The reason The Clash “had no peers”, according to Tom Morello
Every note that Tom Morello made was always about passion over flashiness.
He always loved the idea of practising the most complex guitar solos ever made, but it wasn’t going to mean anything unless it had the right kind of lyrical idea to match it. And while Rage Against the Machine should be commended for showing the world what could be done in the context of a hard rock outfit, Morello knew that there were few artists that were able to walk the walk whenever they came offstage.
Because outside of a few notable exceptions, there are many rock and rollers that almost don’t seem human when the last note of every show rings out. There are plenty that can be humble in a few instances, but in the golden age of the genre, Peter Frampton and Jimmy Page were far from normal human beings. No, they were musical gods, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
That’s all well and good, but it also doesn’t give a kid a lot to look up to.
That was hardly going to stop someone like Morello. He may have been known as one of the people who helped bring down the phoniness of hard rock, but he did have to go through more than a few embarrassing moments before he got off the ground. Did he throw on the spandex and play the most face-melting solos everyone loved? You bet your ass he did, but nothing mattered more to him than the music that came from the streets.
That normally applies to the hip-hop side of Rage’s music, but the same could be said for the early days of punk rock. The biggest names of the genre were far from the same guitar heroes that everyone had thought of back in the day, but when listening to a band like Ramones, you could tell that they weren’t trying to put on some mystique. They were a bunch of guys wanting to play rock and roll with passion, and it didn’t get any more serious at the time than The Clash.
While most of the members of Sex Pistols were put together as a sort of publicity stunt, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones had a firm belief in what their music could do. They had the same kind of anarchic energy that came from their contemporaries, but looking through their discography, they still held onto the credence of rock and roll being a much bigger force than any other genre in its path.
All members of The Clash helped make them who they are, but Morello felt that there was something about Strummer that no other band was going to be able to replicate, saying, “They had no peers because of the center of The Clash hurricane stood one of the greatest hearts and deepest souls of the 20th century music. At the center of The Clash stood Joe Strummer. (He) died in December 2002 but when Joe Strummer played, [but] he played as if the world could be changed by a three-minute song and he was right.”
And without hyperbole, Strummer had seen it all with the band. He was there at the beginning, he was there bringing the lyrical force to London Calling, and he was even there to embarrassingly look at the sad state of the group during Cut The Crap, but what he never lost was the conviction behind his music and the idea that he could shift the musical landscape on its axis with a microphone in his hand.
So despite Morello’s sounding absolutely nothing like what The Clash did back in the day, it doesn’t really need to for people to realise the kind of message Strummer was going for. The world could change within the span of a single song, and even if The Clash’s descendants didn’t have the exact same sound, what was more important was them inspiring people to make their own classics.
