all. He thought I was part of the problem, that I was the one who was hiding Joe in Paris.

It was a very special time for Joe and Gaby, the first time they were away from everything, and they were just being tourists. They loved it. Gaby later told me that those were the three best weeks she ever had with Joe. She said it was like a dream because there was just the two of them. Usually Joe never had a day free.

Frank VanHoorn : Their first gig after Joe was discovered was my festival, which they were headlining. They played great but Topper seemed to be in a bad way.

Topper Headon : I didn't know, but they'd obviously had meetings about the state I was in and said, 'We'll test Topper in Amsterdam'. What a place to test a junkie. So I got stoned there. As far as I was concerned, everything was normal.

I don't know I'm being tested, do I? I don't know it's my last chance, and I'm running round trying to score coke. They're all sitting in the dressing-room, combing their hair in the mirror against the wall and I run in and go: 'Can I use the mirror?'
When we got back to London, we had a meeting and it was Joe who actually told me I was sacked but I think it was more Bernie who wanted me out. Mick didn't want me to leave the group. It was definitely Bernie, and Joe later said, on my sacking, that he nearly changed his mind.

Joe Strummer : Bernie said, ‘He’s a junkie, he has to go.’ Ignorance ruled the day. We knew nothing about heroin.

Topper Headon : I was addicted to heroin and you put that before everything else. The band was like a racing car that was getting faster and faster and more successful, but there was a flat tyre. If I hadn't been addicted to heroin, none of them would have wanted me to go.

Joe Strummer : I don’t think, honest to God, we ever played a good gig after that.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

The Clash soldiered on without Topper, and even stumbled along for a while after Mick Jones was ousted in 1983, again largely at the instigation of Bernie Rhodes. The end came in 1986 shortly after the sub-par Cut The Crap album, which had been largely cobbled together by Strummer and Rhodes and heavily featuring a drum machine. Despite the band's ignominious demise, their classic Should I Stay Or Should I Go reached No1 on re-release in 1991, and The Clash's legend has since gone on from strength to strength.

Gaby Salter and Joe had two children together, but the relationship ended in 1990, after which Joe married Lucinda Tait in 1995 and the couple remained together until his death in 2002.