Like the best mid-'60s work by Bob Dylan, the first three albums by the
The Clash was the only great punk band to successfully free itself from
the didactic ideology of that narrow subgenre and, in the process, become
simply a great rock-and-roll band, period. Its American label, Columbia
Records, once dubbed the group "The Only Band That Matters," and after
one hears its early work -- remastered to stunning effect by Sony/Legacy
-- that slogan reads like the best kind of hyperbole, the kind that
transcends mere brag and becomes simple fact.
The first album, 1977's The Clash, ranks among the five greatest debuts
in rock-and-roll history and retains all of its emotional fury, social
outrage, and sonic chaos. In its pristine British edition (finally issued
stateside 21 years after a patchwork version was initially released), The
Clash embodies as well as eclipses the sound and vision of punk: Guitars
ring like police sirens, taut rhythms come fast and furious, and the
sandpaper roar of Joe Strummer mixes perfectly with the wailing tenor of
Mick Jones.
Bassist Paul Simonon plays with a melodic minimalism that belies his love
of reggae and ska, and original drummer Terry Chimes (replaced after the
first album by Topper Headon) bashes with rabid enthusiasm. More than any
album of its era and ilk, The Clash offers a quintessentially gritty
portrait of gray London's seething, seedy underbelly: race riots,
unemployment (or identity-stripping dead-end employment), heartless
political conservatism, random violence, cheap drugs, cheap thrills, and
the clattering sound of bands bashing out crude, savage rock and roll in
garages and flats. As a soundtrack for the apocalypse and a heartfelt
shout from the street, The Clash is a complete triumph.
Its follow-up, 1978's Give 'Em Enough Rope, was deemed a disappointment
by critics, who heard the metallic production of Sandy Perlman as a
compromise of the band's raging energy. The critics, however, were wrong.
Although it lacks the thematic coherence of The Clash, Rope packs a
throttling punch, from the colossal roar of "Safe European Home" and
"Guns on the Roof" to the anthemic "Last Gang in Town" and
the
autobiographical "All the Young Punks." And with "Stay Free,"
a touching
backslap from Jones to a wayward friend, the band revealed a soft side
that was incongruous to the cynicism and nihilism of its punk-rock
brethren.
If The Clash stands as one of rock's most brilliant debuts, 1979's London
Calling is easily the best double album released by anyone this side of
Bruce Springsteen, whose The River runs a very close second. With nary a
trace of filler, London Calling reveals a Clash that was capable of
anything: wildcat rockabilly, horn-laden reggae, cheesy cocktail jazz,
relentless rock and roll, introspective pop, and hilarious sendups of
drug abuse, sex, and even a lovingly acidic ode to Montgomery Clift. The
title cut presents a horrific glimpse at the aftermath of nuclear war,
while "Death or Glory" and "Clampdown" are furious statements
of purpose
and "Lost in the Supermarket" pinpoints the pain and confusion of
postmodern alienation.
A critical and commercial hit that landed Jones and Strummer on the cover
of Rolling Stone and prompted a backlash among punk's wrongheaded
standard-bearers, London Calling also yielded a Top 30 single: "Train in
Vain," a charging weeper from Jones that offers the flipside to Ben E.
King's R&B staple "Stand by Me." It's "Revolution Rock,"
however, that
sums up the genius of this far-reaching, entirely successful masterpiece.
An incessant reggae crusher driven by splashing drums, soaring horns, and
chopping guitar, the song is a showcase for Strummer, and he tears into
the celebratory lyric with careless, drunken glee, mixing hilarious
wordplay with equally hilarious gibberish, lost in the music's glorious
racket. Its title sums up everything the Clash represented during punk's
rise, but the music itself was something else: adventurous, intoxicating,
funny -- a celebration of joyful noise and a harbinger.
In the spring of 1980, the Clash encamped in the heart of Times Square
for an extended run of concerts. Every night for roughly two hours, the
band members poured their hearts out onstage at Bond's International
Casino, a decrepit vaudeville-era theater taken out of mothballs
specifically for the group's engagement. The off-stage hours surrounding
those shows were reportedly just as intense for the Clash's four members,
but in an inwardly directed fashion. By all accounts the musicians spent
their time sucking up virtually every aspect of the neighborhood's
singular feel: midnight movies (a screening of Taxi Driver and its dank
portrait of Times Square alienation apparently had enough of an effect on
Strummer that he would adopt Robert De Niro's Mohawk haircut from that
film a year later), the street milieu of junkies, hustlers, and "cops
kicking Gypsies to the pavement," and above all else, the music.
"WBLS was blasting all over the city," recalled Strummer in the recent
Clash documentary Westway to the World, referring to the NYC radio
station and its pioneering broadcasts of breaking rap artists such as
Kurtis Blow, The Funky Four + 1, and Grandmaster Flash. "We just hooked
on to that vibe and made our own version of it." The result was
Sandinista!, a sprawling three-album set recorded largely in New York
City during a burst of post-tour energy. "As soon as they got a rough mix
down, we'd be like: 'Fresh tape on the reel! Let's get the mikes out!'"
Strummer gleefully explained in Westway. "We'd keep doing that day and
night. That's why it had to be a triple album, even though it would have
been better as a double or a single album, or an EP. We recorded all that
music in one spot in one moment in one three-week blast, for better or
worse. That's the document."
Released in late November of that year, Sandinista! received a savage
drubbing from many of the same critics who only twelve months earlier had
hailed the Clash's London Calling as proof that the band was indeed "the
only band that matters." Fans, too, seemed confused, though the boos and
jeers with which they greeted the Clash's handpicked concert openers of
Grandmaster Flash and Jamaican reggae toaster Mikey Dread reveal the real
reason behind that critical vilification. For rockists still on the
"disco sucks" warpath, Sandinista!'s fusion of punk with dub reggae,
rap,
thick slabs of churning funk, and even West Indian steel drums stood as
nothing less than an embrace of everything they hated. Moreover, it was a
pointed reminder that the rock world itself was rapidly slipping into
cultural irrelevancy -- a bitter pill to swallow for those who still saw
themselves as rebels rather than die-hard reactionaries.
Twenty years later, with orthodox punk now sounding just as stale as the
orchestral prog-rockers it tried to wipe from the historical stage,
Sandinista! endures, and in its newly reissued form with sterling sound,
it remains fresh as ever. What emerges foremost is the crystallization of
the band's at times inchoate rage into a political attack as nuanced as
its newfound musical passions. It's a position brought home forcefully by
the album's titular salute to the victorious 1979 Sandinista revolution
in Nicaragua and further laid out in "Washington Bullets." The band
members aren't the well-meaning but foolishly short-sighted liberals they
would later mock in "This Is Radio Clash"'s plea to "please save
us, not
the whales." Rather, they unambiguously embraced the guerrilla movements
of the Latin-American revolutionary left.
For those either in denial over American actions on that continent or
balking at picking up the gun as a valid response, Strummer sings: "As
every cell in Chile will tell, the cry of the tortured men / Remember
Allende, and the days before, before the army came / Please remember
Victor Jara in the Santiago Stadium / Es Verdad -- those Washington
bullets again."
It's a world view that takes equal aim at the Soviet Union ("If you can
find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed / Ask him what he
thinks of voting communist") and Beijing ("Ask the Dalai Lama in the
hills of Tibet / How many monks did the Chinese get?"). "The Call
Up"
continues in that vein, begging both Soviet conscripts being shipped off
to Afghanistan and young Americans swept up in the resurgent jingoistic
frenzy surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis: "It's up to you not to
heed the call-up / You must not act the way you were brought up."
Does all of Sandinista! work? Well, no. For every finger-snappingly
sublime pop moment in a song like "Hitsville U.K." there's the backward
tape loops of "Mensforth Hill" to wade through, a creation that may
have
seemed inventive in the studio, but on CD is simply annoying. Then again,
the recorded snippet of addled Rastas torturously rambling their way
through a bizarre late-night WBAI-FM talk show instantly captures a
moment familiar to any insomniac who's flipped his way through
Manhattan's noncommercial airwaves. As Strummer himself insists, one
man's filler is another man's living document of a particular time and
place, and Sandinista! evokes the avant-garde sounds and political
vanguards percolating around New York City circa 1980 like few other
recordings.
Cliché though it may be, "those were different times" is a
notion that
comes to mind here. The moral certainties that gripped the Clash during
that Cold War period -- "the terror of the scientific sun" -- have
given
way to a more muddled social terrain. A socialist (albeit a self-neutered
one) has returned to the helm of Chile, while Pinochet and the killers of
Victor Jara face the imminent threat of an international tribunal. Even
the FMLN guerrilleros of El Salvador (saluted on the Clash's final album
with Mick Jones, 1982's Combat Rock) have traded in their all-or-nothing
revolutionary purism for the more ambiguous parliamentary road to utopia.
Still, those looking to score the soundtrack for the next round of World
Trade Organization protests, whether they be hip-hoppers picking up the
torch from fallen prophets Public Enemy or the Zapatista-feting Rage
Against the Machine, could do a lot worse than look to Sandinista! for
inspiration.
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