The Clash
Epic
By Tom Carson
As a documentary of rock & roll teenagers battling first for good times and then for survival in a blasted urban landscape, the Clash's debut album, released in England in 1977 but never made available here, had an astonishing immediacy. You got the feeling that is was recorded virtually in the street, while the National Front marched and the threat of riots flickered all around. And yet the story the LP told - with rage and humor - was as complex, as varied and finally universal as the American tale of the eternal outsider that critic Greil Marcus found in the music of the Band. Perhaps more than any album ever made, The Clash dramatized rock & roll as a last, defiantly cheerful grab for life, somthing scrawled on the run on subway walls. Here was a record that defined rock's risks and its pleasures, and told us, once again, that this music was worth fighting for.
That is was a fight was never in question. The British punk scene was a battleground from its birth, and the Sex Pistols' violent end let the Clash as the lone survivors on the field. The Pistols, apocalyptic in everything, had wanted to be the last rock & roll band in the world - the Clash, heroes by necessity, had to be the greatest. Ever since The Clash staked out their initial turf, their music has been an excrutiating, extravagant, brave attempt to live up to that role even as they rail against the impossibilty of succeeding at it - i.e. a public debate on what the brass ring might be worth.
By patching together tracks from the first LP along with the later, obsessively self-referential singeles made before last year's Give 'Em Enough Rope, the American version of The Clash tries to tell two stories at once: a gritty journalistic account of one nameless punk's 1977 journey through England side by side with the tale of the not-so-nameless, self-consciously embattled punk stars the Clash later became. It doesn't quite work. Because the Clash is a band that defines itself with each new release, hearing the songs out of chronological order is maddeningly disconcerting - especially to American audiences unfamiliar with the original context.
Though the tunes omitted here were the lesser ones on the British edition of The Clash, they added a lot to that record's vivid sense of wholeness, to the feeling of a single dramatic moment caught in all its shifting facets. The new version, by contrast, is scattershot and marooned - full of worthwhile nuggets but lacking a center. Its double focus is confusing in more ways than one: you hear the band wrestling with its legend without ever being quite allowed to hear the music that created the legend in the first place.
And yet, after all that, what we are left with is still extraordinary. This music has a barbed urgency that no one else has ever matched: sparse, coarse, lunging and extreme, it's always - barely, almost desperately - held under control. The later material grafted onto the U.S. Clash is richer and fuller, exchanging the flinty, humorous lower-depths eye of the earlier numbers for a flailing melodrama that's layered with doubt and ambiguity (a change most obvious in the switch from Tory Crimes' spare, flexible drumming to Topper Headon's more epic style). There's absolutely no loss of tension, however. In the chilling "White Man in Hammersmith Palais," the corruption of rock & roll mirrors the disintegration of a whole society - destruction accumulates by bits and pieces, voices shout and whisper distress signals in the background. Then the horror crystalizes and hits you in the face: "If Adolph Hitler flew in today," Joe Strummer accuses, his voice a corrosive welt of rage and terror, "they'd send a limousine anyway."
If the centerpiece of the original album was "Janie Jones" (a one young man's breakneck plunge into the rock & roll world), the thematic core of the new edition is the Clash's cover version of Bobby Fuller's "I Fought the Law." Though its lyrics admit defeat, this song's greatness has always been that it explodes with a triumphant pride. Here, Headon's drums build like distant thunderheads, the guitars wheel and crash, and Strummer digs into the vainglorious words with a
This music takes chances as a matter of course. It never deals in anything but ultimates. |
meaty gusto that makes it sound as if he wouldn't have it any other way. "I Fought the Law" is flamboyantly self-aggrandizing in a manner that the group's older material would have never allowed. And yet the performance is terrific, savagely exuberant in the face of doom.
"Complete Control" goes even further. Like so many Clash tunes, it escalates a minor incident into full-scale war: a protest against the Clash's record company becomes a life-or-death battle for rock & roll itself. Mick Jones' guitar sounds a final clarion call. Riffs stutter, stumble and catch fire in the trough. Joe Strummer's singing roars up from the depths with a message of no surrender even as the music threatens to flatten him for good. "Complete Control" may be the most desperately heroic call to arms ever put to vinyl.
Like Francis Coppola's journeying upriver in Apocalypse Now, this LP roves over scenes of a struggle that seems as endless as it is brutal. At times the Clash's melodramatic impulse, their incessant need to fling themselves into the center of every storm and turn their experience into epic allegory, plays them wrong. Too many songs rehash the same ground: "Gates of the West", an account of the band's tour of America (included here as a bonus single), sounds condescending, in marked contrast to the bitterly truthful working-class resentment of "I'm So Bored with the U.S.A." But that same instinct allows the Clash to ram home lessons that no one else has put so directly before - as in the album's autobiographical closer, "Garageland," where Strummer flings down what might be the group's credo. "The truth," he sings, "is only known by the guttersnipes."
The Clash's militant politics struggle in a void: sometimes they're less the product of an actual battle than an attempt to get people to go out and fight on their own. In "White Riot" (unless my ears deceive me, a different take than the English version - other cuts appear to have been remixed), which is not about a riot but wanting one. Strummer makes his plea as plain as possible:
All the power is in the bands
Of the people rich enough to buy it.
While we walk the street
Too chicken to even try it.
The Clash are pulled into the fight almost against their will. "You have to deal with it," Mick Jones warns in "Hate & War." "It is the currency."
This music takes chances as a matter of course - it never deals in anything but ultimates. But the rhetoric is always charged and pointed with incisive, specific details. The hero of these tunes, whether he's Joe Strummer or just a punk, never becomes a liberal Everyman. Whether he's mocking the welfare state in "Career Opportunities," reaching out for solidarity in "Police & Thieves" (the Clash's tribute to reggae as punk politics) only to abandon all hope of it in the Hammersmith Palais, or finding his old mates all dead or in jail in the ringing "Jail Guitar Doors," the hero's anger, his rough, deflating wit and his defiant spirit remain uniquely his own. The force of character and the epic in the band's songs, for all their topical urgency, have a grandeur that's almost Shakespearean.
The British edition of The Clash was, triumphantly, about staying alive in a wasteland. The American version of The Clash - less certain, less fulfilled than its predecessor - is about chaos. The new packaging reveals the contradictions: the grainy photgraph of a London riot that adorned the 1977 LP like a newspaper headline is now balanced by glossy liner photos and a helpful (though oddly incomplete) lyrics sheet. It's an attempt to make the Clash look more like everyone else. But they aren't like anyone else. Despite the trimming and the conpromises, their music remains a crackling live wire that can't be silenced. What it has to say is part of our currency, too. And anyone in America who still cares about rock & roll must listen.
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Article contribution by Anthony Peters
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