![]() By Robert Christgau Village Voice, 5 March 1979 Village Voice: The Clash See America Second Most Intense Rock Band Ever Christgau on the Clash Coon quickly informed me that at showtime minus two hours it still hadnt arrived. She was obviously overextended, and obviously worried that I expected her to entertain me in some way, but I just wanted to make contact with the band and split, which is what I did. "Police and thieves in the street/Scaring the nation with two men on stage with their guns and ammunition" Im told every new wave band in the city was on hand, which is over a hundred tickets right there, but even more numerous than punk types were short-haired, unstoned-looking (I said looking) versions of the kind of high-IQ fan Bonnie Raitt gets. This was a crowd that liked to read musicI had my own moment of astonishment when someone asked for my autograph. But it was also a crowd that like to listenkids who hadnt been born when Bo Diddley first recorded clearly knew his beat as well as his name. In the row behind me sat Bostons pioneering new wave disc jockey, a mild young man with pink hair named Oedipus. A few hours before, he and several others had been fired from the only commercial Boston station one of three major FM outlets in the U.S.A. that was playing the Clash, but few in the audience knew it yet. There was that feeling in the air that we used to call good vibes, only the anticipation was sharper, the kilowatt potential more focused. Coon had made clear that the concert was doomed to start late - the P.A. finally got in at 6:30 and the sound check was just ending as I arrived. Recorded music, all titles announced, began with the Sex Pistols "Anarchy in the U.K.," the Monkees "Steppin Stone," and reggae by Dillinger. At around 8 the local opener, two girls and two boys called the Rentals, kicked off hard, dragged into some arty slow stuff, and came back up to a climax entitled "Gertrude Stein": "Coca-Cola Coca-Cola/Pepsi-Cola Pepsi-Cola/Orange soda orange soda." Their set was not enhanced when eight Cambridge cops and a platoon of Don Laws beefy red-shirts ejected two punky nuisanceswhod been hitting on people a if theyd read how in an old N.M.E. with the kind of enthusiasm we used to call brutality. After what was literally a brief intermission, Bo Diddley and an all-black trio surprised me pleasantly by rolling the audience down some funky grooves, easy blues lopes as well as variations on Bos signature shuffle. Joe Strummer came on denimy, still bezippered and fatigued, but Paul Simonons slash-necked red uniform was even more glamour-boy than the fishnet item Id seen him wear in Leeds 16 months before, while Mick Jones, whose turquoise shirt was not only unbuttoned most of the way down but also turned up at the collar, seemed to have achieved most of the evolution from 70s to 50s punk all of the Clash had slicked-back hair, but Micks was almost long enough for a d.a. with sly teddy-boy overtones. Glaring riot lights searched out these details as the musicians paced the stage. Then Strummer and Jones sheared into the chords of "Im So Bored with the U.S.A." and we were off. On a brute physical level, their combination of volume and tempo is unrivaled. Anybody with capital can turn up the amps, of course - the hard part, as an impressed Stanley Crouch theorized after the bands Palladium appearance, is for the musicians to turn themselves up even higher, something not even Robert Plant and Jimmy Page ever try for more than a minute or two, despite the cushion of heavy metals rhinoce-beat. And fast heroes from Little Richard to the Dolls and beyond have known when to slow down, resorting to the change-of-pace much more readily than the Clash, whose dip into "Stay Free" and a speedy "Police an Thieves" induced no one in the orchestra at either concert I attended to sit, although by then simple fatigue had dropped a few. Even the Ramones do ballads and medium-tempo rockers, and the Ramones formalistic poses enable them to generate exhilaration music with almost no expenditure of interpretive emotion, while the Clashs dense and expansive song structures, freer stagecraft, and urgent verbal messages demand interpretation. For the Clash, every concert is an athletic challenge far out on the shoals of expressionism, whence few new wavers return without a mouthful of brine. Words, wonderful as they may have been, werent the point. Clearly, these first-hour ticket-buyers were among the 50,000-plus purchases of the U.S. pressing of Give Em Enough Rope, on CBSs Epic label, and the almost 50,000 who have made The Clash, on English CBS, the largest-selling import album ever in this country. They were familiar with the five singles too; they probably knew half the words by heart, which is all you can expect without crib sheets. But what gave the event its drama wasnt just the singalong cheers and outcries "Guns Guns shaking in terror/Guns guns killing in error"; "This is the city of the dead"; "Need a little jolt of electrical shocker"; "Clang clang go the jail guitar doors" or the clamorous, life-giving onrush of the music. It was the natural theatrical force of Strummer himself, not so much exhorting the audience directly as alerting it to the symbolic world it shared with him. In his most characteristic movewhich he can ease with a modified buck-and-wing or heighten by collapsing toward the floor his shoulders hunch, his eyes narrow and peer upward, and his finger points as if bombs have just darkened the ceiling. His concentration is awesome. Even during instrumental breaks or the songs Jones sings, he is a fierce presence, scowling while he thrashes out his rhythm part or communing with drummer Topper Headon as if to get closer to the god of beats-per-minute. This time Mick regaled me with a tale of love, hate, and Les Paul. "It was older than I am," he kept saying, and it had survived a broken neck at the hands of a stoned-hippie Dutch theatre manager, but the night before, in Washington, after going out of tine throughout the tour a friend whod caught the bands disappointing U.S. debut in Berkeley complained about just that it had started giving him shocks, one or two per song. So Mick, figuring one of them had to go, smashed the thing to bits; his first stop in Manhattan would be 48th Street. Telling me about it cheered him up. I asked after his mum, and learned she was flying in from Ironwood, Michigan, to see her boy play for the first time the next night. Hed be (1) breaking in a new guitar (2) at the Palladium (3) for his mother, Pressure. Not that thats the Clashs crime, exactlyits more their failure to resolve contradictions that only they were brazen enough to confront forcefully in the first place. Like everyone else, they watched in frustration as punk disintegrated into faddish sectarianism. Despite their commitment to Rock Against Racism, their pilgrimage to Jamaica was summed up in a song about "a place where every white face/Is an invitation to robbery." And worst, in a time of rampant nationalism in British music they softened on America. The producer of their second album turned out to be Sandy Pearlman, American ex-rock critic of Blue Oyster Cult fame (and Pavlovs Dog infamy), apparently nominated by the bands U.S. label. While recording they split with manager Bernard Rhodes, a former used-car salesman whose hostile, obscurantist style like that of his mentor, Malcolm McLaren made it seem that hed just as soon tour Patagonia as Pennsylvania. Then Jones and Strummer spent weeks mixing down with Pearlman in San Francisco, and dallied in New York as well. In short, her radicalism would seem to have deeper roots in a lived life than that of Rhodes, who has attacked the bands American overtures bitterly. Yet she clearly agrees with her group that American rock and roll is barely breathing and that no one is better qualified to resuscitate it than the best rock and roll band in the world. Not surprisingly, it was Coon the administrator, rather than Coon the ideologue, who was running what they called the Pearl Harbour Tour. After rejecting the bands magnificent debut album, first on the product-think grounds of sound quality and then because it ad already sold so much as an import, Epic shilly-shallied for a long time on tour support for Give Em Enough Rope. The predominant feeling in the company is simply that it will cost too much to break the band here. The same money between $50,000 and $70,000 for this abbreviated swing through pre-sold locations (every venue was full), with $30,000 or so covering actual travel debits and the rest going into auxiliary promotion could have been invested in a more established band, say a pretty good one like Cheap Trick, with a far more certain payback in additional units sold. Or it could be used to hype more predictable new hard rock product like Trillion or the Fabulous Poodles. Coast-to-coast by bus with one plane hop from Oklahoma City to Cleveland, eight appearances in seven cities in 15 days, is a cruel grind. But the band stayed up, the Clash stage crew works faster than any Ive waited for in years, and even the snow-delayed Cambridge show went smoothly. Ive heard a few reports of blown interviews, and the press doesnt seem to have made press conference in California very interesting, but the group definitely made a sweeter impression than it used to when Rhodes was in there pitching. These were decent lads who know what they were about. Ive never encountered a more efficient tour. Still feeling Joness spliff, I offered (over Coons protestations) to put up 10 bucks myself before discovering that I had only a five, four ones, and some 20s. Headon bid valiantly for 20, got nine, and disappeared into the back, returning 15 minutes later with a collection of about $80 for somebody who probably made more in a week after expenses, of course than any of them. Then Jones and Strummer returned to the bunks and Headon, whod been poking fun at my note-taking all night, told me how at 14 hed earned five pounds a night in trad bands around Dover, unable to leave the stage for a piss because he was underage. After years of tae kwan do, a Korean martial art, his slight body was all sinew. His great dream in life was to break 15 sticks, to skins, and a frame in one night without making a mistake. Only Billy Cobham, Headon told me, has ever broken a frame. Cobham, of course, is built like a football player. Apocalyptic melodrama, I know the world is never going to end. Of course not. But that was how it struck us at the time. And as the radio wound around to local news I was possessed with the need to get up and put on Give Em Enough Rope, the side that begins with "Guns on the Roof." I put it on loud. It made me feel better. But on The Clash, the words did more than specify the tremendous force (and subtler cleverness and difficulty) of compelling music. They made you think all by themselves. "The truth is only known by gutter snipes," Joe Strummer asserted in "Garageland," and although the street roots of this rebellious diplomats son turned out to be hippie-squatter rather than dole-queue, his gutter truths were convincing and gratifying. The working-class youths he and co-composer Jones imagined didnt let their grim analysis get them down. Simultaneously (even clashingly) truculent and cheerful, cynical and fraternal, they refused to become immobilized; their actions may have struck more experienced (and privileged) well-wishers as primitive "If someone locks me out I kick my way back in" but at least they were actions. Here at last was art with access to a contemporary, white, English-speaking proletarian culture. It posited kids whose very determination to survive took guts and whose unwillingness to give up the idea of victory was positively heroic. And at a time when two supposedly communist nations were girding up to ravage each other (not to mention me) I found that the way Give Em Enough Rope transfigured its old ideas and emotions was useful in a way I hadnt felt much need of before. The music channeled my fear into anger and lent me the spirit to do what I had to do. Which was go to another Clash concert, and if you werent there Im sorry. As Alan Platt put it in The SoHo Weekly News: "It would be a pity if the impending nuclear holocaust prevented you from seeing this band." Opening were the Cramps, who are finally achieving the contemptuous rigidity they have sought so faithfully for so long; Im glad the Clash tried to hire local bands with women in them, and would suggest the Erasers, Nervus Rex, or even DNA next time. Bo Diddley was backed by an intriguing combo four black men and a white woman guitarist but (with no help from the show-mes in the audience) couldnt make it jell. Yet from the moment the Clash came on the crowd was on its feet, and that this was only to be expected says a lot in itself. Perhaps heightened expectations were why the seen-it-all audience was still holding back a little at the encore of a performance the musicians themselves thought the best of the tour. That was when Strummer announced (quite undefensively, I thought) that New York was as tough as London. Shortly thereafter the Clash broke into a brief rave-up on "Londons Burning" that scorched New York good. Ive run across those who were basically unmoved. But Ive heard stuff like "swept away," "almost transcendent," "left me slack-jawed" from dozens of others. He also sang as if his mother might be listening, getting through the tricky "Stay Free" a greeting to a mate out of jail that translates the bands new political wariness into personal warmthwithout a clinker. What impressed me about Strummer was how his strumming drove the band, freeing Simonons bass for the military embellishments he favors and allowing Headon to nudge the music toward an occasional Jamacian accent. Not that theres too much of that yet. These buys force the rhythm for sure. Then he cited Nostradamus, not my idea of a reliable source, and offered his own prediction" "I figure theyll pick off tow or three cities by the end of the year. Or do you think Im doomsayer-mongering? Am I some kind of nihilist, Christgau?" And puny as any rock dream may seem in the face of World War Iii, that one is a long way from where we are. Epic apologists talk about how the Clash start out from "below ground zero" as a result of all the punk stuff, but in fact the band has a deeper hole to deal withthe one in which the music biz, records and radio both, hoped to bury the kind of rock and roll that is an abrasive, and/or inspirational force in peoples lives. And then maybe they can get to the place Strummer described a few month ago in the British magazine Time Out: "All we want to achieve is an atmosphere where things can happen. We want to keep the spirit of the free world. We want to keep out that safe, soapy slush that comes out of the radio
All weve got is a few guitars, amps, and drums. Thats our weaponry." |
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