Over the holiday I missed out on posting about the 14th anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death from an un-diagnosed congenital heart defect on December 22, 2002. I celebrated The Clash’s 30th birthday with a slew of posts this last summer and I wanted to revisit this Joe-centric notice to recognize his passing last week. Here’s a bit about the documentary Viva Joe Strummer – The Clash and Beyond followed by the film…

Here’s another post celebrating The Clash at 30: Viva Joe Strummer – The Clash and Beyond documents the British rocker’s childhood as as diplomat’s son, his rock ‘n’ roll initiation with The 101ers, his storied history with The Clash to Strummer’s overlooked later career music which was cut short by his untimely death in 2002. Here’s the word from Open Culture…

Viva Joe Strummer gives us loads of concert footage and interviews with band members and close friends like the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock. The focus remains on Strummer, a frontman with tremendous charisma but also, paradoxically, with a tremendous amount of humility. One reviewer of the film says as much:

Joe Strummer always projected himself as a humble man. Even at the height of The Clash‘s megalomania, when he fired guitarist Mick Jones, Strummer came across like a better read, more worldly Bruce Springsteen. The everyman image has made eulogizing the singer difficult.

This suggests that Strummer’s everyman persona may have been part of his showmanship, but even so, he was respected and admired by nearly everyone who knew him. And his proletarian politics were genuine. As one interviewee says above, “he always had a corner to fight in. He always had someone to stick up for.”

Here’s Viva Joe Strummer…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

One last Clash post to finish off the week and to remind readers that I’ll be on Edward Brinson’s Eigthties/Schmeighties show on WXNA radio in Nashville today to celebrate Joe Strummer’s birthday. We’ll hit the air this morning at 11 AM Central Time.

Tune in here, and enjoy a fun look back at Joe and the band. We’ll be playing songs from The Clash, from Joe’s post-Clash career, and from other bands that influenced the boys while we chat about the impact of punk from the 1970′s until now.

Warm up here with this full concert featuring The Clash live from Japan in 1982…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

Here’s yet another post looking back on the breakup of The Clash 30 years ago in 1986. Although bands like The Police and the Rolling Stones experimented with bringing reggae sounds to rock, The Clash did it better than most covering classics like “Pressure Drop” and creating classics of their own like “Rudie Can’t Fail.” Bassist Paul Simonon’s Brixton neighborhood had a large West Indian population and Simonon grew to love reggae and ska’s mixture of danceable rhythms and social messages. While I was picking out The Clash songs we’ll be playing on Edward Brinson’s Eigthties/Schmeighties show on WXNA radio in Nashville this Friday to celebrate Joe Strummer’s birthday a few days later, I was surfing YouTube and listening to make my final decisions and I came across a cool playlist that compiles most of the band’s reggae-inspired cuts.

Enjoy!

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

With my recent posts looking back on The Clash I’m reminded of all the ways that punk rock influenced the scenes that followed it. Even if the aesthetics we associate with punk music come and go, many of the ethical ideas that punk celebrated and the DIY productivity it inspired have fueled “independent” movements in all of the arts ever since the 1970′s. In my own productivity I haven’t recorded music that I’d call “punk,” but the shoestring budgets, sweat equity trades, and music for music’s sake consciousness that’s shared by all of my collaborators comes right out of CBGB or Warhol’s Factory or a warehouse in London where a band called The Clash recorded an album called London Calling: we’re all clipped-together with those same spikes and safety pins.

One concept I’ve fueled with specifically punk, anti-capitalist ideas is my ongoing war with music videos as advertisements for artists and songs. Since the beginning of music videos it was clear that it was important to treat the medium more like a short film than like an infomercial. With that in mind I’ve been lucky to have most of my videos made by new media artists.

Antonia Oakes showed a collection of art videos that feature my songs as their soundtracks as part of her Future Shock installation at Nashville’s Modular Art Pods event in June. Here’s her breakdown on that otherworldly installation…

FUTURE SHOCK

DREAM IN THE DOORWAY
Dream in the Doorway
A fuzzy dream/memory of a house being built in Detroit c. 1940s.

Here’s the video collection…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts

Today I want to take another look back at The Clash as we continue our remembrance of the band 30 years after their breakup in 1986. Check recent posts for commentaries and documentaries about Joe Strummer; the band’s eponymous debut; and their masterpiece, London Calling. This post jumps ahead to the band’s fourth release, a triple album shotgun blast called Sandinista! Nearly every double album is a great single LP wrapped in fur and fat, and lacking the lean integrity of a perfect-seeming, classic collection of songs. That said there are lots of double albums I love, and I also love Sandinista! If London Calling marked the band’s abandoning of punk’s Year Zero dogmatics, Sandinista! is the sound of that declaration of independence coming to full flower in a boisterous blossoming of music that spreads across genres, mixing proven formulas with experimental sounds, and even making some up along the way. Sandinista! isn’t a collection of hits or even a consistent song cycle, but it’s more than the sum of its parts in its capturing of one of the world’s best bands reaching and grasping and trying and failing and flailing and railing with unleashed confidence and unbounded imagination. This record is absolutely self-indulgent, and its joyous, brave, sexy, speedy, pissed-off and legendary.

Here’s Sandinista!

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

The Clash’s eponymous first album was a classic that didn’t get released in America until after their second album was released here. Give ‘em Enough Rope is generally considered a slick, American produced sophomore jinx of an album, but I’ll be posting about that soon. The band loses their manager and heads back to London, balanced on the edge of legendary status, but needing to prove themselves with a third record. They hole up in a rehearsal space in a warehouse, and proceed to do nearly nothing but play soccer and play music. As they slowly write a new collection of songs they also play the pop, folk and old rock ‘n’ roll classics that they all love, abandoning punk rock’s “Year Zero” aesthetics to simply revel in their love of music. They write. They rehearse. And they record one of the greatest albums of all time, London Calling.

Today’s post continues our look back at 30 years since the end of The Clash with The Last Testament: The Making of London Calling…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

Another post about The Clash, this one goes all the way back to the band’s eponymous first album. It was released in the UK in 1977 but actually followed the band’s second album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, in America. The album helped to define the punk songbook with tunes like “White Riot,” “Janie Jones,” “London’s Burning,” and “Garageland.” It was an instant classic. Here’s the word from the Wiki…

In his 1979 consumer guide for The Village Voice, critic Robert Christgau gave the album’s US import an “A” grade and stated, “Cut for cut, this may be the greatest rock and roll album (plus limited-edition bonus single) ever manufactured in the U.S. It offers 10 of the 14 titles on the band’s British debut as well as 7 of the 13 available only on 45. [...] The U.K. version of The Clash is the greatest rock and roll album ever manufactured anywhere”.[19] In his decade-end list for the newspaper, he ranked the UK version as the best album of the 1970s.[20]

In February 1993, the New Musical Express magazine ranked the album number 13 in its list of the Greatest Albums of All Time.[21] NME also ranked The Clash number 3 in its list of the Greatest Albums of the ’70s, and wrote in the review that “the speed-freaked brain of punk set to the tinniest, most frantic guitars ever trapped on vinyl. Lives were changed beyond recognition by it”.

In December 1999, Q magazine rated the album 5 stars out of 5, and wrote that the Clash “would never sound so punk as they did on 1977′s self-titled debut….Lyrically intricate…it still howled with anger”.[15] The same magazine placed The Clash at number forty-eight in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever in 2000,[22] and included The Clash in its “100 Best Punk Albums”, giving it 5 stars out of 5, in May 2002.[23]

Here’s The Clash…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

So I’ve been posting a lot about The Clash lately as we look back at the end of that band, 30 years ago in 1986. I’ve been asked to celebrate Joe Strummer’s birthday in August on WXNA’s Eighties/Schmeities show, hosted by Edward Brinson. Joe’s special day is August 21. We’ll commemorate Joe on August 19 on low-power FM in Nashville, playing some music and talking about the history of the band

With that in mind, I’m going to lead up to the broadcast with more Clash posts that can serve as a kind of outline for the broadcast. Today we’ll look at the Clash’s last album, after Jones and Topper had been dismissed, after the shady manager has been put in charge of a band for the people, and as that same band releases one of their best-ever singles. Here’s Diffuser with the word…

Between 1977 and 1982, the Clash released five essential albums, starting with their eponymous debut and culminating with their biggest selling album, Combat Rock.

The band was always open to diverse influences, but like many ’80s artists Jones (one of punk’s great guitarists) had become enamored with the decades hottest toy: the synthesizer. Additionally, in the documentary The History of the Clash, subjects suggest that Jones had his “pop star ways,” whatever that may mean. With the relationship already soured, both were too much for Strummer, who fired his songwriting partner and bandmate. Jones and his keyboard were out, presumably in the interest of maintaining the Clash’s punk mojo.

With Jones gone, Clash manager Bernie Rhodes stepped in as the main songwriter and producer (under a pseudonym) for Combat Rock’s follow-up, tentatively titled Out of Control. The problem was that Rhodes was not a Mick Jones-caliber songwriter. His taste leaned toward the sort of lightweight new wave that typified the mid-80s, heavy on the kinds of electronics for which Jones allegedly was fired.

Album opener “Dictator” typifies Rhodes’ baffling take on what Clash 2.0 was supposed to sound like: drum machines, keyboards and overproduction. The result didn’t sound like the Clash but some unholy spawn of Joe Strummer and Oingo Boingo.

Cut the Crap‘s odd mix of rock and electronics sort of reminds me of Chinese Democracy in all the best and worst ways, but Strummer and I both agree that “This is England” is one of The Clash’s best singles. Here’s the album…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

Here’s another post celebrating The Clash at 30: Viva Joe Strummer – The Clash and Beyond documents the British rocker’s childhood as as diplomat’s son, his rock ‘n’ roll initiation with The 101ers, his storied history with The Clash to Strummer’s overlooked later career music which was cut short by his untimely death in 2002. Here’s the word from Open Culture…

Viva Joe Strummer gives us loads of concert footage and interviews with band members and close friends like the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock. The focus remains on Strummer, a frontman with tremendous charisma but also, paradoxically, with a tremendous amount of humility. One reviewer of the film says as much:

Joe Strummer always projected himself as a humble man. Even at the height of The Clash‘s megalomania, when he fired guitarist Mick Jones, Strummer came across like a better read, more worldly Bruce Springsteen. The everyman image has made eulogizing the singer difficult.

This suggests that Strummer’s everyman persona may have been part of his showmanship, but even so, he was respected and admired by nearly everyone who knew him. And his proletarian politics were genuine. As one interviewee says above, “he always had a corner to fight in. He always had someone to stick up for.”

Here’s Viva Joe Strummer…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.

This year we mark the anniversary of the death of The Clash — they fired Mick Jones in 1983, but The Clash was still a thing until 1986. Thirty years later I’m planning a number of Clash-related posts in the months to come. The Clash are always in the running when I consider favorite bands of all time, and their fusions of reggae and punk along with Joe Strummer’s anarchic poetics keep me going back to that well. Here’s a documentary by Julien Temple featuring early footage of the band. Dangerous Minds has these words on the film…

On the liner notes of their first LP Two Sevens Clash, roots reggae band Culture claimed that Marcus Garvey had prophesied that the date July 7, 1977, “when the two sevens clash,” would herald great conflagration. Whether Garvey said it or not (some hold that Culture just made the story up), it’s safe to say that 1977 was a year of great chaos. As the Clash sang around that time, “Danger stranger / You better paint your face / No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones / In 1977.” The tumult of that year is amply demonstrated in 1977, a documentary by Julien Temple, director of The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury, built around never-before-seen footage he shot of the Clash’s early gig at the Roxy on January 1, 1977, a gig that more or less ushered in both the Roxy and the Clash as punk fixtures, although the band ended up lasting a lot longer than the venue. – Martin Schneider

Here’s The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.