FEATURE: Career Opportunities: The Clash’s Eponymous Debut Album at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

Career Opportunities

The Clash’s Eponymous Debut Album at Forty-Five

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ON 8th April…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Clash photographed in New York City in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Putland/Getty Images

one of the most important debut albums ever turns forty-five. It is hard to really state how important The Clash is as an album. The Clash - Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon - released their astonishing debut album through CBS Records. Written and recorded over three weeks in February 1977 for £4,000, it is undeniably one of the greatest and most influential Punk albums ever. The Clash themselves would never been as Punk again. If future albums found them widening their sound somewhat, their eponymous debut is about as Punk as it gets! Strummer and Jones wrote an album that was urgent and resonated in 1977. Subsequently, it has managed to ensure and inspire so many people. Its themes and subjects are relevant to this very day. With Clash classics like I'm So Bored with the U.S.A. and White Riot, The Clash is an album that will never lose its significance and brilliance. I will come to a couple of reviews of the album Prior to that, Billboard wrote about The Clash in 2017. They make an interesting observation about the London band: they do not want to tear things down and cause damage: they wanted progress and betterment in the world:

“Compared to the Sex Pistols, their chief rivals in the early days of U.K. punk, The Clash are seen as righteous and idealistic. They wanted progress, not anarchy. Much of The Clash supports this view. “London’s Burning” is a great example. As guitarist Mick Jones replaces punk’s usual power chords with the type of inverted reggae stabs he’d later use on “London Calling,” frontman Joe Strummer seeks to rouse a numbed city. Strummer used to be disgusted, now he’s enthused. You don’t yell “Dial 99999!” — two digits more than it takes to summon British emergency responders — if you’re happy to see your city burn.

Strummer’s works himself up even more on “White Riot,” the most controversial song The Clash ever did. It was written in response to the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976, where black revelers squared off against white police officers in a bloody street battle. Strummer and Clash bassist Paul Simonon tried to get involved by torching a car but couldn’t get the fire started. The incendiary song that resulted, “White Riot,” is curiously not a show of solidarity with oppressed blacks. It’s a call to white folks who feel similarly unhappy to take action.

“Black man got a lot of problems, but they don’t mind throwing a brick,” Strummer sings. “White people go to school, where they teach you how to be thick.”

Strummer’s heart was undoubtedly in the right place. The Clash were avowedly anti-fascist, and in 1978, they played “White Riot” to thousands of people at a Rock Against Racism festival in London’s Victoria Park. And yet Strummer’s inability to recognize his own privilege — again in the parlance of our times — threatens to undercut his point. The group was better off risking cries of cultural appropriation with their terrifically spiky cover of “Police and Thieves,” a then-current reggae hit by Junior Murvin. Later on, The Clash would learn to play reggae properly — here, they chop away and trust their passion to see them through.

One song nobody was going to get mad at was “I’m So Bored With the USA.” It began life as a Mick Jones love song called “I’m So Bored With You” and transformed into a Strummer diss track aimed at America, the “dictator of the world.” Foreshadowing the international reportage The Clash would offer on 1980’s Sandinista! — named for leftist Nicaraguan revolutionaries — Strummer opens with lyrics about Vietnam vets grappling with heroin addictions they picked up fighting in Cambodia. Joe proceeds to get in a couple digs about Watergate and America’s fondness for TV, violence, and TV shows about violence. This one was almost too easy

The political song that probably resonated most with young Clash fans at the time was “Career Opportunities.” Strummer, Jones, and Simonon lacked what you might call marketable skills, and that was OK, because in late ’70s England, there weren’t many decent jobs to be had. When Strummer sneers, “I won’t open letter bombs for you,” he’s referring to an actual gig Jones had with the Benefits Office. As the low man on the totem, Mick would handle all incoming mail — a dangerous assignment in the days of IRA mail bombings. Jobs that wouldn’t kill you, like the Army or the Royal Air Force, would only make you duller. The Clash can’t decide what’s worse on this stomping sing-along.

“Career Opportunities” speaks to the sort of restless working-class British teens and 20-somethings that Strummer portrays in “Cheat” and “48 Hours” — companion ragers about prowling around for kicks. Jones takes the lead on “Protex Blue,” named for a brand of condom the narrator has no intention of using in the company of another human being: “I don’t need no skin flicks / I wanna be alone.”

These songs of alienation are angrier versions of what fellow U.K. punks Buzzcocks would start blasting out in friendlier form around the same time. The Clash go even darker on “What’s My Name,” where Mick’s howling guitar intro sets up a chilling hooligan’s tale told in 1:41. Strummer stars as an acne-plagued kid with an abusive dad and zero outlets for his energy. When he can’t even get into the local ping-pong club, he resorts to street fighting, then turns up at a house late at night with a “celluloid strip” for picking locks”.

Managing to be inspirational, aspirational, angry and composed at the same time, there is more depth, nuance and meaning in The Clash then most other Punk albums released. In 1977, it seemed like a revelation and revolution. I want to source a couple of reviews for a masterpiece. This is what Louder Sound said in their assessment:

“The holy trinity of punk were so perfectly formed that it’s hard to imagine the scene without any one of them. The Pistols: searing and sneering, nihilistic and iconic (the artwork, the clothes). The Damned: the court jesters. Daft, tough, Tiswas-anarchic, a British Stooges/MC5. And The Clash: the guttersnipes and street punks, the voice you could relate to, and without whom it’s hard to imagine The Jam, Stiff Little Fingers, Sham 69 or Generation X, let alone Green Day, Rancid, or maybe even U2.

The Clash articulated the frustrations of working class kids in a way that the chin-stroking protest pop of previous generations couldn’t hope to, in a way that was more inclusive than the fury of the Pistols or the Damned’s goth theatre. (And, yeah genius, we know the irony: Joe Strummer went to a private boarding school and his father was a top diplomat. Hate to break it to you but David Bowie wasn’t really a spaceman, Tom Waits wasn’t a hobo and Ice-T didn’t really kill cops.)

The Clash was hurriedly-written and recorded and it’s a messy and thrilling snapshot of two creative forces gelling for the first time. From their vocals (Strummer’s yobbish bark balanced by Jones’s boyish sensitivity) to their lyrics (famously, Strummer changed Jones’s track I’m So Bored With You to I’m So Bored With The USA), and even their guitar-playing (Joe’s choppy rhythm guitar versus Mick’s slightly weedy-but-melodic lead), the album is a true Strummer/Jones production. Both men were classic rock’n’roll dreamers. To find themselves in the right time and right place with the perfect partners must have been a buzz and, amid the anger and the outrage, the album captures that rock’n’roll woah perfectly.

Mostly The Clash talks about people in boring jobs, with annoying bosses, in a world going to shit. A London burning with boredom, where everyone sits around watching television. Where the TV is full of American cop shows, because killers in America work seven days a week. Where you get hassled in the street by cops and pressured to take a shit job down the Job Centre. Where ‘hate and war’ has replaced ‘peace and love’ and the world is full of cheats and junkies.

Sounds joyless? It’s only half the picture – a bit like describing Trainspotting as a movie about heroin addicts in Edinburgh. The Clash is full of defiance and dark humour and plenty of cheap thrills. Short adrenaline bursts like 48 Hours and Protex Blue (a stupidly laddish ode to the top condom brand of the time: ‘I don’t think it’ll fit my PD drill’) add levity to darker tracks like Deny and Cheat, while Janie Jones, Career Opportunities, London’s Burning and Garageland do all the heavy lifting – full of righteous anger, great one liners and gleeful humour. (Garageland, the witty riposte to Charles Shaar Murray’s earlier line that The Clash were a garage band “who should be left in the garage with the engine running”, isn’t bitter or spiteful but a warm salute to everyone who’s ever been in a dodgy band with ‘five guitar players, one microphone’ and an old bag of a neighbour who calls the police”.

I will end with a review from Rolling Stone. This is what they said in their review of 2002. They observe how much variation there is in terms of the themes The Clash expressed throughout their debut:

“Nobody fused clamor with conviction like the Clash. Their choppy riffs and shouted choruses touched on rockabilly and reggae, but their insistence was pure punk. When the group's import debut hit the United States in summer 1977, it offered not only raw, hot news from the roiling British underground but the last fantasy of a rock band that could change history with caustic social observations and fanatic faith in guitars. Joe Strummer snarled his lyrics through snag teeth while lead guitarist Mick Jones contributed most of the dense music that never stopped sprinting, even as it lashed out. The most sure and supple rhythms of early punk came from the dub-savvy bass of Paul Simonon and the hammer-on-concrete drums of Terry Chimes (here renamed "Tory Crimes"). With fourteen songs recorded in just three weekends and all of a piece, The Clash rewarded feverish grass-roots anticipation and moved 100,000 copies -- the best-selling import of that time.

The band's first single, "White Riot," slapped New York Dolls guitar screech over Ramones speed-beats and announced that the Clash played rock not to escape problems but to confront them. Starting from the viewpoint of young roughnecks with few resources and fewer options, Jones and Strummer declared that guys felt jilted by power structures more than girlfriends. The Clash excoriated dead-end "Career Opportunities," the omnipresence of "Hate and War," and both "Police and Thieves" in a landmark reggae remake. They celebrated their no-account origins in "Garageland" or just threw out the still-disturbing roar "I'm So Bored With the U.S.A."(with its ameliorative refrain, "but what can I do-oo?")”.

As pop protest drained from rock into rap, the Clash's rhetorical ambitions became a target for detractors even as fans insisted the songs worked as gutter-perspective dramas. Heard now, The Clash works as party and protest. Saucier and more cinematic than activist-rock competition from the MC5 to Rage Against the Machine, the album lays down a guide to exile and cunning. The tunes still detonate as the group still insists justice must prevail, no matter how the world just ended”.

A magnificent and timeless debut that turns forty-five on 8th April, here is to the sensational The Clash. If the band’s third studio album, London Calling (1979), is seen as their most successful and, perhaps, greatest album, I feel their eponymous debut is their most important. Even though there were other Punk artists putting out tremendous work in 1977, I think that The Clash were…

WITHOUT equals.

FEATURE:

Career Opportunities

The Clash’s Eponymous Debut Album at Forty-Five

Sam Liddicott