Retroactive Turkey Shoot: The Clash, Combat Rock

This ridiculously overrated, incoherent, pretentious, messy shitplatter is the type of album that seems "progressive," "innovative" and "interesting" at the time of its release and then ages in a completely unflattering manner over time. It is one of the most dated albums I've heard come from a widely-respected rock band.

There were, of course, extenuating circumstances. Drugs at this point were plaguing the band, particularly Mick Jones and Topper Headon, and there was a fungus of the type known as "artisticus differentius" growing on the rotting tree that (in this inconceivably tortured analogy) represented the future of the band. Joe Strummer wanted to move back to basic chunka-chunk punk rock, while Mick Jones wanted to move the band even further out on the White Dub/Worldbeat/Hip-Hop/Bohemian Pot Riddim Bloop-a-Lot musical direction that Sandinista! had previously explored for three straight albums' worth. Originally, Combat Schlock was planned as a double album with the provisional title Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg. This was in keeping with the Clash's ideas in that it was really fucking pretentious and a military reference.

Many of the songs were in much lengthier versions than the ones that eventually appeared on the LP. (The master takes of "Sean Flynn" and "Straight To Hell" are apparently both in the seven-minute range unedited, and there were about four other lengthy songs cut.) With Mick Jones installed in the producer's chair, what could go wrong?

In the slightly modified words of that great philosopher, Alfred E. Neuman: "What, them worry?"

No one except Jones liked the versions of the songs he came up with. They thought the recordings meandered too much. Keep in mind - this is the band that put out Sandinista! a year or two before. You know you're in trouble if this drugged-out pretentious buncha fools thinks that it lacks focus. So they dragged in classic rock engineer supremo Glyn Johns (so much for punk, but - of course - the Clash hadn't been punk since the first album), and had him edit it down into a single 45-minute LP. Jones didn't take to this very well, thus kicking off the long-overdue demise of a band that gets regularly and mindlessly deep-throated by the Rocque Critical Establishment way too often.

Just in case you didn't get it yet, the idea of a double album this clueless makes me shiver. No other widely revered punk band lost the plot quite as hard as the Clash did, and this album is Proof Positive that the Clash, at this point, needed to break up. (Actually, they probably should have broken up after London Calling, but that's a different story.)

Don't come here expecting punk. I certainly didn't, and I'm glad I didn't, because I can't imagine how nonplussed I would've been if I had. I went into this expecting it to be a nutty, scattershot cauldron of ideas and stylistic attempts, but I was expecting a messy, but fascinating album that had interesting polyrhythmic grooves that supported well-thought-out, intuitive musical ideas that somehow coalesced into classic songs. There are albums that are wonderful, in part, because they are messy. And I was hoping this album would be one of those albums. But this album is simply haphazard, and only one song on this album fulfills that promise of Crazy Polyrhythmic Grooves Turning Into Classic Songs.

"Know Your Rights" is, I guess, supposed to be some kind of attempt at a punk song...but the Clash hadn't played or written an honest-to-goodness punk song in, what, four or five years by this point? ("London Calling" was the last one, as far as I can tell.) It's awful, cliched garbage without a riff. The other two honest-to-goodness rock songs here are a dumbass "Louie Louie" ripoff everyone likes for whatever reason ("Should I Stay or Should I Go"), and a catchy if quite dated song enhanced with amazing piano playing (you oughta know this one). Who let off the cell phone in the middle of "Rock The Casbah," though?

The other songs are a crapshoot. Some songs sound like an attempt to fuse the blip-blop Cockney-Ganja-Mon pseudo-reggae and funk styles that they'd developed on "Sandinista!" with more accessible melodies ("Car Jamming," "Atom Tan," "Inoculated City," "Overpowered By Funk"), but every one of those songs are either underwritten or dated. "Car Jamming" is just a bad song, full stop. "Overpowered By Funk" has a very complex groove, but the white-as-computer-paper doofus trying to rap over it needs to get his mouth taped shut. "Atom Tan" and "Inoculated City" are both okay - at least they aren't really actively offensive - but they're nothing really memorable either. Other songs are much more overtly experimental, pretentious, and just plain bad. What the hell is "Red Angel Dragnet" even trying to convey? Who thought that letting Paul Simonon run off at the mouth about idiotic bullshit while letting another asshole quote "Taxi Driver" at random over incompetent, retarded attempts at New Wave was a good idea? "Ghetto Defendant" and "Death Is a Star" are both unfocused, pointless crap, the former disgraced with an awful Allen Ginsberg recitation, the latter sounding like a dumb, half-sung poetry reading spliced with random attempts at jazz. You will also be pleased to discover that none of these wastes of tape have anything close to memorable melodies, structures or lyrics.

Weirdly, I actually quite like the song that everyone seems to dump on: "Sean Flynn." For once, the groove actually supports the vocal and the out-there instrumentation and echo unit abuse actually feel like good ideas. It doesn't have anything close to a melody or structure, but it is actually pretty evocative.

If you have to have one reason to get this record - and you really shouldn't - "Straight To Hell" is it. This song is probably one of the ten best songs the band ever recorded - hell, maybe one of the five best. Considering that, at the end of the day, this is still the Clash we're talking about - who wrote "Janie Jones" and the most brilliant song about liberal ego-stroking ever recorded, "White Man In Hammersmith Palais" - that's not too shabby an accomplishment. (Seriously, "White Man In Hammersmith Palais" is about Joe Strummer being proud that he was the only white guy at a reggae concert in Britain. How is that not a ridiculously arrogant statement of cooler-than-thou self-importance? The genius of the song is that he manages to make you think it's about the political apathy of late-'70's punks in the UK.)

Let me put it this way: if the rest of the album was at the level of "Straight To Hell," I would have considered calling this the best album the Clash ever did. Since nothing else on here comes within a thousand miles of the quality exhibited on this song, I can't. This song, though, is flooring. The lyrics are wrenching: the song is about, alternately, immigrants getting laid off, and illegitimate abandoned babies that American soldiers fathered in Vietnam. The lyrics connect both types of abandonment in an astonishingly sensitive and insightful manner.

And the musical background is like nothing else in the Clash's discography: Headon and Simonon lay down an extremely complex and polyrhythmic, but somehow catchy groove that's like nothing I've ever heard before (and on its own makes a case for Topper Headon being one of the best rock drummers to ever pick up sticks: how does he play that drumbeat?). A violin that sounds like it's been reversed alternately screeches and lilts out a downbeat, depressive, but lovely melody that establishes itself as one of the best the band ever came up with. Strummer's vocals are absolutely key: his singing is restrained, beautiful, and incredibly sad. Perhaps most impressively, the track somehow manages not to be preachy. (The best moment: When Strummer sings, "And Mama-san says," and the entire song seemingly starts over again.)

This is an awful album, but the band did manage to hit it absolutely out of the park once. Get "Straight To Hell," and maybe "Sean Flynn" and "Rock The Casbah" if you're really curious, and leave the rest to the trash can.

Final Verdict: More like "Rock The Gasbag." This album is a wet fart.