The shouting

Word was out how Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen, at the latest Grammy awards, paid tribute to the pioneering punk rock band, the Clash with a rendition of London Calling, the title cut of the band’s third album, a double record set in those days.

Costello and his band, the Attractions, as well as the Clash are recent inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor well-deserved. Springsteen too is a shoo-in to join that august company, if he isn’t in already.

Time was when the Clash and their contemporaries, the Sex Pistols, ruled the bustling British punk rock scene from the late ’70s to the early ’80s. The Pistols were easily the rowdier bunch, kicking out the jams and spawning mayhem and anarchy with their concerts that resembled impromptu riots. No one cared if they actually knew how to play.

Nevertheless, the Pistols’ debut, Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was hailed as a classic, and Rolling Stone magazine said that hair would grow in palms if one didn’t listen to it soon enough. A Pistols version of the Sinatra and videoke hit, My Way, could offer a clue why the song has been described as something of a serial killer in places where it’s sung.

The Clash were more sober but no less dangerous, and to top it off they were better musicians. This did not mean that they were lacking in energy. For the most part, though, they were able to imbue the punk scene with a cerebral dimension, particularly their later work such as the triple set, Sandinista!

But the Clash’s first three albums up to London Calling were representative of the turmoil of the times. The songs then hit like a shot in the arm, as they most likely still do now: I Fought the Law, London’s Burning, Police and Thieves, Jail Guitar Doors, White Riot, Four Horsemen all contained visions of a protracted apocalypse, and with it perhaps a subliminal admission that if rock couldn’t save the world, it might at least rally the doomed not to go down without a fight.

A later song, Rock the Casbah from Combat Rock, showed the band still busting the amplifiers before finally breaking up some months down the road.

For soon enough the Clash, while not exactly calling it quits, had in fact split into two separate bands – vocalist Joe Strummer who stayed with the mother band, and guitarist Mick Jones who formed Big Audio Dynamite.

There were signs that they were headed for fission, if not outright diffusion. How else explain the three-record, Sandinista!, aside from their leftist inclinations that influenced younger bands from Rage Against the Machine to our very own Betrayed and much later, Yano, except that the musical ideas and experimentations and related intrapolations were too many to contain in a single CD.

That triple album had a lot of excellent stuff as well as throwaway fillers, extended reggae jams and gospel chants and similar dubs that could not be found in any sonograph.

There were hints of new directions in the earlier Lost in the Supermarket, that could easily have been reworked into a song like Somebody Got Murdered. It was understandable that the band lost a vital mass of their original punk fan base, but musicians have to stretch out in a rope-a-dope style a la the reggae dub Junco Partner.

So when Springsteen and Costello did that London Calling duet, it was not so much a tribute to the Clash as it was renewing a chapter in the history of human relations at the brink of a war anyone in his or her right mind would be against.

You can still hear strains of the Clash too in the first classic Yano album, when Dong Abay and Eric Gancio wrote the songs and Onie Badiang scaled the fretboard of his bass guitar.

Once in a little while there might be a Clash CD in the inevitable record bin going at –as they call it now –a nice price, full of visions of a contrived apocalypse well before its scheduled arrival.

Who might have Strummer, Jones, Topper Headon and Paul Simonon have been referring to when they hammered out Four Horsemen? Nothing, not much left anymore but the shouting.