After a lost period following the dissolution of The Clash, Joe Strummer broke through his creative block with the recording of the Walker soundtrack
In 1987, Joe Strummer was a soldier without an army. The Clash had dramatically imploded the year before, leaving the enigmatic frontman without a creative outlet. Throughout the mid-1980s, he shuttled back and forth between his London home and Granada, Spain, where he searched for his muse and led a secretive double life. He became infatuated with a Spanish power-pop group — he demanded to produce their debut LP — and spent months searching for the grave of a revolutionary poet martyred during the Spanish Civil War.
Then, Strummer met Alex Cox.
“[T]he film director’s guerrilla approach correspond[ed] to the musician’s attitude,” Chris Salewicz wrote in Redemption Song, his 2006 biography of Strummer. “Both believed in the energizing, edifying effects of an artist throwing his entire essence into a project.”
While filming Cox’s Straight to Hell — a ridiculous spaghetti Western starring, among others, Elvis Costello and a young Courtney Love — Strummer began to see his path forward as a musician. After the demise of The Clash, Strummer wavered between musical directions, flirting with genres ranging from rock to blues to country to traditional Gaelic folk songs, even reuniting with Mick Jones to produce and co-write songs on the second Big Audio Dynamite record. But on the set of Cox’s studio-funded Spanish holiday, Strummer broke through his creative block, immersing himself into his role as the renegade bank robber Simms for the entirety of filming — never changing out of his character’s black suit and wearing a shoulder-holstered revolver into Spanish bars. When Cox asked him to cameo in his next film, a historical biopic set in 1850s Nicaragua, Strummer jumped at the opportunity on one condition:
He would record the soundtrack.
Walker follows the tale of William Walker, the American filibuster who invaded Nicaragua in 1854 with 58 soldiers of fortune. Played with seething, simmering rage by Ed Harris, Walker, already a victim of his blind faith in Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism, declares himself President and proceeds to descend both Nicaragua and himself into madness. After a year of virtual anarchy, Walker is overthrown by a coalition of Central American nations and eventually sentenced to death by a Honduran firing squad.
As a film, Walker is a strange, ham-fisted satire of American involvement in the Contra War, then-raging in Nicaragua. Harris is brilliant as the tortured Walker, as is Peter Boyle as the vulgar, cigar-chomping robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, but a hallucinogenic movie about an historical footnote in American foreign policy released at the tail end of the Reagan years was doomed from the start. According to Salewicz, even Strummer hated the movie; he reportedly broke the news to Alex Cox by gently telling him the film would “scare the shit out of people.” Nonetheless, the film found a cult audience, thanks in part to Strummer’s powerful score.
Composed on location in Nicaragua and recorded at Russian Hill Recordings in San Francisco, Walker is the first full-length recording by Strummer post-Clash. Featuring a murderer’s row of studio musicians — including former Circle Jerks bassist Zander Schloss, Afro-jazz band leader Rebeca Mauleon and Santana percussionist Michael Spiro — the soundtrack remains one of Strummer’s most ambitious and underrated records. Walker is a little bit Latin and a little bit country, blending shimmering guitarrons, boisterous horns and frenetic percussion with twangy banjos and blues harmonicas to form a subtropical take on an Ennio Morricone score.
On the first half of the record, Strummer further explores the Latin music that the Clash had flirted with on Sandinista! (1980) and Combat Rock (1982). Tracks like “Filibustero,” “Nica Libre” and ‘Latin Romance” bounce across the Latin music spectrum, from salsa to merengue to Afro-Cuban jazz. In the film, they feel like intentional idiosyncrasies — the playful saxophones in “Filibustero” narrate a chaotic battle between Walker’s mercenaries and the Mexican army — but on the album, they’re the heralds of Joe Strummer Mark II. On the B-side, Strummer turns to what he called “American hillbilly music,” inspired by Walker’s home state of Tennessee. “Tennessee Rain” is a jaunty-but-sad banjo tune best heard on a wrap-around porch during a sweltering Southern summer; “Tropic of Pico” features a slide guitar that would make Duane Allman blush. But Strummer the punk rock troubadour is nowhere to be found on Walker: His voice only appears on three of the album’s 14 tracks, and even when it does make a cameo, it’s usually soft and low in the mix, a stark shift from his reputation as a loud, brash frontman.
Despite that, Strummer’s voice is the centerpiece of the album’s standout track. “The Unknown Immortal” is a haunting ballad sung from the perspective of a soldier in Walker’s so-called “gringo army” but easily relatable with the plight of the spiritually lost frontman. “I was once immortal,” Strummer croons over Zander Schloss’ silky Spanish guitar, reckoning with his fall from grace straight to tape. The song blends Latin rhythm, American country-western and Strummer’s deep depression to chilling perfection: trumpets and slide guitars harmonizing with a woeful, angsty voice.
Strummer’s mother had died weeks before Walker began filming. He was still dealing with lingering post-Clash depression while Mick Jones was reaping the critical and popular praise for his new band Big Audio Dynamite. Strummer was the epitome of a tortured artist in 1987, and he knew that Walker was his make-or-break moment — his greatest opportunity to prove himself as a musician, as an artist and as a self-proclaimed citizen of the world. In this way, though he surely found his politics abhorrent, Strummer must have found a kindred spirit in William Walker. Both men had lost loved ones weeks before departing for Nicaragua: Walker’s fiance died of cholera; Strummer’s mother succumbed to bone cancer. When Strummer watched Walker become drunk with power before losing everything, even the support of his financiers and his beloved American government, he saw himself in the Clash’s twilight years, alone and abandoned by the movement he helped create.
But, through the strange tale of the doomed filibustero, Strummer found his path to redemption. For the first time in over a decade, Strummer could flex his creative muscles without the pressure of leading The Only Band That Matters. After years of depression, frustration, personal upheaval and addiction, Walker was the catalyst for Strummer’s transformation from a righteous, pissed-off hellraiser to a righteous citizen of the world.
“No one will remember Walker,” Peter Boyle’s Cornelius Vanderbilt sneers at the end of the film, shortly before the general is unceremoniously executed. “No one remembers the losers.”
Walker lost. Joe Strummer won.
Follow Marek and Split Tooth Media on Twitter
Feature image: John Joe Coffey/Flickr
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
