“I moved to LA so that I could run into bizarre people like Phil Spector,” Clem laughs. “Those stories about him? They’re all true! We were round his house one day and he started waving a .45 at us. Now it looks like he’s going to be tried for murder after that woman was shot dead in his house. Strange times indeed.”
“If that wasn’t bad enough, you’ve had the biggest band in the world, The Beatles, taking Phil off Let It Be saying his stuff sucks,” Chris takes over. “When he wasn’t waving the .45 round, he brought us into his music room and played use these awful demos he’d done for Leonard Cohen. I don’t know if he was playing it too loud or not but, it was ‘aaaaaaaaawwwwwwwggggghhhhhh’, just noise. The record company guy smirkingly said in my ear, ‘Play your cards right and you could sound like that too’, because Phil was lobbying to produce us.”
Big fan that he is of her Dad, Clem was delighted this year when he was asked to drum on the new Nancy Sinatra album.
“She’s really into being a musician and tries to make the band a bit of a mobile family,” he resumes. “Right before the Blondie tour started, we went and played in Budapest which was fun, and in Vienna with Elvis’ Vegas band. DJ Fontana, James Burton, Ronnie Tutt…all the boys were there. What blew me away even more is Nancy’s keyboard guy, Don Randy, being on Pet Sounds.”
“Have you heard about the Frank Sinatra hologram stuff?” Chris interjects. “They shoot this thing of Frank up in the middle of an orchestra and proceed as if it’s a regular show. They’ve been doing it in Radio City in New York and every gig’s been a sell-out.”
“One of the songs I did with Nancy was ‘Two Shots Of Happiness, One Of Sad’, which U2 actually wrote for Frank,” Clem resumes. “It’s a cool number. Morrissey’s written a single for her and Jarvis Cocker’s doing a couple of things too. I love it when you get mutual respect between different generations of musicians.”
Regrets? Like Ole’ Blue Eyes, Clem Burke has a few.
“You know how maniacal a Beatles fan I am? Well, we were just about to meet John when he died,” he rues. “It would’ve been the sweetest moment of my life but, well, fate intervened.”
“We’d brought our Autoamerican record up to the Dakota and asked the doorman to give it to him,” Chris explains. “Bob Gruen (rock ‘n’ roll snapper and Lennon confidante) told me that it got to John and he really liked it. Funnily enough, it was ‘Rapture’ that knocked ‘Just Like Starting Over’ out of number one in the States.”
“I’ll never forget the day he died,” Clem says somberly. “I was in Manhattan, went to the shop and came back to find my girlfriend on the stoop of our apartment building crying. I thought something really bad had happened and, sure enough, it had.
“John Lennon, George Harrison, Joey Ramone, Dee Dee, Johnny Thunders, Stiv Bators, Joe Strummer – it’s a morbid topic but a lot of our peers are dead and gone. We’ve a song on the new album that Debbie wrote for Joey and every time we play it I think, ‘We’re lucky all of us to have survived’.”