Here's a true confession about Joe Dick, something Billy is pretty sure only he and Joe and maybe some of their old classmates from high school know: when Joe was a teenager, he had desperately wanted to be Joe Strummer.
The Clash played Vancouver for the first time in 1979. They let all the kids who were too young or poor to go to the show come in for the sound check. Joe had played hooky and gone while Billy was stuck talking to his fucking guidance counsellor.
Joe had been allowed to hold Joe Strummer's guitar. He hadn't shut up about it for weeks.
Joe was always terribly, hopelessly infatuated with the people he looked up to. He'd been like that about Joe Strummer, and then about Bucky Haight. He'd even looked up to Billy that way, for about two weeks: trying to copy the way that he walked, trying to copy the way he pushed his hair back off his forehead, buying the same kind of soda as him when they went to the corner store.
That was back when they'd just met and Joe still thought Billy was a car thief, a hood, a real JD, not just a poor kid who'd been sitting in a stolen car with a bunch of older kids when then cops came. He'd been crushed when Billy admitted he wasn't really in a gang.
You were never uncertain about how Joe Dick felt about you. He loved you or he hated you, and either way, he would let you know.
Joe, whatever else about him, loved people immensely, pathetically, helplessly. Billy had never loved anybody more than he loved himself. "You have all the warmth and compassion of a rattlesnake," a girl called Crystal told him once during a breakup, and Billy'd just felt touched that she knew him so well.
Joe Strummer: ....If you're really serious, you know, you can't — you haven't even got time to have a personal life.
Interviewer [sarcastically]: If you want to join the revolution, you have to jump in with both feet.
Joe Strummer: Well, before we talk about revolution, let's talk about the fact that everybody's fast asleep. Y'know, you're running way ahead of yourself there.
Interviewer: You still think that the general public is fast asleep?
Joe Strummer: Definitely. Otherwise, why would all the cons be foisted on us? You know — the education system's a con. The record business is a con — big business is a con. City life is a con, country life is a con. The army's a con, the navy's a con — even cable television is a con. Even rock and roll is a con!- The Clash, interviewed in Toronto, 1984.
It seemed like the world was full of suckers, and the cons they eagerly bought into. Billy had never wanted to be a sucker or a con, and neither had Joe.
The only difference was that Billy thought that caring about politics made you a sucker, whether you were getting conned by the left or the right, while Joe thought that not caring about politics made you the biggest sucker of them all.
Joe breathed fire in those days. Viva la revolution, viva la rock and roll. But it seemed like he'd come around to Billy's way of thinking, by the time they did the reunion.
Billy had been watching. Billy had sat in the corner while Bruce interviewed Joe for the documentary — footage that ended up on the cutting room floor, Billy was sure, if only because you could see the giant coke booger hanging off the end of Joe's nose. Joe had told Bruce the whole history of the band — "from rags to rags," he said — but he'd never mentioned politics once.
Bruce had just lapped up everything Joe said. Bruce, Billy thought, had a very one-dimensional idea of what punk was about, and Joe's stories about drugs and fights fit into it perfectly.
Billy hadn't tried to correct the record. What would he even say?
All those gigs for Rock Against Racism and Punks Against Nukes, all those benefits for strike funds and women's shelters, all those heavy-ass boxes of ALF leaflets and Stop The War posters that they'd lugged from town to town. Gone, vanished, like they never happened, like they never mattered.
Billy had always had limited patience for Joe's activist bullshit. He should have been happy that it seemed to be over for good. Instead, as he walked away from Bruce's little office and went looking for a taxi, he'd just felt sad.
The world was full of suckers and cons, and it looked like Joe had decided to become a con. Fine. Great. He definitely had the skills for it.
Billy had never wanted to be either a con or a sucker. But if you had to choose — and it turned out that sooner or later most people had to choose — it was better to be selling than to be buying, better to kill than to be killed.
It just wasn't easy to watch.
Joe loved people immensely, hopelessly, pathetically, right up until he decided he was done with them. Then he dropped them like a piece of trash.
By 1980 Joe'd been telling everyone that Joe Strummer was a fat coke-addicted hypocrite, and the Clash were sellouts, and their new album sucked.
So maybe Joe had fallen out of love with the left. And, just like always, decided to pretend that he'd never really cared.
The left had let Joe down. You just had to look around you to see that the revolution hadn't happened, and probably never would.
And Joe was stupid for ever having believed in it, but Billy realized now that some part of him had been hoping that Joe was right. Had been hoping that someday they'd stop torturing bunny rabbits in labs, and bombing poor countries for oil, and letting people go hungry when there was plenty of food.
It wasn't like punk rock had ever been the most efficient way to stop any of those things, and Billy was sure that there were other people out there trying to make it happen. But if Joe had given up, Joe who had been such a true believer, then maybe they were in bigger trouble than they thought....
"I'm not gonna go out like the Woodstock generation," Joe told a journalist once. "Where are those people now?" he asked, not knowing that what happened to them would happen to him too, and he answered his own question. "They're dead, or they sold out." Nothing changes. The beat goes on. Every gimmick hungry yob digging gold from rock 'n' roll grabs the mic to tell me he'll die before he's sold. Death or glory, just another story.
Joe could still quote every lyric to every song on London Calling, long after he sold his copy of the record. He'd organized the benefit for Bucky Haight, even though the last time they'd seen Bucky he'd called Joe a talentless, flashy attention seeker and then stolen all their coke.
And Joe could never, ever, let go of Billy, all these long years since Joseph Mulgrew nudged Bill Boisy in the line outside the old Vancouver courthouse and asked hey, you got a light?
So maybe Joe's politics would come back to him, in some new shape. Billy hoped so. Because right now, Billy thought, Joe looked like somebody who had fallen out of love with life.