SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by Wolter »

Terry was not held in high opinion long before Hoy joined here.
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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by matedog »

Okay, my anti-Terryism is largely taken to an extreme level here for the sake of humor. I mean my user icon is a picture of his face with a Microsoft Paint red x.
And there is also this:
Image

So yeah, I've been known to accentuate or exaggerate certain opinions or sentiments around here for the sake of having fun. Yes, I do enjoy some awful hair metal, but I'm aware that it is awful and I hardly ever listen to it anymore. I'm not saying I'm never serious on here, I often am, just certain not all the time and I think it's pretty obvious when I'm not winding people up a bit.

I can buy certain aspects of Chris' theory regarding Terry Clash. In some ways it comes down to personal opinion. Hell, Kaleb said as much when discussing his enjoyment of the Terry beat. So the certain things that bother me about Terry Clash might not bother others as much and I'm fine with that. I can't say I agree with you about Topper's studio skills at the end. I think CR has some of his most inventive drumming. The arrangements weren't as fleshed out as they were on LC, but that's probably largely due to how they recorded, similar to S!
Look, you have to establish context for these things. And I maintain that unless you appreciate the Fall of Constantinople, the Great Fire of London, and Mickey Mantle's fatalist alcoholism, live Freddy makes no sense. If you want to half-ass it, fine, go call Simon Schama to do the appendix.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by IkarisOne »

It really boils down to this- Terry, Topper, whoever the fuck, I don't care. The only thing that matters that the Clash were only meant to do two things- yell and scream and run around and smash things or be all dark and broody and smouldering in between for pacing. Everything they did otherwise was just plain fucking stupid.
Last edited by IkarisOne on 08 Apr 2013, 12:43pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by Rat Patrol »

IkarisOne wrote:Here's the thing that I think you guys are all missing- it's not about "Terry or Topper" for me. Terry is a non-entity in my life Until I actually sat down and went through the shows and brought a lot of them into Audacity and fixed all the speeds- nearly every show on the Megalist was WAY offspeed- I only ever listened more than once to a few Terry shows. Of course the ones I did listen to- St Paul, Casbah Club- I played like crazy. Usually I'd hear some way fucked up shit- like that SF soundboard that ended up sounding like a terrible audience recording- and go back to listening to some show with Pete. I was the hardcore Pete guy, remember?

And I have to say it, this anti-Terry stuff is Matey's creation, pure and simple. He's the Evangelist for this and converted everyone here to his cause by relentlessly hammering home his personal opinions. That's fine- I did the very same for Clash II back in the dial-up era. But it used to be that people liked Terry or didn't but pretty much didn't care much one way or the other. The worst I can say about Terry is that he was mediocre and I'm completely gobsmacked by the obvious emotion he arouses in Andrew. I mean I most certainly understand being bugged on a technical sense by a player, but once Terry got his sealegs he was perfectly adequate and certainly on par with the mutton-handed players he shared the stage with. As a former guitarist I'm actually a bit insulted by it- and no dig at Matey per se, since I love talking music with him- because where are the guitarists- never mind the bassists!- standing up for the instrument when the Clash's playing would never have passed muster in the pre-punk days?

And I absolutely won't hear anyone telling me that Topper 1981-82 was an on-par professional rock drummer, because skill is only half the job description. Timekeeping is the first order of business, and there is no doubt in my mind that a Topper Combat Rock tour would have been a clusterfuck of the first order. There would have been an onstage meltdown followed by a bust, either for drugs or statutory, and even CBS would lose patience with these idiots.
Yes, well Topper was broken forever by that point so of course he could not have ever done a CR tour. But if he can't keep time because of his volatility, and Terry can't keep time because of his mediocrity, and any outside hire who could keep time would never be accepted by the band...where does that leave them? A band that abdicated keeping time. Which the frontline didn't do well either. I don't see what the choices are here. They were done with playing tight and on-point by the time the 16 Tons tour ended. Nothing was going to reverse that. It was collective.


And sorry, Chris, Terry's playing got groaned about in many a DCT thread long before Matey registered here. Maybe there weren't any drummers on I-Satch-MCT to frame it in technical terms, but the clunking flat-tire sound of the rhythm section and the very off pacing on a lot of shows and a lot of individual songs was fodder for a lot of bitching. Bitching about how it totally got in the way of the aggro and power he brought to the table. And before-and-after comparisons where the constant kerplunk sound wasn't there, then was there for six months, then wasn't there again in '83...and ruling out Paul's unchanged plonking as the which-of-these-is-not-like-the-other difference between tours. (Note: and in no way am I implying that Topper was remotely steady on the beat before). That's the exposure the not-one-a-hundred-million who didn't see him live in a particular time and place have to go on. No one person injected that into the discussion. You expressed disappointment about his "leadenness" yourself in CCS a decade before Hoy showed up. It was always discussion fodder.

Also, I think you're missing the tongue-in-cheekness with Hoy vs. Terry here. That's long graduated to pure GNDA-larity board meme status. He'll uncork a drummer-muso treatise when it's on-topic, but all the rest is inside-jokery from the board mascot. You have to know the guy and how laid-back he is to see he doesn't really obsess about anything except 1) Springsteen, 2) defense of horribly, horribly wrong pop music, and 3) TMI stories of his love life that need a thorough Brainbleach chaser afterwards. :twitch:

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by IkarisOne »

Rat Patrol wrote:
IkarisOne wrote:Here's the thing that I think you guys are all missing- it's not about "Terry or Topper" for me. Terry is a non-entity in my life Until I actually sat down and went through the shows and brought a lot of them into Audacity and fixed all the speeds- nearly every show on the Megalist was WAY offspeed- I only ever listened more than once to a few Terry shows. Of course the ones I did listen to- St Paul, Casbah Club- I played like crazy. Usually I'd hear some way fucked up shit- like that SF soundboard that ended up sounding like a terrible audience recording- and go back to listening to some show with Pete. I was the hardcore Pete guy, remember?

And I have to say it, this anti-Terry stuff is Matey's creation, pure and simple. He's the Evangelist for this and converted everyone here to his cause by relentlessly hammering home his personal opinions. That's fine- I did the very same for Clash II back in the dial-up era. But it used to be that people liked Terry or didn't but pretty much didn't care much one way or the other. The worst I can say about Terry is that he was mediocre and I'm completely gobsmacked by the obvious emotion he arouses in Andrew. I mean I most certainly understand being bugged on a technical sense by a player, but once Terry got his sealegs he was perfectly adequate and certainly on par with the mutton-handed players he shared the stage with. As a former guitarist I'm actually a bit insulted by it- and no dig at Matey per se, since I love talking music with him- because where are the guitarists- never mind the bassists!- standing up for the instrument when the Clash's playing would never have passed muster in the pre-punk days?

And I absolutely won't hear anyone telling me that Topper 1981-82 was an on-par professional rock drummer, because skill is only half the job description. Timekeeping is the first order of business, and there is no doubt in my mind that a Topper Combat Rock tour would have been a clusterfuck of the first order. There would have been an onstage meltdown followed by a bust, either for drugs or statutory, and even CBS would lose patience with these idiots.
Yes, well Topper was broken forever by that point so of course he could not have ever done a CR tour. But if he can't keep time because of his volatility, and Terry can't keep time because of his mediocrity, and any outside hire who could keep time would never be accepted by the band...where does that leave them? A band that abdicated keeping time. Which the frontline didn't do well either. I don't see what the choices are here. They were done with playing tight and on-point by the time the 16 Tons tour ended. Nothing was going to reverse that. It was collective.


And sorry, Chris, Terry's playing got groaned about in many a DCT thread long before Matey registered here. Maybe there weren't any drummers on I-Satch-MCT to frame it in technical terms, but the clunking flat-tire sound of the rhythm section and the very off pacing on a lot of shows and a lot of individual songs was fodder for a lot of bitching. Bitching about how it totally got in the way of the aggro and power he brought to the table. And before-and-after comparisons where the constant kerplunk sound wasn't there, then was there for six months, then wasn't there again in '83...and ruling out Paul's unchanged plonking as the which-of-these-is-not-like-the-other difference between tours. (Note: and in no way am I implying that Topper was remotely steady on the beat before). That's the exposure the not-one-a-hundred-million who didn't see him live in a particular time and place have to go on. No one person injected that into the discussion. You expressed disappointment about his "leadenness" yourself in CCS a decade before Hoy showed up. It was always discussion fodder.

Also, I think you're missing the tongue-in-cheekness with Hoy vs. Terry here. That's long graduated to pure GNDA-larity board meme status. He'll uncork a drummer-muso treatise when it's on-topic, but all the rest is inside-jokery from the board mascot. You have to know the guy and how laid-back he is to see he doesn't really obsess about anything except 1) Springsteen, 2) defense of horribly, horribly wrong pop music, and 3) TMI stories of his love life that need a thorough Brainbleach chaser afterwards. :twitch:

Well, my opinions were based in poor data- only a handful of shows, many of which were poor recordings (like the LA shows) or copies. Then when I got sick of listening to Clash II or Topper-meltdown Clash I went and downloaded all of the shows and took them into Audacity and discovered that my prior opinion was ill-informed and incomplete. I thought stuff I absolutely loved like St Paul or Edinburgh was the exception but after sitting down and doing the work I realized that they were the rule. I have a maxim- it's more important to know the truth than to "be right." In the same way I realized my opinion of those shows was not correspondent to the evidence I realized that all the cheeseball late-Clash pop shit I hated at first blush and had to program myself to like wasn't some brave statement, it was a naked stab at sacrificing integrity for sales. That The Clash were in fact totally full of shit in those days just like all the people who I normally agreed with but argued with said all along. It realized there was no honor in propping up a lie, especially when there was a treasure trove to explore in the Clash realm.

And I love Matey- he's my music talking bud. But I think people are being a bit revisionist because I never remember Terry being the goat even if a lot of younger fans whose first exposure was FHTE didn't like him. And no one ever said boo about any of it back in 1982. I remember chilling with Mensie at an Upstarts show that summer and having him be quite happy Terry was back.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by 101Walterton »

I think it is important to remember that (unlike us) Joe, Mick, Toopper and Paul were not influenced by punk nor were they punks before the band. They evolved with the punk movement but each came from their own influence so is it such a suprise if they move back to their musical roots?
On the grand scale of things they weren't punks for very long.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by TeddyB Not Logged In »

OK, I won't quote the lengthy above but I enjoyed the fuck out of Chris's second to last missive on the previous page. He's still fighting the punk wars, but they were still fighting them back in '81. Maybe not everywhere so much as in Boston. It's the glow of history that glorifies Sandinista (and Chris would say Sony marketing). The Clash (mainly Mick) may have been "right" about hip hop and sampling, and forward thinking, but Sandinista didn't sell and they didn't even get tour support. And the mix was fucking watery. The mix on London Calling was beautiful. That was right in Bill Price's wheelhouse. But all the reverb on Sandinista did make it sound weaker than intended. And Pepe Unidos's remixes were worse! The Bonds shows didn't help them outside of New York. It's only through the tapes and Internet that they have become legend. Until Rock the Casbah was a hit, the group was in commercial trouble. After London Calling, any half-assed rock and roll album would have kicked over the final can in the States and to their credit or not, the band didn't produce one. Casbah saved the day. I disagree about SISOSIG though. It was a major FM AirPlay hit in the States and helped sell a lot of albums on its second go-round, along with the long tour slog. It was also all over MTV. Yeah, none of it matters now but whe. The discussion doesn't get ugly, it's fun. I will add that I think Mick was trying to stretch on the TRAC stuff, with his voice lessons and all, but obviously decided that some of it was beyond even his limitations (bit of snark there).

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by IkarisOne »

TeddyB Not Logged In wrote:OK, I won't quote the lengthy above but I enjoyed the fuck out of Chris's second to last missive on the previous page. He's still fighting the punk wars, but they were still fighting them back in '81. Maybe not everywhere so much as in Boston. It's the glow of history that glorifies Sandinista (and Chris would say Sony marketing). The Clash (mainly Mick) may have been "right" about hip hop and sampling, and forward thinking, but Sandinista didn't sell and they didn't even get tour support. And the mix was fucking watery. The mix on London Calling was beautiful. That was right in Bill Price's wheelhouse. But all the reverb on Sandinista did make it sound weaker than intended. And Pepe Unidos's remixes were worse! The Bonds shows didn't help them outside of New York. It's only through the tapes and Internet that they have become legend. Until Rock the Casbah was a hit, the group was in commercial trouble. After London Calling, any half-assed rock and roll album would have kicked over the final can in the States and to their credit or not, the band didn't produce one. Casbah saved the day. I disagree about SISOSIG though. It was a major FM AirPlay hit in the States and helped sell a lot of albums on its second go-round, along with the long tour slog. It was also all over MTV. Yeah, none of it matters now but whe. The discussion doesn't get ugly, it's fun. I will add that I think Mick was trying to stretch on the TRAC stuff, with his voice lessons and all, but obviously decided that some of it was beyond even his limitations (bit of snark there).
Maybe it all boils down to production. I would never argue that they had to rewrite "Cheat" over and over- no, my whole point is that their songwriting was improving, when you discount all the filler. But that was only released because they wanted to break their contract. It wasn't the writing so much as the production. Self-production is the worst idea any rock star ever had- if a pro producer was good enough for the Beatles then it was good enough for everyone ever.

Forget "Punk" and do this- take your favorite live versions of all the key tracks on S! and CR and line them up against the studio versions. Which do you think is more vital, more exciting, more forward, more Clash? What sounds like a band that calls itself The Clash- the "Ivan" on the record or the Jaap version? To me it's a no-brainer. This whole "Punk or progress" thing is a total red herring that Mick and CBS threw out to make the fans who thought the Clash were a rock band feel like idiots for pointing out that these records were not up to par, that they sounded like Squeeze assraping The Police at a quaalude party.

But here's what I think and it's something even Joe couldn't get out of his head (see soft rock dominated X Ray Style)- compromise ends up pleasing no one. The Clash compromised so much they forgot what they were supposed to do in the first place. And maybe it all comes down to payola- I think Mick panicked and started second-guessing the Clash sound because London Calling wasn't getting the airplay they all hoped for. But if you read Hit Men that was all due to payola. The Clash would have been a lot better off had they surrounded themselves with managers and producers who looked out for them and knew their strengths and weakness. Self-management and self-production are terrible in the best of cases, never mind with a bunch of fuckups like The Clash.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by TeddyB Not Logged In »

Yeah, the Clash had no relationship with the record company and Joe Isgro wasn't on their payroll. You all remember the famous CBS wants to sell REO Speedwagon bit. Bernie had no relationship with the suits either. The Clash were treated as temperamental artistes. There's probably a DCT sidebar in investigating when Dick Asher was at Epic and when he wasn't, as he was probably a fan. If they'd been on Colimbia with Yetnikoff to begin with it would probably have gone better.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by IkarisOne »

TeddyB Not Logged In wrote:Yeah, the Clash had no relationship with the record company and Joe Isgro wasn't on their payroll. You all remember the famous CBS wants to sell REO Speedwagon bit. Bernie had no relationship with the suits either. The Clash were treated as temperamental artistes. There's probably a DCT sidebar in investigating when Dick Asher was at Epic and when he wasn't, as he was probably a fan. If they'd been on Colimbia with Yetnikoff to begin with it would probably have gone better.
I'll tell you, I don't know if I buy the story that Bernie wanted to sack Mick anymore. I think he was too smart for that. Kosmo seemed to deny it. Sure, Bernie wanted control. But I don't think he wanted to fuck up a million-selling situation either.

Firing people was Joe's thing. It was his weird power trip. I just re-read some of the Salewicz on the EW debacle and I lost count how many people Joe had fired at that point. He even fired Harrington, who was the only guy pulling for him. And Harrington forgave him, which boggles the mind.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by IkarisOne »

101Walterton wrote:I think it is important to remember that (unlike us) Joe, Mick, Toopper and Paul were not influenced by punk nor were they punks before the band. They evolved with the punk movement but each came from their own influence so is it such a suprise if they move back to their musical roots?
On the grand scale of things they weren't punks for very long.

Again, though I'm not agitating for "Punk" like Ramones music, there is truth in this. And I think it's really why the thing fell apart. I think they were raised on those corny old Vaudeville/Tin Pin Alley kind of values, where you tart everything up and smooth out all the rough edges. Don't make a racket or you won't sell records in America. I do think they had a major crisis of confidence when London Calling underperformed which is why you can't hear actual Clash guitars - meaning the way Joe and Mick really sounded- until the first LP of Sandinista is almost over.

I understand that perfectly. I just don't want it sold as being more punk than punk. It was the opposite of punk.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by Silent Majority »

Marky Dread wrote:Joe after The Clash II fiasco that was CTC went onto soundtracks making some good music in Trash City and Love Kills/Dum Dum Club but these are not a million miles away from the 101ers.
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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by IkarisOne »

Silent Majority wrote:
Marky Dread wrote:Joe after The Clash II fiasco that was CTC went onto soundtracks making some good music in Trash City and Love Kills/Dum Dum Club but these are not a million miles away from the 101ers.
I've decided that Love Kills is a weird, flawed masterpiece.

It has its moments. Wish the lyrics had something to do with the film, though.

Seeing that Bowie recently came out of retirement, I wonder if Mick in particular was thinking about the Bowie model when it came to breaking America. Bowie didn't do much with his heavy guitar rock here and didn't hit the Top 10 until he started playing disco and such. I wonder if that was a factor.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by 101Walterton »

LC was the best 101ers album.

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Re: SOUNDBOARD UPGRADE BRIXTON 30 JULY 1982

Post by IkarisOne »

101Walterton wrote:LC was the best 101ers album.

[youtube][/youtube]

Tell me the truth, though- wouldn't it be a million times better if all the guitars sounded like this on the whole record? The Clash's real sound - flamethrowing guitars drenched in reverb and layers of distortion- kicks the living shit out of any of the studio-created substitutes.

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