Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Clash’s famously complicated fifth album that contains some of their biggest songs as well as their moodiest and most impenetrable material.
Joe Strummer claimed he’d run the Paris Marathon in three hours and 20 minutes. Officially, he didn’t race at all—just showed up that morning in May 1982 and dodged whoever was taking names. Hardly anybody knew he was in France. Strummer was dodging them all: Clash manager Bernard Rhodes, who’d dared him to go AWOL as a publicity stunt and then had to hire a private detective when Strummer actually disappeared; songwriting partner Mick Jones, who’d been hurt when the group rejected his vision for their new album and become increasingly difficult to get ahold of; brilliant drummer Topper Headon, who was losing his friends’ trust as his drug use escalated precipitously. Only the Clash’s unflappable bassist, Paul Simonon, seemed to be doing alright.
Combat Rock, the band’s fifth album, came out that same marathon weekend. The Clash were supposed to be touring the UK, but when Strummer didn’t return, the dates had to be postponed. Maybe the Parisian vanishing act was calculated, a way to show his bandmates they couldn’t very well carry on without him. Maybe, as Strummer would tell NME’s Charles Shaar Murray days later, he’d just gone “a bit barmy.” Wouldn’t you have to be, to gatecrash a marathon after a night out drinking and then get drunk again afterward? But compared to the Clash, Paris probably felt like a dream. Not long after the race, Clash PR rep and fixer Kosmo Vinyl tracked Strummer down at a café and hauled him back to London.
It makes a certain grim logical sense that an album heavily inspired by the aftermath of the Vietnam War and more directly by Apocalypse Now would get in deep and then start to lose the plot. The second-to-last Clash album is better than it has any right to be, considering the tension amid the people who recorded it, and the debt it owes producer Glyn Johns, who tightened an unwieldy, 16- or 17-track album into a 12-song bruiser after the band deemed Jones’ mix unsatisfactory. It wasn’t as zippy or as effortlessly brilliant as London Calling—few albums are. But it’s a good record: bracing, challenging, authentically conflicted by its own enthusiasm for military aesthetics. When Margaret Thatcher made a bid to save her re-election prospects by launching an imperialist war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands weeks ahead of its release date, Combat Rock became spiritually aligned with the anti-war cause, hit No. 2 in the UK, and made the Clash stars in America.
The Clash were an extraordinarily intertextual and self-conscious, and in that sense postmodern, punk band. You know this instinctively when Strummer says something like, “phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust,” and if listening to London Calling is like reading a book with a lot of footnotes (BBC World Service, Spanish Civil War, original “Brand New Cadillac”), Combat Rock is an oblique political tract that lifts off into a hallucinatory vision of a society plagued and entertained by violence. It’s all less legible than it first looks, particularly pre-internet. (“If you don’t know what’s goin’ on,” urges Strummer on the recording of that October’s concert at New York Shea Stadium, “just ask the person standing next to you.”) Combat Rock is as wrapped up with world events of the day as it is spectacularly still relevant; it holds a couple of the band’s most overexposed songs and some of their moodiest and most impenetrable material.
The history of the Clash reads like a comic strip—maybe a soap opera—where nearly all the main characters are young Englishmen, the kind of rough-and-tumble social environment where if you miss the setup, you’re about to be the punchline. The antagonist is usually Rhodes, the manager; he preferred Bernard, so naturally, the Clash always called him Bernie. Rhodes, along with guitarist and singer Mick Jones, had assembled the band in 1976, recruiting Paul Simonon, a passionate reggae fan who couldn’t yet play the bass, and Joe Strummer, the magnetic frontman of local London pub rock band the 101ers.
Rhodes, a volatile, fast-talking operator who moonlighted as a car mechanic, was undeniably a formative influence. Early on, the Clash rehearsed at his studio seven days a week. Rhodes insisted the group write songs not about their own small lives or feelings, but about real-world issues: conflict, power, protest. “Bernie was very against it being a social scene,” original drummer Terry Chimes says in Pat Gilbert’s Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash. “He’d say, ‘Are you here for a goal or are you here just eating a cucumber sandwich?’ He had a way of wording things to make you feel stupid, and get you to do things his way.”
Trouble was, Rhodes answered to no one, certainly not the band he worked for. “If the Clash was the Communist Party, Bernie was our Stalin,” quips Simonon in Mark Andersen’s We Are the Clash. In 1978 the band fired him, allegedly for scheming to replace Mick Jones with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, the latest bungled maneuver in Rhodes’ long-term frenemy drama with Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. But the band didn’t cut him off for long.
In 1981, frustrated by public response to the sprawling triple-LP Sandinista! (with production supervised by Mick) and anxious to recapture the dynamism of London Calling, Strummer insisted the Clash take Bernie back. Mick understandably objected, but Strummer supposedly threatened to walk, and Simonon backed Strummer, so here they all were again, making Combat Rock and gradually accumulating emotional scar tissue.
Work commenced in London until Mick Jones purportedly said he’d only show up in New York City, where his girlfriend lived, so they moved to the Electric Lady recording studio. Later, he’d claim he’d been joking, but the mood was heavy: Jones appointed himself producer while Strummer holed up in a fort made of flight cases (the “spliff bunker”) and by the end, they worked separate shifts and were barely speaking. Reaching a compromise on the final mixes and track sequence proved impossible. The album wasn’t done when the Clash departed for a tour of Asia and Australia in early 1982, so they flew out the unfinished tapes and the standoff continued. As photographer Pennie Smith, who joined the band in Thailand to shoot the Combat Rock cover, puts it in Passion Is a Fashion: “If you’re with people for long periods of time you can sense they’re fed up without anyone having to say anything.” Finally, Rhodes suggested they call in Glyn Johns, a career rock engineer who’d helped salvage the Who’s Who’s Next, and Johns, Strummer, and a very reluctant Mick Jones sat down and reworked every song in three days.
Some popular bands get along well, and some make enough money to fake it, but the Clash circa Combat Rock couldn’t manage either. They weren’t yet cashing in on their records, because they’d sold London Calling and Sandinista! for bargain prices in Britain. They weren’t making it up on tour, because they wanted rock-star live production and refused to pass on the cost to the audience. After Sandinista!, the band owed their label, CBS, something like half a million pounds. The upside was that, by now, the Clash could play almost anything: slinky socialist disco (“The Magnificent Seven”), white reggae-rock (“Bankrobber”), swanky barroom blues (“Jimmy Jazz”), even a fluke American pop hit (“Train in Vain”). It’s this flexibility and fluency that carries Combat Rock’s walloping opener “Know Your Rights” into the carbonated R&B-punk of “Car Jamming” and on to the spacious, echoey dub of “Sean Flynn.”
The album’s themes—antimilitarism, the damage inflicted by American imperialism—weren’t new material. “I don’t wanna go fighting in the tropical heat,” the band had railed on “Career Opportunities,” from 1977’s The Clash. London Calling’s anti-fascist rocker “Clampdown” took up the specter of Brownshirts; Sandinista! protested the draft and U.S. interventions in Latin America. Combat Rock is constantly of two minds, fascinated by the grit and vibrance of early ’80s New York and aghast at the bigger system of which it was part.
The ambivalent nature of many later Clash songs reflected the criticism the band faced in the UK rock press (too focused on America, betraying punk values) and doubles as a way to sidestep the fact that art doesn’t equal political action. Often, Combat Rock seems to speak in the voice of another, absorbing establishment doublespeak on “Know Your Rights,” the omniscient narration of Allen Ginsberg on “Ghetto Defendant,” and the POV of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle on “Red Angel Dragnet” (voiced by Kosmo Vinyl). Sometimes the provenance is less clear: “Car Jamming” is like a folk song stitched together from fragments of broadcast news and “Atom Tan” presents the grotesque spectacle of “the first all-live heart attack.” Casualties of war on “Inoculated City” occur not in battle but “at the top of the hour” for an indifferent public. The mediated distance, the intimation of surveillance, feeds into the album’s sense of wariness and paranoia. Yet the Clash also speak with clarity: “Murder is a crime!/Unless it was done/By a policeman or an aristocrat.”
If you think of the two sides of Combat Rock as a narrative arc of tension building to fury and the slow, destabilizing comedown of catastrophe, you’ll notice the comedown lasts far longer than the fury. But for a thrilling few moments it sounds like “Rock the Casbah,” an instrumental Headon recorded practically by himself on a day when no one else showed up to the studio. Strummer’s lyrics, about a repressive sheik’s failure to stamp out rock’n’roll, were partly a parable inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and partly a shot at Rhodes, who’d quickly grown impatient with the Clash’s taste for improvisation and complained that all their new songs were too long.
Taking a page from Apocalypse Now, “Rock the Casbah” mythologizes the Clash’s professional frustrations and maps them onto the cinematic land of the sheikh, who drills oil and drives an American car. In retrospect, it’s a terrible miscalculation: “Rock the Casbah” is famous now in part because it was a hit in the U.S., and thereafter used as an ad hoc soundtrack to the American bombing of the Middle East. The orientalist imagery enables this sort of reading even as the narrative writes against it, a criticism that doesn’t apply to, like, fuck-up former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani using “Rudie Can’t Fail” as walk-on music. Like the band’s polarizing debut single, “White Riot,” “Rock the Casbah” is almost too powerful; the Clash mean to suggest music as the catalyst for revolution, but their hedonistic glee summons the kind of energy that’s hard to control.
All of Combat Rock is preoccupied with cycles of violence and the structures that support them, especially “Straight to Hell,” where the music echos hollowly under an enormous arc of oppression that spans deindustrialized English steel towns, the children of American servicemen in Vietnam, and the plight of immigrants throughout history. When the Clash ask who has the right to kill, the answer is: no one. “Who got shot tonight?” they cry above the ominous reggae thump of Simonon’s “Red Angel Dragnet,” another perilous Clash political mirror that holds up New York City vigilante organization the Guardian Angels alongside Kosmo’s deranged Travis Bickle: self-congratulatory reactionaries celebrated for their impatience to clear the streets.
Nothing on the second half brings quite the same energy—in Strummer’s words, “Fifty percent of Combat Rock was great rock, but the other fifty was what Phil Spector would call ‘wiggy.’” Side two kicks off with the lively but lyrically weak “Overpowered by Funk,” perhaps the nadir of the Clash’s interest in early hip-hop and improvised rap (“Breakfast, serials?/You know you can’t escape”); the guest verse by graffiti artist Futura, whom the Clash had hired to live-paint their stage backdrops, is more interesting as a glimpse into the golden age of New York street art culture than as a technical accomplishment. From there, it moves slowly from the cockeyed apocalyptic humor of “Atom Tan” into the cold fog of ambient dub collage “Sean Flynn,” named for the photojournalist and son of Hollywood actor Errol Flynn who had disappeared in Cambodia more than 10 years earlier. The closing “Death Is a Star” tinkles like the accompaniment to film credits, mournful and a little confused, reflecting on the cinema-going experience with the faintly dissociated feeling of one who’s just walked out of the theater.
But if Combat Rock eventually spirals off into psychedelic battlefield phantasmagoria, Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg is the director’s cut, Apocalypse Now Redux. Half an hour longer and significantly woozier than the album proper, Rat Patrol—a working title borrowed from the vintage television series about a quartet of Allied servicemen—is often described as Mick Jones’ final version of Combat Rock, shelved sometime in 1981. In truth, the bootleg sounds a little rough and hissy around the edges, like a transmission to a cheap radio, but to this day, plenty of Clash fans will tell you it’s required listening. The influence of Jones’ sequence on the final tracklist is clear, bunching together his timeless “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” with “Rock the Casbah” and “Know Your Rights” before spiraling out with a lengthy instrumental jazz interlude and versions of “Ghetto Defendant” and “Sean Flynn” that stretch to six and seven minutes.
Extended runtimes came naturally to the Clash as dub reggae fans and prodigious stoners, though you don’t have to be a major record label to see why they’d be a hard sell. Much as they might’ve downplayed it for the benefit of the British press, the Clash aspired to reach U.S. audiences, and a third super-long LP would’ve risked already tenuous label relationships. But it can be tempting to overwrite the 46-minute Combat Rock with Rat Patrol, the looser, wilder album, arguably the more ambitious attempt to fuse the Clash’s diverse musical interests and take in the whole sweep of American moral decay in one staggering, 77-minute slow pan.
Then there’s the notion that the clarified and abridged version of anything must be inauthentic and thus fundamentally un-punk. Imagine if the Clash had released another dense double LP and “Rock the Casbah” would’ve never taken such a gruesome turn, because the whole album would’ve been weird and unmarketable. Offer any counterfactual you like: If Combat Rock weren’t so successful, maybe the band wouldn’t have felt so conflicted about it, and there’d have been more Clash albums after (there is one, the unfortunate 1985 Bernard production Cut the Crap). When fans debate Rat Patrol vs. Combat Rock, it’s like watching an endless re-enactment of the competing tastes and opinions that fueled and then splintered the band.
It is traditional to locate the Clash’s failure in their fundamental contradiction, a collective psychic conflict between ambition and principle—what Strummer, speaking in 1984, called “an experiment of a kind, that’s never succeeded, mind you, in making rebel music for a mass audience.” Of course, contradiction is their source of success, the reason why Rat Patrol is interesting but Combat Rock hits. Jones’ mix brought the sinister atmosphere and heroic stamina, but popular art requires strategy. “Every night we play I wonder who our audience is,” Strummer told Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore during the Clash’s 1982 U.S. tour. “But you have to figure you’re reaching some of them. Maybe we’re only entertaining most of them, but that’s not really so bad when you think about it—look what it is that we entertain them with. I reckon each show we reach some new ones, really reach them. It’s like fighting a big war with few victories, but each of those victories is better than none.” The other word that comes up a lot with the Clash is “romantic,” because the romantic is always holding out hope.
So chalk up a few victories to Combat Rock. It sounds like a band drifting toward the edge, yet it remains astonishingly, unsettlingly topical. Among the lessons the Clash learned from reggae: Protest music doesn’t have to be loud and fast (punk) or slow and serious (folk); it can be midtempo and jammy, spare and surreal. Its power lies in the ability to unite an audience in the sense of being outsiders—to draw in other people who like to think they’re pretty clever and tell them something worth knowing. Forty years later, the opening trifecta on “Know Your Rights” will grab you by the throat: the impunity of wealth and power, the indignity of means-tested welfare, the suppression of dissent. At the end of the song, when Strummer breathes the word “Run!” and Jones’ lead guitar takes off in flight, the rhythm section pursues in a jackbooted stomp. I don’t suggest that you learn politics from the Clash, necessarily; you listen to the Clash and understand what politics means, which is life and death.
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