Renting and viewing documentaries about punk rock legends The Clash has sparked a renewed interest the band.
Written by randomfool on January 24th, 2007 with
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For a guy who by any objective measure just cannot sing, The Clash’s Joe Strummer was a very effective lead singer for, as I have learned lately, one of the most influential rock bands of all times. The Clash’s best days were behind them by the time I entered adolescence and began my career as a rock fan. Even though The Police began in the same era out of the punk movement in the late 1970s, I never really was as big of a fan of The Clash as I was of The Police. Part of the reason I think was because The Police reached their zenith in 1983-84, about the time The Clash were burning out and breaking up (followed shortly by The Police). I had a copy of London Calling (who didn’t? and, after a recent re-listening to Combat Rock, I remember now that that cassette was in heavy rotation in my car in the mid-80s.
As usually happens with us, we get interested in a documentary topic and then watch too many documentaries on said topic which, in turn, relieves us of our interest. This happened to us a few years ago with surfing films. We first watched Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys followed in rapid succession by Riding Giants and Step into Liquid. Then, we figured we were done with surf films for a while. We did watch the fictional Lords of Dogtown which was based on the same events as Dogtown and Z-Boys and was disappointing given our newfound expertise on the topic of 1970s era surf culture in Southern California.
That brings me back to The Clash. We rented The Essential Clash thinking incorrectly that it was a documentary. In fact, it was a series of live performances with a little bit of interviews and such; however, not being a die-hard fan of the band, it left me wanting more information (this is coming from the guy who after seeing the Doors movie with Val Kilmer I bought The Best of the Doors CD and read No One Here Gets Out Alive…that was in the days before the World Wide Web). I read the Wikipedia entry on The Clash which was interesting but we found out that there was a documentary called The Clash: Westway to the World. Westway is a series of interviews with the members of the band and follows their history from the beginning to break-up but I felt that the movie was missing a narrator to fill in the blanks between the band interviews. Title screens before each major topic helped but it would have been great to have more intermediary commentary.
What always amazes me about stories of popular bands, especially bands like The Clash which are later deemed to be “great”, is that their greatness seems to be so situational. Not taking anything from their talent but I don’t think that The Clash is any more or less talented than any other band of their era. They just happened to strike a chord (right time, right place and kind of, yes, random). It always seems like they were successful in spite of themselves and that was definitely the case with The Clash. Fame, like everything else, is basically random. You have to believe that any one of the hundreds of garage bands with bad lead singers from that, or any, time could have been the great band that The Clash became and that there was a large amount of luck that resulted in their success.
That being said, their music is great. I decided to listen to some Clash while writing this for inspiration and you can definitely tell how influential London Calling was. You can hear in some of the reggae and funk material the beginning of the crossover bands that came later, like The Police. It also strikes me as funny just how tame bands like The Clash, The Police and The Sex Pistols were in comparison to modern day punk and certainly the really hard core underground punk that I used to listen to in high school. For its time, though, bands like The Clash were revolutionaries and saw themselves as such even though you can catch a few disco influenced beats in their songs here and there. I added Train in Vain to my “Great Songs” playlist on my iPod and probably will spend more time listening to The Clash in the future.
Written by randomfool on January 24th, 2007 with
no comments.
Read more articles on General Folly and Movie Reviews and Music.
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