The reggae and dub thing makes more sense from a British perspective.
From the late 1960s to the early 2000s (when internet era Americanisation basically ate British music history), British and particularly London music was heavily influenced by Jamaican music. It was the dominant form of 'Black Music', hugely influential in the underground as well as dominant in the pop charts.
From the Clash or the Ruts through to Massive Attack and the Prodigy, it was just natural for a British band to simply pick up reggae and dub and general bass culture without necessarily seeing it as an external or niche form of music, as it was perceived to be in the US. It was as normal to the Brits as a white American rock band rapping or scratching would have been in the 2000s.
Thanks for this. Yeah, I was a big fan of reggae myself, I just wondered if the Clash were using it as filler at the time. Later, I realized no, I had misjudged them, and that the dub/reggae stuff they did was actually really good.
That's the whole point of the piece. That I was too caught up in my own punk purity issues. And that caused me to dismiss them at their peak.
I got that. It was a well written and clear piece. I always like reading from the people who were there are the time. I was just pointing out that the dub / reggae thing wasn't just a Clash thing.
Dick Hebdidge’s classic, near-contemporaneous book on the origins of punk, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), documents this influence really throughly.
I like Sandinista. The first record was one that you had to buy as an import. I had both versions. The American one just added some singles like a few other bands did, like Buzzcocks and 999. I saw them on the early tours (1979-1982), and they were one of the punk/new wave bands that could actually play. Of course, bands like Public Image Limited and Gang of Four were even better.
I saw Public Image on their US tour in May of '80 at the Olympic Auditorium. Los Trios Lobos opened .. almost purely mariachi at that time. PIL were excellent! The crowd was very hostile - not to PIL but to each other. The surf punk violence dominated live shows from LA to O.C. If the Buzzcocks added singles to their albums (Singles Going Steady is the only one that comes to mind but it's all and ONLY singles, so..??) Regardless, all Buzzcocks songs were good so doing so would not have diluted the quality of the music like it did w/the US Clash 1st album.
The PIL Olympic Auditorium was the biggest punk show at the time. So, I don't know if all those people were punk rock or music fans or thrill seekers? John Lydon had a crazy following and they were violent. I never had any problems myself. But I didn't stick around when things went hardcore.
Hey Blake, remember we covered Janie Jones as the Compulsions, just after you joined the band, pre- October Days. Chris Wink of Blue Man Group on drums! I have a recording! I like Strummer's later work with the Mescaleros.
I had a high school English teacher of certain age who just adored The Clash and gave London Calling his highest recommendation. I listened, I liked some of it some, but it didn't really capture my imagination at that time and felt kinda flat. I've come to appreciate it much more over the years but at the time I was mainly listening to Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, and grunge so it just seemed like a relic in the attic. I have a Clash playlist that is their two-disc greatest hits supplemented by the rest of the London Calling album not included, and I've tended to think that's enough for me. Maybe something will catch my ear someday and I'll want to dig deeper than that.
London Calling is probably the best record. Only one weak song about Montgomery Cliff. Sandinista could have been two records, but "One More Time/One More Dub" is awesome. It's more of an atmosphere, not song based. I like how The Clash just tried to do all types of music by 1979-1980. Punk was pretty much over by 1979. Combat Rock was just an attempt to have a hit record. They had peaked.
A thoughtful and interesting piece. I remember the first time I met someone who didn't like the Beatles. I couldn't comprehend that or understand why they would admit it. But this person was a music student at Cornish, so their opinion had some gravitas. My family didn't listen to the Beatles at home, but my parent's bought me a record of their love songs one year for Christmas that I cherished. And later, I bought a tape of a very early concert of the Beatles in Berlin. And I've been listening to the Clash's London Calling album for 30+ years but I don't really know much about them. Thanks for the pop history lesson!
Once again, Blake tells it like it was as opposed to how the two bands mentioned have been presented over the years. If I'm honest with myself, the latter half of the Beatles catalog can be plodding. The early recordings made the toes tap involuntarily. Glorious pop hooks. Similarly, the Clash's first three albums had some great rockers. Music for music's sake eventually got bogged down in political messaging and posing in exotic garb. Anyway, Blake struck a note with this reader.
By the way, I may have owned the same Beatles live album that you mention. My copy was pretty horrible recording quality, but I still played it more than, say, Sgt Peppers or Abbey Road. It must have been the energy of the live performance that kept me listening, audio fidelity notwithstanding (album linked here - youtu.be/UbUmLoSW8tY). Another favorite and frequent visitor to my turntable was the "Rock n Roll Music" album, a great collection of songs as well as a dust jacket with the curiously strong smell of printer's ink (youtu.be/SkMkpjJ5Els).
I relistened yesterday - probably a forty-year absence for me as well (I'm not so good on listening to complete albums these days) - and noticed there are at least two songs sung with vocals that don't sound very Beatle-y. Well, thanks to the internet, a ready resource I wouldn't have had back in the day, I learn that two of the Star Club staff (brothers) make cameo singing appearances on the album, Fred Fascher, a club waiter, and Horst Fascher, the venue's manager.
I agree for all the exact same reasons that the UK release of the 1st album is great. I don't agree with the production being bad. It's fine. Stop being an audio snob Blake - yer pissing me off! ON the other hand being intentionally Lo Fi is equally frickin' stoopid. Anyhow all the singles and so on BEFORE GIve Them Enough Rope were great. I retain my deep sense of disappointment over the songwriting from thereon out. But unlike you I kinda like Clampdown and Rock The Casbah.. Yes, stupid vacuous songs but hey ok. Don't worry; I didn't spend any of my hard earned money on that crap.
BTW I saw them at the Hollywood Palladium in Oct. of '79. They only had one bad album under their belt. By this time the surf punks and ultra violent behavior had infiltrated live shows and this one was no exception! But if ya just stood back like five people you had an exceptional view, no violence, and great sound. When they did Garageland it was truly epic!
Fast forward three years: I shared an elevator with a couple of the Clash on the way to the show in '82 opening for The Who in Seattle. By then I hated them so much I ignored them in the elevator. Just get out of my sight. And at the Kingdome, a terrible venue, they were equally terrible. Booooorrring! The Who were terrible too as I had seen them with Moon the last time 6 years earlier and there is just no comparison. But, I'm a diehard so to the Kingdome I went.
The entire Beatles catalog is great. You dismiss .. the White Album, Abbey Road, and Let it Be? OK I know McCartney wrote great tin pan alley songs and ballads, but Lennon's contributions everywhere were my preference - regardless of that, the White Album is in the Pantheon of all time great albums. The remix/master/whateverthefuck they call it is fantastic. The AI remix of Revolver also shines. Anyhow my favorite stuff is their Deccagone Sessions and Live At the Star Club in Hamburg - amazingly great stuff! Most people only heard any of that stuff 'cause of the Anthology. We diehards had the early bootlegged stuff on colored vinyl in '76 going down to Django's. Ya payz yer money and ya takes yer chances!
IN 1979, The Clash had two albums out. The first album wasn't released in the USA until 1979. Most people that liked the Clash either bought the import or probably waited. I don't think they were still playing "Garageland" in 1979. I looked at a setlist from the show and it wasn't on there. Most people had moved on from punk in 1982.
I personally witnessed them play it. Were you there? Tim Small was! I bought the UK pressing as Renaissance Records in Portland always had the UK 1st wave punk LPs and singles hot offa the plane at PDX. Joe Carducci managed the store as well as being a central conduit for the local scene, tho proto-punks knew each other since the early seventies - and possibly late sixties. Anyhow the UK pressings were the only way I was havin' it .. having started that habit in '76 or thereabouts.
THere was nothing worthwhile on which to move until Guns'n'Roses. I know, I know, there was the Pixies and The Smiths and so on - very little of which I even mildly liked but there ya go.
Was enough of a fan to have a hits mixtape and saw that fun and raucous Palladium show. I remember a big black kid with “White Riot” written on the back of his leather jacket. LA got mugged by hardcore not too long after. By spring ‘80 the mosh pit at the Santa Monica Civic for the Urgh! Shows was a very unfriendly place and I checked out for good. As noted, The Clash had shifted gears and were aiming for the charts by then.
I think I remember that black kid... in the dim recesses of my memory. LA was a big enough town that even back then there were enough black kids who liked the 1st wave punk stuff to make their presence known. I even remember getting into a debate with a very fucking smart black kid at a show about whether the Damned's first album or their 2nd is better. I of course sided with the 1st album. Now, of course I gotta give it a tie, for very different reasons in each case.
I also remember at that Palladium show someone hocked a loogie on poor Joe Ely right in his face. He played on as if it never happened, being a good sport. I recall drinks flying around..
Then again, there was the Germs and Agent Orange show in the Fall of '79 at the Hong Kong Cafe.
Uh, then again there was the Iggy Pop show at the Stardust in Nov. '79.
Yeah, then again there was the Germs, Mau Maus, and Middle Class at the Fleetwood in either March or May of '80. Total and complete mayem, the cops swarming, etc.
You got the gold Mutt! My budget was tight and I relied on my bf who worked at Licorice Pizza for tix and albums to tape, so lived on the crumbs. He was a Clash fanatic so didn’t miss that one. Poor Joe Ely! Was back a ways and didn’t see that but I remember he made a good account of himself, overall still one of my fave shows ever. FWIW one of my close HS pals had a football scholarship to Mudd in fall ‘78. The place depressed the sh*t out of him and that’s as long as he lasted.
Wow you were there too! I saw the Buzzcocks and the Jam (one of them with the Cramps opening in either late '79 or the spring of '80 at the S&M civic. For whatever reason, the usual Gestapo security let us get up onstage and sit cross-legged admiring the Buzzcocks up close and personal. I think we did that for a few songs then ambled peaceably enough offstage. I also saw the Cramps at the Whisky - what a show! Total chaos, mostly on stage! Anyhow Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle had matching Les Pauls and Marshall stacks and I couldn't hear a thing! Dudes, turn up the bass knob and crank the frickin' things to eleven! BTW I went to Harvey Mudd College in '79/'80. TERRIBLE COLLEGE, TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE, but I saw some great shows. I even saw the Ramones at the whatever center at Pomona Men's College.. How conveeeeenient!
I've been reading Johnny Rotten's memoir. He's pretty dismissive of The Clash, accusing them of being performative, at least politically. Like they were "real" punks. But, I mean, so what? Don't we all sort of perform our politics? Performance is important to engaging others, and if we want our politics to succeed, we need non "real" ones to join in.
I'm not sure there is any such thing as "punk purity." I started college in 1978, just punk was really ending and all the earliest post-punk bands were starting up. I understood punk as a sort of cultural bomb that was meant to explode the music industry in particular, but related pop cultural milieus as well. Explosions just don't take that long and they don't actually "develop" in any way. They just go off and everyone is left to pick up the pieces and start again.
I came from a greaser town where punk was ignored and went to a liberal arts school where it was very much the taste of a small marginal subset of students. Consequently, I didn't pay punk per se a lot of attention. Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen were more important to me than the Clash. But the Clash was one of the few bands I can think of that started as a punk band and then helped to invent and shape the possibilities of post-punk (including the dub stuff, the roots rock, bizarre injections of psychedelia, etc.). John Lydon was the guy in the Sex Pistols who was enough of an artist and intellectual to form the bridge himself, but he had to do with Public Image Ltd. The Ramones, bless them, just kept doing the same damn thing start to finish, but nobody did it like them.
By the way, Brand New Cadillac is a cover of a classic British rock and roll era tube by a really quite odd guy called Vince Taylor, who dressed head to toe in leather, including leather shirts. One of those strange characters.
The reggae and dub thing makes more sense from a British perspective.
From the late 1960s to the early 2000s (when internet era Americanisation basically ate British music history), British and particularly London music was heavily influenced by Jamaican music. It was the dominant form of 'Black Music', hugely influential in the underground as well as dominant in the pop charts.
From the Clash or the Ruts through to Massive Attack and the Prodigy, it was just natural for a British band to simply pick up reggae and dub and general bass culture without necessarily seeing it as an external or niche form of music, as it was perceived to be in the US. It was as normal to the Brits as a white American rock band rapping or scratching would have been in the 2000s.
Thanks for this. Yeah, I was a big fan of reggae myself, I just wondered if the Clash were using it as filler at the time. Later, I realized no, I had misjudged them, and that the dub/reggae stuff they did was actually really good.
That's the whole point of the piece. That I was too caught up in my own punk purity issues. And that caused me to dismiss them at their peak.
I got that. It was a well written and clear piece. I always like reading from the people who were there are the time. I was just pointing out that the dub / reggae thing wasn't just a Clash thing.
Dick Hebdidge’s classic, near-contemporaneous book on the origins of punk, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), documents this influence really throughly.
I like Sandinista. The first record was one that you had to buy as an import. I had both versions. The American one just added some singles like a few other bands did, like Buzzcocks and 999. I saw them on the early tours (1979-1982), and they were one of the punk/new wave bands that could actually play. Of course, bands like Public Image Limited and Gang of Four were even better.
I saw Public Image on their US tour in May of '80 at the Olympic Auditorium. Los Trios Lobos opened .. almost purely mariachi at that time. PIL were excellent! The crowd was very hostile - not to PIL but to each other. The surf punk violence dominated live shows from LA to O.C. If the Buzzcocks added singles to their albums (Singles Going Steady is the only one that comes to mind but it's all and ONLY singles, so..??) Regardless, all Buzzcocks songs were good so doing so would not have diluted the quality of the music like it did w/the US Clash 1st album.
The PIL Olympic Auditorium was the biggest punk show at the time. So, I don't know if all those people were punk rock or music fans or thrill seekers? John Lydon had a crazy following and they were violent. I never had any problems myself. But I didn't stick around when things went hardcore.
Hey Blake, remember we covered Janie Jones as the Compulsions, just after you joined the band, pre- October Days. Chris Wink of Blue Man Group on drums! I have a recording! I like Strummer's later work with the Mescaleros.
I think I was the one who suggested that. Because Janie Jones was so easy to play. And we could run around on stage!
Some of the best records from the UK were never released in the USA. So, you had to buy them on import, which cost twice as much. Here's a list
The Adverts One Chord Wonders Stiff
The Adverts Gary Gilmore's Eyes Anchor
The Saints This Perfect Day Harvest (UK issue)
The Lurkers Shadow Beggars Banquet
The Boys First Time NEMS
The Boys Brickfield Nights NEMS
Chelsea Right to Work Step Forward
Eater Outside View The Label
Eater Thinking of the USA The Label
Johnny Moped No One Chiswick
Looking through Gary Gilmore's Eyes! One of my early early punk faves!
I had a high school English teacher of certain age who just adored The Clash and gave London Calling his highest recommendation. I listened, I liked some of it some, but it didn't really capture my imagination at that time and felt kinda flat. I've come to appreciate it much more over the years but at the time I was mainly listening to Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, and grunge so it just seemed like a relic in the attic. I have a Clash playlist that is their two-disc greatest hits supplemented by the rest of the London Calling album not included, and I've tended to think that's enough for me. Maybe something will catch my ear someday and I'll want to dig deeper than that.
London Calling is probably the best record. Only one weak song about Montgomery Cliff. Sandinista could have been two records, but "One More Time/One More Dub" is awesome. It's more of an atmosphere, not song based. I like how The Clash just tried to do all types of music by 1979-1980. Punk was pretty much over by 1979. Combat Rock was just an attempt to have a hit record. They had peaked.
Ha, I like the Montgomery Clift song! Not that I knew who he was circa 2002, when I first heard the album, I had to look him up on the Internet.
Joe Strummer and the mohawk was a reference to Taxi Driver.
A thoughtful and interesting piece. I remember the first time I met someone who didn't like the Beatles. I couldn't comprehend that or understand why they would admit it. But this person was a music student at Cornish, so their opinion had some gravitas. My family didn't listen to the Beatles at home, but my parent's bought me a record of their love songs one year for Christmas that I cherished. And later, I bought a tape of a very early concert of the Beatles in Berlin. And I've been listening to the Clash's London Calling album for 30+ years but I don't really know much about them. Thanks for the pop history lesson!
Once again, Blake tells it like it was as opposed to how the two bands mentioned have been presented over the years. If I'm honest with myself, the latter half of the Beatles catalog can be plodding. The early recordings made the toes tap involuntarily. Glorious pop hooks. Similarly, the Clash's first three albums had some great rockers. Music for music's sake eventually got bogged down in political messaging and posing in exotic garb. Anyway, Blake struck a note with this reader.
By the way, I may have owned the same Beatles live album that you mention. My copy was pretty horrible recording quality, but I still played it more than, say, Sgt Peppers or Abbey Road. It must have been the energy of the live performance that kept me listening, audio fidelity notwithstanding (album linked here - youtu.be/UbUmLoSW8tY). Another favorite and frequent visitor to my turntable was the "Rock n Roll Music" album, a great collection of songs as well as a dust jacket with the curiously strong smell of printer's ink (youtu.be/SkMkpjJ5Els).
Dude, thanks for the Hamburg Live album recommend. I didn't know about this. It's incredible!!
Looks like there are even longer versions of the Hamburg performances on YouTube. But the link above is the vinyl version that I remember.
Yes! It was Hamburg, not Berlin. Thank you! It's been so long - close to 40 years since I've listened to it.
I relistened yesterday - probably a forty-year absence for me as well (I'm not so good on listening to complete albums these days) - and noticed there are at least two songs sung with vocals that don't sound very Beatle-y. Well, thanks to the internet, a ready resource I wouldn't have had back in the day, I learn that two of the Star Club staff (brothers) make cameo singing appearances on the album, Fred Fascher, a club waiter, and Horst Fascher, the venue's manager.
I agree for all the exact same reasons that the UK release of the 1st album is great. I don't agree with the production being bad. It's fine. Stop being an audio snob Blake - yer pissing me off! ON the other hand being intentionally Lo Fi is equally frickin' stoopid. Anyhow all the singles and so on BEFORE GIve Them Enough Rope were great. I retain my deep sense of disappointment over the songwriting from thereon out. But unlike you I kinda like Clampdown and Rock The Casbah.. Yes, stupid vacuous songs but hey ok. Don't worry; I didn't spend any of my hard earned money on that crap.
BTW I saw them at the Hollywood Palladium in Oct. of '79. They only had one bad album under their belt. By this time the surf punks and ultra violent behavior had infiltrated live shows and this one was no exception! But if ya just stood back like five people you had an exceptional view, no violence, and great sound. When they did Garageland it was truly epic!
Fast forward three years: I shared an elevator with a couple of the Clash on the way to the show in '82 opening for The Who in Seattle. By then I hated them so much I ignored them in the elevator. Just get out of my sight. And at the Kingdome, a terrible venue, they were equally terrible. Booooorrring! The Who were terrible too as I had seen them with Moon the last time 6 years earlier and there is just no comparison. But, I'm a diehard so to the Kingdome I went.
The entire Beatles catalog is great. You dismiss .. the White Album, Abbey Road, and Let it Be? OK I know McCartney wrote great tin pan alley songs and ballads, but Lennon's contributions everywhere were my preference - regardless of that, the White Album is in the Pantheon of all time great albums. The remix/master/whateverthefuck they call it is fantastic. The AI remix of Revolver also shines. Anyhow my favorite stuff is their Deccagone Sessions and Live At the Star Club in Hamburg - amazingly great stuff! Most people only heard any of that stuff 'cause of the Anthology. We diehards had the early bootlegged stuff on colored vinyl in '76 going down to Django's. Ya payz yer money and ya takes yer chances!
Great article, Blake - one of my favorites.
IN 1979, The Clash had two albums out. The first album wasn't released in the USA until 1979. Most people that liked the Clash either bought the import or probably waited. I don't think they were still playing "Garageland" in 1979. I looked at a setlist from the show and it wasn't on there. Most people had moved on from punk in 1982.
I personally witnessed them play it. Were you there? Tim Small was! I bought the UK pressing as Renaissance Records in Portland always had the UK 1st wave punk LPs and singles hot offa the plane at PDX. Joe Carducci managed the store as well as being a central conduit for the local scene, tho proto-punks knew each other since the early seventies - and possibly late sixties. Anyhow the UK pressings were the only way I was havin' it .. having started that habit in '76 or thereabouts.
THere was nothing worthwhile on which to move until Guns'n'Roses. I know, I know, there was the Pixies and The Smiths and so on - very little of which I even mildly liked but there ya go.
Was enough of a fan to have a hits mixtape and saw that fun and raucous Palladium show. I remember a big black kid with “White Riot” written on the back of his leather jacket. LA got mugged by hardcore not too long after. By spring ‘80 the mosh pit at the Santa Monica Civic for the Urgh! Shows was a very unfriendly place and I checked out for good. As noted, The Clash had shifted gears and were aiming for the charts by then.
I think I remember that black kid... in the dim recesses of my memory. LA was a big enough town that even back then there were enough black kids who liked the 1st wave punk stuff to make their presence known. I even remember getting into a debate with a very fucking smart black kid at a show about whether the Damned's first album or their 2nd is better. I of course sided with the 1st album. Now, of course I gotta give it a tie, for very different reasons in each case.
I also remember at that Palladium show someone hocked a loogie on poor Joe Ely right in his face. He played on as if it never happened, being a good sport. I recall drinks flying around..
Then again, there was the Germs and Agent Orange show in the Fall of '79 at the Hong Kong Cafe.
Uh, then again there was the Iggy Pop show at the Stardust in Nov. '79.
Yeah, then again there was the Germs, Mau Maus, and Middle Class at the Fleetwood in either March or May of '80. Total and complete mayem, the cops swarming, etc.
Good times, Tim, good times!
You got the gold Mutt! My budget was tight and I relied on my bf who worked at Licorice Pizza for tix and albums to tape, so lived on the crumbs. He was a Clash fanatic so didn’t miss that one. Poor Joe Ely! Was back a ways and didn’t see that but I remember he made a good account of himself, overall still one of my fave shows ever. FWIW one of my close HS pals had a football scholarship to Mudd in fall ‘78. The place depressed the sh*t out of him and that’s as long as he lasted.
Yep! THat's Harvey Mudd. Just awful.
Wow you were there too! I saw the Buzzcocks and the Jam (one of them with the Cramps opening in either late '79 or the spring of '80 at the S&M civic. For whatever reason, the usual Gestapo security let us get up onstage and sit cross-legged admiring the Buzzcocks up close and personal. I think we did that for a few songs then ambled peaceably enough offstage. I also saw the Cramps at the Whisky - what a show! Total chaos, mostly on stage! Anyhow Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle had matching Les Pauls and Marshall stacks and I couldn't hear a thing! Dudes, turn up the bass knob and crank the frickin' things to eleven! BTW I went to Harvey Mudd College in '79/'80. TERRIBLE COLLEGE, TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE, but I saw some great shows. I even saw the Ramones at the whatever center at Pomona Men's College.. How conveeeeenient!
I've been reading Johnny Rotten's memoir. He's pretty dismissive of The Clash, accusing them of being performative, at least politically. Like they were "real" punks. But, I mean, so what? Don't we all sort of perform our politics? Performance is important to engaging others, and if we want our politics to succeed, we need non "real" ones to join in.
I'm not sure there is any such thing as "punk purity." I started college in 1978, just punk was really ending and all the earliest post-punk bands were starting up. I understood punk as a sort of cultural bomb that was meant to explode the music industry in particular, but related pop cultural milieus as well. Explosions just don't take that long and they don't actually "develop" in any way. They just go off and everyone is left to pick up the pieces and start again.
I came from a greaser town where punk was ignored and went to a liberal arts school where it was very much the taste of a small marginal subset of students. Consequently, I didn't pay punk per se a lot of attention. Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen were more important to me than the Clash. But the Clash was one of the few bands I can think of that started as a punk band and then helped to invent and shape the possibilities of post-punk (including the dub stuff, the roots rock, bizarre injections of psychedelia, etc.). John Lydon was the guy in the Sex Pistols who was enough of an artist and intellectual to form the bridge himself, but he had to do with Public Image Ltd. The Ramones, bless them, just kept doing the same damn thing start to finish, but nobody did it like them.
By the way, Brand New Cadillac is a cover of a classic British rock and roll era tube by a really quite odd guy called Vince Taylor, who dressed head to toe in leather, including leather shirts. One of those strange characters.
The Clash did a lot of covers. And many of their songs sound like an angry sped-up Chuck Berry.