Review - March 1980, Los Angeles

By Sylvie Simmons

from an unknown publication

Clash/Lee Dorsey/Mikey Dread

Los Angeles

FIRST CAME hard-working Mikey Dread. Jamaican DJ crooning over dub tapes, dodging missles. He was booed. Then ceme Lee Dorsey, grinning, working in a coal mine. He was tolerated. And the industrial-horizon backdrop fell, Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" bellowed out the speakers and Clash strode on. Complete delirium. A working Clash hero is something to be.

Dread's set, bascially echo vocals over invisible reggae backing, was interesting, yet sounded too vacant in a hall still in the process of being filled at this festival setting (as in standing, arms pinned to sides). Lee Doney was the other extreme, smiling, jolly, chirpy good-time rhythms (the backing band, Score, deserve a special mention for extreme bounciness in the face of apathy) going through the roster of great nostalgia songs on a PA that sounded like a transistor radio, just right. "Holy Cow", "Working In a Coal Mine", "Ride Your Pony" (with camp gun-shot accompaniment by the dimunitive vocalist himself) were some of the numbers featured, and he was brought back for an encore by the efforts of the DJ rather than crowd reaction, though he certainly deserved one. (The old timers seem to be making a comeback lately, what with Roy Orbison opening for the Eagles down the road. They should be given headlining spots of their own.)

But the crowd had come to see Clash. Obvious? Not really. At their last LA gig, the Hollywood Palladium last year, it seemed like most of the audience had come to see themselves up on the stage, a lot more intent on drawing attention to themselves than to let the Clash get on with their job. The broadening out of the band's music on "London Calling" has brought the inevitable broadening of the audience, fewer jackboots and spiked hairdos, fewer fistfights, even a bit of teenybop appreciation for Mick from the young girls at the side, a smattering of imaginary guitar soloists and just the Clash on the stage (except for regular appearances by keyboardist Mickey Gallagher and a Mikey Dread-plays-Sinatra-to-Clash's-rude-boys bit at the end).

This was the nearest to mainstream that I've ever seen the band, but they make a bloody good mainstream, bloody good whatever, rock and roll band. The band have left the front line, but there's still the odd explosive attacks -- machine gun drums, shrapnel guitars, knife-edged vocals of the old songs, brought back to life more powerfully, more heroically than even before like some old war film that uses clever lighting, beefed-up sound, poses, pauses and expectations to make it stand out so unforgetably in your mind.

The band's new position has at least given them the luxury of getting the sound right and the lighting right and the overall presentation just so, which made tonight's show one of their best here on certain levels, though a bit hollow, a bit like a powerful memory of others.

The opening was hot. "Clash City Rockers", the first of several tough, tight, anthems. Quite a few at the front joined in. Then "Brand New Cadillac". Joe Strummer discovers rockabilly and looks surprised. Mick Jones looks in the direction of the young girl by my side and she screams and waves. A bunch of "London Calling" numbers, the title track making the rest pretty redundant, a wonderful song. "White Man in Hammersmith Palais", "Police and Thieves" were the best of the rest, though "I Fought the Law" went down well. Other than a couple of older songs, the show drifted along for a couple of dozen songs, showing various Clash's I'd never seen before -- frisky, lazy, be-bopping, amusing, brooding, positively wholesome -- some of them (the hard-edged ones) preferable to my ears over the wholly reggae numbers that slowed the set down a lot.

Echoed reggae closed the set, calls brought them back, and they got Mikey Dread to trade echoes with Joe on some cosmic reagge encore. Five more, the oldies "Tommy Gun" and "White Riot" speeding things up to a great finale.

Life goes on, everything changes and other cliches: Clash as Gene Vincent meets Phil Spector and argues the merits of reggae over Stax I never thought I'd see. But they did it well, got them dancing, and I guess a lot of people think a smile on your face beats a foot in your gut anytime, which makes this a hell of a lot more successful than the Clash's last performance in LA, as far as most of the crowd was concerned.