Love Kills

Under normal circumstances, I like to tie in some personal anecdote to my ruminations about the songs I praise here, but I don't really have one in this particular case. All I can say is that I was walking up 6th Avenue earlier this week on my way to my new job, and this track came blasting through my headphones at the corner of 34th Street, and it completely made my morning. So, I thought I'd share it with you.

"Love Kills" isn't the late, great Joe Strummer's finest hour -- by a looooooong stretch -- but it's still a favorite of mine. The song was originally conceived and executed as the title track to Alex Cox's largely indefensible and slavishly revisionist 1986 biopic, "Sid & Nancy" (the film's distributors, evidently, didn't like "Love Kills" as a title for the film). It appeared on the soundtrack LP and also as its own single and 12" e.p.. For some inane reason, it didn't surface on compact disc until 2001, packed alongside a couple of truly cringe-worthy renditions of punk standards by the otherwise entirely respectable Gary Oldman (who portrayed Sid in the film) and far too many songs by some go-nowhere favorite band of Alex Cox's called Pray for Rain. Joe Strummer did not elect to slip "Love Kills" onto his first solo album a few years later, Earthquake Weather either. As such, it was a tricky tune to track down for a while.

After some very big, of-their-era gated drums (smacking out more or less the same rhythm that ushers in "Girlfriend is Better" on the live Talking Heads album, Stop Making Sense), Strummer's signature choppy chords (see also "Clash City Rockers," "Capital Radio One," "London Calling" etc.) detonate a somewhat moronically simple melody. It's almost as if Cox pulled Joe aside and asked him to compose the most slack-jawed stomp imaginable. It comes across with all the subtlety of a ball peen hammer to the back of the head. BANG-BANG-BOOM/BOOM-BANG-BANG/BANG-A-BANG-BANG-BOOM/BANG-A-BANG-BANG-BOOM etc. For the rest of his days, Strummer would never again make music this clangy, heavy and simple. Coming hot on the heels of Joe's catastrophic attempt to reinvigorate The Clash without Mick Jones and Topper Headon (which manifested itself in the embarrassingly unlistenable Cut The Crap album), it's almost as if "Love Kills" was Stummer's last identifiably "Punk" song.

But as cartoony and unintentionally parodic as it may have been, "Love Kills" still kicks like a mule. It's a great, bashing rock tune with a big shouty chorus. Lyrically, it's not really one of Strummer's finest. I presume it's about Sid, but Strummer somehow injects allusions to Mexico and the Rio Grande into the mix for no readily discernible reason. Certain lines -- notably "Down in Dixie You Were Cryin' For Dope!" and the one about Ryker's Island -- are obviously about ol' Sid, but the song doesn't suggest that Strummer's heart was really in it. Even the title -- "Love Kills" -- is a bit of a throwaway. It always seemed like more Alex Cox's vision of the events than Strummer's, being that Joe was actually around at the time during Sid Vicious' messy downward spiral.

The movie, of course, was insipid. The song, however, still rocks.