Last night I took on Westway to the World, Don Letts' 2000 documentary on The Clash. Unlike the Townes Van Zandt doc that I watched last week--and am still digesting--this film won't blow you away. Most of the footage is canned material from the band's personal collection, interspersed with snippets from one session's worth of interviews. I suspect you won't discover anything groundbreaking that you didn't already know about the Clash, nor will you come away thinking that the group is some forgotten artistic force in the pantheon of 20th century music.
That being said, if you dig the Clash, Westway will give you a much deeper appreciation for the sound and fury that comprised their "moment" from the late 70's until their breakup in 1983.
Part way through the documentary, Clash manager Bernie Rhodes is describing his attraction to the band's sound, and uses a word that resonates through the rest of the documentary: "Vital." It's dead on. Above everything else, the Clash had a tremendous amount of life. You see it in the concert footage, where--whether the crowd is in a frenzy or not--the center of gravity is always on the stage. This was helped, as bassist Paul Simonon points out, by the fact that none of them knew how to play their instruments very well. Half the fun of being in a band was the opportunity to jump around on stage, and they took advantage. Even in their swan song, as the band was deteriorating during a bruising residency New York in 1982, their music and their presence is so full of sneer and swagger. It's intimidating and inspiring at the same time.
But sure, I thought to myself, that's the punk trope: 4 guys with no money and no skills realize that you can move a crowd by wailing on your instruments, spitting into the crowd, and cursing the man. So what?
There's a few things beyond that going on with the Clash, though, and even though they take credit for none of it (that wouldn't be very punk of them, after all), the evidence is all on display Westway. First of all is ambition. Without sacrificing their credibility as a "ga-rage band," from the moment the Clash began gaining momentum with Joe Strummer's addition in 1977, they had direction. You can hear it in the way Strummer talks about their record deal, which unexpectedly put them on the hook for 10 albums. Rather than hand-wringing over the question of selling out, Strummer and Simonon immediately looked beyond England to figure out how they were going to use the opportunity to "go global."
None of this is to dispute the Clash's very serious, radical socialist politics. However, not many punk bands would cop to such pretension, and it's indicative of a second aspect to the Clash that went deeper than their "Stalinist" identity: musicality. Don't get me wrong, the Clash were just as technically bad as advertised when they formed, and their contributions did not exactly move musicianship forward to some glorious aesthete. But what the Clash excelled at was creating a definitive sound, which is all the more impressive given their individual musical handicaps. Mick Jones, who learned guitar by playing along with punk and reggae records in his room, ends up being the master arranger for the band, according to Joe Strummer. Paul Simonon, who joined the band with the express purpose of acting like Pete Townshend on stage, says he forced himself to write "Guns of Brixton" because he realized that you didn't make money in a band unless you could write. Finally, it's impossible to ignore Joe Strummer's own emphasis on the drumming of Topper Headon, who was so technically skilled that he allowed the band to explore different forms of music at will. That's where Strummer (and Jones) come in--synthesizing 1970's West Indian Reggae with blue collar British Punk; fat-chord American punk a la the Ramones with emerging hip hop--writing and arranging songs that sound like nothing really before or since.
The documentary also gives due credit to Guy Stevens, who produced the Clash masterpiece London Calling. As any good producer must do, he succeeded in eliciting and amplifying the band's emotions and personalities in the studio. The result is undeniably good--London Calling is, for me anyway, the White album of punk rock. So many styles, so much range, and the band's confidence (skill or no skill) bleeds through every song from the title track to the punk-ballad standard "Train in Vain." Strummer admits that the album represents the band's "finest hour." Their rise from a group of derelicts to really (for lack of a better word) professional musicians by 1979 is stunning.It's equally jarring, then, to see the group fall apart by 1983. The documentary recounts all the reasons--overtouring, drug addiction, internecine hatred [Jones and Simonon would only communicate through Strummer]--but the end was somewhat anticlimactic. After a bitter show in 1983, the band simply made a decision to call it quits. A few of the members wonder on camera how things might have played out if they stayed together, but the implicit answer is that it doesn't matter. The Clash embodied the dilemma at the heart of the term "punk rock": they pulled themselves up from nothing, proving that the D.I.Y. punk ethic didn't have to limit a band, but could actually shape the development of something musically ambitious. Their rock n' roll was vital, but ultimately it was about just living for a moment. When challenged, the moment fell apart, and so did the band.
They left it all on stage. And what's more punk rock than that?
**Note: Much of the documentary is on youtube, but rather than give the links to a pirated version (of which I'm sure the Clash would approve), I've embedded some links to relevant clips.
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