It never ended. It will never end. He will keep agitating. They will keep repressing. 1977, in England, meant something, even in the new world, and means something still, to him, and the other few that kept the aesthetic. The scowling presence, the jackboot jaunt, but the stuff wears thin on a second decade. Most left for sell-out status, few stayed. At the brokerage houses the powder was free, but that proposition  was unattractive to the real partisans if they had to become yuppies in the bargain. No, he won’t do it. No condos and babysitter budgets, no working wives and money markets. He knows Joe Strummer would never cave. Even the pressure of stardom and the cascade of money couldn’t make Joe a Tory. Here, on the other side of the pond, he himself could think of nothing to make him a Republican. Even music of the 50’s was too progressive for those people; Christ, they were still listening to Benny Goodman. Meanwhile, the modern soundtrack slashes through his mind and he navigates the street scene back then; of homeless wanderers and sick refugees, turned-out factory workers and people cut off the dole. It’s morning in America but the sun don’t come up here. The passing of years erased the obvious evidence but left the collateral damage. It was a trick they pulled, letting it get so bad that people would become grateful for the slightest improvement, then watching the grateful spend the rest of their lives toiling just to keep the status quo, while access to real capital swirled invisibly, unknowingly just out of their reach, to the powerful few. It never ended. It will never end. He will put on his leather and yell at the world.

-Danny Grosso