The Lost and Found Department
Rare and Not-So-Rare Items Worth Finding Again

by Andrew Lau

Item #0005 -- Combat Rock

Who: The world-weary Clash.

What: Fifth and most difficult release (last with original line-up) of this glorious and frustrating combo. Originally titled Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg.

Where: Available on CD (Epic EK-63896, 1999) re-mastered with original artwork and a re-installed version of "Inoculated City" (song contains sample of "2000 Flushes" television commercial; taken off final version of original album and replaced here in all its odd glory). LP is readily available as a re-release and original copies can be found in the used bins.

Why: The Clash is down but not yet out on this one, their last creative gasp. This album can be quite an argument started among the faithful. Some see it as a blatant attempt at commercialism (especially with two hit singles that the album generated) and evidence of the band limping to their doom, while others see it as the most diverse and creative release from a constantly searching group.

This is a group that was never satisfied with the constraints of three chord punk structures and started to break away early in their career; a move that gained them mass amounts of criticism that followed them through their eight years...but what could be more "punk" than wanting to separate from what everyone else was doing? To understand Combat Rock you have to go back to their previous release, Sandinista!, a sprawling three LP set record so overwhelmed by creativity and ideas that it alienated most fans. While constantly touring the U.S, the band soaked up influences, much of it from New York City's developing hip-hop scene. Throw in their old love of dub reggae and you've got yourself a difficult listen for the unsuspecting. The band had fought with CBS/Epic into letting the three record set be priced as a single LP and, although the band won, the record stumped too many people including their own label who didn't know how to market it (so they didn't) and the whole matter forced the band further into debt.

A year later the band's two main songwriters, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, were no longer on speaking terms and worked in separate shifts in the studio; drummer Topper Headon was sliding into heroin addiction and bassist Paul Simonon sulked. After the indulgence of Sandinista! and the 1979 double LP London Calling, the aim was to get back to a single LP. By the time they finished the basic recordings, the band found themselves with enough material for another double record set. Arguments flew over which songs to cut and, in the end, Strummer and producer Glyn Johns hammered out the twelve tracks that made up the final version. Plus, adding to the tension, the mixing for Combat Rock was conducted while the band was on tour in Australia.

The typically spot-on rhythm section is moved to the corner of the music and TEXTURE is put in front, while guitars are almost an afterthought. Headon's drumming, which had been aggressively elegant on previous albums, has to share space with furthered experiments: sound effects, Allen Ginsberg, keyboards, rapping, woodwinds, early electronica try-outs, experimental tempos, spoken word ghost stories and unsurpassed lyrical imagery.

The first four tracks deceive you into thinking this is a lighthearted, arena rock showcase. After the politics of "Know Your Rights"; the avant pop of "Car Jamming" and the two hits ("Should I Stay Or Should I Go" and "Rock The Casbah"), it's off into the album's song cycle and general theme. The world in which Combat Rock revolves in is a combination of the band's new fascination with Vietnam and its old fascination with New York City. In fact, it's almost if the band --through imagery and instrumentation-- pick up the city by its moorings and drop it into the middle of some far east jungle thereby creating their own world of decay and disco. Headon skills it up by switching from reggae beats to disco to rock again and again, song after song.
Although this may sound like another example of sensory overload, the record ends up being more streamlined and focused than its predecessor, the varied experiments and possible misfires of Sandinista! are re-worked and pulled into focus as Strummer and Jones turn in their best lyrics to date.

"Red Angel Dragnet" unites afro-funk with lines from the film Taxi Driver, setting a scene of urban rot and vigilantism ("Champagne on ice / And no stranger to Alcatraz to boot"). "Straight To Hell" is loaded with Kerouac-like stream of conscious lyrics ("…where procaine proves the purest rock man groove and rat poison / the volatile molatov says…") that plays out a patterned theme of the gentrification in Southeast Asia ("Lemme tell you about your blood bamboo, kid / It ain't Coca Cola, it's rice."). All of it over a tapestry of hypnotizing drum clatter and afro-centric bass pops. It's one of their darkest and best songs.

An upbeat, almost celebratory political call-to-arms and militant dance track, "Overpowered By Funk" gives a stark contrast. While it carries out the running theme of an Americanized Asia, ("Buy dog food / Rogue elephants / Tarzan on a ticker tape / Breakfast cereals? / You know you can't escape…"). It's in this song that the record's inner moto is exposed when Jones and Strummer ask in tandem: "Don't you love our Western ways?" Escapism put to music, disco in the jungle. Near the end, graffiti artist Futura 2000 puts down an early fusion of rap and rock. It's a party song on a non-party album.

The albums' final group of songs is just as intriguing. "Sean Flynn" is a swampy drone-raga where you can almost hear the buzzing insects hiding in the trees. "Ghetto Defendant" matches reggae with disco and afro-beat in an apocalyptic inner city vision complete with Allen Ginsberg's narration. The anti-war tale, "Inoculated City", features Jones' double tracked vocals and his more straightforward words ("At every stroke of the bell / In the tower there goes / Another boy from another side") and then, strangely enough, a sample of a "2000 Flushes" television commercial. The LP comes to a slow halt with "Death Is A Star"; more Beat wordplay and imagery (Strummer trying to re-write Kerouac's Doctor Sax) along with barrelhouse piano, crickets and Headon's brushed drums on an eerie, depressing end to a stifling LP.

All in all, the record is a successful collision of the contrasting tastes of arguing band members; it's their Abbey Road. In the five years the Clash had covered an amazing amount of ground and the distance between their debut and Combat Rock is as remarkable as the distance that separates Meet The Beatles and Sgt Pepper's.

After all the work that went into this one, the band was only able to limp through 1983 before shedding two members (Headon and Jones) and pushing out a final lackluster LP, (Cut the Crap, 1985) before they unceremoniously called it quits. Combat Rock’s ghost lived on in Mick Jones' next project, Big Audio Dynamite, where -on their first two albums at least -they extended on this records' experiments and found themselves at the forefront of dance music.