The Clash: Combat Rock

The Clash: Combat Rock

1982

CBS/Epic

Format I Own it on: Vinyl and Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Know Your Rights  2. Car Jamming  3. Should I Stay or Should I Go?  4. Rock the Casbah  5.Red Angel Dragnet  6. Straight to Hell  7. Overpowered by Funk  8. Atom Tan  9. Sean Flynn  10. Ghetto Defendant  11. Inoculated City  12. Death Is a Star



Yes! I finally get to copy and paste myself! I actually touched on "Combat Rock" a coupla weeks ago... I'll re-post what I said there, real quick:

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"I guess technically an old 8-Track of  "Combat Rock" would have been my first punk album, but I wasn't really aware it was supposed to be punk...To me, "Rock the Casbah" wasn't part of some anarchic musical upheaval, it was simply the song that came on the radio after 'Hungry Like the Wolf.'" 

 Yea, this album was huge when I was a kid..."Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go" where all over the radio in '82...I can remember not quite grasping what was being said on "Rock the Casbah" but singing along anyway...That's pop...But the 8-track came and went and to be honest I just kind of forgot about it...You hear the singles a lot on the radio now, but there was a good decade there after its release that radio didn't play them...Not in my neck of the woods anyway (my neck of the woods being more of an armpit...).



But yea, I was later getting into punk and had read that the Clash was like, an awesome punk band or something, and bought a copy of "Combat Rock" at the K-Mart in West Branch...

(Note: This is not the K-Mart in West Branch.....But it looks sufficiently 70's-like...)

Imagine my surprise when I got home, tossed it into my high-tech CD player and heard the opening riff of "Know Your Rights"..."Oh yea! It's this album," I shouted while violently spanking my monkey...

To this day I still love "Combat Rock" to death...Sometimes I listen to it and it seems like a tight pop record, and others times I listen to it and it seems extremely experimental...I finally fully understood this dichotomy  when I listened to "Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg," which is the original double-album version of "Combat Rock."

Apparently, "Combat Rock" was originally intended to be another boundary-pushing multi-disc affair, micked by Mix Jones, err...Mixed by Mick Jones, but the rest of the band wasn't thrilled with his extended, effects-heavy versions, so they shipped it off to Glyn Johns, where half the tacks were cut and those that survived the judicious culling were edited down to more-manageable lengths...

If you guys haven't checked out "Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg," I can't recommend it enough if you're a Clash fan...You can find it easy enough online or on youtube. Quite a few of the outtakes ended up as B-sides, and a couple released for the first time on this years "Soundsystem" boxset...


I always figured that, judging from the previously released outtakes ("Cool Confusion," and "First Night Back in London") that they must have cut only the most non-commercial material, but they actually axed a couple of pop songs, like...

 "Kill Time"...

...and "Beautiful People Are Ugly Too."

So it's not quite accurate to say that they were strictly going for a commercial album, since they had the option to make "Combat Rock" even poppier...And as much as I long for an official version of "Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg," I have to say they made all the right choices...There's really no other album like "Combat Rock," that I can think of...I can only explain it as poetic world-punk...Listening to this, I just can't process the fact that there's only five years separating "White Riot" and "Sean Flynn." I mean,  check out "Straight to Hell," it's absolutely amazing...and Joe is at his lyrical peak...One of the few albums out there where you could just read the lyric sheet without ever once listening to the songs and still be blown away...

So sad this is their final album, unless you count "Cut the Crap," which the group apparently doesn't, but we'll get to that tomorrow...I wonder what the album after this would have sounded like if the band hadn't splintered apart? Would they have gone for a quadruple cassette that only cost as much as a cassingle? How would the Clash have handled grunge?  How would the Clash survive the disembodied brain that invaded Earth in the year 2025?

 Who knows? But it's safe to say that they went out on top...That's right, I said it..."Combat Rock" is tops in my book! Oh yea, I should probably mention that there were two different versions of this album...

 The original pressing  had a red and black label and had an extended version of "Inoculated City" that included a "2000 Flushes" commercial, that ran 2:43...

 My copy has the more common blue/black Epic label and even though it says "Inoculated City" is 2:43, it actually has the commercial edited out and the running time is only 2:11...The unedited version is rare, and the extended version has only recently reappeared on the 2000 CD reissue...You can usually tell it's a 2000 reissue if it doesn't have that big ol' "Nice Price" sticker on it...Lol...RFMLOALOAL...

So let's listen to the unedited Inoculated City"...Enjoy.,..