Is there a band as acidly punk as The Clash?
Everyone’s seen the cover of The Clash’s London Calling. It’s a milestone in the history of punk rock, a depiction of the anarchic and destructive soul that expressed the rebelliousness and defiance that this movement spread throughout the world. But what’s the story behind it’s cover art?
It happened on a late September night in 1979 at the Palladium in New York. The precocious band led by Joe Strummer expected to turn the concert hall into a pandemonium. NYC was famous for being the hotspot of punk in the American continent. All in all, it had given birth to two of the most electrifying bands of those years, namely The Ramones and The New York Dolls. However, the audience wasn’t as energetic as the English band had expected.
Punk rock gigs were supposed to be a space for catharsis. People went to those type of events so they could blow off some steam against the establishment by dancing wildly in the moshpit and breaking all things in sight. But at the concert at the Palladium, the crowd was as docile as a herd of sheep. This didn’t just disappoint Strummer and his cronies. It pissed them off.
Out of all the members of The Clash, the one who became the most furious with the situation was the rowdy bassist Paul Simonon. As it has been stated in Rolling Stone magazine, despite their efforts to cheer up the crowd, the sassy band from London didn’t get a response from the crowd. It was apathetic, dull. Nothing could get more on the bassist’s nerves. Overwhelmed in frustration, he grabbed his instrument from the fretboard and trashed it furiously against the stage. Little did he know that the photographer Pennie Smith would snap a picture of him in the exact moment when he decided to chop the stage with his Precision bass.
When she first saw the picture, Smith dismissed it at first. She thought it looked too blurry and the composition was anything but special. However, there was something she wasn’t quite catching about the stunning shot she had taken of the bass player. It had a raw and powerful vibrancy. The attitude of Simonon smashing his bass was all that punk rock was about.
Joe Strummer fell for the picture as soon as he saw it and decided to use it for the cover of London Calling, which was due for the end of the year. The photographer, still unsure about the value of her work, tried to convince the singer not to use the picture. From that moment on, the blurry picture would become an iconic image not only of punk rock, but of rock and roll itself.
The Clash was a band that held classic rock in high esteem. Among the song list of London Calling, for instance, the band paid
homage to this genre through other covers. This happened at first, for instance, with their version of Sonny Curter and the Crickets’ “I Fought the Law”, and they would take it even further through a sassy cover of Vince Taylor and The Playboys’ “Brand New Cadillac”. Furthermore, they decided that the design of the album sleeve would also pay tribute to rock n’ roll, this time for Elvis Presley, the King himself.
The London Calling cover design is hence a clear tribute to Presley’s debut album from 1956, and it chose the exact same colors and typography for the title of the LP.
The rest is history. Simonon’s broken bass made it all the way to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and the album cover has been voted among Q magazine and Rolling Stone as one of the best of all time. And it was all because a fit of rage.
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