16. The Clash, "London Calling"
After yesterday's, um, unpleasantness, it is so nice to get an album like this, an album I love completely that also happens to be one of the Greatest Albums Ever Recorded, Slam-Dunk edition.
The opening chords to the first track, the title song, sound like an alarm, a staccato siren, and the song is an alarm, a warning about the myriad fears of the Cold War era, when disaster always seemed a day or so away:
Engines stop running, the wheat is growin' thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning, I, I live by the river
The alarmlike quality of the song is accented by Topper Headon's martial drums, pounding out a march that matches Joe Strummer's guitar. Strummer's voice is typically hoarse and strained, and that quality lends itself to the time-is-running out anxiousness of the song. Strummer's wolf howls and yelps only add to the feeling of doom.
I guess this was called "punk," but, as we've discussed before, it's not the kind of "punk" you're thinking of when you think of "punk." This album made me realize that punk isn't angry, fast songs; it's an attitude, and on the scale of attitude, this album is punk as fuck. Musically, it's all over the place. The song "London Calling" could easily be described as just punk or post-punk, but a song like "Rudie Can't Fail" is some amalgam of punk and dub that just fucking works. Independent of my eagerly awaited Top 100 albums list, I've long maintained a Top 20 songs list, and you can bet that "Rudie" is on that list. I love that song so much.
Also dub-influenced, if not outright reggae, is "Revolution Rock," a cover of a Danny Ray song that had been released only months before the band started recording this album. The only other cover is "Brand New Cadillac," a 1959 song by Vince Taylor and the Playboys that the Clash owned so thoroughly that I bet a lot of people don't know it's a cover. I don't mean to downplay the original; it's got a great edge and a lot of heart. It's just that the Clash, I don't know, Clashified the hell out of it.
"The Guns of Brixton" is also strongly reggae-influenced, or maybe just straight reggae. One of the few Clash songs sung by bassist Paul Simonon, who grew up in Brixton, it's about the hopelessness British youth at the time felt. And of course, since it's the Clash, it's eminently hummable and catchy as fuck, even while delivering its grim message.
Of course, there's "Spanish Bombs," maybe the best pop song about the Spanish Civil War. The song makes jarring contrasts between the bloody history of the war (and other wars, like those in Ireland and South Africa) and the English tourist's casual use of modern Spain as a vacation spot:
The freedom fighters died upon the hill
They sang the red flag, they wore the black one
After they died it was Mockingbird Hill
Back home the buses went up in flashes
The Irish tomb was drenched in blood
Spanish bombs shatter the hotels
My señorita's rose was nipped in the bud
The "buses" and "Irish tombs" are a clear reference to the Troubles of Ireland, which were still raging when this album was recorded. And the "bombs shatter the hotels" line refers to the Basque separatist attack on Costa Brava resorts in 1979. The struggles of the underclass, the oppressed, the unfortunate were never far from Strummer's mind.
But not just the struggles of a class; the struggles of a single person could be of equal interest. "The Right Profile," for example, is about actor Montgomery Clift's slow decline into alcoholism and drug abuse after his 1956 car accident.
We must not leave without discussing "Train in Vain," the "hidden track" (only because it was added to the album at the last minute, after the sleeve had been printed. It is quite unlike the rest of the album, almost a funk song, propelled along by a three-strum riff and that percussion and the chanted lyrics. Predictably, it became the band's biggest single in the US to date, peaking at number 23. I think it may have been the first Clash song I heard? It's a perfect little pop/funk gem, and I wouldn't trade it for the world.
Is this album in my personal Top 100? Of course!
This is one of my all-time favorite albums and I never realized either of those were covers! Fun fact, "Spanish Bombs" was the first time I became aware of the Spanish Civil War, and in the pre-internet early-90s, inspired me to read several books to learn about it.
ReplyDeleteBeen listening to and loving London Calling for 40 years. This is the first I'm learning it's not "nuclear era."
ReplyDeleteApparently "nuclear error" was a reference to Three Mile Island, which freaked a lot of people out at the time. We're all learning a lot about London Calling!
ReplyDeleteI always heard it as "nuclear terror," so we have all learned something!
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