By the late 1990s Joe Strummer was emerging from of his wilderness years and able to look back at fucking things up so badly with The Clash and the commercial failure of Earthquake Weather. His 1999 album Rock, Art And The X Ray Style, the first with The Mescaleros, is much underrated but contains a bunch of good songs. This one was written for Johnny Cash and has some basic clattering drum machine percussion, a low key guitar part and Joe looking back at his early years. One of his gifts was being able to take a simple lyrical idea, something honest and sincere, and make something moving out of it, turning a little piece of personal hard-earned wisdom into something universal.
The Road To Rock 'n' Roll
It would've been nice to have heard Cash take a stab at this or, better still, 'Long Shadow', another one written for the man in black.
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