The Clash were the second greatest Rock'n'Roll band ever. Second to The Rolling Stones. The Beatles of course weren't a rock'n'roll band- they were a pop group. The Clash run a very poor second-place. They made three good albums (“The Clash”, “London Calling” and “Combat Rock”) to The Stones's six (go figure). They make up good ground as a singles band as is attested by something like “The Story of the Clash”.
What's Rock'n'Roll? Essentially bastardised blues. Amplified (Led Zeppelin), sped-up (The Stones) stretched out (The Grateful Dead) freaked out (Captain Beefheart), or elaborated upon (Eric Clapton). I would say that Chuck Berry was not a rock and roller - but a bluesman. Likewise Bo Diddley. Likewise Jimi Hendrix. True innovators all of them, but working within the possibilites of the Blues.
Rock'n'Roll is fake blues, in which the potent cliches of the Blues become exaggerated to accommodate unsubtle aspirations. The Blues itself has none of the cloying warmth and predicatability of Rock'n'Roll. It's become a commonplace utterance to comment of the blues as anthologised by Harry Smith that it couldn't be weirder or colder- but this assumes that once you move beyond the scratchy 78s and out of the Delta that Blues ceases to be a powerful music. Not so, much by Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters or Fred McDowell has a still depth we're more accustomed to hearing in the freezing wastes of Krautrock. Interestingly (and not at all ironically if you know your onions) Krautrock, particulary the work of Neu! stands time immemorial as the anti-rock. In the short history of amplified guitar music you could draw up a sliding scale of influence which would have “Blues-influenced” at one end and Neu! at the other. Neu! function as a kind of strange attractor, most people seem oblivious to their presence but dig a little deeper and there they are. Their most obvious conduit being David Bowie.
Rock'n'Roll was bonkers and could be measured in quality by the distance it travelled from the blues. Led Zeppelin win points for defacing their own image of it, Captain Beefheart wins points for chucking it out of his pram. In many ways the whole affair is an embarrassment. Through the same logic Canned Heat are the worst Rock'n'Roll band ever, such is their assumed proximity to the source. That makes sense. My attitude towards the whole Rock'n'Roll thing is pretty ambivalent. It still remains, however, the best music to get drunk and cut loose to, perhaps by virtue of its "unrealness". It’s too easy to view the title “Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band” as an oxymoron.
If there was any real musical target for the 90s it was rock. It was irrelevant to ravers and anathema to the new-music fans (Wire readers). I can't think of any Rock music in the 90’s with a hip cachet. Madchester was white funk with a dose of Krautrock so we can exclude that. A lot of critical energy that decade was expended in trying to contextualise a space for Rock within the new hegemonies and hierarchies of music appreciation (someone stop me!). This was motivated by the a desire to rationalise the pleasures it produced within more current modes so as to preserve it's memory. Don't throw away all those records and waste all that time, money and effort! Both the Carducci and the Reynolds models sought to build bridges between old and new music. Reynolds tried to imagine a way in which Rock could be "new", Carducci tried to rationalise the music to make it politically relevant. Carducci viewed Black Flag, the american Hardcore band, as a model of cooperation and musical democracy and Reynolds suggested a new lineage of Post-Rock, virtually the antithesis of Carducci's vision, a new tradition of nerds using the studio as an instrument epitomised by Brian Eno. Essentially they were both saying the same thing “Yikes!” The point was of course that Rock was essentially pretty daft. It's silliness was it's motor. Like the journalist Chuck Eddy said, it was "stoopid". Stoopid like Funkadelic and Black Sabbath.
The Clash were the last Rock'n'Roll band by virtue of lasting longer than The Pistols. The Pistols said they killed Rock'n'Roll but “as any fule kno” P.I.L's Metal Box killed Rock'n'Roll. The Pistols were in fact, in their pure “Chuck-Berry-icity” the very epitome of Rock'n'Roll. They may have even been more Rock'n'Roll than The Stones. But wait, I hear you say, if The Clash were the last Rock'n'Roll band, what does that make The Vines and The Strokes.
The last Rock'n'Roll record was The Clash's “Cut the Crap” (ha ha). There was in fact no Rock'n'Roll after this point. The latest wave of Rock music can be dated back the 'orrible Oasis or the quite good Nirvana. This is the era of Retro RockTM, defined not by artists reinterpreting Black music but by reinterpreting "Classic" Rock’n’Roll. Right from the outset we get diminished returns. The archetypical Retro RockTM relationship is what Noel Gallagher has with John Lennon. It's also the relationship The Strokes have with The Ramones, the relationship The Beta Band have with The Beach Boys, the relationship The White Stripes have with The Stooges. I tend to think there are trace elements of Neu! in Nirvana through their relationship with post-punkers like The Raincoats and Steve Albini.
Were The Clash stoopid? They certainly didn't think they were. Perhaps unintentionally. In fact they were awesomely earnest. The first time I met Joe Strummer was at the Rock against the Rich tour. I paid for my Tour T-shirt with my Coutts cheque book and wore it around my public-school. There can be no more goofy thing than that, perhaps with the exception of being a Public-school educated Diplomat's son throwing the gig in the first place. There is one dopier thing, which would be to sign over your share of profits to your record company so as to keep things punky (oh dear The Clash!)
Were they Blues derived? The Clash tried to fashion a Rock'n'Roll in the same manner as their Rock forebears, with the exception that they used different source material. Country (Joe Ely), Reggae (Mikey Dread) and New Orleans Soul (Lee Dorsey) all got the nod. Perhaps they were Rock's first real syncretists? Although I have always thought how Rock’n’Rollish they made Reggae seem, while the tendency nowadays is to view it as a kind of systems music.
Where did The Clash stand in relation to Neu!?! Well if Keith Levene, and his icy chops, had stayed on board they may have stood a chance at attaining the same kind of immortality afforded P.I.L. but I just can’t imagine the band holding together.
Joe was The Clash and I’d like to think that all the things I’ve said about his band actually said rather wonderful things about his personality. He had a surfeit of good humour and generosity. He had an uncomplicated, direct world view and was happy to get stuck in there and not worry too much about the contradictions in life which can grind the best of us to a halt, someone with a lot of love in his heart. The Clash were a band exhibiting that one quality which is most easy to criticize, faith. I will always remember, aged 18, cycling down the Portobello and Joe (who recognized me from gigs and lurking on the All Saints Road) waving at me. I felt I had cheated him. But how can you cheat someone who was (as described by Lester Bangs) a fake?
Posted by Woebot at January 21, 2003 12:50 PM