Alaska Employment Law

I made my way Sunday to see The Future Is Unwritten, a documentary biography of the late, great Joe Strummer, the lead singer and half the motive force of the iconic punk band The Clash.  If you’re a Clash fan or perhaps a Mescaleros fan, you should sprint, not jog, to see this movie, which manages in a wonderful way to humanize Mr. Strummer, who, I suspect, was a very difficult character to live or work with.  Born John Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, the son of a diplomat, Joe changed his name to Woody Mellor as a teenager, and finally settled on Joe Strummer when he realized that he could “only play all the guitar strings at once, but couldn’t play the fiddly bits.”

Told in the voice of Strummer himself (his friend Julian Temple, who directed this movie, interviewed Strummer scores of times while Joe was alive), as well as by means of “campfire interviews” with many of the key people in his life, the movie captures something about the immense charisma of the man that went missing from the recent gigantic Chris Salewicz biography of Joe, Redemption Song.  The campfire motif reflects Strummer’s latter day camping expeditions to the Glastonbury music festival in England, which he felt provided a way for humans to reconnect with one another.  These interviews may seem odd if you don’t know that Strummer was fond of campfires and bonfires, but by the end of the film they seem somehow perfectly normal.  Interestingly, none of the speakers at these campfires is identified on screen, although some of them identify themselves.  Again, if you don’t know the story, you may have some trouble figuring out the part each person may have played in Joe’s life – or, in the case of Bono, John Cusack and even Johnny Depp (in pirate costume!), his part in theirs.

There is early footage of the 101ers, Joe’s first real band, and early footage of The Clash.  Filmic evidence shows that no rhythm guitarist in history can possibly have played his instrument more aggressively than Strummer.  He tended to tear his own fingers and forearm on the strings, such that eventually he had someone wrap his forearm in electricians’ black tape before a concert, to minimize the damage.  The music in this film is wonderful, and the soundtrack is even better than what is contained in the film, including Algerian singer Rachid Taha’s  incredible, stupendous, play-it-really-loud cover version of “Rock the Casbah” – it tops the original, which I would have thought absolutely impossible.

It’s a great film, probably a bit too long for casual fans.  Still, I had a tear in my eye at the end.  “White Riot,” indeed.