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Product Description
Johnny Green was a footloose slacker who loved punk rock, stumbled into being a roadie for the Sex Pistols, then tripped again into a job pushing sound equipment for the Clash and driving their beat-up van to performances in the mean industrial towns of England. Disaffected youth anointed the Clash as their spokesmen and made the group synonymous with punk itself in the late 1970s. Eventually becoming the band's road manager, Green had a unique vantage point from which to witness the burgeoning punk rock movement while helping the band in their perpetual search for women, booze, and drugs. Green was with the Clash when they conquered America, bringing with them their bad behavior and great music, and burning out after their third, too-long tour. Written in a tell-it-as-it-was style and accompanied by contemporaneous drawings by Ray Lowry, who tagged along with the Clash on their American tour as their official "war artist," A Riot of Our Own pierces the heart of the culture and music of punk rock and the people who lived it.
Amazon.com Review
Chronicles of the 1970s punk era aren't scarce by any means, but Johnny Green's narrative escapes the multiple traps of dried-out historical reportage, sociological analysis, and glory taking. Instead, he offers a certain worm's-eye vantage point on the advance of the Clash's career. A Belfast college grad when he met the band in 1977, Green accompanied them on endless tours, and he describes various episodes with a mix of detailed dialogue and picaresque humor. The Clash don't get the lavish hagiographic treatment one might expect from a fan. They come off, rather, as funny characters--intensely charged and, of course, young, sometimes-stumbling artists with insurmountable energy for performances. Green describes clearing the spit off band members' instruments in the same way that he recalls losing the demo tapes of London Calling. And then it all winds to an uneventful close, as so many things do (remember T.S. Eliot's maxim, "This is the way the world ends, the world ends, the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper"?). There's not even a whimper here, though, just Green announcing to the band--at their career peak, on the London Calling tour in the U.S.--that he wanted to see more of North America. Such a low-key ambition to end such a high-key narrative! Nonetheless, this is an essential document in the annals of punk. --Andrew Bartlett
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