Debunking Punk What the Clash meant to rock 'n' roll. By Stephen Metcalf Posted Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005, at 2:35 PM PT
On the Clash's London Calling, the pink-and-green lettering that frames Paul Simonon—red London down the Y axis, green Calling across the X—mimics the "first" rock album, Elvis Presley's 1956 debut. This is not an homage. Where Elvis was holding up his acoustic guitar, shouting blues to the rafters, Simonon has split his legs wide, the better to drive the head of a Fender Precision into the stage at the old Palladium. The Clash were built to smash twilit idols—"no Elvis, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones" had been the band's rallying cry since 1977. The working title for London Calling was "The Last Testament," and it was supposed to stand, according to the band's manager, as the "last rock and roll record." This is the goofy imperial hubris of the young, of course; but it's also utterly sound dialectical reasoning. With London Calling, the Clash merged the arty daring and political sincerity of the '60s with the rage and trashy nihilism of the '70s. Pop music has been many things since, but it has never again been as artistically and commercially dominated by rock 'n' roll. Now that London Calling is 25 years old, an anniversary currently being celebrated with a handsome box set and a lot of reverential air guitar, the time has come to think of their record as the lads intended: as the headstone for the rock era. Why were the Clash so well-positioned to take punk rock beyond punk rock? This will strike some ears as heresy, but the first reason is simple: The Clash weren't a punk rock band. Joe Strummer had fronted a group called the 101ers, a pub-rock outfit more in the tradition of Dr. Feelgood or Brinsley Schwartz than the New York Dolls or the Stooges. (Before that, he passed himself off as a folkie, demanding to be known simply as "Woody.") His hokey stage bravado, which so blew away his new chum Mick Jones, was based on Strummer's recent study of Bruce Springsteen, who had been headlining at the Hammersmith Odeon. For his part, Mick Jones was an avowed punk, the better to spite his own sweet disposition. Before they became famous, Jones and Chrissie Hynde hung out and wrote music together. She later remembered his creations as "rather dippy love songs." True, from the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, the Clash learned to execrate dippy love songs and to embrace sonic crudity. But the great fun behind the Ramones and the Pistols had been their love of the total lark, part and parcel to spitting on the burnt-out legacy of the '60s. There the Clash did not follow. They still sold authenticity, wailing spitefully at "every gimmick-hungry yob digging gold from rock and roll" as if that yob were emphatically someone else. Unlike their rivals the Sex Pistols, a bunch of lowlifes tossed together by a cunning impresario, the Clash were formed on something of the model of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: Two white working-class boys meet when young; bond over their mutual love of American rhythm and blues; and found a songwriting partnership. Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richards, Strummer-Jones—the mythic co-credits run like a spine through the heyday of album rock. Look more closely, though, and you start to see another, more intriguing pattern. One boy is from a relatively stable, more solidly middle-class home, while the other is from a poorer, less respectable or broken home. Paul McCartney's father worked as a cotton salesman, an unusually solid career for Liverpool at the time and a job that typically went to his social "betters." After Paul's mother died, his father stuck it out—in enduring contrast to Lennon's, who bolted while he was still an infant, leaving him to a carousing and inconstant mother. Keith Richards was born in Dartford, a candidate for "arsehole of England," as Richards would later have it, near a smallpox hospital, a chemical plant, and the reeking salt bogs of the Slade marshes. The