The Clash’s Romantic Rebellion

Village Voice October 1, 1979
By Geoffrey Stokes

As a self-proclaimed garage band, the clash have always been musically rather conservative. Their one great innovation - the breathless speed with which they supercharged traditional riffs and rhythms - wasn’t really theirs at all. They simply did it better than anyone else. More important, the astonishing pace they set themselves (next to early Clash, early Who is mellow as Jackson Brown) was a condition of intensity, not a cause. If speed were everything, Alvin Chipmunk would be Johnny Rotten.

Certainly the patterns of their songs fall comfortably within the pop framework; there are verse and choruses, maybe even a bridge or two. And though the Clash’s political sentiments are more-or-less in synch with those of the Normal or the Gang of four, they avoid the former’s Eurodicso affectlessness and the latter’s arrhythmic electronics in favor of songs that are - if still short on hooks - long on melody. Some of them are even pretty.

Both live and record, however, this prettiness is well-disguised; the melodies are a palimpsest beneath the furious snarl of Joe Strummer’s vocal and the band’s nonstop, no-space riffing. It is those more obvious characteristics that both define(d) the Clash and validate(d) the politicopunk genre. But for all its apparent musical conventionality, the band’s first album - The Clash, now out here in a somewhat truncated and resequenced version, and with five newer songs and a bonus single added, as their second American release - was genuinely revolutionary. It is not simply that Strummer and Jones’s attack on English class and caste was explicitly radical, but that the speed of their assault on the lyrics stripped their deliberately primitive forms of virtually everything except power. The songs thus did more than merely indict a system which fixes 11-years-olds into a lifetime of manual labor; they became - like Marianne Moore’s toad – imagery weapons in a real war.

But that was in another country, and besides, Margaret Thatcher is alive. If the Clash had demanded only a political response, its current new/old album would be just a documentary - a scrapbook from our cousins across the sea. Instead, the album makes demands of quite another sort, challenging not only rock’s received pre-punk aesthetic, but the band’s own history as well. The second challenge is only partly successful.

First, the good part. The personnel change which saw Nicky Headon replace Tory Crimes behind the drum kit soon after The Clash was recorded in 1977 is generally for the better. Crime’s wall-of-noise drumming was central to the early Clash - with hindsight, too much so. He was a bulldozer. He knew where he was going, by God, and if the rest of the band didn’t stay out of his way, they’d be crushed. When it worked (e.g., "Janie Jones," "Career Opportunities"), Crimes’s more-is-more made one appreciate the bulldozer’s functional elegance; when it didn’t ("White Riot"), the loss of control left the band sounding as though they thought the first one to the end of the song was gonna get all the beer.

Headon is a more open drummer; he has attacks and releases. Piledriver to Crime’s bulldozer, he provides breathing space for Paul Simonon’s bass and Mick Jones’s lead guitar with no sacrifice of power. When Headon kicks in after one of his strategic pauses, he seems not to be having the band before him, but adding force and clarity to a direction the guitars have already established. The new lineup is simply more musical than the old, and the Clash concert at the Palladium last February was an exhilarating as any I’ve seen over a stretch that extends back to the Who’s and the Stones’ first American tours.

Last Thursday’s show was not as good. Some of the problems may have been temporary - Strummer’s voice seemed strained and he was often fatally tentative - but I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on it. That’s not to imply that the show was a disaster - far from it, in fact - but that it was more interesting for its failed ambitious than for its by now predictable successes. Chief among experiments was the increasing reggaefication of the repertoire. The Clash have always been fascinated by reggae, but at this concert its sprung rhythms were not confined to "Police and Thieves" and "White Man in Hammersmith Palais." Even in a song as straightforward as "Career Opportunities," Simonon (whose one vocal was straight deejay chant) employed bass figures that ran against the rhythms one anticipated, and the anthemlike chorus of "I’m so bored with the U.S.A." was punctuated with assumption-challenging accents. It wasn’t reggae per se anymore than the Stones’ "Little Red Rooster" was Chicago blues, but reggae Clashified and stripped down and speeded up in the same way they, the Ramones, and other pop minimalists transformed 1957 rock ‘n’ roll. It bodes well.

Against this evidence, however, one must balance their most recent releases ("I Fought the Law" on the American album and "Gates of the West/"Groovy Times" on the single are all the British Cost of Living EP). There, if the rhythms are Hopkins-ish, they are more like Nicky’s than Gerard Manley’s. "I Fought the Law" is the worst recording they’ve ever made. Though there are various clever ways to justify their doing the song at all (as a counterfoil to "London’s Burning," for instance), there are none at all to justify what they do to it. Cheerfully chipper, theirs is a misreading as spectacularly wrong as Emmylou Harris’s lugubrious version of the strutting "Save the Last Dance for Me." It is without pathos, without intensity, without anything except dizzying mindlessness. It is getting lots of airplay.

The single is by no means as bad, yet it too is problematic. In style, it represents a leap forward in time from the ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll you hear in the band’s early work to the relatively sophisticated rock of Highway 61 Dylan or middle Beatles (where Headon finds himself thoroughly at home). Strummer’s voice remains gravely and their lyrics dense and ironic, but the melodies are lush and the production of the harmony vocals is elaborate( though managing to stay - just - this side of gussied up). Both songs are as ambitious as their production, substituting evocation for the kick-in-the-head directness of the band’s early work (to get to the Gates of the East, do you walk left or right from Hammersmith Palais?), the irony is sometimes wickedly witty (the Mark Knopfler-like guitar on the last verse of "Groovy Times"), sometimes merely ham-handed (Little Richard in the kitchen on "Gates of the West"), but the overall effect is as unsettling as it would have been if Pope has polished off his Dunciad and then come right out with Kubla Khan.

He couldn’t have, you say, he wasn’t Coleridge: between them lay a generation-wide gulf. Yet when one plays either side of the single immediately after an early song like "What’s My Name?" the change is as shocking as the Romantic rebellion. The faces may look the same, but this Clash is a different band from the one that burst upon us in 1977. As international performing stars, Strummer and Jones can no longer literally embody London’s anomic lumpenproletariat. Too honest to fake it, they need time to find out who they are now, and their exploration of popish symbolism may be merely a byway already four months old, and the concert showed hints of another direction entirely.

For what it’s worth, I hope they take it.

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