The mystique of the Clash is still so powerful that when IT Specialist Craig Giffen found himself in Bangkok, Thailand a few years ago, he decided to locate the exact spot where the cover of the group’s fifth album, 1982's Combat Rock, had been photographed.
"The photo was taken in March 1982 by Pennie Smith," says Giffen, a Portland, Oregon based music fan. "The band stayed at the Bangkok Palace Hotel. The general consensus was that the train line on the album cover was the one that was east of the Makkasan Train station, about 30 minutes from the core of downtown. I think I found the right area, but Pennie might laugh."
At the time, the British quartet was nearing the end of a month-long Asian tour, one that saw them perform in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong and Bangkok at the beginning of that year. This came on the heels of recording "Straight To Hell" in New York on New Year’s Eve, which would be the last song on Combat Rock. Though the group was hopeful about the upcoming release, there was trouble brewing. Drummer Topper Headon was battling a heroin addiction, while co-songwriters and singers Joe Strummer and Mick Jones were increasingly having creative differences about the group’s sound.
Smith saw the storm clouds through her lens midway through the cover shoot. "Halfway through the shoot, something just happened," she said in the 2000 documentary The Clash: Westway To The World. "Somehow they dissolved in front of my eyes."
The catch is, the group still had to release Combat Rock, which is getting re-released four decades later this month with several previously unheard recordings.
When they formed in 1976, the London-based quartet quickly went to the head of the class as a leading punk act. But their ambition to be one of the best bands in the world, combined with a stifling record deal (the group signed a 10 record contract) meant that they wrote songs at a blistering pace — recording 100 songs in just six years. "We always did it on our own terms," bassist Paul Simonon told GQ magazine. "And that's the magic of the Clash, right or wrong, it was on our own terms." It also meant that the group’s collective capabilities blew right past punk and explored a dizzying array of genres.
"They combined rough-hewn punk with ‘50s rock, reggae, disco and even some music-hall crooning," says Mike Sauter, VP of Broadcasting at WYEP in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "It’s hard to overstate the Clash’s importance to rock’s evolution in the US. The band was among the key acts feeding into the rise of college radio’s musical approach in the 1980s, which grew into the alternative rock that became fairly dominant in the rock world by the mid-1990s."
Fresh off their sprawling 36 song, triple album Sandinista and an exhausting 17 date residency in New York City, the group watched from afar as political frustrations built up in the UK and hunkered down in NYC’s Electric Lady Studios. At the time, hip-hop was emerging as a new, exciting music form — and following their successful dance single,"This Is Radio Clash," the group set about recording their upcoming album with an infusion of the vibrant elements they were hearing.
"I want the Clash to get bigger because you want people to hear your songs, you want to be successful," Joe Strummer told journalist Lisa Robinson, as quoted in Mark Andersen’s book We Are The Clash. "But on the other hand, I’m pretty wary of that, of having it get too big to handle. You always think you can handle it, but you never know."
By most accounts, recording sessions went smoothly, with Jones handling production duties and Strummer turning his lyrical gaze to such places as El Salvador, and seeing modern urban parallels with previous conflicts in Vietnam. "This is a public service announcement— with guitar!" Strummer can be heard bellowing loud and clear on the new echo-filled rendition of opening track "Know Your Rights" on the reissue (recorded at The People’s Hall on the Rolling Stones' Mobile Studio). The guitars on the new rendition have more of a jackhammer sound than ever and the chilling lyrics seem even more timely. "Get off the streets - run!" Strummer implores at the conclusion.
Amidst the now-obvious radio hits, several other sleeper album tracks carry more relevance. "Starved in metropolis, hooked on necropolis, addict of metropolis, do the worm on the acropolis, slamdance the cosmopolis, enlighten the populace…" Decades on, Allen Ginsberg’s seemingly throwaway poetic lines and dark delivery on the mysterious album track "Ghetto Defendant" seem to pack more of a punch today than they ever did.
"I just turned around to him and said, ‘You’re America’s greatest living poet and you’re going on the mic now," Strummer told interviewer Joel Schalit, per We Are The Clash. "He said, ‘Well great, what should I do?’ I said, "I want the sound of God!" I gave him two or three minutes scribbling on the piano and on paper. And then there he was, "Slam dance the cosmopolis.""
While eventual first single "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" was Jones’ self-admitted effort at creating a rock classic, eventual mega-hit "Rock The Casbah" was a studio surprise. As he waited for the rest of the group to come to the studio one day, drummer Topper Headon laid down the drums, bass and piano riff that he had been toying with. Enthused by what he heard, Strummer then played around with some lyrics he’d been writing, including one about the lengthy "ragas" their manager Bernie Rhodes had been accusing the group of making.
"Somebody told me earlier that if you had a disco album in Tehran, you got 20 lashes," Strummer said on the recent podcast "Stay Free: The Story Of The Clash." "And if you had a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whisky, you got 40 lashes. I couldn’t get this out of my mind. I was trying to say that fanaticism is nowhere…there is no tenderness or humanity in fanaticism." The song would go on to become the band’s biggest ever U.S. hit, climbing to No. 8 on the Billboard singles charts in 1983.
Internally though, the group were divided on how the album was developing. While Strummer wanted a stripped back single album, with Jones producing, they were heading towards a sprawling, jam-filled 2-LP set they were calling "Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg" (several recordings from these sessions can be heard on the new reissue).
"To understand Combat Rock, you have to realize it was a salvage operation," Strummer said in the book The Clash On The Clash by Sean Egan. "I finally had to take it to Glyn Johns, an outsider, to save it. Mick’s attitude was that I ruined his music. Fifty percent of Combat Rock was great rock, but the other 50 was what Phil Spector would call 'wiggy.'"
"Rock The Casbah" and "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" became hits with the help of heavy MTV video airplay, and the album sold over two million copies. "Combat Rock went top five for us in America," said Strummer in the Westway To The World documentary. "This is unheard of for us. Our place is like 198 - and suddenly it all blew up."
But this came with plenty of mixed fortunes. Within weeks of Combat Rock’s release, Headon was out of the band, to be replaced by former drummer Terry Chimes. Stadium dates opening for the Who followed, as well as a lucrative $500,000 gig at Southern California’s landmark US Festival, held over Memorial Day weekend in 1983. Before the end of the year though, Jones was gone from the band too. As bassist Paul Simonon and Strummer were forming a new version of the Clash, Jones started up his rock-dance hybrid group Big Audio Dynamite. Jones later called his ejection "the greatest mistake in rock and roll history" – a sentiment Strummer grew to agree with.
Still, the Clash's influence looms large, both musically as a classic and innovative punk record, and culturally. A 1991 Levi’s ad in the UK enabled "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" to go to No. 1 on the singles chart there, becoming their only chart topper. Today, the song is prominently featured in the Netflix TV series "Stranger Things." And other songs, like "Straight To Hell," have been sampled by such artists as M.I.A. ("Paper Planes").
As Strummer was keen to note, they came, they spoke and they went. But the Clash remain as vital and as influential as ever. "With the music on Combat Rock we’re just learning to decipher things that it’s saying that we couldn’t when it came out," Steven Taylor, longtime Alan Ginsberg guitarist, told Antonino Ambrossio in the Joe Strummer biography Let Fury Have The Hour.
"‘As railhead towns feel the steel mills, rust water froze in the generation clear as winter ice. This is your paradise,’ are the lyrics of ‘Straight To Hell’. They certainly describe the current state of things."