Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of The Clash
“Stealing All Transmissions is a love story. It’s the story of how The Clash fell in love with America, and how America loved them back.” Check out this excerpt from the punk history by Randal Doane.
Excerpt taken from
Prelude: Paul Simonon Wields a Mighty Ax
With her Pentax camera in hand, Pennie Smith stepped onto the left wing of the stage of the Palladium, just behind the curtain, and waited for The Clash to return for their encore. It was September 21, 1979, the second of a two-night stint for The Clash in New York City. WNEW-FM, the album-oriented rock station that had recently found felicity in punk and new wave, supplied a live simulcast for the tri-state region. On the opposite stage wing, Richard Neer, the on-air host, gushed, “If you’ve never seen The Clash it’s an experience, I’ll tell you that. I was out front for a bit and it’s so loud. I’m used to loud music but it is loud to the point of real distortion, and the people are just totally enveloped in the music. . . . They’re dancing, they’re jumping up and down and they are just totally into it!” Back onstage, The Clash offered the audience a respite from their collective fury with “Armagideon Time,” a 1978 reggae tune by Willi Williams. “Armagideon” was a new addition to the band’s live repertoire and, with its walking bass line and adagio pacing, it confirmed over a leisurely five minutes that The Clash were not prisoners to the sonic parameters of punk.
Following “Armagideon,” lead guitarist and vocalist Mick Jones shouted “1-2-3-4!” and the band launched into the snarling “Career Opportunities.” Without pause, The Clash blasted through “What’s My Name” and the incendiary “White Riot.” Over the last few bars, lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Joe Strummer offered a final, exhausted, melismatic “whi-ite rii-ot,” as bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon thumped ahead to the cadence. “White Riot” was a band favorite for closing encores, as it stoked the frenzy of a crowd delighted by The Clash and agitated by everything else. The three songs were done in five short minutes.
On this night, The Clash were aware that they stood at the crossroads of rock history. The band had just laid down the final tracks for London Calling, a double album they had put together largely on their own. Brimming with confidence, The Clash drew on their advance to finance the tour, despite the fact that Give ’Em Enough Rope, their second album, had failed to crack the U.S. Billboard Top 100. The Clash were nearly $100,000 in arrears and in a week would run out of money.
Still, the Epic promoter who deemed The Clash “the only band that matters” appeared to be onto something. Their chief UK rivals, The Sex Pistols, broke up in January 1978, on the last night of a nearly aborted tour of the United States. Sid Vicious, the twenty-one-year-old bass player for the Pistols, died in February 1979, on the first night of his latest parole, of a heroin overdose. The live-fast, die-young ethos had its adherents among the rock elite, too—those who, given enough rope, would hang themselves. Keith Moon of The Who, in September 1978, suffered a fatal overdose of Heminevrin, the sedative prescribed to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Within the year, Bob Dylan would enter a born-again stupor, and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin would enter a vodka-induced stupor and never awaken.
As Strummer, Jones, and Headon left the stage, a young woman dashed across front-stage right, with a bouncer in close pursuit. Simonon, alone, remained onstage and stepped toward the stage left exit. After two weeks on the road with The Clash, Smith told me, “I was shooting very little live stuff. . . . It was only when Paul started looking really fed up that I thought something peculiar might be about to happen.” On this tour, Simonon had been using a variety of basses, “cheap Fenders from CBS,” he recalled, but that night he played an older Fender Precision, which retailed for $350. Simonon turned to his left, spread his feet wide, and gripped his Fender by the neck. Smith stepped forward from the wing and pressed her eye to the viewfinder. “I was very close to him, using a wide-angle lens,” she said. “He was almost three feet away and heading in my direction, so I was backing off.” Simonon lifted the Fender past his left ear, folded his frame at the waist, and drove the instrument like an ax toward the floor. As it arced toward her, Smith stepped backward, clicked, advanced the film, clicked twice again, and dove out of the way.
Clash fans at the Palladium had little idea how prescient it was for The Clash to close with “White Riot” and a bass-smashing coda—for upon their return to New York City, in May 1981, The Clash would inspire a riot of their own. The thousands of Clash fans who caught the shows at the Palladium in 1979, and the thousands more who descended upon Times Square for their residency at Bond International Casino, came together as a result of the determination of punk aficionados on the airwaves and in print in New York City.
Thirty-five years hence, it’s evident that The Clash—more so than other bands of that moment—were aided en route to pop stardom by free-form FM radio and long-form rock journalism: two media mechanisms that would, in the ensuing years, follow the eight-track cartridge, the seven-inch single, and the televised teen-dance show into the dustbin of rock history. The agents behind these forces helped construct the initial audience for The Clash and, in turn, helped ensure their success—and the success of dozens of other post-punk and new wave bands—through the 1980s. Beginning in 1976, select deejays and rock journalists championed punk and new wave bands and, with punk bravado, sought to consummate a desire articulated by Strummer himself: “All we want to achieve is an atmosphere where things can happen. We want to keep the spirit of the free world. We want to keep out that safe, soapy slush that comes out of the radio.” Amid the skirmishes between deejays and management, the former held sway, if only temporarily, to help The Clash secure a shot at superstardom.
Be sure to pick up a copy of Stealing All Transmissions to read the rest!
Featured Image: Simonon to Headon: “Feck off! Play the tempo!” On occasion, Headon
would play songs at double time, simply to get a rise out of Simonon.
At the Palladium, March 1980 (© Joe Streno, go2jo.com).
