I am unimportant. I am small. I am a microbe, a mite, a molecule, standing in the towering shadow of this album. I am daunted, I am overwhelmed, by the mere contemplation of attempting to put this work down in words, this towering achievement. It is times like these that you realize exactly how good music is at speaking for itself, and how fruitless it really is to attempt to make them any better by talking about it.But fuck it. Let's do it anyway.
Here is where I learned there are no limitations. There is always a choice. There is no essence to which you are bound. You can change, you can transcend, you can revisit, progress, revert, mutate. My first full listen to London Calling, after my 15th birthday, was a moment of clarity in my young life, opening the doors to my mind. It begins so simply and eloquently with that punk anthem, the title track, a warning call from the brink of catastrophe, a signal that things are going to have to change. It was a fusion of urgency and perceptiveness, a lot more sophisticated in both message and form than simpler punk anthems. Relative to the Sex Pistols, The Clash were there to repair what other punks would destroy: they were about improvement, even in the face of disaster. By the end of the first side, it is clear that the supposed normal "rules" of punk no longer apply. We hear saxophones in "Jimmy Jazz," a humming organ on "Hateful" and ska-inflected horns on "Rudie Can't Fail." Distinctions are not important anymore. Divisions don't exist here.
The second track reaches back to twelve-bar blues rock, "Brand New Cadillac," an archetypal rocker from the halcyon days of the 1950's. Punk of course has much in common with the roots of rock and roll, its "back to the basics" approach being indicated by the Elvis-referencing cover art and the image of guitar-smashing. I love that cover, incidentally, to destroy the very thing you're using to create, to destroy your limitations and free your mind. Punk may have much in common with "Brand New Cadillac" but it has considerably less in common with Jazz, but the second track has a slinky, sinister tone, and "Hateful" is confident in its breakneck pace. The Clash aren't shy about their stylistic flourishes. They own them. That's what's so punk. That side culminates in "Rudie Can't Fail," one of the first indications that the album is leaning toward growing up and getting responsible but not losing your edge. The horns and guitars chirp feistily.
This panoply (good word) of styles makes London Calling a mythical figure in rock critic circles. It's so easy to listen to and so hard to pin down in words, because there's just so goddamned much of it. Records didn't typically go an hour-plus, so if you were going to press two LPs worth of music, it had better be worth the effort (especially since, at the time, the band actually managed to outsmart their label into getting it priced as a single-disc!)
Turn disc one over and you're treated to "Spanish Bombs," a romance of sorts set against the Spanish Civil War. Even leaving beside the great lyrics, here is an excellent song, with its recognizably lamenting guitar rift, diving like bombs, and vocal interplay between Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. The blending of love and war is a good indication of the breath of this album's all-seeing eye, wrapping everything together perfectly, here and there, in single songs and between tracks. Following that is "The Right Profile," which swaggers with amazing big city horns, and features Strummer at his most uncontrollable on vocals. The man could wail, and his voice was perfect to represent a man's life coming apart. The man in question is now largely-forgotten Hollywood star Montgomery Clift, depicting the night he smashed his face in an auto accident. There's a pattern here of privileging what some theorists call the "ex-centric" figure, those often left behind or minimized in conventional narrative. It rips history apart at the end with a howl best rendered as ARRBSSSURGH JUH SUFFFURGUHHH ARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!
I like that about this album: at a time when rock was either proggy or punky, it was privileging all these alternative song forms. "Lost in the Supermarket" manages to be a disco-punk tune that's heart-rendingly introspective, one I often find myself humming on my lonely days. It's got this galloping bassline and kick drum drive that leaves Mick Jones' narrator behind. The side ends with another great global moment, Paul Simonon's "The Guns of Brixton," a heavy reggae lament for the Afro-Caribbean area of London plagued by violence. But before this, there's one f the greatest punk stompers in the canon, "Clampdown." How great is this album? So great that "Clampdown," with its lyrics calling for self-determination and resistance to all forms of control (whether by governments or corporations) its anthemic call-and-answer lyrics, its masterful guitars, and its overall excellent encapsulation of musical rebellion, it's still an underdog in the question of "Best song on the album." Of course there's no objectively correct answer to that, but there's so much going on that the competition is stuff.
If London Calling consisted only of that first disc, those ten tracks, it would be an extremely powerful 33 minutes of music, but this one proves it has much more to offer and spreads its view wider, celebrating Stagger Lee in horns on "Wrong 'Em Boyo" and uniting historic conflicts under "The Card Cheat." Strangely, although the first disc would have made a great album on its own, the second disc feels best like an expansion pack to the first. That's not to say they're inferior, only that they belong in this context. You get a great sense of why these tracks all needed to be heard together. Implicitly, they further and resolve the globe-spanning, all-encompassing route set out on that first disc. The middle of side three contains two great tracks, the bracing corporate piss-take "Koka Kola" and the excellent "Death or Glory," probably the most nuanced depiction of punk fury there will ever be. Is it all worth the effort when it becomes "Just another story?" Anthemic in every sense of the word, and probably the song on the album most responsible for imitators, this is yet another strong contender for best track on the album.
After all this brilliance and creation, the album aptly settles back into modest punk rock mode in what can be taken as either a disappointing last wheeze or a great case of coming full circle. "Lover's Rock," "Four Horsemen" and "I'm Not Down" are either "merely" good rock, or they are "fuck, yeah!" good rock. They help the album along in their own way, even if I don't consider them standouts. More notable is the Caribbean-tinged horn-and-shaker cover of "Revolution Rock," which begins to bring the album to a close, paradoxically considering its opening lyrics, by saying "Everything's gonna be all right." And for some reason, coming from Joe Strummer, you fucking believe it.
And just when you think the album has spent its last dime, said everything that can be said, that glorious fade-up brings us back. "Train in Vain (Stand By Me)" provides a final triumph for the album, proving that for all their globetrotting and philosophizing, they can put everything into a 3-minute pop song, too, and make it seem like the most natural goddamned thing in the world. "Train in Vain" is excellent, a punking-up of British Invasion sounds. It's notable that "Train" initially went unlisted due to the haste with which it was added to the record, but lore holds that it was because the Clash were afraid of being seen as too commercial (that would come later in the wake of "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go.")
For me, London Calling isn't about the message anyway, but about the representation. I remember the exact moment I realized what sort of album I was dealing with. It was very immediate and very complete. It was my very first listen, I was on my bike, it was a warm spring day and the CD had made it to the end of "The Right Profile," the horns were swinging this way and that and I felt as if I had known this song all my life, deep inside my bones. In my experience especially since starting this blog, you don't always get that, where an album becomes part of you so immediately. A lot of them take repeated listens to really dig. Some are up-front but never make that deep a connection. Some never even come close. But you know you've got a great album when it feels like something you've been waiting to hear all your life.
The beauty of London Calling isn't that it has something for everyone, but that it has, in fact, everything for everyone. This isn't a mere sampler, it's a complete work. That's why it has become so monolithic, probably, because it's impossible to pick apart, even despite or perhaps because of its impossibly high quantity of different styles. They all eminate from the center and speak to the universality of the Clash's messages. And everything they do on this record, they do so well.
This album manages to make it near the top of a lot of lists, and I'm not thinking myself revolutionary by putting it on mine. It's very obviously a masterwork, and has obtained that rare critical standing of being unassailable. I've never heard a bad word against it, and I doubt I will by any sound-minded critic. In a weird way, it outshines its fellows on those lists. You could say "Sgt. Pepper is overrated" or "I don't really care for Bob Dylan" or "Exile isn't the Stones' best," but if you listen to this album there's nothing you can justifiably say is wrong with it except that it eventually ends. What happened to me when I first heard it at age 15 is what I think happens to everyone when they listen to this album: my very definition of "great music" redefined itself to be centered on this album. I don't mean to make it anything more than a great record, but it's as great a record as anything ever made, and deserving of all the praise.
It is, as much as music ever can be objectively (and to be clear, it can't, but bear with me here) perfect.
So your next question may be, if it's so perfect, why is it #2 and not #1? I'll tell you soon enough.
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