"Sing, Michael, Sing..."

London Calling (25th Anniversary Legacy Edition) - The Clash (Epic)

I didn’t get London Calling in a very punk rock manner. I was sick, and my mother bought it for me. I was almost thirteen.

One Sunday, in the winter of 1979, the big, fat edition of the Daily News came with its weekly Sam Goody sale circular, and London Calling was priced to move at $6.99. (That’s seven bucks for a double LP, a perfect combination of the Clash keeping their record affordable for the workin’ man, and…well, it being 1980.) I planned on taking the bus two miles up Kimball Avenue to Cross County Shopping Center and getting myself a piece of that action. And then I started sweating.

Shortly after getting dressed for my trip to the record store to answer London’s call…I started to feel like crap. Here’s the thing about my childhood illnesses: My temperature would go through the roof. I rarely sneezed or sniffled, but when the thermometer came out of my mouth, it would be redlined from end to end. It wasn’t unusual for my temperature to go as high as 105 or 106. (One time, I was rushed to the emergency room to sit in a tub of towels doused with isopropyl alcohol. They never told me how high the temp was that night – I just knew that the fever and the alcohol were certain to make me burst into flames.) With the high temperatures came delirium.

That week in late ‘79, I spent a couple days out of school and out of my mind delirious (pulsating spiders and evil steam pipes, hissing noises dripping down the walls). On Tuesday, my mother came home from errands with a 12-by-12 Sam Goody bag for me. Obviously, I’ve never forgotten this moment. Here was the woman who disturbed most of my listening hours by banging on my bedroom door and complaining about the “shit,” or “hateful shit,” or “disgusting punk shit” I was listening to – here she was handing me a feel-better copy of the Clash’s London Calling. It was probably the last record she ever bought me, and most definitely the best.

For the rest of that high-fevered week I listened to it over and over and over and…. (Occasionally, I’d swap it out for Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Get a load of THAT one the next time you have a 106 fever and seeing your own army of hammers goose-stepping across your bedroom carpet!) I’m not going to add my own review of a 25-year-old album that’s already been named the Greatest Album of the 80s in so many corners. (Step away from the math and no one gets hurt! Think of the 1980s as a “vibe” and we’ll all be fine.) I knew immediately that they were no longer a punk band, or “just” a punk band. They were rock and roll’s best band.* They’d actually backed up the claim stated on the record’s promotional sticker. They WERE the only band that mattered. London Calling was drunk on joy and anger and self-confidence, swaggering into the room carrying an armload of rockabilly, satta, and thunderous riffs.

The initial experience of listening to it while under the influence of fever eventually faded, but the album remained dear to me. A perfect document of what I – at age 13 – thought music should sound like. In the closed-door air-guitar privacy of my bedroom, I was in the Clash. Not exactly Joe, not exactly Mick, but some amalgam of the two. (And, in my imagination, the Clash I fronted had greater appeal to the American audience. Concertgoers at those early air-guitar bedroom shows dug “Guns of Brixton,” and screamed out requests for “Complete Control.”)

The 25th Anniversary Edition of the album arrived at my doorstep yesterday, and though I’m sick of people who don’t do their jobs, people who break promises, the heat on the subway, UPS, rudeness, liars, and myriad other daily hassles, my body temperature is a comfy 98.6, thank you.

The packaging is beautiful. Think: Apple Computer-style design – foldouts, translucent slipsleeves – gorgeous. The liner notes by Tom Vague and Pat Gilbert have a wonderfully distinct British slant to them, as they should. This is a welcome correction of the abysmally wrong American flavor on comps like Clash On Broadway. The remastered sound is like that of most remastered disks we own; we won’t notice much of a difference, because who are we? Georgio Moroder? (Am I really hearing that piano, twenty seconds into “Wrong 'Em Boyo,” for the first time, or am I just paying more attention?)

I have one minor beef: “Train in Vain” should have been left off the track list, just like on the original issue. Marketing won out over purism, I suppose. Sony Legacy spent an assload of dollars to re-release this thing, and if the biggest (only?) hit off the album is unlisted I guess they’ll sell a few less copies. (But wouldn’t fans of that song first need to know that it’s not “Stand By Me,” as they probably call it?)

All of that aside, the gimme-factor of this release is not the reissued recording; it’s the included DVD and demo disk. The Don Letts-produced “Last Testament” DVD (named for the original title of London Calling) documents the making of the album at Wessex Studios and the rehearsals at Vanilla. It’s supplemented with talking head narrative from Kosmo Vinyl and latter-day testimonials from band members. A lot of this seems to have been re-jiggered from previous Letts Clash films and their outtakes, but there’s some black and white studio footage that’s priceless. Some of the stuff is so wild, it seems staged. It’s not. (Dig producer Guy Stevens trashing a chair, or bouncing like a drunken monkey as the band jams away.) It’s quickly paced and a pleasure to watch these charming, thoughtful men discuss the process. The Wessex Studio footage is raw and fascinating. Think of “The Last Testament” as a complement to Westway To The World. A worthy, valuable complement.

[One cool still photo in “The Last Testament” shows Mick Jones crossing a street in New York. Tucked under his arms is a Trash and Vaudeville bag. I’ll try to remember to share some personal T & V stories someday.]

The demos disk, The Vanilla Tapes, were culled from long-lost rehearsal tapes that Mick Jones found in a cardboard box while he was moving this past March. The tapes themselves have a strange history; one-time Clash road warrior Johnny Green (read his memoir A Riot of Our Own!) has claimed he lost them on a Northern Line tube train back in 1979.

There are two types of demo recordings. On the first, you catch a band ripping through their new songs before the spit, polish, smoke, and mirrors of the studio rob them of passion. (See X’s Beyond & Back.) And then there’s the type you get here: learning the song and getting it down on tape before the band forgets how it goes. These are musical Post-It notes.

There are four originals, an unreleased Dylan cover (“The Man in Me”), and fifteen in-progress versions of the songs we know and love. Plus a fun run-through of their debut LP’s “Remote Control.”

There are some warm bodies among the bloodless cadavers here. “I’m Not Down” has some alternate lyrics and great playing by the guys. “Jimmy Jazz”’s instrumental doppelganger (“The Police Walked in 4 Jazz”) rings out nicely; and so does “Working and Waiting,” the “Clampdown” template. But if I never hear “Koka Kola” (here titled “Koka Kola, Advertising, & Cocaine”) in this condition again, I’ll live. Mick Jones’s C&W “Lonesome Me” actually reminds me of the Beastie Boys rarity “Railroad Blues,” at least the Beasties version is funny.

Together, the old disk, new disk, and DVD are quite a package. It’s twenty-five bucks for a lot of great music and video. Listening to those songs in my office again today, I couldn’t believe how great they still sound: beautiful, angry, and restless. I’m serious, not delirious…this music still matters.

* Put into perspective, the Stones were in Jamaica or some posh island resort re-heating the Some Girls leftovers that would become the uneven Emotional Rescue, after-Face Rod Stewart had dropped “Do You Think I’m Sexy” on our disco-loving asses, and the closest rock came to the charts was estrogen-flavored Styx (“Babe”) and a “Crazy Little Thing Called” Queen. In the midst of all this came The Clash’s hot, throbbing, skip-through-the-genres London Calling. See?

Comments

[walein]

great review. i gotta check this band out. I've heard they're like the Pixies. of course I only know about the Pixies because I hear that Nirvana is like the Pixies and Bush is like Nirvana; but i only have aheard a few Bush songs because I'm a huge Good Charlottte fan and they mentioned Bush as an inspiration.