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The Clash: Albums
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The Clash were a major success in the UK from the release of their first album in 1977 named 'The Clash', and became popular in the U.S. in 1980. Their third album, the late 1979 release London Calling is an influential album in the history of rock and alternative music; it was released in the U.S. in January 1980, and a decade later Rolling Stone magazine declared it the best album of the 1980s. Rolling Stone ... placed it at #8, The Clash at #77, and Sandinista! at #404 on their 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
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The Clash recorded Sandinista! in New York, producing it themselves. The triple-LP package was a deliberately anticommercial gesture. It sold for less than most double albums, and Columbia took the lost profits out of the group’s royalties and tour support funds. The sprawling, often-experimental album was chosen by a poll of Village Voice critics as album of the year, and Sandinista! (#24, 1981) was the first Clash album to sell more copies in the U.S. than in the U.K.
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The debut album The Clash was released in the UK in 1977. It didn't see a US release until 1979, after it had become the best-selling import album of all time in the US.
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The Americanization of the Clash may have been evident when they invited Bo Diddley along as opening act on their first U.S. tour in early í79. But it reached a peak of sorts with their third album, London Calling, released at the end of the year, produced by Guy Stevens, known for his work with Mott the Hoople. The ambitious double-LP set incorporated rockabilly, soul and R&B, even a taste of jazz ('London Calling,' 'The Guns of Brixton,' 'Clampdown,' 'Rudie Canít Fail,''ìLost In the Supermarket,' 'Jimmy Jazz,' 'Train In Vain'). The Clashís first platinum album would earn Rolling Stoneís endorsement years later as ìthe greatest album of the í80s.'
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In the spring of 1977, the Clash released their first, self-titled album under the management of Malcolm McLaren's (manager of the Sex Pistols) friend Bernard Rhodes to a highly receptive young British audience. However, their message proved too leftwing for American consumption and was prevented from being released in the United States for nearly two years. By then they were selling out stadiums in their homeland, and their second release had reached Number 2 on the British charts.
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For his post-Clash part, Simonon returned to action as the leader of Havana 3 A.M., a rootsy/modern Los Angeles quartet with local new wave perennial Gary Myrick and singer Nigel Dixon, late of the English rockabilly band Whirlwind. The eponymous debut album — an exceedingly clever commercial sublimation of unassailable source material (rockabilly, reggae, punk, power-pop) stripped of any edge or conviction — is clearly the work of experienced pros making something presentably adult out of what they can recall of their long-gone youth. "The Hardest Game" sounds like Squeeze on an uninspired day; "Surf in the City" is a fairly obnoxious rewrite of Elvis Costello's "This Year's Girl" as if done by a Del-Lords cover band; the Stray Catsy "Blue Gene Vincent" is one tribute the late rocker could have done without.
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