Listening to The Clash's Sandinista! Again

I've been a huge fan of The Clash since I was a kid. While a lot of bands that I liked in my youth are now embarrassing to even mention (ahem, Def Lepard), my appreciation for The Clash has grown considerably. The band's 1979 release London Calling has been one of my default "play this" albums for well over 20 years.

"Spanish Bombs" is for me the quintessence of punk: it's both a rocking tune and a decent introduction to the Spanish Civil War. As a special bonus, the "oh my corazon" refrain rendered in Strummer and Jones' thick Brit accents is strangely endearing. Another song on that album, "Lost in the Supermarket", is hands down the most clever critique of consumerism I've ever found; every time I walk into a big-box store, it's queued in my internal sound track.

But, for some reason Sandinista!--the album that many critics consider to be the band's greatest achievement--never really got to me. I've owned the CD for many years and have probably listened to it every couple of years, but, always left with the feeling that the next time I was in a Clash mood, I'd put London Calling on. Tonight was different for some reason. I put Sandinista! on in the background while I was doing some cooking, and this time the album "took".

The first thing that hit me was just how extraordinary Paul Simonon's bass-playing is on this album. This probably caught my attention because the mixing on the album pushes the bass rather hard (and it works). The brilliant, jazzy "Look Here" is one example. The riff is a pretty standard one from the jazz bass repertoire, but Simonon gives it a Clash signature, in part by playing what you'd expect to hear on an upright bass on an electric. "One More Time" is another example, but this time in a ska piece (and one that includes among Strummer's most brilliant lyrics: "you don't need no silicon/to calculate poverty." This song was recorded in 1979, i.e., before the birth of the personal computer.)

After my revelation about Simonon while listening to Sandinista!, I went back to my usual Clash fix, London Calling, to hear if I'd been missing something in that album. And I had. It is clear to me now that Simonon's bass is one of the driving forces on this album as well. If you take his bass work out of "Lost in the Supermarket", the song loses its musical soul and with it the substantial punch behind Strummer's lyrics. And "Koka Kola" becomes just another song.