Joe Strummer to Appear at Coach House

Joe Strummer may have a reputation for being a flinty sort of fellow, but he is willing to take a pat on the back.

Actually, being honored for having put out the best album of the 1980s is more like a luxuriant massage than a pat. The editors of Rolling Stone magazine recently cited “London Calling,” the 1980 double album by Strummer’s old band, the Clash, as the decade’s finest.

Strummer, who plays at the Coach House tonight on his first U.S. solo tour, wasn’t about to feign cool indifference as he spoke over the phone last week from a hotel in San Francisco.

“Musicians are really like children, y’know. Of course I would have been upset” if the Clash hadn’t finished high in Rolling Stone’s decade-end album rankings.

“It’s an honor to be in the thing anyway, whatever number,” said Strummer, who fronted the Clash along with his songwriting partner Mick Jones.

After albums like “London Calling” and “Combat Rock,” it seemed as if the Clash was poised in the early ‘80s to become the first band from the British punk explosion to reach for the brass ring of big-time stardom. Instead, the band fell off the merry-go-round--the key setback being the falling out between its songwriting partners that resulted in Jones being drummed out of the band in 1983. Two years and one album later, the Clash was finished.

“Some groups should stay and some groups should go,” said Strummer, who reconciled with Jones after the Clash had disbanded. “We couldn’t really handle the mega success, I think.”

Strummer didn’t exactly plunge back into the quest for

stardom after the Clash broke up. Instead of doing the usual thing--moving quickly to establish a solo career so as to capitalize fully on his successes--he dabbled with sound track scores and a bit of acting, touring the U.S. only as a sideman filling in for an ailing member of the Pogues.

Now Strummer is back with his first solo album, “Earthquake Weather,” and stardom is clearly on his mind: two of the album’s songs, “Leopardskin Limousines” and “Slant Six,” are about the quest for pop fame. It’s a quest, though, that Strummer is not about to leap into with enthusiasm. Both songs are cautionary tales in which stardom is seen as a gain-the-world-but-lose-your-soul proposition.

“It was partly autobiographical,” Strummer said of the songs’ concerns, “but I was thinking of the whole process from beginning to end. The process of fame or what you exchange for fame.”

In “Slant Six,” Strummer portrays a superstar whose inspiration is being siphoned by his wealth and fame, and asks sardonically, “What are you gonna do for an encore? C’mon baby, after an act like that, people are gonna scream for more.”

In a “morbid” mood, Strummer said, he might imagine himself in that trapped rocker’s shoes.

“It’s not really a true situation” drawn from his Clash experience, he said. “But it can get like that. I know Jimi Hendrix felt very trapped by the audience demands” when he tried to take his music in new directions. “They just wanted to hear what they knew. That’s human nature.”

Strummer isn’t trying to buck human nature in his tour with a backing trio made up of Los Angeles rockers Zander Schloss (formerly guitarist of the Circle Jerks and Thelonious Monster), Jack Irons (an ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer) and bassist Lonnie Mitchell.

“When we play live, we try to mix it up a lot, going back and forth” with songs from the Clash repertoire, some cover tunes, and material from “Earthquake Weather” and Strummer’s film work. “We’re still going to play ‘London Calling.’ It’s our ‘Purple Haze,’ you might say.”

“Earthquake Weather” takes a musically varied trip through a landscape far removed from stardom’s more chic precincts. The shifting topography takes in slums, back alleys, jazz dives, and remote roadsides where cars idle aimlessly.

Strummer often adds to that sense of restless wandering with a dense, frenetic rush of words and images that recalls Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello. The album slows down for a few pretty but dejected ballads and a bouncy but wistful reggae song lamenting lost innocence and simplicity.

The music has its bright passages (Strummer said that brightness is a quality he enjoys in music, naming Paul Simon’s “Graceland” as his own best-of-the-’80s pick because “I like the way the sun shines in it”). But the overall mood of “Earthquake Weather” is as foreboding as the title, with scenes of frustration, languor and decay predominating.

A world in trouble is no new theme for Strummer, who sang of Armageddon around the corner in the song “London Calling.” But he said the title of “Earthquake Weather” doesn’t come with any apocalyptic connotations intended. Instead, Strummer said, it comes from the fact that he experienced four earthquakes while recording the album in Hollywood late last year and early this year.

“Zander had to drop a guitar quite quickly to get out of the place” during the most severe of the tremors, Strummer said. “One of them was really, really scary. I just stood there with my mouth open.”

Strummer, who has a deep and gravelly speaking voice to match the gruff braying of his singing, didn’t offer any particular reason for taking almost five years before putting out his first album apart from the Clash.

“In 1984 I stuck my hands together with super glue, and it took five years to get ‘em apart” he quipped. “I was just taking time out.”

He did keep up his credentials as a politicized rocker with a 1988 tour of England that was dubbed “Rock Against the Rich.” The tour, he said, began as a benefit for a British organization called Class War that was fighting a wave of gentrification in London that had sent housing prices soaring while displacing poor and working-class people.

“What they really meant was Rock Against the Greedy,” Strummer said. “Things were going mad at that point. The house prices were going through the ceiling. The developers had gone amok. There were hundreds of real-estate agents on each street corner, and people were really depressed.”

Some thought it an anomaly for a presumably well-off rocker to play under such a strident banner as “Rock Against the Rich.” But Strummer said he hardly is leading the life style of the rich and famous that he scorns on his new album.

“I’ve never been very clever about money,” he said. “I spent most of my money on that (benefit) tour, and my place (a house in London that he says he bought with a mortgage when prices were cheap) is the same as any plumber would have.”

Joe Strummer plays tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets cost $19.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.