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#1134: The Clash – Rock the Casbah

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The Clash, The Clash, The Clash. Now, I appreciate the band and their influence and I understand why people would be a huge, huge fans of their music. I did revisit the London Calling album some months ago and did think that it was where Pete Doherty and Carl Barât got their whole shtick from for their Libertines stuff. Seemed so obvious while listening through it. But for me, The Clash are a group that I’ve never caught the fever over to start worshipping them. They do have some great songs, though. In fact, here’s one right now. ‘Rock the Casbah’. At least, in my opinion, it is. As one of the band’s most well-known singles, some may think it’s overplayed and they’ve heard it too much. I’m not one of those people.

Unlike the majority of Clash songs where songwriting duo Joe Strummer and Mick Jones would create the music and then continue to develop the songs with the rest of the band, ‘Rock the Casbah’ was brought into the studio almost completely finished by drummer Topper Headon. He had a piano idea in mind for some time. When one day he came into the studio and found no one there, he recorded the drums, bass guitar and piano. Strummer, Jones and regular bassist Paul Simonon came in and were impressed with what Headon had got down. After not-so-subtly rejecting Headon’s original lyrics for the track, Strummer wrote his own – detailing an ongoing situation where a king calls a ban on Western music, much to his people’s annoyance. They go ahead and play it anyway, because they just don’t care. We’re meant to imagine that this is all happening in the Middle East somewhere, most likely Iran, hence the mentions of ‘ragas’, ‘minarets’ the ‘Sharif’ and so on and so forth.

I think it was after seeing the video a few times on MTV2, or some other music video channel, that I thought the song was cool enough to add to the personal library. Upon finding out how the song was made, I always thought it was wrong how the bass guitar was mixed so low in the version that ended up on Combat Rock. Luckily, the mix used when it was reissued some years later (and in the music video above) altered that choice and pushed it forward. How Strummer sings “The Sheikh he drive his CADILLAAAC” makes me chuckle. He really hacks out the “cadillac”. You can hear a digital wristwatch alarm at one point during the track. I don’t have much else to day. I enjoy this one a lot. A shame that Topper Headon wasn’t able to enjoy the success the song he made got. He left the band before the song was released because of a slight addiction to heroin and had to witness the music video the band filmed without him with another drummer in his place.

#1133: Blink-182 – The Rock Show

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I’ve never listened to Blink-182’s 2001 album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket in full. I don’t think I’m missing out on anything if I never did. But I may be being a bit too harsh. I’m sure it has its fans, but the album being sandwiched in between what are considered to be the band’s best works with Enema of the State in ’99 and the self-titled/untitled album arriving in 2003 has built up this preconceived idea in my head that the whole record probably wouldn’t be as good. ‘Happy Holidays, You Bastard’ is a regular at the Christmas parties I have with friends. I’m pretty indifferent to it. And I’ll be one to say that ‘Anthem’ is way better than ‘Anthem Part Two’. So we’re off to a good start.

‘The Rock Show’ is a song that can be found on the album, however, and is one that’s been around in my life for a long, long time. Maybe even since 2001. I have a memory of watching the video on TV, even before I was consciously looking for music of its type. It was probably on The Box or something. My sister laughed at the scene where Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus buy a box of doves from a store and free them from their captivity. It wasn’t until years later, after finding out who Blink-182 actually were and getting into their music, that they were the group who made that song about falling in love with the girl at the rock show. The track, mainly written by bassist Mark Hoppus but credited to the entire band, was released as Take Off’s… first single.

The track is a tale of young love. Very pop-punk oriented. A boy meets a girl on the Warped Tour, they’re both into each other, they tell their parents they going to move Las Vegas… and by the song’s bridge it seems that some time’s passed and the relationship has ended, but it doesn’t stop the narrator remembering those good times as he stares at her picture on the wall and waits for a phone call that never arrives. I never realised that there was a line that was a nod to Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’, but it’s there, that’s quite neat, actually. It’s a tight performance by Hoppus, DeLonge and Travis Barker, energetic and very cathartic with those cymbal crashes on the “Fell in love/She said what/She’s so cool” moments in the choruses. The whole track just seems like a brief snapshot in time when things in America seemed to be carefree before another event in 2001 happened and messed everything up.

#1132: The Who – The Rock

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And here we are again. Another last song from an album that’ll be written about on here, but certainly not the last you’ll see from the band. Out of the 17 songs from The Who’s Quadrophenia, I’ve talked about ten of them, with ‘The Rock’ bringing it to a total of 11. Without looking back in those posts, I’m sure that I’ve mentioned in nearly all of them how the album is my favourite of the band’s. And I guess through that sentence, I’ve done it again. But it really is fantastic though. Was a teenager myself when I first heard it, and even though the story revolves around a character whose scene was very much of its time and place, the thoughts and feelings expressed in the lyrics are pretty much universal. Plus, the music’s top-notch. ‘The Rock’ arrives as the album’s penultimate track and the second instrumental song on there after the title track which appears earlier.

I prefer ‘The Rock’ to the ‘Quadrophenia’ song and always have done. They do almost mirror each other in terms of their structure, but the former comes at a climactic point in the album’s story, and as a result the music was made to be that little more intense. It’s here that the album’s protagonist Jimmy steals a boat and uses it to sail to a rock overlooking the sea, which is the rock referred to in the title, acting as the transitional piece between him having an almighty drug-fuelled rampage in ‘Doctor Jimmy’ and screaming for salvation in the album’s final track. Utilising the four musical themes established in the album that represent the individual members of the band, the instrumental is split into four/five sections. I’m telling you, it’s better to listen to than to read about, so maybe I won’t go through them all. Leave it to you to discover.

The best one however is clearly the ‘Helpless Dancer’ section that begins at 2:45, with Townshend’s guitar mirroring the vocal melody of that song while Keith Moon thrashes some serious thundering drum rolls on top. The vocoder-affected ‘Love Reign o’er Me’ refrain that pops in near the end is quite neat too. The track finishes with an explosive crash and the sound of thunder and rain, leading perfectly into the record’s closer. What amazed me, when the deluxe edition of the album was reissued in 2011, was finding out that the final version of the track was essentially ripped straight from Pete Townshend’s demo recording of it with John Entwistle and Keith Moon adding their respective bass guitar and drums on top. I don’t know, it just floored me. Goes to show that Townshend really was on something during the making of the record. And to think it’s not in the 1001 Albums You Must Hear book I have. Doesn’t make any sense to me.

#1125: Ween – Right to the ways and the rules of the world

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Maybe the best way to listen to The Pod is through the way its broken up on its vinyl releases. Split up into four sides, having the time to digest one of those at a time with some breaks in between would probably allow a new listener to at least digest the 15-20 minutes that each side of vinyl provides. I didn’t do this. When I was fully on my Ween exploration in 2015, I dove headfirst into the album on Spotify and listened to it the whole way through. All 76 minutes. That first time was a slog. I don’t know if you know, but the album is known for having extremely shitty production, even though a lot of the songs are classics. At least to us Ween fans, anyway. ‘Right to the ways and the rules of the world’ is only the seventh track on there. On that first listen, it felt like I’d been listening to the album for much longer than when the song arrived. And it also felt like it went on for a lot more than the mere five minutes it lasts for.

Now of course I’m used to it all. The track is a slow, slow one though. Coming after the little non-song of ‘Pollo Asado’ (a very popular one for Ween people), ‘Right…’ is what I believe to be a mimic of those old, melodramatic ’70s progressive rock songs by bands who would write about things like folklore or traditions of the past… myths and legends and the like. Gene and Dean Ween take on this melodramatic route, singing about nothing but a bunch of silliness – brilliant imagery though, gotta be said – all of which is crowned by the aloof harmonies that recite the song’s title phrase. “Monsters that trinkle like cats in the night/The cosmic conceiver continues his plight.” Those are just the first couple of lines.

The screeching organ that blares throughout is the melodic linchpin throughout the song, really hammering home that sort of medieval type of sound that I think the song’s going for. Something of a vocal chameleon, Gene Ween puts in another captivating performance. Increasing in intensity throughout, it culminates in the final verse where he lets out a shriek and then falls into a fit of laughter as the instrumental continues. Some people may argue that the song takes some momentum out of the album’s proceedings. Whatever “momentum” that may be, going through this album can feel like being in a state of purgatory sometimes. It’s just as essential as any other track on there, I feel. The production is so murky, you could almost choke on it. But the song at the core of it stands strong.

#1120: Supergrass – The Return of…

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It’s been a long while since I’ve written about a song from Supergrass’s Diamond Hoo Ha. In fact, the two songs I wrote about from that album, I don’t even like that much anymore. Been that way for a while. Supergrass are one of my favourite bands, hands-down, no question, though I have to say that the record – their final release before initially splitting up – is my least favourite of theirs. The songs aren’t bad, but they pale in comparison to almost everything the band provided in the years before. There’s something about its production that’s always never felt right to me. To a lesser extent, it just reminds me that we’ll never get another full-length release by the band again.

All right, so I may have said the songs “pale” just a few sentences ago. But there is one that shines amongst them. The track is ‘The Return of…’, the sixth song on there, closing out Hoo Ha’s first half, and I’ll state sincerely that it may be one of the best in Supergrass’s entire catalogue. This was my third most-played song on Spotify last year. I don’t know why the realization of its greatness happened so many years on, because I owned a physical copy of the album from its year of release. Sixteen years ago. Its “return of inspiration” chorus was one that had remained in my head for some time. But it may have only been a couple of years ago where I was sitting down, listened to the whole song with some good headphones, and thought, “Wow. This song is actually really good. What the hell?”

A production trick I do appreciate on here is how particular elements of the track are separated into the two channels. In the left ear, you have the drums and the rhythm guitar. In the right, you have the lead guitar playing the main riff. In the middle is Gaz Coombes’s vocals, the bass guitar and keyboards. So with whichever earbud/headphone you’re listening to the track with, you can get two separate experiences. That’s cool. In terms of mood and lyrics, the track’s a cheery, optimistic number. The narrator here is a nothing-can-get-me-down type of person, who’s never phased by unpleasant news in the papers or on the TV, by the unpleasant people they encounter, or even when they sustain an injury caused by falling down the stairs. An enchanting, dreamy chorus ties the verses altogether and it features a screeching saxophone solo in the brought-down instrumental break, which goes all crazy once Coombes starts singing again. It’s all fantastic. I should have known this for at least 15 years. But better late than never.