New Monday #96

Happy Monday -

We screwed up the numbering of New Monday last week. Almost two years of doing this... I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner. NM 104 marks two years... will we make it????

Speaking of anniversaries, yesterday was December 14th, and 46 years ago yesterday, London Calling was released.

London Calling

I remember when this record came out. I was in high school, listening to Jimi Hendrix and playing lots of guitar.

I went to a very uncool high school—Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The mascot for CSHHS was a Seahawk, but it could have been a Bag of Dicks because that’s pretty much what the place was. Dicks everywhere. Wealthy dicks, mainly. There was an accident in the student parking lot in which one dick’s Mercedes hit another dick’s BMW. I drove a Ford Pinto station wagon. Sigh.

There were some really cool kids at CSHHS, though. My friend Steve had wonderful taste in music. At parties at his house, I first heard The Tom Robinson Band, their Power in the Darkness album. And of course, London Calling.

Honestly, there was so much hype about The Clash, with the whole “The only band that matters,” marketing BS that was floating around, I didn’t really bother with it. I heard the hits. They were ok.

When MTV sauntered into the scene in the early 80s, I was at college at Purdue in Indiana. Rock the Casbah and Should I Stay or Should I Go were omnipresent and overplayed. Inescapable. Worse than Hotel California a few years before or Eye of the Tiger a few months later. God, I hated that song and that dopey one-note bassline. Dur dur dur dur Dur dur dur dur... quarter notes on the root! Yay! Survivor was very Chicago, very Midwest. Dur dur dur dur.

There were some punk rockers at Purdue, but they were mainly haircuts venturing forth looking for a drug problem. Bag of Dicks.

I did produce and engineer a lot of punk records in New York in the 80s and 90s. Bands I really liked, people I really liked. I loved making punk records.

I saw guitarist Mick Jones' post-Clash project, Big Audio Dynamite, a few times. Loved them. It was a cool scene—all these white kids from NYC, Long Island and New Jersey, all New Waved out with big hair and shoulder pads, mostly drunk, waiting for BAD to come on at two in the morning after standing through hours of hip hop acts Mick Jones picked out for the warm-up. Cross-cultural pollination.

An embarrassing confession: I didn't listen to London Calling all the way through until I was in my mid-40s!

Bag of Dicks = Me. I was such an idiot. It's utterly fantastic in all ways. Great songs. Great playing. Great production. It morphs and winds its way through styles and influences more than The White Album. There's not a bad song on it. In fact, they're all really good and a bunch are simply great.

Have you listened to London Calling lately?

Have you heard this ever? The Right Profile - the Clash does Vaudeville. Check out the horn sections and the room sound on the gang vocals.

Or this? Koka Kola - Prog/Ska as commentary on the pervasiveness of advertising.

What a frickin' great drummer they had in Topper Headon. A punk Ringo. Supple and creating parts rather than just playing drums. And like Ringo, when he arrived in The Clash, he was the missing piece that made the band magical. He had a drug problem. They had to boot him. The band was never the same. Topper wrote and performed most of the music for Rock the Casbah.

Does it get better than Lost in a Supermarket? Does it get better than these lyrics?

I wasn't born so much as I fell out

Nobody seemed to notice me

We had a hedge back home in the suburbs

Over which I never could see

I heard the people who lived on the ceiling

Scream and fight most scarily

Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling

That's how it's been all around me

I'm all lost in the supermarket

I can no longer shop happily

I came in here for a special offer

A guaranteed personality

This is more revealing than anything by Jackson Browne or any other confessional singer-songwriters. Certainly not typical punk. The Clash was a great rock band first and foremost, punk second. They could really write.

London Calling was recorded at Wessex Studios on a Cadac G series console. These were superb boards. Radiohead cut OK Computer on that same console, by the way. They bought it from Wessex. The link to Wessex studios pops you down on a really interesting site, by the way.

I could go into the recording of London Calling, but I found this article and it's better than anything I can write—it's the engineer, Bill Price, who made the album. Read this. It's full of ideas and things you can apply to your own recordings.

London Calling was produced by The Clash and Guy Stevens.

Guy Stevens... impresario, producer, A&R man, band manager... he caused Procol Harum to come into existence and record Whiter Shade of Pale. He named Mott the Hoople and produced their first albums. Mick Jones was a huge Mott the Hoople fan.

Guy Stevens was passionate and erratic, made worse by alcoholism and hard drugs. But he laid down in the parking lot of Wessex, blocking the head of CBS England from leaving until he agreed to release London Calling as a double album.

Stevens died at 38, overdosing on medication treating his alcoholism.

Joe Strummer, the main lyricist and singer of The Clash, died in 2002. Strummer didn't want to compromise on his political, socialist stance and he basically never did. Jones just wanted to make interesting music. Strummer kicked him out, but Jones was asking for it—Bag of Dicks. The Clash was better for their writing partnership. A few years later the band called it quits. Strummer and Jones mended their friendship quickly, and co-wrote some of Big Audio Dynamite's best songs, like this, V Thirteen. Lyrically, it’s an extension of Lost in the Supermarket. Jones and Strummer are word gods.

The paper drags and folds me down

Like a paper cup, I fly around

I've been eating food that ain't been checked

And the Russian rain is beating down my neck

Screen blackout on the southern war

Cue talk breakdown on point forty-four

There must be a place the preachers say, "I guess"

But a drifter will tell you no place is best

Fabulous guitar on this. I think Mick Jones is an underrated and undercelebrated musical genius.

The bassist of The Clash, Paul Simonon, was a non-musician, recruited because he had a great look, but he was so much more than a face with an attitude. Simonon was a graphic artist: he designed their promotional materials, backdrops, clothes, flyers, their boxed set. That's him smashing the bass on the cover of London Calling.

He learned bass in six months and was heavily influenced by the music around him—he grew up in a Jamaican neighborhood in London. That reggae influence is all over London Calling, and it came from Paul Simonon. I think London Calling is one of the greatest bassline albums anyone has ever made. If you're stuck for a bassline, there's inspiration all over this record. I love Paul Simonon's playing.

London Calling has been on the entire time I've been writing this. Never a dull moment. It makes me want to make records.

A Lesson

We've been talking about passive EQs, now let's talk about active EQs. Soon you'll know everything!

Read the latest lesson on active EQs here.

Have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Warm regards,

Luke