The First Clash Album
Legendary British Punk Band Released Debut 30 Years Ago This Month
The first album from British Punk legends the Clash has influenced rock and roll music for almost three decades.
They came off the hardscrabble streets of 1970s London. They lived in burned out buildings, played in the crowded pubs, and raged against the status quo. They were the British Punks. They cursed, they spit, they spray-painted their clothes, and sometimes they even cut themselves with razor blades during their raucous concerts. All along the way, they scared the bloody hell out of just about everybody in the entire British power structure.
The Clash is Born
One of the original British Punk bands was the Clash. The Clash was formed in May, 1976 by manager Bernie Rhodes when he teamed up guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon with the high-octane lead singer of London pub band The 101ers. His name was John Graham Mellor, but he called himself Joe Strummer.
The band added rhythm guitarist Keith Levene and drummer Terry Chimes during the summer, and began to play the dirtier pubs and smaller clubs throughout London and rural England. The initial reviews of the band were less than favorable. After seeing the Clash in August of 1976, rock journalist Charles Shaar Murray reviewed the group as follows: “the Clash are the kind of garage band who should be speedily returned to the garage, preferably with the motor running, which would undoubtedly be more of a loss to their friends and families than to either rock or roll.”
In response to the scathing review, Strummer immediately sat down and wrote the words to a song he would call Garageland. It became one of the band’s first hits.
The Clash is Discovered and Signed to CBS Records
The band stayed together, and the gigs and reviews quickly improved. The crowds grew, and record executives eventually began scouting Clash shows. By January of 1977, CBS records approached the Clash with a £100,000 record contract offer. They signed the deal. Hardcore British Punks cried foul. They thought the Clash had sold out. They didn’t. They had to do 10 albums for the money. They also thought the record company would take the edge off the true punk sound in the recording studio. That didn’t happen either. The album was raw, edgy, and electric.
The first single, White Riot, was inspired by a race riot that Joe and Paul witnessed in the Summer of 1976. Strummer said that he admired the courage of young black men to stand up to police and the power, and wished that the downtrodden members of his race would do the same. White Riot was more of a rallying cry for revolution than a song.
I’m So Bored With the U.S.A. was Strummer’s rant against American greed and imperialism. 48 Hours was an attack on the laconic mentality of London’s working class, whom punks thought lived only for the weekends. The lyric “Monday’s Comin’ Like a Jail on Wheels” summed up the collective but silent dread faced by a nation of indentured servants. The song Deny is a grim recount of the band’s dealings with guitarist Keith Levene’s drug addiction, and Career Opportunities rails against the British welfare state of the late 1970s.
The reviews of the album were phenomenal, as evidenced by Rolling Stone Magazine’s take on the band: “The Clash dramatized rock & roll as a last, defiantly cheerful grab for life, something scrawled on the run on subway walls. Here was a record that defined rock's risks and its pleasures, and told us, once again, that this music was worth fighting for.”
A Clash Critic Has to Eat His Words
After listening to the album all the way through, Charles Shaar Murray -- he of the famous ‘garage’ quote -- described the Clash as “the greatest band in the whole world.”
The album reached No. 12 on the UK charts. It also sold over 100,000 copies as an import in the USA. At the time, it was the highest selling import in American history.
To this day, The Clash is cited as one of the greatest albums of all time by music critics, rock magazines, and musical groups as diverse as The Specials, Rancid, U2, and Rage Against the Machine.
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For more artilces by James L. Ray, click here.
