The Clash

Artist:  The Clash

Albums I Listened To:  The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, London Calling, Sandinista

Backstory:    

A few weeks ago, I was talking with my pal Paul Cantin.  We’re both huge film buffs and regularly have terrific exchanges about the movies and the people behind them.  We can also talk on an even footing about jazz.  But when it comes to rock, Cantin’s the expert.  He was, for many years, a professional arts journalist and critic, but I think the real reason he knows rock so well is just because he loves it.  And he’s is definitively open-minded.  We talk or text every day.  Every time we get into rock, I learn something new from him. 

He knows the thesis behind Music I Missed but when I told him I had no knowledge whatsoever of punk rock and, especially, The Clash, he texted me, “Well, just what were you listening to in 1977?  How could you have missed them?”

Good question.  What was I listening to that year when The Clash burst onto the scene? 

That June, I finished Grade 13 at Brebeuf College School in the Willowdale ‘hood of TO.  In September, I started in the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University (then known by a name we don’t use anymore). 

As I have said before in this blog, my first music was jazz.  Jazz has as wide a range of genres as rock and I was nuts about all of jazz.  Totally open to whatever jazz offers.  I still am.  But with rock, I was picky.  As I had done for my high school newspaper, when I showed up at TMU, I offered myself up as a music writer to TMU’s Eyeopener student newspaper (that was a terrific paper).  And as I began filing record reviews to the Eye, I found myself much more drawn to writing about jazz.  That was just where my natural instincts led.  And it gave me a hook in the TMU journalism community – I was the only one who would willingly write about jazz.  So all my stuff got printed. 

But with rock, I was all over the place.  I loved some bands, wouldn’t listen to others. 

Thanks to Google, this week I was able to call up “1977 rock albums” to remind myself what I listened to.  I loved Steely Dan’s Aja (which is as much a jazz album as rock), I was bored by Eric Clapton’s Slowhand, I went crazy for Billy Joel’s The Stranger and for Weather Report’s Heavy Weather (although WR sits right on the borderline of jazz and rock), I loved Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty, I enjoyed (although didn’t tell anyone) the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever.  And I couldn’t help but listen to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors – it sold like crazy and everyone seemed to love it, but I never have been able to get what the big deal was/is about that one. 

But I dismissed two albums out of hand.  I didn’t even listen to them. 

One of them was the Sex Pistols’ debut, Never Mind the Bollocks, We’re the Sex Pistols. 

The other was the debut album of The Clash (that was the name of it, too).

I was certainly aware of this new music called punk rock.  It was hard not to be.  We didn’t call it this then, but “soft rock” was a huge favourite in the mid-late ‘70s.  James Taylor, America, Carole King, Carly Simon, those types of artists.  That’s partially why Springsteen and Elton John worked for me so well – they rocked.  I was especially fixed on The Boss.  There was nothing soft about Bruce’s music.  Even the acoustic songs had a gritty edge to them.  But punk came screaming into everyone’s consciousness, as the polar opposite of soft rock and with a decidedly more angry edge than Bruce. 

The music was all fast, loud and brash.  There wasn’t anything sweet about it.  The lyrics seemed to be about the dissatisfaction of the singer with, well, everything.  And just as much as the music was hard-edged, so was the culture that went with it.  Punkers wore tall, heavy-soled boots (there was a shop on Yonge St in Toronto called Master John that specialized in these boots), incredibly tight jeans, usually ripped, studs all over their leather jackets.  They had safety pins through their noses.  And then there was the hair – either it was buzzed into a bristly crew cut or spiked up high with tons of gel or superglue or whatever. 

I just couldn’t get into it.  Not the music or the fashion or the sneering attitude. 

So, I missed all of the punk revolution.  Even Bruce got into it -- one of rock’s great innovators actually let the punks innovate for him.  Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) has a fierce anger running through those songs and his majestic double album The River (1980) is obviously influenced by punk in a musical sense.  When I listen to Jackson Cage and The Ties That Bind today, I can hear the punk.  Back in 1980, I just thought it was Bruce and the E Streeters playing faster.

Why did I reject punk out of hand so quickly, while embracing Bruce Springsteen, who brought as much punk attitude to his music and his lyrics as the official punkers? 

Maybe I could identify with Bruce more than the punkers.  Bruce had a tough-ish look to him, but he didn’t seem as ready-to-rumble as the punkers.  And a Bruce concert was more about joy and fun.  Even the angry songs, like Badlands, had triumphal vs hateful feel to them. 

But as the years rolled on, I kept seeing The Clash’s London Calling ranked as one of the 10 best rock albums of all time – right up there with albums I respected and loved, like Sgt Pepper, Born to Run, Exile on Main Street and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’On?  That the fact that The Clash had garnered this much respect from so many serious critics always intrigued me. 

And good, smart music friends like Cantin, Mark Beamish and Mike Kurts, who I trust even more than the critics, held the band its music in such high regard. 

So, in 2016, as what would become Music I Missed began to take shape, The Clash went on the list. 

Reactions:

Listen, I went into this Clash experience totally clean. 

I didn’t read anything about them, I didn’t research their record catalogue.  All I had in my head was raves from critics and friends over the years and the cover of the London Calling album.  It’s a fantastic cover – a photo of a bassist Paul Simonon about to smash his guitar onto a stage. 

That image, to me, summed up punk.  I figured London Calling would be what I thought punk rock was – fast sog, screaming guitars, thumping bass, vocals that raged about the ills of society and crashing cymbals. 

So I called it up on Spotify and listened. 

Within about 30 seconds, I thought, “Huh?  This doesn’t sound like punk to me.”

The guitars and drums sound like a prog rock band like Roxy Music.  And as drummer Topper Headon (more on him later in this piece) does his basic beat, there are quick rolls of what sounds like a tympani.  It was all very carefully plotted and orchestrated. 

“A-ha,” I thought.  “They did that tympani separately and laid it over later.”  I loved it…but, again, I knew this wasn’t what I thought was punk rock.  Even with my limited knowledge, I knew punk was basic guitar chords, a bass playing two or three notes and drums that just played fast.  You plugged in and played.  No studio stuff. 

I listened to the rest of London Calling (it was a double album when it was released, so there’s a lot there).  I loved it.  It’s not a punk rock album.  It’s a sophisticated sampling of everything – rockabilly (Brand New Cadillac), reggae (Rudie Can’t Fail), smart pop a la the Beatles or Kinks (Spanish Bombs), R&B, New Orleans funk. 

It even has a big hit – Train In Vain.  Honest to God, I’d never heard it before, but as soon as it came through my headphones, I thought, “Man, this has ‘hit’ written all over it.”  I should have been a record executive – when I checked it out online, turns out it was a Top 40 smash. 

So – London Calling is a bold and stirring album that absolutely deserves its “Top 10 Best Ever Albums” status. 

BUT…what about their punk reputation? 

I checked in with Cantin and he said, “Go back to their first one.”

So I did. 

In fact, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of months with the band’s first four albums – The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, London Calling and Sandinista (their final two don’t seem to be highly regarded)

My reaction:  I was a complete idiot for dismissing these guys back in the day.  This is some of the best music I’ve ever heard. 

These four guys -- Joe Strummer and Mick Jones on guitars, Paul Simonon on bass, and Topper Headon on drums – can play.  They are superb musicians and, much to my surprise, terrific singers with, when they want to, quite vocal range.  And the songs have quite a diversity.  I had this idea that The Clash’s music would be lyrically around the theme, “I hate everything” and musically a couple of chords and smashing cymbals. 

It’s anything but.  On the first two albums, most of the songs are played at a fast, energized tempo.  But this is not simple music.  The guitarists grind out some heavy riffs but also are nicely adept at more complex touches throughout.  And Topper Headon has a remarkable to ability to play at lightning speed in these incredibly tight 4-4 structures and still play intricate fills when he finds some air in between the sections.  Believe me, that’s hard to do.  Check out, for example, “I’m Bored with the USA” and “Career Opportunities” on the first album. 

The lyrics can be hard to understand.  Knowing what they are singing probably gets easier (as it always does with rock) when you spend hours and hours listening to the songs.  There’s a general philosophical tilt toward, “I’m not happy with the world I inherited from my parents, and I want things to get better.”  But their thoughts are not the nihilistic rants I thought they’d be.  In fact, I often felt joyous as as I heard their music.  Joyous in the way they can flat-out rock or in the lilt of their reggae songs.  And joyous in the sense that they took an intelligent kick at the establishment. 

Take “Career Opportunities.”  I’m 64, now a freelance writer and no longer working full-time in corporate settings that employed me for 40 years.  I’m on the early steps of easing into whatever “retirement” is supposed to be.  But I get what Strummer is saying as he becomes a guy who is reluctant to take whatever job is offered to him, just for the sake of doing a job, saving up for the house and the car. 

They offered me the office, offered me the shop
They said I'd better take anything they got
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?

Career opportunities, the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunity, the ones that never knock

I hate the army and I hate the R.A.F.
I don't wanna go fighting in the tropical heat
I hate the civil service rules
I won't open a letter bomb for you

Even at 64, I get that.  When I started writing for money in 1980 and taking whatever gigs came along, I remember wondering if I was selling out as I moved further away from the newspaper reporter role I had started out with.  I became editor of the company paper at a big chemical manufacturing company in 1982 and I felt really weird.  Put on a business suit, started writing about sales of sulphuric acid and thought, “Man, I dunno.  Should I be doing this?”  I stuck with it. I took the office, I made the money, learned how to play office politics.  I wore the right clothes, bought the cars, the life insurance and mutual funds…and wondered, “Holy shit, I’m living my parents’ life now.”

There’s nothing wrong with asking those questions – and everything right about it.  Yeah, you will take the job and you’ll find joy and maybe even contentment in it.  But you’re always going to be asking those questions. 

And I have to give The Clash a big hand for being so articulate in giving us the words for those questions. 

And, to me, this sophistication in story and emotion is what I’ve really loved about The Clash. The music is played superbly. These guys could play any genre as if they invented it. But it’s the characters they identified and their situations and the band’s uncanny ability to get to the soul of these characters’ lives that has really impressed me.

Surprise Factor:  10+.  I’m now a Clash believer. 

Will I Listen to More?  I still have to spend a lot more time with the triple-album, Sandinista.  From the bit I’ve heard, it’s magnificent.  And I will be definitely delving more deeply into other punk bands.  The Ramones are next.