Repost - In Honor of John Mellor

This is the first major post ever on my Blog, all the way back to 5/5/03. I'm reading Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer by Chris Salewicz, which I bought with the last of my birthday gift certificate to Borders [thanks again Vicki and Scott] and jamming to my Car Tunes Clash CD, so I thought it appropriate.... for the record, the picture is still in circulation on my binder that I keep work papers in...

I first saw the Clash on Saturday Night Live during the Combat Rock tour. That was when I was learning about cool bands like Squeeze and the B-52s seeing them on SNL before SNL started REALLY sucking, also known as the Tim Kazurinski and Brad Hall years, which is how I missed the Replacements immortal appearance. Anyway, I don’t remember the first song they played that night, though I’ll bet it was Should I Stay or Should I Go, but I remember them coming out on the simulated Vietnam camouflage in fatigues. Skinny assed Mick Jones and Joe Strummer sporting a wide ass Mohawk playing Straight to Hell. Hypnotizing!

So my friend Morgan got Combat from Columbia House [“12 records for just a penny!” plus shipping and handling.] and then he needed money, so I bought it from him for five bucks [along with Rush’s Moving Pictures, for historical reference]. I just remember dropping the needle on side 1 and that cheng cheng cheng cheng “This is a public service announcement…. WITH GUITAR!!!!” and that’s all I needed to hear, I was hooked. That whole first side is pretty amazing with Red Angel Dragnet, Car Jamming and Know Your Rights. I don’t remember how long it took me to get to side two, and it starts off okay with Overpowered by Funk and Atom Tan, but Sean Flynn and Inoculated City???

But no one I knew had anymore Clash, so I let them go for a few years. Somewhere I bought the brilliant first Big Audio, This Is Big Audio Dynamite in there, but I didn’t really make any connection between Mick Jones’ BAD and the Clash. I started working at Sound Warehouse in 1987, before they became Blockbuster Music and then Wherehouse Music [currently in bankruptcy, and it couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of folks considering they charged list price for CDs, 13.99 for midline and 17.99 for current titles. FYI - now F.Y.E. music 2007] Aside from hearing the second Big Audio [No. 10 Upping Street] that reunited, temporarily at least, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones [thought the significance of this reunion was unknown to me at the time], I started hanging around with Scott Downey. That silly fucker would walk around all the time; “Spanish bombs, oh my corazon!” Well, we finally found out where he lived and crashed his pad, the we got invited to hang out and he’d play side 2 of London Calling with Spanish Bombs, Right Profile, Lost in the Supermarket…great stuff to expose to a 20 year old kid with ears wide open, I’ll tell ya. Eventually I bought a copy and found lost treasures on the other sides: Brand New Cadillac, Rudie Can’t Fail, Death or Glory and the haunting Train in Vain, which I knew as the last song played on John LaBella’s shift the day he left the morning show at KZEW, effectively driving the first nail in the death of Dallas radio.

But all good things must end and I got fired and Scott graduated college and went on active duty for Uncle Sam. When he shipped out to Fort Campbell to ranger school, left me two things: his Who/Pete Townshend collage he had made in high school and his copy of Sandinista, both of which I am still “just holding on to until he calls for them.” Sandinista, where it is good, is VERY good. But it’s too long. Still, it has great moments like Somebody Got Murdered, Police on My Back, Lightning Strikes and Charlie Don’t Surf.

Strangely, I never bought the first two Clash, though I know I had the first one in my hands several times. I never really discovered that stuff until I got the Clash on Broadway box set. That’s really about all early stuff I need like London’s Burning, White Man in Hammersmith Palais, Tommy Gun and Capital Radio One. Plus it has Bankrobber [once referenced by a record company genius as “All of David Bowie’s records played backwards,” but one of my favorite cuts none the less]and Armagideon Time and the “Cost of Living” EP with the positively cheerful Groovy Times. Positively great set and if I had to sell all my other Clash in a pinch, I could live with just that set, though it doesn’t have Know Your Rights or Car Jamming.

Fast forwarding from 1989 to 2003: I have a framed picture of Joe Strummer on my desk at work. What I had was several photos from a British punk magazine of Joe and Elvis and the Ramones I was rotating out with my Mario Lemiuex. Just to see if anyone would notice that I was changing the photographs. When I had first put Joe into the frame, I also typed up the lyrics to Death or Glory to put up there. When I read about Joe’s passing, I put him in the frame again and it’s just kind of stayed there [picture frame falling down and all, cheap cardboard stand on the back taped and re-taped] while the Elvis and Ramones got pinned up. It’s a picture from oh, 1979 I would guess, Joe just screaming into the microphone with a very thin Paul Simonon in the foreground. I look up and I read the lyrics, somehow thinking they reflect Peter Townshend’s famous “Hope I die before I get old” to the punk bands as much as it reflects the “get off the road you old farts” to the Zeppelins and Pink Floyds. And maybe, just maybe, Joe was talking to himself [and his mates as well].

“Now every gimmick hungry yob digging gold from rock and roll
"Grabs the mike to tell us how he’ll die before he’s sold
"But I believe in this and it’s been tested by research
"That he who fucks nuns will later join the church…
"In every dingy basement on every dingy street
"I hear every dragging handclap on every dragging beat
"It’s just the beat of time, the time that must go on
"If you’ve been trying hard for years, we all ready heard your song…”

I think about the Clash now and I miss the immediacy of their music. Only the Clash could put out Capital Radio One digging at the BBC for not playing the Sex Pistols [especially since God Save the Queen was a number one selling record] or really themselves or any of the punks. Elvis Costello merely sneered at the system he was so disgusted with on Radio, Radio, but listen to Joe screaming at the end of Capital Radio: “DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL!” like his life depended on you not touching that dial. Of course, Elvis did sneak in “anethistithize” into a song, but the Clash were more street smart punks anyway. Elvis’ music was dark where the Clash at least sounded like they were having fun. And they played together as a unit; four guys, one front. They weren’t going to keep talented but sometimes blowhard bands like Yes or King Crimson awake at night, but that was the point, wasn’t it? Besides, they knew enough to get their message across.

The Pistols were doomed from the start. They offered no solutions and they never grew together as a unit like the Clash did. They doomed themselves by having a high profile and swearing on television and generally being the lightning rod for anything “punk.” They turned themselves into cartoons. Plus they were Malcolm McLaren’s marionettes. Malcolm proved he could put a unit together and get it noticed, but beyond that, what did it really get him? Of course, there needed to be a galvanizing force in the movement and the Pistols were that. Like him or not, you weren’t going to ignore Johnny Rotten/Lydon spitting out “God save the Queen/ the fascist regime” like he had a mouth full of cobra venom he wanted to personally spit in the Queen’s face. Expectation killed the Pistols; they couldn’t live up to their hype. Lydon’s irony didn’t play well in Middle America, like Oklahoma, where they at least got the lowest common denominator and the “threat” ensconced in the idea of “punk,” even though most rednecks just wanted to prove their machismo by beating the shit out of someone named Sid Vicious. And it hasn’t aged very well at all. Strummer and company were lucky enough to fly under the radar or hide in the shadow that the Pistols cast. By NOT being the Pistols, they were allowed to just be another band with not many expectations [even though they were linked to the Pistols and labeled one of those “punk” bands] and no price on their heads.

The other thing so striking about the Clash, even now, is how much growth the band showed in their five year run. Like the Beatles, they grew up fast and embraced and incorporated everything they found: rap, dub, reggae, funk and good old fashioned rock and roll, and they cranked it back out with their own spin on it. If you didn’t like what the Clash were doing with one song, chances are the next would have a little different flavor to it. And the punk bands that progressed beyond three chord venom and “anti- everything” Rebel Without a Cause posing, grew to be decent middle level bands. Bands like the Jam, the Buzzcocks [who were really pretty melodic anyway], the Pretenders [who really might have been the first true “new wave” band] and Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Oh, and the Police! [Yes, their first single, Fallout, pre- Andy Summers, very punk!]

They weren’t meant to last, though. Just like the punk explosion and subsequent implosion, the Clash came in, said their peace and scattered. Topper’s arrests, Mick’s desire to move to the next level or Paul and Joe’s refusal [or desire] not to entertain Mick’s ambitions all contributed to the sudden decline in the band’s spirit. Perhaps they are one of the few bands that really did break up over “musical and philosophical differences.” Re-reading the Clash bio Last Gang in Town, we see the band realizing that they were gonna have to get more “commercial” to sell records; i.e. no more Sandinistas. Mick was very bitter that his 2 Lp mix for Combat was given to Glynn Johns to pare down and tighten up, which is kind of ironic considering how commercial Big Audio Dynamite’s records [well, first few anyway] would be. They toured with the Who after Combat with Terry Chimes on drummer after Topper was arrested in England. Strummer said on the semi-famous MTV interview that once Topper was gone, it wasn’t the same, that it “was never gonna buuuuuurrrrrn like it did before.” Maybe watching that multi-headed monster like the Who showed them that it was time to cash it in; “We’re gonna be like that in five years? Fuck that!!!” Or did they look at each other after seeing Combat climb the charts and figure that was as good as it was going to get? Or was it the dread of having to go in and create something that people would expect something equaling or better than Combat? [I point out at this moment that I conveniently delete the absolutely terrible post-Jones album Cut the Crap the same way one deletes the Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison-less Velvet Underground album from 1972 or so, or the two records the Doors made after Jim Morrison died.]

Still, what they did in their five years though stands as a musical legacy that many bands would be proud to have. From the energy of London’s Burning and Hate and War, to the maturity of London Calling with the slick and the beautiful [Lost in the Supermarket, The Card Cheat] alongside the slashing [Death or Glory, Clampdown] to the overpowering funkiness of Sandinista and the commercial pinnacle of Combat Rock. In five years they grew from young loud and snotty to leaders of a movement, musical pioneers for the new decade, and just when it seemed ready to bust open big, they shut it down. It did keep the name [mostly] from becoming tarnished by decay and ever changing members and shattered expectations from trying to follow up their most successful work. Still, sometimes it feels like it’s incomplete, still a work in progress, though now the chance to complete the legacy, to bring it full circle, is now obviously gone.

The sad part of the Clash legacy is that it is almost lost. Sure, radio will play Should I Stay or Should I Go and Rock the Casbah once in a while, [mostly on your 80s Saturday night flashback show] but the Clash could be lost in the grand history of rock and roll as a “one hit wonder.” Yes, there will also be the occasional kid curious about the “original punks,” but that kid will more likely be sent to get Sex Pistols or Ramones record than the Clash. The Clash “hits” don’t sound like “punk” to todays Green Day/ Rancid / Nirvana / Offspring “punk” kids, and they will not hear the really edgy early stuff [Tommy Gun, Safe European Home, Capital Radio One, White Riot, London’s Burning] on the radio. Strummer and company will be nothing more than one more record collecting dust in their parents closets until they move the folks into the retirement community and take the records to the dupmster or over to Half Price for a couple of bucks. Yes, the Clash also got a bit of a name boost when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which CBS/ Sony took advantage of to repackage the Clash YET AGAIN, this time in The Essential Clash. Unfortunately the Clash weren’t big enough and they didn’t make enough of a cultural impact on their own so that they will always be in the musical / rock and roll consciousness they way the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Nirvana will. Or even in the infamous way the Sex Pistols always will. Sad to think that a great band can be just a musical footnote.

In another flashback note...

I bought myself one of my favorite 80s records by one of my favorite 70s bands on Ebay this week and the first concert I ever attended. Electric Light Orchestra / ELO [they had basically fired the strings by this time] Time album from 1981. I was about to be a freshman in high school when this came out and me and my Dad went to see ELO [with strings] at the Tarrant County Convention Center in Septemnber or October 1981 with the Michael Stanley Bad [a/k/a 'Kings of Ohio'] opening. It's a pretty futuristic album, time travel and all - back when Jeff Lynne was still relevant, I guess. Still an under rated favorite of mine, along with the Cars Panorama.

'The summer of my 40th year begin with death hanging over me. Not for me specifically mind you, but if you're a friend or relative of mine, Id be watching my back...'

That's kind of flippant, but it's a sad reminder of our short time on this planet. First Mike, now my great aunt and uncle Stueber who lived up the hill from my grandparents, like 4 weeks apart. My grandfather is going in for surgery tomorrow.

I'll say again, both of my families are pretty blessed - in my Mom and Dad's immediate families, I've only lost my Dad's mother, brother and nephew [my cousin Harold / Hal] since the 70s. My grandparents have lived long and full lives and though I will always wish I could have spent more time with them, they will be at peace when the time comes. Grandpap is 86, grandma is 84, Aunt Cecilia was in her 80s and uncle Donnie was 86. Uncle Donnie was your great uncle who tells you corny jokes all the time, but he was a hoot and I will miss him.

Mom is 60, her oldest sister is a few years older.... my dad's oldest brother is 65. It's inevitable, of course. We are all going to die sometime. But I've been lucky enough to keep death at bay for a long time - Henry and Heather excepted. And Renae.

Just remember to tell your friends and family you love them.

Anaheim Ducks - Stanley Cup Champs!!!

I ask: How 2 out of 3 readers of the Hockey News could think Ottawa was going to win the Stanley Cup? Were / are they all Canadians? I bought my Chris Pronger Jersey last Sunday, before the Finals started.

Someone explain to me why Jason Spezza could not be BENCHED. He played TERRIBLY the last two games for Ottawa - bad passes, no defense... I thought he should be benched after the 2nd period in game 4 and maybe even scratched tonight. It didn't matter.

Congratulations Ducks!