In an earlier post, I presented an experiment in film, music, and short fiction I prepared for a reading I gave at the University of Maine in 2007. It blends clips and stills of Joe Strummer and The Clash, and excerpts from my short bio fic piece, “Joe Strummer Along the Westway to Heaven.” You can view that film here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y06HvAV5eP8

Since then, I’ve had a request to post the text of the bio fic short. The piece is part of a collection I’m collaborating on with the artist Jeff Edmunds. We’re calling the collection “Evocations” because these works seek to evoke the spirit of their subjects. The piece begins

I came at them a leather-clad rooster of the Apocalypse, my nicotine cockadoodle rousing the weary that they might receive the London call. Belying my nom de punk, I didn’t so much strum tunes as punch salvos of witty rebuke, my Fender Tele faring no better than my bloodied right fist.

Read the entire piece with accompanying art by Jeff Edmunds. [PDF]

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3 thoughts on “Joe Strummer Along the Westway to Heaven, text version

  1. This is incredibly amazing! I love your style, and the tribute to Joe is brilliant. Thanks so much for letting me know about this. Did you do the piece on Ian Curtis?

  2. Many thanks for the kind words, Cathey. I’ve written the Curtis piece, and it’s presently in the hands of the artist with whom I’m collaborating. This is a back-burner project for both of us, so the going’s slow. But the collection is starting to grow bit by bit. Our hope is to create a tight interplay between the texts and the art, each informing the other, not merely illustrated texts.

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