London’s burning!
One of the several excellent gifts I received for my birthday was a complete surprise: The Essential Clash on DVD. F’in’ rocks! It’s stunning to me (and a little disappointing) that this stuff still sounds as fresh as it did 25 years ago, and it left me wondering where the rebellion against corporate muzak is today? In a world where Disney sticks its recording stars in its movies and plays its own “artists” on its radio stations, where the complete consolidation of the music/video/entertainment industry has put ClearChannels in nearly complete control of your music money, it seems like there oughta be SOME kind of rebellion against all this truly awful music they’re foisting off on us. And nowadays it’s easier than ever to get music onto a disc — getting it played anywhere is another story, but it seems like it’s time for another garage band revolution, ’cause as Joey said, “Lately it all sounds the same to me.”
Anyway, the Clash DVD is great. I still remember the first time I heard “London Calling,” while I was working in the Community Darkroom at Syracuse, 1980. If you don’t know, developing and printing film is an unbelievably tedious and boring process, and I had a deal with the campus TV station by which I would develop their slides (E-6 processing, difficult to do by hand) in exchange for free film. E-6 was about 56 minutes in the dark, if I recall, and required you to keep the temperature around 100 degrees, which wasn’t easy. So, you’re not reading a magazing or doing your homework while processing slides. Luckily, at that time SU had an excellent, extremely eclectic radio station, WAER-FM, and that’s what they played in the darkroom. And so there I was in the dark, listening to those amazing bass lines coming through over the low-end speakers, and I was just stunned at what I was hearing. I had already heard OF the song, but hadn’t heard it yet, and it was amazing.
For some reason, my first copy of “London Calling” was a cassette tape I made from a copy of the LP borrowed from the public library, which I would have thought would be the last place to stock The Clash. There were a few skips on the record — no matter that the tape is long gone, when listening to the CD, I still hear those skips in my head to this day.
WAER, by the way suffered an ignoble fate a few years later, when its faculty adviser decided that in order for students to get “real” programming experience, it needed to be a programmed radio station, and oddly enough this adviser, who was widely and well-known as a huge jazz fanatic, chose jazz as the format. The radio industry’s aching need for a fresh annual crop of experienced jazz programmers is met to this day, and Syracuse remains one of the few sizeable college campuses without a real college radio station. (The other station, which then didn’t reach most of the campus, plays pop crap, and always has.)