(no subject)
It’s been a long time…
I went to see Chuck Prophet and Spanish Bombs playing the whole of London Calling last night. Apparently, the deal was a Spanish promoter contacted him and said they’d like him to cover someone else’s album for a show and he chose London Calling. The promoter also called Johnny Green, the Clash’s road manager who you can see in scenes in Rude Boy and who wrote the book ‘A Riot of our Own’ with Ray Lowry, who illustrated London Calling providing illustrations. Johnny Green has performed some spoken word sets mainly elaborating on excerpts from the book so the performer asked him to open the shows and after a Spanish tour, the band are doing four UK shows. It’s interesting because this is kind of an interlude, it’s not what Chuck Prophet is ‘doing’ now as he has his own shows booked either side of the dates which gives an insight into the project.
I Think it was about 12 years ago, I wrote to Johnny Green about his book saying how I’d loved it and how it really gave a feel for the time around the recording of London calling. I sent it via the publisher but I got a lovely reply a few weeks later written in Green Pen. Johnny Green was great last night. He read a few excerpts from his book but gave funny and interesting sides and is clearly happy on stage like an uncle with some great stories to tell crossed with a guy in the pub telling tales.
I got to speak with him afterwards and he didn’t remember writing back but signed my book (green pen again, he also had a green suit on, I’m here to tell you, if my surname was Green, I’m pretty sure I’d go the same). He did say that he was currently writing a book with Topper Headon about Topper’s life, that Topper had been clean for 15 years and that he had a kit but didn’t drum much. He seemed to have a massive admiration for Topper as a musician and a drummer which isn’t surprising after the music we’d just heard. I’m sure a lot of the directions on London Calling were made possible by Topper’s versatility and influences, in fact right up until Rock the Casbah, which he wrote, I’m not sure that we would have the post ‘Give Em Enough Rope’ Clash in any way like the way we do. London Calling is a whistle stop tour through popular music since the fifties but it was only really made possible by a drummer who could get the feels for such an eclectic set of musical styles.
It was a real treat meeting Johnny Green, he seemed like a nice happy guy and my 16 year old self was pretty pleased.
The show opened with Chris Von Sneidern, who would later become Mick Jones, which was pretty cool because he looked pretty similar and I’m sure he sneakily copped some of Mick Jones’s moves. Not too much, but just a touch. I found his set frustrating because I was distracted by the octaver/eq pedal that he had on his 12 string that brought in bass frequencies. He mentioned his ‘ bass player’ but throughout the set I wanted to say ‘can you do one without the pedal?’. He had a £900 Takamine 12 string, essentially a guitar and a half in terms of sonic range, a beautifully made instrument that would have shimmered with the slightly off- tuned string pairs and he’d been greedy with those frequencies by adding fake bass frequencies. There’s a gulf of difference between a fat piece of metal wire creating a thud and getting a machine to copy a thinner piece of metal and making it an octave lower. It rattles the right bit of the speaker but the whole sound then gets shaped around it and EQed as a whole and you’re left with a muddy compromise rather than a shimmering cymbol of a guitar. Also, he’s a guy so a lot of that nonsense trampled on his vocals when it could have highlighted them by contrast. This was my whole musical experience, try as I might to get into the songs, that fucking pedal was like the Jug Guy from 13th floor elevators. The real surprise is that he came on later with a TV Yellow Les Paul Junior, THE most basic guitar that has ONLY a treble pickup.
On the whole the band’s run through London calling was just a load of fun. They seemed to have absorbed the songs as their own while learning not only the backbones to them but a lot of the tiny details that kept anchoring us in the record which let them also do the things they were great at as musicians. The band were more than equal to the task and ploughed through a formidable song list stopping pretty much at the end of ‘sides’ for chat unless a song needed a specific intro.
They split the vocals roughly so that Chuck Prophet sung the strummer songs and Chris Von Sneidern the Mick Jones songs. Chuck Prophet is a true rock n roll musician, he didn’t seem to be intimidated or approach the songs gingerly but could play them like the record or played them as he’d play his own songs. I was waiting for some military hacking in London calling but he seemed to be playing that really old Epihone telecaster pretty gently and still getting the same effect.
They seemed to balk at the outright Reggae songs and while keeping some off-beat feel to Guns of Brixton and Revolution Rock, there were no Jamaican inflections and the songs sat in a more traditionally rock skin. This was no bad thing, in fact every time they did re-interpret the songs, the choices were always good, the encore Bankrobber was a Ramones-style zip through which worked perfectly. They seemed to have no anxiety to change the arrangements and did this with confidence and care so that you never felt they were a cop-out.
Chuck Prophet is a 100% entertainer, someone you look at and can see that he’s spent his working life playing the guitar in bands. He did this magnificent over-milked hammering of the Stagger Lee intro to Wrong em Boyo, made some spirited political points about the state of economies weaving them into the songs without getting obvious or pointed and the band were just great! Chris Von Sneidern had a great vocal and especially guitar Mick Jones thing going on and splitting the vocals was perfect. I loved it when the Keyboard player hit the piano chords for the Card Cheat and he, the bass player and the drummer were note-perfect and exciting musicians who couldn’t have treated those songs better.
I don’t know, the Clash are my favourite band and London Calling my second favourite album. I was telling Johnny Green how I really don’t understand the people who don’t get the Clash, and there are a lot of people. They’re not a hard band to get, the music drags you in and is directly wired into everything that’s good that came before it. I’ve met Clash fans in that Strummerville stage at Glastonbury and everyone seems affected by the band in some way. I’ve wrung everything I can out of that album. 16-19 I bet I played part of it three or four out of seven days a week. When the reissue with the Vanilla tapes came out a few years ago I tanked it again and found some things my more analytical mind might have missed before but I said that I’d love to become amnesiac about the album so I could get it again and start afresh.
Seeing it played by a different band with singers emphasising specific lines or just anticipating killer lines ‘You grow up and you calm down, you start wearing blue and brown’, ‘So you rock around and think that You're the toughest In the world, the whole wide world’ is probably the only way, at this point to get the excitement of those songs again and it was a truly inspirational thing to see and was probably the first music I’ve seen in a long time that made me want to go home and pick up my guitar.
I don’t often play covers as I don’t learn songs well but I think maybe I should just to get different types of muscles working. I’m currently sandwiched between listening to two songwriters Greg Cartwright (Oblivions and a million other bands)
and Eleanor Friedberger
Click to viewwho has made the no fucking around Fiery Furnaces album I’ve always wanted to hear, as a solo album. Both write songs that make you think ‘Damn! I wish I could write like that’ not because they seem to have a gift from God but because they’ve found the song building blocks that are all around and put these simple elements together to make these bits of magic. Then along comes Chuck Prophet and Spanish Bombs doing a great ‘remake’ of a batch of my favourite songs and I get the urge to stay in.
One other interesting thing I noticed. Chuck Prophet is in his late forties and the audience were largely late thirties to early fifties. When I looked around the audience I saw weight. There was a lot of physical weight. I have physical weight and physical weight is part of a variety of weights that I could see. Age isn’t just age, weight and the effects of gravity are kind of the graphic representations of the weight of life. People look old because of gravity but some people seem to resist it more than others and I suppose some people have more than gravity (harder lives, children, long working hours) than others but these factors seem to add weight and gravity. I don’t know Chuck Prophet’s situation, I’m realistic about the economics of music and who knows what’s going on with a person but playing rock n roll music looks like it’s kept weight and gravity at bay for him and for the room full of people, everyone found those songs before weight and gravity really exerted itself and I can’t help thinking that somewhere in all of the tools of resisting those forces, and in the world you see so many people who just give in to them, that those songs are a help and an night like last night was a reminder of that.