They Were Still in Love With Being The Clash

February 1, 2021 1:53 PM

Sandinista! has so many of the Clash’s peak moments: “Hitsville U.K.,” “Up in Heaven (Not Only Here),” “The Call Up,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “Washington Bullets,” “Police on My Back.” It also has loads of stoner rubbish — 36 tracks, at least one third filler. There was a message scrawled in the vinyl outgroove, spread over the six sides: “In Space … No One … Can … Hear … You … CLASH!” from In Praise of ‘Sandinista!’: Why the Clash’s Triple-Album Mess Is Also Their Masterpiece [Rolling Stone]
posted by chavenet (35 comments total)

40 years ago? FORTY? 40 years ago?!!! Ahem... excuse me. Anyway - fucking excellent stuff. And some other bits, too. I don't go back to it often, but it still has the power to make me feel something... immediate. Which isn't necessarily the case even with older music that I love.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:14 PM on February 1, 2021 [7 favorites]

I remember really enjoying "Last Gang in Town" but I don't remember a damn thing from the book. Did Joe Strummer contract hepatitis after he inadvertently swallowed a concert-goer's spit at one of the shows? Either way, so many Clash tunes make me so happy. And the Big Audio Dynamite stuff. And the Strummer and the Mescaleros stuff.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:19 PM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

My favourite story about Sandinista is that it was the first album by a punk band that Kurt Cobain ever heard. Finally, he would hear the fearsome sound for himself! He put it on, and after a song or two was very confused.
posted by Beardman at 2:21 PM on February 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

Police On My Back
I was almost 50 when I learned that this song is a cover. I guess The Clash really made it theirs; it sure sounded like a Clash song to me.
posted by thelonius at 2:24 PM on February 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

The only problem with Sandinista is that it's not long enough.

Sandinista CD 3:

Revolution Rock instrumental
Justice Tonight / Kick it Over
bankrobber dub
Rockers Galore UK Tour
The Cool Out
Stop the World
Radio One
The Magnificent Dance
This is Radio Clash
Outside Broadcast
Radio 5
posted by the bricabrac man at 2:30 PM on February 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

i was a young clash fan at the time , this album blew my mind and opened my head and ears to so many things musically ,socially and politically

on reflection now i find it slightly astonishing and wonderful that they made that album , at that time...

if music could talk .... ;)
posted by burr1545 at 2:37 PM on February 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm not convinced - by the Rolling Stone article, I mean.

I was a massive Clash fan from 1976 till about 1982, bought every disc they released during that period, saw 'em live seven or eight times in venues ranging from sweaty little provincial clubs to the New York Palladium, and followed their adventures obsessively in the UK music weeklies. Just about everything they put out before Sandinista has remained a fixture on my mental jukebox ever since, so how come the only two songs from that albun I can still sing in my head without a refresher are The Magnificent Seven and Somebody Got Murdered?

[Magnificent Seven is great, mind - almost worth the price of admission on its own.]
posted by Paul Slade at 3:03 PM on February 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

To me, the way that everyone has a different Ideal Sandinista! is part of its charm. If you had to cut London Calling in half, I feel like you'd get broad agreement about 7-8 of the 10 songs to keep, but with Sandinista! it's The Magnificent Seven and maybe Police on My Back as consensus picks and then we're off to the races. The wild variety of weird experiments, jokes, and dumb crap that kind of works really brings out the different facets of what people are looking for in a Clash album.

This one praises quite a few that I find eye-rolly at best, but, then, I kind of like Lose This Skin (and some of the stuff that didn't even rate a mention like Ivan Meets GI Joe and The Street Parade). The one thing that I'd like to think could unify us all is that the backwards version of Something About England is actually the stupidest thing on the album and should easily be the one universal cut. I'd probably also lose a couple (but by no means all) of the ones where Joe got high and rambled for a bit, most of the dub versions of songs that are already on the album (although Bankrobber and its dub are both good, so maybe put those in instead), and a couple of the tracks I find tuneless and kind of boring, like The Equalizer, and I think you'd have a very good double album with peaks that hold their own with pretty much anything The Clash ever did.
posted by Copronymus at 3:13 PM on February 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

The only problem with Sandinista is that it's not long enough.

I concur. The folks who dump on the Clash for having gone too far! with Sandinista are working the same level of conservatism that didn't approve of Miles Davis's pursuing amplified rock possibilities with Bitches Brew and beyond.
posted by philip-random at 3:13 PM on February 1, 2021 [7 favorites]

If this a vote, I concur.

1) Sandinista is their best album, and the novelty filler tracks are all hilarious and a lot of fun!
2) Tymon Dogg guest song Loose This Skin is one of my fave tracks.
3) even though Sandinista is their best album, their first album has their best individual songs.
4) their second album is really muddy sounding (bad mastering or our copy was a bad pressing?)
5) I saw them live once in a stadium for the 'Combat Rock' tour. Black Uhuru w/Sly & Robbie opened for them and uh... kinda blew them away. That time anyway.
posted by ovvl at 3:28 PM on February 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

This Friday just happens to be International Clash Day
posted by photoslob at 3:29 PM on February 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

To me, the way that everyone has a different Ideal Sandinista! is part of its charm.

I wouldn't even agree with myself on that list from day-to-day.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:31 PM on February 1, 2021 [13 favorites]

their first album has their best individual songs.

I'll get even spicier: the American version of their first album is better than the English one. It's got a bunch of killer singles added on, making it longer, and they replaced one of the songs with a (better, rawer) demo version. Plus there's nothing funnier than following the adolescent whinefest of "Remote Control" with the song "Complete Control," which starts out by saying "The record company forced us to put Remote Control on here."

their second album is really muddy sounding

Definitely. I've always blamed it on the fact that the producer was Blue Öyster Cult's Sandy Pearlman, who treated their music as heavy metal and mixed Joe Strummer's voice into the background sludge.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 4:05 PM on February 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

i dunno man. stay free? safe european home? tommy gun? there's solid work here that transcended the production. so it couldn't have been that bad.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:03 PM on February 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

The Clash are so incredible good ('cept Cut the Crap), ALL their album are keepers. If you need a longer Sandinista! go play The Clash on Broadway. Mick's rendition of Every Little Thing Hurts turns on the water works for me, just like Mick's solo of Train in Vain.

The only band that matters!
posted by alex_skazat at 6:06 PM on February 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

I've always blamed it on the fact that the producer was Blue Öyster Cult's Sandy Pearlman, who treated their music as heavy metal and

I've been doing a bit of a Blue Oyster Cult deep dive of late. Two things come to mind about this:

A. nobody forced Pearlman on the Clash, they sought him out. It's possible the record company gave them a short list of "suitable" producers, but he was nevertheless their choice. I have heard that Mick Jones was a fan, particularly of the Black + White albums.

B. apparently they chose Pearlman as much for what they hoped they could get in terms of a beefed up live sound (suitable for American arenas etc) as what he might pull off in the studio.

It does seem to be true that he made a mess out of Strummer's voice, deliberately mixing it low because he didn't like it much.

i dunno man. stay free? safe european home? tommy gun?

agreed! Nothing was going to stand in the way of those songs. And wrong production or not, Safe European Home remains one of my all time fave ROCK records, regardless of era, genre, anything. It just keeps on cutting through.
posted by philip-random at 6:29 PM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

> The Clash are so incredible good ('cept Cut the Crap)

This is going to get me kicked out of the thread, but: This is England is really good.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:35 PM on February 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

it's definitely better than anything else from that album. Although I do have time for The Sparks' wonderfully straight-faced take on We Are The Clash. Maybe they should've done the whole album.
posted by philip-random at 6:52 PM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

(Strummer had a podcast on the BBC -- of too few episodes -- where he just played whatever he wanted. It was awwwwwwsome.)
posted by wenestvedt at 7:30 PM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think London Calling has a lot of their very best tracks, but Sandinista! is, these days, the album of theirs I listen to most and if it's not their "best" it's my favourite. I had it on just a couple of nights ago and was marvelling at how it's almost certainly the only album where Side Five is my favourite.

If I was going to boil it down to one 10-song album I might go with...

Magnificent Seven
Hitsville UK
Somebody Got Murdered (back in university I listened to this song for like an hour straight one time as I came down from a mushroom trip)
If Music Could Talk
Police On My Back
The Call Up
Lose This Skin (maybe my favourite song on the album)
Charlie Don't Surf
The Street Parade
Living In Fame

...but if you asked me again tomorrow it probably wouldn't be the same list.

Strummer himself is quoted in this list as saying "There are some stupid tracks, there are some brilliant tracks. The more I think about it, the happier I am that it is what it is."
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:58 PM on February 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

Forty years, I am so old. It's still my favorite album of theirs. Maybe it's not their best or most consistent but it's just so bursting with a 1,000 different ideas musically and lyrically that you have to love it.
posted by octothorpe at 8:10 PM on February 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

The record feels more like hanging out with a bunch of very smart, very talented and rather annoying people for an evening than anything coherent - I wish more records were like that honestly.
In a world where I had to find someone to ask what a Sandinista was it made for a great source of things to go and find out about.
I am totally uninterested in Rolling Stone's opinion.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:41 PM on February 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

Anyone else ever heard about being all lost in the supermarket while looking at a frozen goat head when all other meat was gone this past year? It seemed loud. My kid laughed too. Those eyes.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 9:54 PM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was so excited when this album came out. I ran right out and bought it, put it on and
whu?
Fuck me this thing blows!
Ok it's not the worst album I ever bought ( "Bat Outta Hell", anyone?)
but, it's supposed to be The Clash!
Unlike that meatloaf album, I didn't immediately give it away or toss it out.
It does have some tracks that reward patience, and all these years later I don't hate it,
But it doesn't grab you the way the first two did, or even Combat Rock, so obviously their Swan song and they for sure weren't going out at the top of their game.
Rolling Stone hasn't been able to buy a clue since disco. If you want a hot take on their masterpiece you should try Black Market Clash.
posted by evilDoug at 10:43 PM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

And yes, I know about Cut the Crap, but no, that's not a Clash album. IT IS NOT, SHUT UP!
posted by evilDoug at 10:46 PM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Atom Tan and Radio Clash are my favs. That's all I got.
posted by Beholder at 11:00 PM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

( "Bat Outta Hell", anyone?)

Columbia House intructory mail order offer.

The meatloaf album. Two bostons. A kansas. Two styx. Year of the cat. Foghat. Changes One. Paul Simon's hits, bad company twice. Something else I have completely blocked out.

13 albums for a penny. I kept Stewart and Simon and paid for every Bowie album.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 2:19 AM on February 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

I'm pretty sure I bought Sandinista the week it came out on vinyl. As I remember, even though it was a three-record set, the Clash kept the price down to something like $12.

I played the hell out of that set; my roommates at college hated it so much and bitched every time I played it. They were hard-rock and metal heads from Central PA and didn't want to hear all that black influenced funk, rap, and dub music and would yell "disco sucks" when I played tracks from it.
posted by octothorpe at 5:35 AM on February 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

Since the subject of that album has come up a few times, the documentary The Rise and Fall Of The Clash, which despite its title is mostly about the Cut The Crap-era version of the band, is worth a watch. The interviews with the three hired guns, especially Vince White, are really insightful and often surprisingly affecting.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:27 AM on February 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

I inhabited a universe (and still do for that matter) where it wa possible to both love Sandinista and at least the title track of Bat of out Hell. In fact, I distinctly remember having a mixtape where Bat out of Hell was followed by Police on my Back. They both travelled at a similar velocity and featured electric guitars ... and I was always trying to convert commercial rock radio types over to my side of things. Still am now that I think of it.
posted by philip-random at 8:06 AM on February 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Lose This Skin is hardly "a stomach-churningly terrible country-fiddle hoedown". It has strings, but there's nothing country or hoedown about it, and it's far from terrible -- I've always found it downright touching in its earnestness.
posted by mikeand1 at 8:24 AM on February 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

Sandinista was released at the very end of 1980 but it didn't show up in my world until maybe a month into 1981, so yeah, almost exactly forty years ago. Which was coincident with the arrival in my locale of the strongest LSD I've ever experienced. Green Windowpane. Guaranteed to remove one from their moorings, for better or worse. So yeah, Sandinista was fated to forever be one of my fave psychedelic soundtracks, long and deep and wilfully odd, and Lose This Skin -- I'm pretty sure the first time I even heard it I was ... way out there. Which made it perfect in its wigged out, fiddle driven brashness. That whole side five was perfect, and so was side six. Another album that was brand new to us at the time was Byrne + Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. We probably would've put that on next. The conclusion was obvious. The 80s were going to be a profoundly wonderful and weird decade, musically speaking. And they were. You just wouldn't hear much of it on the radio -- not the corporate stations anyway. I've never gone back.
posted by philip-random at 8:49 AM on February 2, 2021 [7 favorites]

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts still sounds futuristically experimental, in all the best ways.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:52 AM on February 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

We Are The Clash is a great deep dive into their final years. Really makes one believe Cut the Crap could've been great if some different decisions were made.
Edit: first link was not particularly helpful
posted by look busy at 12:08 PM on February 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

( "Bat Outta Hell", anyone?)

Both Sandinista and Bat feature Ellen Foley on vocals!
posted by octothorpe at 12:55 PM on February 2, 2021 [5 favorites]