'Know your rights. All three of them...'
I had a good friend who once came round to my flat and was disparaging about the fact that I had The Clash's Combat Rock in my record colllection. He then proceeded to bang on about how much better The Dickies were. Now he was an excellent and very intelligent fellow but Combat Rock and indeed pretty much everything on it is better than anything The Dickies ever did and I'm quite sure The Dickies themselves would be the first to admit it.
I have every Clash album with the exception of Cut The Crap, the record they made after Mick Jones left, or probably more accurately was forced out of the band by Joe Strummer. It barely qualifies as a Clash record in my book as Jones was every bit as an integral Clash member as Strummer. Despite the fact that I have all these records, I don't listen to them all that often, I'm not sure why. I guess it's because I came of age musically a bit too late to be totally taken over by them as so many of my age and slightly older than me were. I still recognise their worth.
The Clash are not universally loved or even liked, even by the original Punk Generation. Clothes horses, London poseurs, bandwagon jumpers, just some of the slurs cast apart them. I think a cursory listen to any of that incredible run of albums, The Clash, Give 'Em Enough Rope, London Calling, Sandinista and this one are enough to establish exactly why they made such an indelible mark. They're just phenomenally exciting.
R.E.M's Peter Buck is always a good man to go to where these things are concerned. Serving an apprenticeship in a record shop, (record shop people generally 'know'), which is where he met Michael Stipe and started to plot the formation of the band. 'The people who listen to The Clash,' Buck said, 'either already agree with The Clash or don't listen to their lyrics at all. It's pretty symptomatic that all The Clash's hits have been, you know, Rock The Casbah and Should I Stay Or Should I Go...' As so often. I'm with Buck, who in many ways was my Mick Jones, just as Stipe was my Joe Strummer. Very different approach, but similarly astonishing results.
Still, listening to Combat Rock now I understand fully why I bought it when it came out, my first Clash record. I like the lyrics just as much as the tunes but then I do agree with The Clash politically and don't think for a moment that it was just a pose, the band's generosity to their fans, particularly in their early days was legendary. I have another good friend who went to see them in those early days, befriended them after the gig and travelled round with them on tour for a while, roadying for and generally just hanging out with them. I imagine he still swears by the band.
No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones, in 1977...' , sang Strummer, famously in the year and song of the same name, on the B Side of debut single White Riot, Unlike many of his peers, I'm fairly sure Strummer loved all of those. But he knew a good slogan when he wrote it. What he was decrying was the lack of such excitement in the days he was living through and drawing a line in the sand and marking out a Year Zero was the best possibly way to express it and bring some of that excitement back.
The Clash, more probably than any of those original bands did just that. They also stayed the course, more than any of their contempories and got better. London Calling is probably the high water mark of their achievement, though Sandinista has its adherents too. This is one mean record too. Clearly trying to break America at this point, they played Shea Stadium, supported The Who, got into early Hip Hop and all the most cutting edge current Black music and hung out with Scorsese and the like. They'd always been completely in thrall to American music, despite 'I'm So Bored With The USA'.
Evidence to this effect is all over Combat Rock. It's certainly their most American album. Some saw this as a sign of them 'selling out', but The Clash had been being accused of selling out ever since they signed to CBS. It's all nonsense. Much more a matter of getting their message across to a wider audience. They understood the contradictions right from the off better than most of those around them.
Their records and Strummer's message got stronger so how could the path they chose possibly be a bad thing. Strummer got new teeth and the band developed a Rock and Roll look that frankly wasn't a million miles away from The Who. They understood well that it was all really about the quality of the music and there's plenty of evidence to that here .
The record has twelve tracks, far less than either London Calling and Sandinista but frankly despite their greatness, there's also an element of overload about both those albums. I can listen right the way through to Combat Rock, which frankly I never do to either of those.
As I said I'm no hard core Clash fan but their back catalogues is just wonderful and Combat Rock,does nothing whatsoever to tarnish that legacy. It's tough as nails. I'll leave the grand theorising to others. This record is more than enough for me. As for The Dickies. Pah!
PS. I could have gone into the strengths of this album in more detail, but frankly it speaks of them starkly enough for itself. There's plenty of insurrection in Know Your Rights and Rock the Casbah, (check out the video with a Jew and an Arab raving it up together in a cadillac), and Should I Stay or Should I Go has plenty of Rock and Roll muscle. Plenty of pure genius too, just listen to Straight To Hell. They stayed true to their ideals right to the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment