102. The Clash, "The Clash"

 


I'm not sure what the first Clash song I heard was, but it was probably something like "Train In Vain" or "Rock the Casbah" or something else from Combat Rock that would have been on mainstream radio in the early 80's.  (This was early in my musical life, when I was still into Pink Floyd and Rush and your standard suburban angsty teen stuff.)  And then I read about the Clash being "punk" and I was like "What?  That isn't punk."  By this point, I had stumbled across the Sex Pistols which not unreasonably defined what punk was for me, and the Clash songs I heard on the radio didn't sound like that.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Clash are most definitely punk, and this album, released a few months before Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, is as good a punk album - or rock album, for that matter -  as was ever made.  Maybe it's not "the greatest rock and roll album ever manufactured anywhere," as Robert Christgau wrote, but it is a very, very, very good album.

Joe Strummer wrote these songs with Mick Jones when Strummer was 24 and Jones was 21 or 22, and they absolutely brim with young anger and overflow with musical ideas.  Take a song like "Remote Control," the second track, which has a complex melody that wouldn't be out of place in a Kinks song but with the snarling intonation Strummer brings it and the slashing guitars that make this album absolutely crackle.  And that's the Clash, isn't it?  That punk sensibility with a heightened musicality and sense of possibility that other punk groups could aspire to but never really achieve.

There are so many good songs on this album!  "Garageland" starts with a riff Springsteen could have copped, and serves as a manifesto and an introduction:

Back in the garage with my bullshit detector
Carbon monoxide making sure it's effective
People ringing up making offers for my life
But I just want to stay in the garage all night
We're a garage band
We come from garageland

Sounds like Elvis Costello lyrics but with Strummer's immediately identifiable vocals, which are so raw and young and unpolished that he absolutely sells the idea.  "Career Opportunities" bemoans the 9-to-5 life, like a lot of young punks did, but with an incredible melody and the omnipresent Strummer snarl.  "White Riot" is basically the template for like 90% of punk songs that followed, a letter in support of the antipolice rioting by black youth in Notting Hill in 1976.  But my favorite is probably "Janie Jones," the album opener.  The song has it all, the double-time drumming, the crunched-out guitar, probably the best vocals on the album, and that hummable chorus.  Love it.  This album is the shit.

This is not the last time we'll see the Clash, let me assure you.

Is this album in my personal Top 500? Hell yeah!

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