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Arts and Music (CONT.) |
The Prater's Creek Gazette 17th Issue Spring 2008 Page #7 |
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This Is A Public Service Announcement, With Guitars! (Cont.)
Their US tour was over for London Calling by the time I
had gotten into them, so I couldn't wait to see the band on the
Sandinista! tour. But, it was announced that they would only play a few
dates, seven, at a club in New York City, Bonds. Sitting here in Prater's Creek, I
couldn't fathom why they would not tour to let their growing fan base see them.
But,
The band had went back into the studio and recorded another rap song, "Radio Clash" and released it as a 12 inch dance single, the same format that the hip hop artists were doing. This
is Radio Clash The Bonds dates sold out immediately, but, when the band came offstage the first night, NYC fireman were there saying the club had exceeded the fire capacity limit. The Clash agreed to spread out the shows to a total of 16 nights to accommodate everyone who bought tickets, even though that would cost the band money. Then the fire marshal determined that there were not enough fire exits. There were near riots in New York because of this and every television news station and newspaper in the city made it their main story. It was picked up by the national media and Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro lobbied the mayor's office to let the shows go on. Finally the building superintendent, whose daughters were Clash fans and ticket holders, told the club if they fixed things, the shows could go on as planned. I'll always refer to the summer of 1981 as the "Summer of Sandinista". The Clash were on the nightly news because of Bonds, and one Friday night they appeared on Tom Snyder's show. That night's show's theme was sex, and Snyder wanted to make sure to emphasize that The Clash were not part of that theme, that it was the only night they could appear. The show had Divine, The Plasmatics, an S&M dominatrix (who said she catered to famous businessmen and politicians) and a sex therapist. The Clash gave one of their most intelligent, coherent, and funny interviews ever and performed "Magnificent Seven" and "Radio Clash" while a graffiti artist spray painted the white backdrop behind them. This performance can also be seen on You Tube. Later in the show, the psychologist was talking about the show's deviant guests, lumping The Clash in with the others. Snyder jumped to their defense reiterating that they were not part of the rest of the show's theme and that they were exceptionally intelligent, motivated, and socially conscious young men. At the Bonds shows, the band had a wide ranging array of opening acts such as Texan Joe Ely, rappers Grandmaster Flash, and their hero Bo Diddley. On their first American tour they had insisted on Diddley opening that tour and be paid well. They had to fight with the record company who wanted a "new wave" act to open, and CBS wasn't keen on paying Diddley what The Clash wanted him to earn. The rowdy crowds didn't take to well to the rappers and Kurtis Blow was hit in the head by a beer can during his performance. This infuriated The Clash. Later that "Summer of Sandinista" I was taking a British history class at the university. Over in England, riots were erupting every day in the urban areas of that country because of the poverty level and the government and police's violent reaction to the uprising. A student in our class asked about the riots and the professor replied that it was "just young hoodlums making trouble". I immediately tore into the professor for not knowing what was going on in that country, saying that the music of The Sex Pistols and especially The Clash had been predicting these riots. I then asked how he could teach us if he didn't know what was going on with the British working class. The professor brushed my comments aside. The following Monday, he told the class that he owed me an apology, and pulled out the Sunday edition of the New York Times which said exactly what I had told him and the class. After class, he asked me to write down some significant lyrics, many of which appear here in this article. For years, those lyrics I gave him were part of the his lecture. The Summer of Sandinista! I also started reading Mao's Little Red Book, The Guardian newspaper, and signing up for more Central American political science classes because of the band's influence on me. Also that summer, The Red Brigade, an Italian rebel group whose T-shirts Strummer often wore, kidnapped an American high ranking officer and forced him to listen to The Clash. The Summer of Sandinista! Also, at the end of that summer, when fall classes were to begin, the first day in a history class a cool looking girl, long brunette hair, with little cute librarian glasses was wearing a homemade T-shirt that said "Sandinista!"! We became great friends, and Mark ended up dating her. Katheen McEvoy, if you're reading this you were one of the coolest people I've ever met. In May 1982, the band released Combat Rock which would produce their two biggest hits, "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" and "Rock the Casbah". I didn't know the album was coming out and my girlfriend and I were riding in my car, which only had an AM radio. The local Clemson station, WCCP-AM, which later played a big part in The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show getting known, played it and I can remember exactly where on campus we were driving that day! The album opens with "Know Your Rights", punkabilly number where Strummer says we only have three rights: for food money, not to be killed (except by a policeman), and to free speech (unless you're dumg enough to actually try it). The album contains two great funk numbers, "Red Angel Dragnet" about the Red Angels vigilantes in NYC, and "Ghetto Defendant" about how heroin addiction will keep the inhabitants of the ghetto from rising above. The latter contains a great rap poem by Allen Ginsberg. The band had been so influenced by Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now that Travis Bickle shows up in "Ghetto Defendant" and the songs "Sean Flynn" and "Death Is A Star" are like aural movies, where the band takes us to their Heart of Darkness. After my girl and I were playing the album all day, everyday, it was announced that they were coming to the Fox Theater in Atlanta for the third date of the tour. This was the days before Ticketmaster and the Internet of course, so we drove down there the day tickets went on sale. As we walked up to the ticket office, there were many black people in line. "This is great" I told my girlfriend, "black people are now into the band!" I figured that their funk/hip hop songs had caught black people's ears. But it turned out they were in line to get tickets to see Patti Labelle in the gospel musical "My Arms Are Too Short To Box With God"! I had signed up for a four week summer class, and on the morning of the first class, I woke up in panic because it had just hit me that the final would be the night of the Clash concert. Having no phone, I ran to the nearby supermarket to call my professor to tell him I had to delay taking the class. A few weeks before the show, the news was out that Strummer was missing. "Oh great!" we thought. But he showed up in time to play America. My cousin came to the show with us, and as we neared the entrance there were all of these Communists with long hair giving out pamphlets. There were also all these biker looking dudes (I would later learn that these sort of people were called "skinheads") protesting the show and carrying signs that said things such as "If you are so bored with the USA, go back to England". I have no idea who opened the show, some nondescript rockabilly band. Before The Clash played, music was played over the PA and we heard the original versions of all of the songs the band had covered such as "Brand New Cadillac", "I Fought the Law", and "Pressure Drop".
The band hit the stage to the recorded strains of Ennio
Morricone's theme song from the Clint Eastwood movie "For A Few Dollars
More" and launched into "London Calling". I was seeing the Clash! They were
better that I ever imagined. Here is a list of the songs that I remember
them playing, in no particular
London Calling Radio Clash Red Angel Dragnet White Riot I'm So Bored With the USA Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Magnificent Seven Working for The Clampdown Know Your Rights Complete Control Ghetto Defendant Career Opportunities Armageddon Time Guns of Brixton Straight To Hell Rock the Casbah Safe European Home Somebody Got Murdered We had brought along binoculars and I immediately noticed that Topper wasn't on drums!! I was shocked. I didn't know who was on drums, but he seemed to be best on songs off of the first album. Turns out it was Terry Chimes on drums who had played on that first album. The summer before, The Summer of Sandinista!, I had worked construction, and one guy on the crew was a big classic rock guy who loved the band Rush. I know, makes you sick don't it? Oh, he didn't want to hear anything about The Clash. I hated that guy. But a year later, he ends up behind me at the show yelling "Breaking rocks in the hot sun!" over and over. I finally had to tell him to shut up, that they were not going to play that "I Fought The Law". When we came out of the Fox after the show, the skinheads were beating up the Commies. It was surreal. Traffic on Peachtree Street in front of the theater was stopped and I'll never forget this family looking at the bodies rolling around on their car. The little girl in the back seat had her face pressed up against the window, and it reminded me of a family riding through Lion Country Safari and lions climbing on the car. The tour continued on and the band got lots of press. When they played Los Angeles, Bob Dylan, a huge fan, brought his son Jakob, who was then 13 or 14. So impressed, and inspired was Dylan, that he went into the studio the next day to record "Left Waiting at the Altar", which was his best rock and roll in sometime. In the fall, on my birthday no less, the band were the musical guest on Saturday Night Live and played "Should I Stay?", but for a less safer choice on the second number, they played "Straight to Hell". As the year ended, they were atop all of the critics' list for band and album of the year, and atop most fan polls too. "Rock the Casbah" reached #8 on the US charts, their biggest hit to date. The video for the song was in heavy rotation on the newly launched MTV. They opened a few shows for The Who in the fall, playing stadiums, and in the Spring of 1983 they headlined New Wave day at the huge US festival. It seemed that they were ready to finally break through to the mainstream. Then, soon thereafter, Mick Jones was kicked out. A new lineup recorded "Cut the Crap" and then they were no more. About that time, a punk band who had started out as a Clash cover band moved to South Carolina. they had played a show the year before and I went to the sound check. The lead guitarist was wearing a red jacket and playing a black Les Paul, just like Mick Jones. He even kind of looked like him. The bassist had on a beret, and they even had a bunch of world flags hanging as backdrop. Such Clash wannabes. The brothers I had seen a few years before with The Clash albums knew the band, and when they moved to SC, they got me to be their singer/rhythm guitarist. I was so tired of The Clash and fought all Clash-like things in the band. The Les Paul playing chap, Chuck, turned out to be the one who had hit Kurtis Blow in the head with a beer can at Bonds and the beret topped bass player was the student in the dining hall wearing Clash T-shirt years before. But, in the 90's the press started making their best lists as the century was winding up, and The Clash were on all of the music list, Rolling Stone picking London Calling as the best album of the 1980's and 14th best album over all. Then the boxed sets, DVDs, etc. and Clash rip offs like Rancid brought the band back to people's minds and their legacy reevaluated. I was telling Grandpa, of The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show about this article, and he mentioned Jakob Dylan's comment about meeting the band that time when dad Bob took him to the show in Los Angeles. About how Jakob Dylan had said The Clash looked so cool, "like a gang" and that's how he wanted The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show to look. That if the four of them walked into a large room from different entrances, it would be no doubt that they were together, to have that strong an identity. Grandpa also told me that every night he performs, he feels he is channeling not only his bluegrass heroes Bill Monroe, Carter Stanly, Lester Flatt, and Jimmy Martin, but also Joe Strummer. Grandpa wanted me to make sure I put the lyric from The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show's song, off of their Dreamland album, "1969 Plymouth Roadrunner (Grandpa's Dream #1)"
I got my buddies in the backseat passing
around some homemade wine BOOK REVIEW: THE GOD 0F SMALL THINGS- Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy, India's recent writing sensation, is also reminiscent of those two great writers, especially in her detailed narratives of nature scenes. The God of All Small Things centers around fraternal twins, Rahel and her brother Esthappen (Estha), who are described as: "two-egg twins, "Dizygotic" doctors called them. Born from separate but simultaneously fertilized eggs. They never did look much like each other, Estha and Rahel, and even when they were thin-armed children, flat-chested, wormridden and Elvis Presley-puffed, there was none of the usual "Who is who?" and "Which is which?" from oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox bishops who frequently visited the Ayenenem House for donations. The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place. In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities. Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha's funny dream" I literally could not put this book down I became so caught up in the twins' life. When I had to go back to work, all I could think about was what was going to happen to them. The novel is set in Kerala, India in the late 1960's and deals with the centuries old caste system's shakeup when Communism was taking over and serves as the backdrop of Roy's look at how "small things" are more important than the "big things" such as political affiliation and one's station in society. What makes this novel so good is her portrayal of the children and their inner thoughts. Roy does not make them sentimental like most authors dealing with children in their writing, but portrays them in a realistic light with real feelings. Even though I did love this book and recommend it to all of my readers, there were a couple of events in this book I found totally unnecessary. I don't understand why felt Roy had to include these scenes, which added nothing to the novel. One such event occurs early in the book and hangs over the plotline like a dark ominous cloud and the reader expects to later play a large part in the novel and it never occurs. It seems Roy put these in just to add sexual tension which only kept the novel ranking up there with the works of Faulkner and Dickens. Of course, Faulkner did write Sanctuary. |
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Mick Jones wanted to work on his studio tan and did not want to tour,
and drummer Topper Headon was in no shape to tour due to his heroin
addiction.
order: 
Here at the Gazette office, we were
having a book drive for charity. I was looking through the box of books and read the
back of this novel where the critic compared the narrative prose to Charles
Dickens and William Faulkner, my two favorite novelists! I had to read this book.
And like those two greats, Arundhati Roy takes a look at family, race,
class, and society. In her case, it is not the 1920's South of the United
States, or the Victorian Era of England, it is 1960's India.