September 20 – Pennie Got Luckier Than The Fender

This day in 1979 turned out to be a big day for another of the original Brit-punk bands, The Clash.

Although they didn’t necessarily think they were having a great day at the time. they were on their second North American tour and playing New York City for the third time, at the Palladium, and the crowd seemed subdued and unenthusiastic. Not only that, but bouncers at the venue kept anyone who was “into it” seated and stopped people from getting up and dancing. This ended up making bassist Paul Simonon mad and he ended up smashing his guitar. His trusty Fender bass, as well as his watch, was ruined…but photographer Pennie Smith captured the scene on film.

The image became the iconic cover of their next, and best, album, London Calling. Rolling Stone ranked it the fifth greatest record cover ever in 2011 (Sgt. Pepper topped their list.) Around the same time, Q called it the “greatest rock & roll photo ever.” The bass is now in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the band apparently liked the photo. So much they got Smith to take their less-spontaneous photo for the cover of Combat Rock three years later. Smith however, didn’t like the shot, thinking she messed up because it’s not very in focus… she was moving around the stage at the time, shooting with a wide angle lens, and had to be darting around to keep out of their way and the way of flying guitar bits!

Simonon for what it’s worth, was usually the laid back one of the group and says he at least regretted ruining his favorite four-string. “If I’d been really smart,” he told an interviewer, “I would’ve got the spare bass out as it wasn’t as good!” Bad waste of an instrument, good photo, great album that lives on over four decades on.

August 23 – The Music Was Hot In Ontario 40 Years Back

By this time in summer, the average temperature in Toronto is only in the 70s, but this day 40 years back was a “Heatwave“. That was the name of a major outdoor concert dubbed the “New Wave Woodstock” that took place at Mosport race track about 40 miles outside of the city this day in 1980.

The posters for the event (tickets- $20, $30 on day of event) called it “the 1980s Big Beat Rock & Roll Party” and advertised The Clash, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Rockpile and more. The event drew close to 100 000 and had a few glitches – The Clash failed to show (some reports suggest they couldn’t get through customs at the border), and the final 15 000 or so attendees got in free due to some radio stunt pulled by Dan Akroyd offering free admission. Nonetheless, the fans liked full sets from then up-and-coming acts like The Pretenders, Elvis Costello, B-52s, Talking Heads and locals Teenage Head and the Kings.

Surprisingly, although CFNY-FM played this music extensively in Toronto, the event was put together by American promoter John Brower who noted “I don’t think this show would sell anyplace but here…this is the strongest new wave market on the continent.” It was a success in many ways – attendance was great, it boosted the careers of several young acts and didn’t have any major problems or health concerns unlike the original Woodstock. But Brower ended up losing money on it, perhaps because of the obvious oversight. The festival wasn’t officially recorded and thus no albums or concert videos came out afterwards.

August 21 – Punk’s Not-So-Ordinary Joe

Even were he around still, he’d be no “Young Turk.” Which is fine because I might guess that Rod Stewart song wasn’t likely Joe Strummer‘s favorite. Joe was born 68 years ago today, as John Mellor, in Turkey.

His Indian-born dad was a British diplomat and thus Strummer got to live in Turkey, Africa and Mexico before being sent to a boarding school “where thick rich people send their thick rich kids” at age nine. That experience and the experience of seeing so much of the world left a mark on the lad as did the suicide of his neo-Nazi brother; the decidedly left-leaning Joe had to go identify the three-day old corpse. Joe started to go to college for art but immersed himself in the music world instead, joining bands like Vultures and the 101ers, who were quite popular in London in the mid-’70s. “I know the 101ers were good, but they were just too old…” he said in 1977, after he’d joined Mick Jones in the London SS which soon became The Clash.

The Clash’s influence is well-known, what became of Joe after the band broke up not as widely. He soon made amends with Jones (whom he’d fired from the Clash) and helped produce Jones’ new band, Big Audio Dynamite‘s second album. He dabbled in acting roles, sat in for Shane MacGowan as singer of the Pogues on one tour and put out solo albums before starting the wildly-diverse sounding Mescaleros. Of them, he said perhaps prophetically in 2000, “this is my Indian Summer. I’m far more dangerous now because I just don’t care.”

Strummer died quietly at home at age 50 from an undiagnosed heart defect. Fender issued 1500 limited edition Stratocasters like he played for charity and his widow Lucinda helped organize the Joe Strummer foundation, a charity dedicated to helping people be empowered through music globally.

May 14 – Joe & Mick’s ‘Combat’-ive Personalities Clashed Well

Selling out or getting the message across better? Either way, The Clash hit it big with their fifth album, Combat Rock, released this day in 1982. The band which had become the critic’s favorite got their first taste of real North American success with an album that was partly recorded in, and largely written about America.

Not that their take on it was all positive mind you. “Rock the Casbah” reflected the hypocrisy and xenophobia on both sides of the ocean, with the American culture infiltrating the Middle East despite mutual mistrust. “Straight to Hell”, regarded now by fans as one of their best songs, is about kids American troops fathered in Vietnam then left behind. (“Sean Flynn” was also a Vietnam-themed song, Flynn being a journalist – son of Errol Flynn, no less – who disappeared on assignment covering the war.)

If nothing else, the Clash were hyper-productive at the time. Following in the footsteps of London Calling, a double album, and Sandanista, a triple, it meant the band had churned out six LPs worth of material in less than three years. And, to top that off, some members of the band wanted Combat Rock to be a double as well.

February 29 – Bonus Tracks For Bonus Day

February 29th, “Leap Day”, is rather a bonus day, so how about some bonus songs for the day?

Generally to state the obvious, when you look at the back of an album cover, you either see a listing of all the songs on the record, or else cryptically nothing at all – let the buyer beware. But there are a few examples of hidden, or “bonus” tracks – songs not listed on the album notes but present for the patient listener who lets the LP or CD run to the end.

Take for instance, Crowded House. Their third album, Woodface, lists 14 songs. But the listener who was somehow preoccupied and didn’t get the album off the player when it “ended” found they were still there… with a part of a rowdy, drunken-sounding track called “I’m Still Here” following the official last song “How Will You Go?” after a 30-second silence. A 2016 reissue of the album had the entire 2:19” version of “I’m Still Here” at its end. go figure.

When R.E.M. signed with Warner Brothers, they wanted to change things up just a little from what they’d done with IRS Records previously. Apparently Michael Stipe told the others “not to write any more R.E.M.-style songs” for Green, their late-’88 debut on the big label. The result was a little infusion of mandolins, a record that was “a little more upbeat lyrically as well as musically” Mike Mills suggests and saw them break more ground into becoming a major international act with hits like “Stand” and “Orange Crush.” And it also saw them tease their fans with an almost unlisted song. The album back lists 10 songs, by track number, title and length, and a mysterious “3:15” listed after the tenth track.

That three-plus minutes was a very good little track with a catchy backbeat that opens with the upbeat statement “the world is big, but so are we” and Mike Mills adding a nice harmony to Stipe’s usual vocals. The song is quite good, but lacks an obvious chorus and is typically simply title “Untitled”, although Diffuser went a step deeper in their research and found the band had copy-righted it as simply “11.” Michael Stipe says of it, “at the time it was really cool to have unlisted, ‘hidden’ tracks for the fans.” Apparently that might have been the plan right from the get-go; Mike Mills told us at A Sound Day that he doesn’t remember them ever having even a working title for the song.

Probably the best-known example of the “hidden” track in rock though is the last track on The Clash‘s London Calling … a song which amazingly would go on to be their first North American hit single, despite not showing up on the album listing. “Train In Vain” was a danceable, hummable little track everyone liked … which is probably why it got added at last minute to the record. This wasn’t an obvious ploy to be cute by The Clash, mind you. The song had been cut and was supposed to be distributed as a bonus with the NME magazine, a great way to add sales to a publication But at the last moment the mag balked on it, citing some problems with cost and manufacturing a “flexi” single so it was an orphan. CBS Records and the band decided to add it to the pressing at last minute, but the covers had already been printed… without “Train in Vain.” If you have a newer copy of the LP or the CD, you likely will find the error has been rectified and it is no longer a hidden song.

So there you have it, three bonus songs for your bonus day! “Leap” to your collection and blow off the dust and maybe you’ll find even more examples yourself.

February 14 – Billy Wasn’t Loving His Band

There was no love lost between Billy Idol and his bandmates…he quit Gen X on this day in 1981. That effectively broke up the punk act whose story started a little like the beginning of the Sex Pistols story.

A trendy London clothing shop (in this case Acme Attractions) owner decided he wanted to run a band and put out an ad looking for people with the right look and attitude. William Broad (later Billy Idol) was one of the people who responded. The band was called Chelsea and played a few shows around London in ’76; however the singer picked by the owner didn’t get along with Idol or the others so they split and formed their own band,Generation X (which they later shortened to Gen X). They took their name from a ’60s book about youth culture (not, it should be noted, Douglas Coupland’s later novel) before the name became widely-used to describe the entire cohort of kids born in the second half of the ’60s through the ’70s.

The band toured extensively, got signed to Chrysalis Records, put out three albums to middling results and a bit of resentment from the punk crowd who thought them a little too apathetic in attitude- little call to anarchy or political statement from Gen X- and too fond of ’60s rock. Disappointing sales and strife in the band , largely between bassist Tony James and the others- over their drug use (which James says did them in) led Idol to quit, move to New York and go on to great success with Chrysalis…including one song that had been a Gen X staple.

One would speculate Billy came out the best by far from the break-up. Although Gen X’s bassist, James, went on to be part of the odd and briefly-successful Sigue Sigue Sputnik and drummer Terry Chimes went back to The Clash (he was that band’s original drummer, then in turn replaced by Topper Headon, but went back after Headon was fired), neither matched the longevity or commercial success Idol has had since. To date, Billy’s snarled his way to five platinum albums in the States, where he’s scored nine top 40 songs.

January 23 – Clash Of Cultures Led To Smash Single

In the early-’90s, the world of pop music was thrown for a loop when “alternative” rock became so popular it was suddenly really the mainstream music. A decade earlier though, it was happening on a slightly smaller scale. On this day in 1983, those angry, political punks from Britain, The Clash, were having their finest hour in America and in so doing, standing toe to toe with such decidedly-mainstream artists as Phil Collins and the J. Geils Band. “Rock the Casbah” peaked at #8 in the U.S. 37 years ago.

Three years after they first hit the U.S. airwaves with the similarly upbeat-sounding “Train in Vain”, “Rock the Casbah” quickly became their biggest hit there. That was fitting perhaps since it was recorded in New York, not their home base of London. In the UK meanwhile, at the time it only got up to #30, making it only their sixth-biggest single to that point, although oddly it would make it up into the top 20 in 1991 there around the same time another single from the same album, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” got to #1 there after being used in a TV ad.

The single helped The Clash and their Combat Rock album break through into the American market in a big way, going double-platinum; at home the sales were below London Calling and about on a par with their other three previous albums. What it wasn’t though was representative of British punk rock, nor of The Clash’s sound necessarily, although on their previous couple of records – London Calling and Sandanista – they’d experimented with enough different music genres as to not have a “sound” beyond the gruff vocals of Joe Strummer tying it all together.

The fun, dancy tune is atypical of The Clash in another way. It was the only track written and performed largely by drummer Topper Headon. He had the piano melody in his head and ended up in the studio hours before the other three in the band, so he recorded away, doing the piano work, then his drums and even bass before Strummer heard it. the singer later acknowledged “the real genius of ‘Rock the Casbah’ is Topper.”

What wasn’t necessarily genius was Topper’s lyrics, about his girlfriend, and depending on which person close to the band you ask, either very “sappy” or rather “pornographic.” Strummer looked at them, tossed the lyric sheet in the garbage and started on the witty geopolitical statement we know. The song which gloriously showcases the Middle Eastern dichotomy of both a fascination with and a hostility towards American pop culture was something Strummer had in his mind for awhile. The lyrics had begun falling into place when he’d seen a documentary on Iran, and in an interview aired on I-heart Radio, he said he was astounded to find that having a bottle of Jack Daniels there could get one “forty lashes.” “I was trying to say ‘fundamentalism is nowhere, man’”. Around the same time, manager Bernie Rhodes was complaining to him that his songs were getting increasingly like “ragas” – long, complex Indian musical pieces, which is where that word in the lyrics originated.

CBS Records sensed it had a hit on its hands and remixed it as a single with more bass and the extended vocal bit on the word “jive”, then sent the band to Texas to record the armadillo-featuring video which became an early favorite on MTV.

There were a couple of ironies in the success of “Rock the Casbah.” First, while it was more the work of Headon than any other Clash song, he’d been fired from the group by the time it began its run up the charts. Headon had deepening drug problems which curtailed his ability to perform and didn’t sit well with Strummer. So Topper doesn’t even appear in the video.

More galling to much of the fanbase, is that the U.S. military adopted the song as an unofficial theme or anthem for the 1991 Operation Desert Storm (the mini-war to free Kuwait from Iraq’s grip.) The left-wing band surely never expected their music to be the soundtrack to an American military operation and as one journalist quipped, “the notion of The Clash as spokesfolk for (military) adventurism in the Middle East might have been enough to bring Joe Strummer back from the dead.”

The Clash rocked the casbah, but didn’t rock very much of anything after. Strummer was also getting tired of guitarist Mick Jones as well and perhaps was getting weary of the Clash altogether. They recorded only one more album, 1985’s under-achieving and critically-panned Cut the Crap.That one lacked Jones, Headon and had only a passing involvement from bassist Paul Simonon but did have their business manager in charge of drum machines and production. After that, Strummer knew it was time to move on and leave the band’s legacy alone.

December 22 – Mescaleros Favorite Brit

We lost another good one 17 years ago. Joe Strummer passed away of a heart attack at his home in the UK on this day in 2002.

The Clash singer was more of a health-conscious person than many punk rockers; he did like his hard cider but was outspoken in his disdain for narcotics and he was a marathon runner until shortly before his death. Part of that might come from what he told Hot Press in 1999 about his maturation: “I have 3 girls, two from my first marriage and a stepdaughter aged 7, who needed their tiny corner of the world to include a dad.”

Much has been said and written about The Clash but a few fun facts about him…he once spent a night in jail after being caught spray-painting “The Clash” on a building wall; he once dated Ellen Foley (the gal who sings with Meat Loaf on “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and was in the TV show Night Court) and he once described founding Clash member Mick Jones as “indfifferent” and kicked him out of the band when it became like “dragging a dead dog around”. After breaking up the Clash in the mid-’80s, he never left music for too long. He briefly took over vocal duties from Shane MacGowan with The Pogues in the ’90s and he was working with a band called the Mescaleros, who picked up where The Clash left off when it comes to mixing musical genres, for the last few years of his life.

Strummer’s belief in DIY and challenging corporate music norms lives on with the Joe Strummer Foundation. His widow and children began it soon after his death, with an aim of promoting and assisting new, up-and-coming musicians. They will at times provide financial assistance and advice to promising, unsigned artists and have free rehearsal spaces in London and (curiously) Columbia. Many of the artists they help perform on the Joe Strummer sidestage at the Glastonbury Festival. This month the foundation hosted a fundraiser at the Bowery Ballroom in New York,headlined by Debbie Harry. It marked the 40th anniversary of the release of Strummer’s musical highwater mark, London Calling.

December 14 – Clash Came-A-Calling 40 Years Ago

Forty years ago, the Seventies ended with the release of the best album of the Eighties, or at least according to Rolling Stone. The Clash release their Epic Records epic, London Calling on this day in 1979.

It was their third album and while the predecessor , Give ‘Em Enough Rope did well in their Britain (reaching #2 on the charts), London Calling not only opened up a new continent , North America, to them but also was a major leap forward musically. They put it together quickly, as Mick Jones noted later, “Joe, once he learned to type, would bang out lyrics at a high rate of good stuff, then I’d be able to bang out some music while he typed.”

The double-album spans over its 19 songs and hour-plus running time , as Allmusic puts it a “dizzying array” of sounds, from the hard rock of the title track to reggae inspired songs like “Jimmy Jazz” and “Guns of Brixton” to jazz-influences to the straight ahead perky-sounding pop of “Lost in a Supermarket.” and the upbeat dance-ready “Train In Vain” (their first top 30 hit in the U.S.) Even the imagery was varied- while the iconic photo of bassist Paul Simonon smashing his guitar reeks of the anger they felt (says Simonon: “by London Calling, we’d become grown men and having traveled had become more worldly,”) the lettering in cheery, bold pink and green capitals was a deliberate homage to Elvis Presley’s happy-go-lucky debut! The lyrics however, were rather dark throughout, touching on a myriad of social problems of the beginning of the Reagan/Thatcher era- the urban violence, the indifference of youth, the over-the-top consumerism of the wealthy…”Spanish Bombs” was inspired by a real-life Basque separatist terror attack. If the tunes hadn’t been perky at times and varied, the album could have been a bleak tome consigned to the dustbins of bad history. But that is obviously not the case.

The album went on to sell about 5 million copies worldwide and be their first chart success in Canada and Australia but the impact was far beyond the numbers. By expanding their sound successfully in so many directions while remaining cohesive, The Clash created a lasting masterpiece. At the time – well,four months after release- Rolling Stone called them “the greatest rock and roll band in the world,” although noting “the band resists such labels.” It praised their “rock and roll rebellion in grand, epic terms” and gave it a perfect 5-star rating and then years later called it the greatest album of the 1980s. Three decades after its release, the magazine put it at #8 on their list of all-time great albums, noting that the “19 songs of apocalypse (were) fueled by the unbending faith in rock and roll to beat back the darkness.” They added it was like a “free form radio broadcast from the end of the world.” It was, it is worth noting, the newest of the eight best on their list. The Village Voice liked its “urgency and vitality, ambition which overwhelmed the pessimism of its leftist world view” and called it the best album of the year. At the turn of the century, Q put it as the 9th best British album of all-time. Surprisingly, only alternative rock specialty mag Spin was indifferent to it, retroactively giving it a 7 out of 10 rating.

Oh, and that radio hit “Train In Vain”... it was originally recorded as a song to be given away with NME magazine. When that fell through, the band rushed it onto the LP, but the cover was printed…thus no listing on the song list! The NME perhaps would rue that decision – they’d later go on to call it the best album of the ’80s.

As is the fashion these days, there is a 40th Anniversary edition (or editions) available on both LP and CD but while they perhaps have improved mastering, there is no new content other than a hardcover book accompanying the “super deluxe” version.

September 21 – Soaring With The Raven

By this point 40 years ago, the British punk scene was morphing quickly. Many of the early movers-and-shakers were done (think Sex Pistols) and those still standing were expanding their horizons beyond the stereotypical badly-played 3-chord anti-social rants. One example was The Clash, readying London Calling for release. Another case in point, The Stranglers who put out their fourth album in Europe on this day in 1979.

The Raven was their final album on the UA label and the beginning of their development into a formidable crafter of smart pop tunes. As with their previous three albums it hit the UK top 10 – actually getting to #4 – and went gold (or better), helped along by their sixth top 20 single there, “Duchess.” Both it and “Nuclear Device” were among the first real humorous concept videos, although not everyone appreciated the humor. The BBC played the single “Duchess” on radio but banned the video off their TV channels as it was deemed “blasphemous.”

The album contained a bigger emphasis on melody and Dave Greeenfield’s keyboards than some of their earlier work, and a variety of song matter. They frown upon heroin in the languid “Don’t Bring Harry” and the fakeness of Hollywood in “Dead Loss Angeles” and spoof the messed-up Middle Eastern politics with the neo-disco “Shah A Go Go”, three years before The Clash would with “Rock the Casbah.”

Bassist JJ Burnel explained the new wide range. “We were traveling around, suddenly everything was happening,” he says, noting they toured Australia and Japan prior to recording this one, “we were voracious readers. If one of us had a book, he’d pass it around.” He says drummer Jet Black was fascinated by UFOs (no surprise given their attire and nickname “The Men in Black” has alien-contact conspiracy theories wrapped up in it) while singer Hugh Cornwell was interested in the Iranian Revolution, and that country’s supplying the West with much of its heroin. UA went all out on the album; a large number of the LPs had a pseudo-3D cover picture of a raven.

Allmusic would later laud it, calling “Duchess” a “tuneful power pop number with clear chart-oriented influences” and applauded  the fact that “half the songs sport verses critical of social or political issues.” It did take issue with the poor sound quality of the U.S. release though, which came years later. At the time, it was only available as an import over here. In 1980, IRS Records released a similar album in North America, Stranglers IV, which contained about half the songs off The Raven with some previously-released singles like “Who Wants the World?” and “5 Minutes.” That album was one of CFNY in Toronto’s top 20 of the year but didn’t do much elsewhere in North America.