 The Clash I don't frequently get stopped in my tracks while record shopping – that moment when I'm flipping through CDs and suddenly discover something I know I have to buy, like my life depends on it. When it happens, it's simultaneously thrilling and frustrating … I almost don't like it when record stores actually have something I need. I like it when it's on my terms, when the clerk is beguiled by my selection, not the other way around. But even Muhammed Ali got knocked down every once in awhile. So it was when I was poking around recently and found Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg, a boot I'd just read about in Ice magazine. This 2-cd set presents the original double album that became The Clash's Combat Rock, which I am uncool or perhaps cool enough to say is by far my favorite Clash record. It's their tightest, edgiest, and most intimidating album, successfully venturing out into about as many styles as you could want without losing either the punk spirit or pop sensibility that makes all of their records interesting. Where Combat Rock really wins, for me (aside from it having been the album that got me in to the band … excuse me for being a bandwagon-jumper; I was ten), is that the album just sounds like a motherfucker. Nothing The Clash did has anything close to that kind of punch. And the songs are amazing ("Know Your Rights," "Should I Stay Or Should I Go," "Straight to Hell," "Overpowered By Funk," "Ghetto Defendant," and the still-spellbinding "Rock the Casbah") – track for track, utterly ass-kicking. Little did I know that Combat Rock very nearly was yet another overly long and sprawling mess! Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg (the original proposed title) would have made Sandanista! seem rather tasteful by comparison. It's amazing what some remixing and editing can do … Rat Patrol sounds almost like an underground hip-hop mix; Combat Rock sounds like a Jay-Z record. Of course, I'm talking sound, not style. For all their street cred, The Clash (thankfully) never wandered over into hip-hop. But clearly they loved the sound of the street, because Rat Patrol is a murky and mysterious endeavor, willfully aiming to not sound like a major-label album. The lead vocals are mixed just below the middle of the mix, the backgrounds are way up front, the sound effects are layered on top of it all, and there's no apparent low end to be found, despite these being some of the fattest tracks the band ever came up with. I can't say that Rat Patrol would have been a bad record, by any means, but it would have been a very different statement than Combat Rock – and I will say that there's no way in hell it would have spawned any hit singles, much less the band's two biggest hits. Purists probably argue that the band ought to have been allowed to release the record exactly as they wanted it, but that's hogwash. Sure, there are plenty of documented stories wherein a great album was deemed unreleaseable, but in most cases, I'll bet that the label's objective assessment is, at the very least, some needed third-party opinion as to whether the band is on to something great. Rat Patrol shows in bountiful detail that The Clash were on to something great (and probably on something great), but that it needed to be reined in. Too much of a good thing, perhaps. The songs on Rat Patrol are substantially longer, and mixed in entirely different ways, than the final versions on Combat Rock. Even something as familiar and direct as "Should I Stay Or Should I Go," which doesn't sound like it has all that much to it that could be different, comes off as subversive experimentation here – as in the second verse, which actually positioned the Spanish background vocals as the primary ones, with the English lyrics providing the response. Kinda mind-bending to consider how one small difference could make such a huge impact on the effectiveness of the song. Throughout, too, the lo-fi sound quality gives the record the sound of a C90 blaring from a Hell's Kitchen boombox – a million miles away from the Ibizan discotheque blast that graced the official version (for the better, in my opinion). Disc One contains the original album offered up to the label by Mick Jones, beginning with a rather shocking cheese-calypso tune called "The Beautiful People Are Ugly" and a totally different tracklist fleshed out by several songs and versions that didn't make the final cut ("Kill Time," "Walk Evil Talk," "First Night Back in London," "Cool Confusion"). Disc Two offers a ton of instrumentals and variants, some that have been released officially since, some that haven't – either way, it's a beautiful thing to have this stuff all in one place, for the most intriguing exploration of Combat Rock I could imagine. There's even a version of "Rock the Casbah" with Ranking Roger freestyling instead of the conventional lead vocal! Now I don't know which version of events I want to hold on to … Combat Rock or its most amazing bizarro-world brother. This is the way all bootlegs should be – lovingly presenting all the evidence so that you can decide how things ought to have gone down: how they did, or how they might've. In the end, it's given me a new appreciation for Combat Rock, because now I not only love the songs and the sound, but also the mixing, editing, programming, and even the label interference! Amazing stuff. I still sting a bit from finding Rat Patrol, seeing the prohibitive price tag, and knowing that I had no choice; I could have been starving to death, and I'd still have had to buy the CD instead of getting some food. You might call into question why I'd stop into a CD shop while en route to get some food to quell fatal starvation, but frankly, it wouldn't occur to me not to. And I'd have gladly spent my final penniless, malnourished moments fading away to Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg.
Review by Wimpempy Tarlisle |