I read with pleasure Helen’s remembrance of London calling though it was never my favorite Clash. My fave was (in order):
The Clash (English Edition)
The Clash (American Edition
Sandinista
What, you say, Sandinista?? That sprawling mess of a triple from way back in 1980.
Yup, I prefer it to London Calling. Despite loving the title track and “Rudy Can’t Fail”. There was too much of it that failed to hit my music bone, stuff like “Lost In The Supermarket” and “Brand new Cadillac” didn’t do for me as advertised and except for the title track just any song on The Clash is better.
So fast forward a year and I didn’t bother buying Sandinista for two reasons. 1) I don’t mind political naivite but how could anybody think for a moment that a coup d’etat in Nicaruaga would help a damn thing. It didn’t. The Sandinista’s were just another military junta only this time under the USSR’s thumb. Daniel Ortega sure could talk the talk but you can’t change one military for another and expect your contry not to be run by the military. Which is exactly what happened. 2) A triple album felt way too overwhelming. Who had the time for what you just knew would be a single album’s worth of good material.
But my Creem editor gave me a call and asked me to interview em and so I had to do my research.
And I loved so much of it which was a relief because I don’t think DiMartino or Holdship woulda been too thrilled with me spending a coupla hours dukin’ it out with Paul Simonon.
It is a messy sprawl which reaches a weird sort of synthesis on the penultimate track, a version of “Career Opportunity” sung by school children just in case we missed the point that crap jobs were forever.
And perhaps jobless was a worldwide problem from because Sandinista is a trip round the trouble spots of the world. On “Washington Bullets” -a sorta dub rock ode to the before mentioned. “Hitsville UK” a promise of a world of punk bands doing it themselves in what is a very prescient concept: “No slimy deals, with smarmy eels in Hitsville U.K. Lets shake and say, we’ll operate in Hitsville U.K. ” And a Clash classic for the ages with “The Magnificent Seven”. A stunningly innocent look at where world politics, celebrityhood and the business of living meet.
Although some of the other songs don’t quite happen, “The Leader”, though a jauny pop rock number, is a bit obvious, it didn’t really matter because the effect of the album was accumulative. One unfiltered political manifesto after another and if you didn’t like it, that was cool because there was another round the corner.
Helen missed him but I hafta shout out Mick Jones. The Clash sound much more like Big Audio Dynamite than they do like the Mescaleros here, suggesting you governing musical force behind the Clash is precisely who we thought it was. The range and depth, from waltz to dub, reggae to pop, is, I would guess, due to Mick Jones interest in form over content. When Strummer took over the Clash, they kept their politics but lost their musical scope.
Anyway, for all my misgivings with the Clash, and however dated the politics can sound, Sandinista is a great act of political alchemy and a tribute to Mick Jones and Joe Strummer.