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"Show Me Love"
In Sweden, this little film about lesbian teenagers was as big as "Titanic."
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[10/19/99]

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Melodramatic and ill-conceived, "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" is so bad, it's a crime.
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[10/18/99]

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Bryan Ferry retreats from the ignominy of contemporary pop with a set of smoky standards.
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The late-'90s crisis of masculinity has arrived in pop culture with a vengeance.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[10/15/99]

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Yet on the Clash's new live album, the grandly titled "From Here to Eternity," the one track recorded at that concert doesn’t sound like the bell tolling on punk’s English dream. While the band plays "Career Opportunities," a biting proletarian gripe from its first album, a shade slower (and longer), it’s otherwise true to the studio original, down to the crappy mix and uncoordinated Joe Strummer-Mick Jones joint vocals. Other songs from a Boston theater date a scant month earlier on that same tour are cut from the same loudly flapping but sturdy cloth. In fact, the entire 17-song collection, which documents a four-year stretch beginning in early '78, sounds like it could have been come from one set. The album's diversity -- the reggae lope of "Armagideon Time," a cover starring nasal toaster Mikey Dread; the blue-beat guilt trip of "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais"; the somber moodiness of "Straight to Hell"; the urban guerrilla-riddim rumble of "Guns of Brixton"; the racing New York rhythm rock of "Magnificent Seven" (with vocal audience participation) -- is due less to any growth in the band's concert ambitions but from the original records, artifacts that are now so far removed from Limp Bizkit land that the Clash fighting the law (... but the law won) in 1978 might as well be the Bobby Fuller Four doing the song in 1966.

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When the Clash crossed the Atlantic and first revealed themselves to obsessed Americans in early 1979, the Londoners welcomed themselves with the defensive disdain of "I'm So Bored With the U.S.A." and then a musical barrage of furiously wound energy and death-or-glory conviction. (Which might actually have been abject post-colonial nerves sublimated into cocky aggression.) Back at New York's Palladium later that same year, they brought along keyboardist Mickey Gallagher, enough guitars to outfit Cheap Trick and a not-entirely salutary measure of confidence as seasoned stage hands and burgeoning rock stars.

In early '80, the Clash paid a final call on the Palladium, a rock shrine that is currently a hole that will soon house New York University students. The band's instinct for onstage anarchy battled to a draw with its self-imposed challenge of "London Calling," an expanding nova of an album whose restraint, variety and subtlety broke punk's clutches without renouncing it. With the solipsistic intimacy New Yorkers grow to expect, the cover photo, of Paul Simonon wielding a bass with seconds to live, had been shot at the venue on the group's second visit there.

What had first excited me about the Clash was also a photo, this one printed in the New Musical Express (or maybe it was Melody Maker) of Joe Strummer, clinging to a mike stand (as he often did) on his knees. The singer's head was whipping around so that his mouth was trailing a few centimeters in a contortion that reeked of pure rock release. Or so I imagine remembering clearly. The yellowed newsprint is somewhere in a box in my closet, and that’s where it’s gonna stay. Whatever the particulars, that moment in late '76 made an impression, attaching a sense of excitement to the word "Clash" that was better than any of the other 999 the photo might have conjured up. In 1991, Legacy Records was preparing to reissue the only Clash long-player not already on CD: "Black Market Clash," an artistically strong 10-inch oddity of rarities and studio leftovers from 1980. The modest project quickly blossomed into a full-blown box set, fraught with all the complications possible to the estranged, quarrelsome and jealous remnants of a non-functioning band possessing such a favorable contract that no compilation of any sort could be released without their unanimous permission. Which was, needless to say, difficult to obtain. Active vendettas continued, dormant prejudices resurfaced and greedy debates erupted over the inclusion of each songwriter's compositions.

The more the band (minus alternating drummers Nicky "Topper" Headon and Terry Chimes, both of whom had been kicked out of the band at one time or another and neither of whom seemed to have a say) got involved, the weirder and worse things got. Plans sent to them came back rearranged and broken, like fragile toys loaned to hyperactive children, or an innocent nymph sent out to play by the river with Frankenstein's monster. The two who were managed by one's former girlfriend had, years earlier, with the Iago-like encouragement of their highly dubious manager, sacked the third, a disastrous rift that had leveled the band, leaving a now-all-but-forgotten cultural hangover.

At one point, the corporate junta to which I was serving as an unpaid advisor against the promise of getting to write the liner notes plotted four discs (under the dubious title "Scrawl on the Wall" -- I was pushing for "Garageland," but no one wanted to know) with live tracks from the Clash's calamitous summer-of-'81 stand at Bond's, a former clothing store in Times Square. Three tracks here are from those shows: "Complete Control," "Guns of Brixton" and Jones' smartly rendered "Train in Vain."

Sensing the rare opportunity of having its hated major label over a barrel, Strummer, Jones and Simonon attacked like vultures. They nixed the box's live component and instead proposed that it be released as a separate live album the following year. The band's dreadlocked Super 8 pal Don Letts had filmed the Bond's shows for a documentary that was going to be called -- accurately as well as ironically -- "The Clash on Broadway." So putting seven and seven together to get 22, the Clash -- in their infinitely twisted determinism -- decreed that "The Clash on Broadway" would suit a three-CD retrospective of their studio work. It didn't, and left more than a few wondering what the title had to do with anything. (Letts' film is finished and about to be released as the career history "Westway to the World.")

Next page | The Clash were all mouth and no trousers