Give ‘em Enough Rope
“Combat Rock” was playing
And it had to be a folk song
Cause everyone knew the words.
-- Roger Manning
Although you’d think I’d know better, last night I went down to a local club to see a tribute show to the greatest rock band of all time, the Clash. It was sponsored by a group called No Vote Left Behind, dedicated, they say, to regime change in 2004. It was also the birthday party for a local DJ and there were lots of bands on the bill. Surely some of them might be worth a listen.
As it turns out, the evening was a testament to the songwriting power of the late and greatly lamented Joe Strummer and his bandmates. If the Clash catalog could survive interpretation by the lineup that turned up last night, it could survive anything. Of the eight bands we saw, one was worth hearing – a mostly-white rap group that did spirited hip-hop versions of “Train in Vain” and “Guns of Brixton.” As the Clash were one of the first white bands to embrace hip-hop in the very early 1980s (check out “Magnificent Seven” and “This is Radio Clash”), I’m sure they would have approved.
The remaining acts clearly spent too long in their parents’ basements, or maybe not long enough. Apparently the bands didn’t coordinate their set lists, so there was a great deal of repetition. Does anyone need to hear four versions of “Brand New Cadillac,” a song the Clash didn’t even write? Also, get the memo: the Clash were a four-piece for a reason. Don’t try performing “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” as a trio unless your guitarist is named Bob Mould. I don’t care how good your bass player is.
Painful as it was to see the classics lined up and murdered, there was something interesting about the whole event. The Clash got started in 1976, nearly 30 years ago. That moment in rock history – the punk outbreak – is the clear line separating the antedeluvian world of Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones from the era we still live in. No matter how many years go by, the Clash, along with their immediate contemporaries (Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Joe Jackson, etc.), remain irreducibly modern in ways that musicians from just a year or two before don’t. Even within that epoch, the Clash were uniquely accomplished, producing the definitive punk rock record (The Clash, their first), the monumental double-album set London Calling, and their misunderstood magnum opus, Sandinista, which laid out a precise blueprint for the next 20 years of musical history. Almost incidentally, they were the greatest white reggae band ever. Even the much-derided Combat Rock, from their decadent later period, is worth another listen. Every significant musical figure that followed, from REM to Bill Laswell, Nirvana to Radiohead, owes something to their influence.
Angry, smart and relentlessly cosmopolitan, the Clash set the standard for the modern rock-band persona. They were political, but usually in an oblique way that prevented their work from descending into the dated clichés of the “protest song” of the 60s. “White Riot” and “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” – two of their early rabble-rousing classics – were based on real incidents now long forgotten, but their relevance lives on because of the craft and passion Strummer and Jones put into their creation and performance. “If Adolph Hitler were here today/ they’d send along the limos anyway” is an observation that defies time and place. If anything, the celebrity-obsessed culture it is commenting on has become even more pathological than when the words were first penned.
As such, they are, for better or worse, uniquely well-suited to events like last night, where the agenda is specifically political. Everyone between 25 and 45 years old with a political consciousness knows when and where they were when they first heard “London Calling,” and can sing along to the often-incomprehensible lyrics of “Safe European Home” or “Spanish Bombs.” Unlike, say, Bruce Springsteen, the Clash are cool enough to give image-cover to hipsters, punks, skaters, Seattle scenesters, graying Gen-Xers, hippies, gangstas and dreadlocked stoners. Unlike Bob Dylan, whose hoary current-day incarnation still walks the earth to compete with his eternally-young and transcendently-relevant 1960s persona, the Clash have gone over the great water into the mists of fondly-remembered history (especially if you end that history in 1982, forgetting the final ugly album and tour). Joe Strummer, taken from us too soon just before Christmas in 2002, provides the essential martyr element.
So, in a dynamic that seems as improbable as inevitable, the Clash have become folkloric. Like Woody Guthrie, the Depression-era troubadour whose work was rediscovered by the 1960s protest kids (most prominently the aforementioned Mr. Dylan), the Clash have found an afterlife as totems for progressive politics, 25 years after the fact. Think about that: in 1980, at the Clash’s creative peak, 25 years ago was 1955. Nothing from that era, with the possible exception of the Beat Generation writers like William S. Burroughs, could conceivably have relevance to the present day.
And yet now, the world the Clash described so brilliantly in their work seems to still be with us. A lesbian punk band in 2004 could rip through the 28 year-old anthem “I’m So Bored with the USA” and make it sound like it was written about the November election. “All the Young Punks (New Boots and Contracts)” was trotted out in service of a get-out-the-vote message. “Straight to Hell” sounded like commentary on the current obsession with the Vietnam era. Interestingly, no one performed the Clash’s most enduringly-relevant political song, “Washington Bullets,” which remains one of the most trenchant observations on the complex dynamic between colonialism, terrorism and political oppression. If you can find an Afghan rebel who the Moscow bullets missed/ ask him what he thinks of voting Communist.
Just as well. Even the Clash had trouble performing that one live, and given the caliber of the performances last night, it probably would have sucked beyond the telling of it. But hey, the spirit would have been right.
12:33:15 PM 
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