"Give' em enough rope" revisited

[minimaltone]

10.11.1978

...The punks didn't cease power. But they did seize create — a measure of freedom, the chance to make choices that weren't even there before. That means the punks too — the Clash among them — now have enough rope:

they no longer live in a world they never made...

G. Marcus
Rolling Stone
January 25, 1979

***Hanging was corporal punishment. Saying, "If you give someone enough rope, they'll hang themselves" means that you don't need to punish them. Leaving them to their own devices will end up with them getting themselves into a lot of trouble of their own making. So it means not trying to step in and stop bad behavior, but letting someone deal with the inevitable consequences of their behavior themselves***

 

[minimaltone]

...
In the eye of the storm, and in the devastated battlefield, at the junction of punk and post punk, stands GEER. It's in my opinion one of the most important albums of the post 77 era because it articulates what's going to come while making a statement on what happened before. The dead cow-boy on the sleeve is the cadaver of punk. This album is way more dark and desperate than the first, which articulated the feeling of mid 70's britain, the cultural desert it had become. Here, after a short, bright, and violent explosion, is an LP that is unique in that it shows the mutation about to happen, a statement of what's happened and what's going to rise from the cadaver of 77. Without this disc, you don't get LC. The gap is too wide.

It's a polaroid of the death of punk, and the birth of what's going to come after.


You have to be there to understand that London Calling, as a song, couldn't have the same impact if you didn't went thru GEER before.
I still remember getting into the store, xmas 79, asking to listen to LC 12" single, and still remember the needle hitting the groove, the headphones on my head, and the first bars coming up. There was life after death after all. It's engraved in my mind forever.
Basically, it's like you meet your girl, and you have one year of passion. Then, it all goes sour, and you are depressed and think about darkness and death. Then she comes back. The come back can't be as good without the darkness that went before. And even that darkness, is part of the relationship, a feeling that makes it whole.


Seventeen,,,Paris France,,,,fan,,,

I have two words which to me, mean that nothing on this album is "weak": Joe Strummer.

What I mean is this: Joe's performance on this album (just like every Clash/solo album, yes including Cut The Crap) has enough great moments that it lifts the less than great material.
I don't know how extemporaneous Joe was in the studio but it sure sounds like it - right out of the gate, the latter section of Safe European Home (which I think we all agree is the high water mark) Joe just rolls out this basically unintelligible tangent almost under his breath while Mick is belting out the refrain. Very cool.
As an aside, the seemingly off the cuff outros/codas that The Clash did (sometimes just vocally) are one of my favorite things about the band - so many great, surprising moments in already great songs. It's like finding an extra gift under the tree xmas morning.
Julie's in the Drug Squad - not as great as the greatest Clash but imo it's a damn fun and catchy tune. Great work from Topper. I love Joe's delivery on "you got the time to cut all of your hair."
Guns on the Roof - this tune is rife with great Joe Strummer line readings, starting with Joe with matter of factly testifying "I swear by almighty god to the tell the whole Truth and Nothing But... the TRUTH"
But he quickly escalates and by the time he gets to "guns guns shatter the lands" - He's barking and spitting out bile and venom. electrifying. Classic, imo.
Maybe it's just me but everytime I hear it, I am all ears as he squeaks out the "like" in "I like to be in Af-e-rica" as as the emphasis on "usA".
Perhaps not a great song but I submit it's a great Joe Strummer performance.
All You Young Punks - another one I quite like - always made me a little sad when I was growing up, this one. Melancholy tune. I dig how Joe starts the verse with a brief shout immediately before he utters a word.
The last verse has a lot of great Joe inflections.... how he emphasizes and elongates "FUTure" but, in comparison, spits out "coal." Great pause between "week" and "once" and he lets the "once" just drop down, driving home the ill fated factory stint. Again, the coda here is classic Joe ad libbing, riffing all the way out.
Just some random thoughts from a guy who also prefers the debut and London Calling and Sandinista but finds plenty of rewards in Joe's performance.


,,,,Sandinista,,,Florida,,,,,fan

 

[Nelsy]

The Clash - Tommy Gun

 

[minimaltone]

History will teach us nothing...

.....It’s rock and roll all over
In every street and every station
Kids fight like different nations
And it’s brawn against brain
And it’s knife against chain
But it’s all young blood
Flowing down the drain.



By G. Marcus

Rolling Stone

January 25, 1979


Produced by Sandy Pearlman, an American brought in by CBS and who's best known for his sometimes muddy work with Blue Öyster Cult, Give' Em Enough Rope's sound seems suppressed: the highs aren't there, and the presence of the band is thinner than it ought to be. The record doesn't jump. But the producer's concept comes through — accessible hard rock — and nothing has been gussied up.

The Clash's attack is still fast and noisy (straight English punk), but with lyrical accents cracking the rough surface (straight English punk with a grip on the future). The band's vision of public life — the sense that there's more to life than pleasure and safety — is uncompromised, and so is the humor that keeps that vision from degenerating into a set of slogans, that keeps it full of questions and honest doubt. Imagine the Who's "I Can't Explain" as a statement about a world in flames, not a lover's daze, and you've got the idea.

If Johnny Rotten really did sound like the Antichrist, Clash lead singer Joe Strummer railed in the voice of a streetfighter. It wasn't Armageddon he called up, simply the next battle. The point of the Clash's early "London's Burning" wasn't just to cheer the fire. Despite the thoughtfulness that had to go into "White Riot" and a cover of Junior Murvin's reggae hit, "Police and Thieves" — both cut in 1977 as attempts at solidarity with the angry West Indians of England's slums — there was a certain intentional dumbness to the Clash's style: a way of saying they knew no more than anyone else, but it hadn't stopped them from stepping out to take the heat and give it back. They defined punk populism — they made it sound at once like a test of valor and a real good time.

Today, in England, the Clash are something of a myth: perhaps the last band to promise that something other than the fate of their own career is hanging on a new release. Give 'Em Enough Rope entered the U.K. charts at Number Two. Though a sniveling backlash has hit them in the British pop press, there's no question that a lot of hopes, symbolic and otherwise, are riding on the group: If the album sells, does that mean the spirit is there to make society change a little faster? If the album is good, does that mean life will be a little richer? In the U.S.A., the Clash remain no more than a potent rumor — wary of the Sex Pistols' fate, yet intrigued with the possibility of turning what they see as a moribund scene around.

Give 'Em Enough Rope is a confident piece of music. The storm begins with the first note and lets up only in snatches. The reality the Clash convey is that of a world upside down, a world in which no one can be sure of where they stand. Lines are drawn between oppressors and victims, killers and targets, but it isn't meant to be clear who's who, and there's not a hint of self-righteousness, of political purity. What you hear in the clatter of guitars (the Yardbirds passed through Captain Beefheart, reggae and Mott the Hoople, all anchored
by a big beat) is a reach for drama and passion: the Clash are out to catch the most dangerous moods and fantasies of their time, not to stake out a position. Their field of action — on a rock & roll record, a fantasy in itself — is the world. The terrorists of "Guns on the Roof" could be, are, anywhere; the out-of-step march of "English Civil War" is based on "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," a song from the American Civil War, and it's a prophecy that has nothing to do with borders.

The LP begins with its most spectacular cut, "Safe European Home," a furious and funny account of a trip Joe Strummer and Clash lead guitarist Mick Jones (who, with Strummer, writes the songs) made to Jamaica. What might have been a nice Patti Smith-style ode to Rasta Consciousness ("Jah speak to me, too, man — uh, mon?") turns out instead to be a hard-rock version of 10cc's "Dreadlock Holiday." Would-be soul brothers Strummer and Jones report back from "a place where every white face was an invitation to robbery," where Natty Dread is drinking at the bar in the Sheraton Hotel. They looked for Bob Marley's punky reggae party (he even sent them an invitation!), but no one knew where it was, and Bob was out of town. The feeling of displacement is hilarious, but what makes the song more than a good joke on the Clash, what tosses you right into the middle of it, is the pure power of the performance: Strummer's outraged and self-mocking vocals, Jones' wonderfully sardonic chorus ("Where'd you go?" he keeps asking Strummer) and the careening caterwaul of the band. The music pushes harder and harder, and finally the two Englishmen flee — right back to their safe European home, to the safety of a land where Jamaicans are treated with the same scorn Strummer and Jones were offered in Jamaica.

And then "English Civil War" kicks off, and home is a crueler joke than paradise.

Give 'Em Enough Rope moves strikingly — from heroic fanfares ("Drug Stabbing Time") to an almost wistful look back on adolescence and the different paths friends took ("Stay Free," with a lovely Keith Richards-like vocal from Mick Jones) to pure fear ("Guns on the Roof") to a good slap back at an audience that won't allow a band a false step ("Cheapskate"). Amid all the force and momentum, melodies slip through, are buried, surface again. Lyrics peak out and disappear just as you're sure you've made them out, as they did on "Brown Sugar" or any Stones 45. The tracks grow with each listening; after a week with the record, you only think you know what's on it.

As one tune after another kicks in — as you find yourself rooting for the political
killers (Left? Right?) in "Guns on the Roof" and then running from them; cheering the Jamaicans in "Safe European Home" and then feeling nervous; fitting yourself into Jones' gang in "Stay Free" and then realizing why he had to leave it behind — the basic theme of the album becomes clear.

Stated in a dozen different ways by Mick Jones' guitar (the pulse of "Tommy Gun," the "I Can't Explain" riff in "Guns on the Roof," the soaring opening lines of "Cheapskate") and driven home by Joe Strummer's singing (blasted in "English Civil War," possessed in "Guns on the Roof," amused in "Julie's in the Drug Squad"), the theme is that of making choices in a world organized to close choices off. When Jones bids his pals a final goodbye with the simple admonition. "Stay free," the line hurts: you know the odds are they'll never make it — and that he might not make it, and that you might not. The chances of finding the right choices may be slim at best; the odds of being wrong if you don't choose at all are 100 percent.

Whatever the Clash are after, it isn't peace of mind. Give 'Em Enough Rope means to sound like trouble, not a meditation on it. The band's vision of a world strangling on its own contradictions hasn't changed, but their idea of their place in that world has. The sleeve of Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves (which must have inspired the Clash) showed cops and robbers in a snake dance, picking each other's pockets; the back cover of The Clash was a shot of London's riot squad rioting. The contradiction perceived here was one a primitive rebel would catch: the authorities weren't just bent, they were backwards. Give 'em enough rope, and they'd hang themselves.

Today, with the Sex Pistols gone, the punk movement scattered and rebellion receding, the contradictions buried in 1977's ideology of righteousness have emerged. Despite Bob Marley's seal of approval, a good reggae collection and a long and noble stand against Britain's send-the-blacks-back-where-they-came-from National Front, the Clash were brought up short by those contradictions in Jamaica. Whatever sympathy they might feel for terrorism isn't going to do them any good when a bullet picks them out of a crowd. If the possibility of a final crunch seems more real than it ever did, the prospect of Blood running in the streets is no longer romantic: "You'll be dead." Strummer mutters, if one can mutter a shout: "The war is won." Sure, "give 'em enough rope" is still partly a brag — time is on our side, and all that. But there's an unbroken sense of uncertainty on this record, an uncertainty that at times shades into panic, and those emotions are a lot truer than a brag is to the stories we have to read in the papers, and read in the eves of our friends.


The punks didn't cease power. But they did seize create — a measure of freedom, the chance to make choices that weren't even there before. That means the punks too — the Clash among them — now have enough rope: they no longer live in a world they never made.

 

[minimaltone]

The making

Make me not fake me... ( and who the f... is this produder ? )


"Although in the end I find that Sandy Pearlman’s production does as much justice to the power of this band as the debut does to their rough intensity, I know why some are disappointed. The band’s recent strategy has been to cram their dense, hard sound so full of growls and licks and offhand remarks that it never stops exploding. Here that approach occasionally seems overworked, and so does the vision–this major (and privileged) pop group sounds as wearied by the failure of punk solidarity, the persistence of racial conflict, the facelessness of violence, and the ineluctability of capital as a bunch of tenured Marxists. But these familiar contradictions follow upon the invigorating gutter truths of the first album for a reason–they’re truths as well, truths that couldn’t be stated more forcefully with any other music. Great exception: “Stay Free,” Mick Jones’s greeting to a mate fresh out of jail that translates the band’s new political wariness into personal warmth. "
Robert Christgau

 

[minimaltone]

You can't turn all rebellions into money...

Fun side note: the band’s first, eponymous album came out in the UK in 1977; CBS/Epic, moving in mysterious ways, didn’t drop it in the US until July of ’79 – eight months after GEER was released on November 10, 1978. The US version is radically altered from the UK release. Songs were dropped, others added, and there’s yet to be a definitive version released. Wacky, but true.

And the NME reviewing Dave Mc Cullough... ( I 'm not into kicking people just cos they make other people feel threatened or unhip )

 

[minimaltone]

Us Promo Poster

 

[minimaltone]

Can't find the facts , can't find my Sounds newspapers...

 

[minimaltone]

Not a word for London Calling......Mess here....

01. Safe European Home


02. English Civil War

 

[minimaltone]

03. Tommy gun

04. Julie's been working for the drug squad

 

[minimaltone]

05. Last gang in town


06. Guns on the roof

A system built by the sweat of the many
Creates assassins to kill off the few

Take any place and call it a court house
This is a place where no judge can stand



07. Drug Stabbing Time

 

[minimaltone]

08. Stay Free


09. Cheapskates

Like a load of rats from a sinking ship
You slag us down to save your hip

But you don't give me the benefit of your doubt
'Cos I'll bite it off and spit it out



10. All The young punks

Face front you got the futureShining like a piece of gold

But I swear as we get closer
It look more like a lump of coal