The Clash – Memphis Flyer

Introducing: Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Johnny Mellor — aka Woody Mellor, aka Joe Strummer (of the Clash) — who tragically passed away in 2002 due to an undiagnosed heart condition.

But talk about exhaustive biographies: Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer (Farrar Straus & Giroux) takes the cake. Most music biographies fall victim to too much pre-fame, pre-relevance, and youth coverage, and Redemption Song is no different. Occasionally in the opening pages, Salewicz does flash-forward and back through Strummer’s adolescence, the Clash era, and post-death accounts from friends and relatives. For the most part, though, Redemption Song follows in chronological order, and the highlights of the first 160 pages — some of it slow reading — are as follows:

Strummer’s older brother suffered from depression and committed suicide when Strummer was 18. This had a massive impact on Strummer’s life and creative drive, including Strummer’s pre-Clash concern, the 101’ers, a decent pub rock band that never released recordings while together.

Naturally, the Clash sections of Redemption Song beat out the book’s beginning and end in terms of readability. Most interesting is the fact that the band was created by an impresario, just like the Sex Pistols, who had Malcolm McLaren. The Clash was more or less masterminded by a lesser known but equally brilliant London scenester/hustler by the name of Bernard (“Bernie”) Rhodes. The political phrases pasted on Strummer’s Telecaster, for example? That was Rhodes successfully launching a trend that carries on to this day.

Salewicz’s writing is workmanlike, and he gets the job done. It also helps that the author was a good friend of Strummer’s. This intimacy benefits Redemption Song, peppering it with minute details that a less familiar biographer might not know.

After the Clash folded, Strummer busied himself with sporadic projects, including but not limited to soundtrack work for the movie Sid and Nancy, co-writing much of the second Big Audio Dynamite (Mick Jones’ post-Clash project) album, and recording a 1989 solo album, Earthquake Weather, which turned out to be a flop.

The closing portion of Redemption Song is given over to Strummer’s final years with the Mescaleros, his handpicked band, which made a respectable impact by jumping all over the musical map: reggae, roots-rock, ska, and much cover material. It was with this group that Strummer reignited the spark that burned hot during his days with the Clash.

Clash fans are encouraged to check out Pat Gilbert’s Passion Is the Fashion: The Story of the Clash. For Strummer fanatics, see Redemption Song. — Andrew Earles

You’ve read your fair share of critical essays. You’ve read plenty of personal essays. But what of the “familiar” essay? Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt in the 1820s made the prose form famous, but over half a century ago, writer Clifton Fadiman was mourning its demise, along with what went with it: “formal manners, apt quotation, Greek and Latin, clear speech, conversation, the gentleman’s library … [and] the gentleman,” according to Fadiman’s “A Gentle Dirge for the Familiar Essay.”

But perhaps Fadiman was speaking too soon, and who better to prove him wrong than Fadiman’s own daughter — author, editor, teacher, and, yes, essayist Anne Fadiman? Her collection of a dozen essays, At Large and At Small (Farrar Straus & Giroux), makes delicious summertime reading, whether it’s Fadiman fille remembering Mr. Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Vilhjalmur Stefansson. You’re not familiar with Stefansson, the Arctic explorer? Fadiman would love to introduce you. The surprise ingredient to her brother’s homemade ice cream? Liquid nitrogen.

But don’t be surprised by Fadiman’s observant eye and equally keen intelligence. She was once editor of The American Scholar. She’s currently the first nonfiction writer-in-residence at Yale. But in At Large and At Small, she wears her scholarship lightly. She doesn’t indulge in Greek or Latin. Her manners aren’t exactly formal. And yet, her speech is clear; her conversational style is winning. No, she’s no gentleman. But, thanks in part to Anne Fadiman, the familiar essay is not only alive, it’s well. — Leonard Gill

Call for Submissions

It’s that time of year — time to get that short story of yours whipped into shape and into the hands of Memphis magazine, the Flyer‘s sister publication. Entries for the magazine’s annual Fiction Contest are due by mail (no faxes, no e-mails, please) on Wednesday, August 1st.

Co-sponsored this year by Burke’s Book Store and Davis-Kidd Booksellers, the contest rules are simple: Authors must live within 150 miles of Memphis; stories (which needn’t have a Memphis setting or Southern theme) should be between 3,000 and 4,500 words; and multiple entries from a single author are allowed, but each entry must come with a $10 fee. That’s a small price to pay, because the winning story earns a $1,000 grand prize and publication in a future issue of Memphis. Two honorable-mention awards of $500 each will go to stories if the quality warrants.

Need more info? Click on “Fiction Contest” at MemphisMagazine.com or contact Marilyn Sadler at sadler@memphismagazine.com. Or that’s all you need to know? Mail your short-story manuscript now to: Fiction Contest, c/o Memphis magazine, P.O. Box 1738, Memphis, TN 38101.

What makes a popular band just disappear?

“You want to hear about me sitting alone in a room doing coke and listening to the phone ring?” asks Mark Akin, the lanky guitarist and charismatic frontman for the Subteens, a hard-rocking trio (and sometimes quartet) that spent nearly a decade earning a reputation as Midtown’s best bar band before vanishing without a trace. “I was doing a considerable amount of drugs, and that became more important than everything else,” Akin confesses. “Obviously, I never expected that to happen. But nobody ever does.”

The Subteens story sounds a lot like a Subteens song. Although the band’s reunion on Saturday, April 28th, at Young Avenue Deli will likely draw a considerable crowd, when the band formed in 1995, nobody paid them much attention. During their first four years, the Subteens went through drummers like Spinal Tap and played in almost total obscurity to an audience the band describes as “girlfriends and bartenders.”

“The running gag was that we were too stupid to quit,” says bassist Jay Hines, who calls the Subteens “a band built for self-destruction.” But stupid is as stupid does, and the Subteens stupid fortunes began to change for the better when drummer and vocalist Christene Kings from the all-girl California duo the Chubbies joined the group in 1998.

“That’s when I first started noticing people showing up for shows,” Akin recalls. “And that’s also when we started putting boobs on the flyers we’d put on telephone poles.” The band wasn’t any better, he says, just better looking.

By the time Kings was replaced on drums with John “Bubba” Bonds (previously with Kenny Brown and the Verbs), the Subteens were drawing enthusiastic crowds. In 2000, the group released Burn Your Cardigan, a modish nine-song rocker that one critic accurately described as “harkening back to the days when the Clash could share a stage with the Jam.” Buried amid Akin’s originals, which vividly chronicle such tried-and-true subjects as beer, Midtown melodrama, and suburban malaise, was an unlikely cover of Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right.” Although the Subteens would crank out many more originals and cover more obvious material such as AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie” and the Ramones’ “Chinese Rocks,” “You May Be Right” became the band’s standby and a rallying cry for fans who thought Akin was just the lunatic they were looking for.

“I always thought it was fun to play a song that everybody would immediately dismiss as dorky,” Akin says of the song, which turned out to be less dorky than prophetic. As the Subteens’ popularity grew, so did Akin’s ego and habits.

“I got my head up my ass a whole lot more,” he says. “I was somewhere backstage dumping out piles of my favorite party favor. The guy I was doing it with was in the opening band, and he looked at me and said, ‘Man, what do you think you’re in — Aerosmith or something?’

“I wanted to live that [rock-star] life,” Akin says. And when people started showing up [to our shows], I took that as permission to start behaving like a jackass without the whole part of selling millions of records.”

As Akin sank deeper into his habits, Subteens sets became shorter and more unpredictable. The band might pull off a brilliant show or Akin might throw up on himself. “Either way, it was entertaining,” he says. And no show was over until Akin had stripped down to nothing but his guitar and a drunken grin.

“I think I may have started performing to strip buck-naked rather than to play the music,” Akin admits. “My idea of what a Subteens show was was debauchery, nudity, and alcohol. That’s fun, but you’ve got to put the music first.”

Things got worse.

“I pawned my girlfriend’s guitar — as all good stories start,” Akin recalls. “She had been bearing down on me to return it, but someone else had bought it. [The Subteens] were playing at Young Avenue Deli, and she lived around the corner. I remember calling her on the phone from backstage and telling her what happened. She understandably freaked. The place was filling up, and the opening band was playing. I left the Deli and walked to her house and found her standing on the porch smashing plates.”

Shortly after the release of the band’s second (and much better) album, So That’s What the Kids Are Calling It, Akin stopped showing up for shows. Instead, he sat alone in his room doing coke and listening to the phone ring.

Akin isn’t worried about returning to the stage mostly clothed and fully sober, although his last attempt at playing it straight left him feeling a little awkward.

“I’d been off drugs for maybe two or three months of a five-year coke bender [at the time of the band’s last show a few years ago]. Your head’s still pretty twisted. Usually I was half-drunk and half-naked and babbling all kinds of insane stuff to the crowd. But immediately I was more self-conscious.”

Whether or not this show is a one-time-only event for the band’s fans, who never got to say a proper goodbye, or the beginning of a new, more responsible chapter in Subteens history, depends largely on the show. “If we can get through this show without anybody getting arrested or divorced, we’ll talk about it,” Akin says.

“It’s probably a one-off,” Hines concludes, pointing out that he’s the only member of the band who is still married.

The Subteens Reunion Show

Young Avenue Deli

Saturday, April 28th

Door opens at 9 p.m.; admission $10