Alaska Employment Law

I earlier made it clear what a big fan I am of The Clash and the late, lamented Joe Strummer, despite reporting that I lost patience with the overlong biography of Strummer (Redemption Song) written by his friend, the former NME reporter Chris Salewicz.  I won’t dwell too long on any one item, but I have been delving into the band again and wanted to comment on a few things.
 
A few weeks ago was when it all started, on a rainy night in Brookline, as I was driving down Beacon Street playing a copy of The Sandinista Project, a two-CD set produced by ex-rock writer Jimmy Guterman (whose intriguing, typographical error-filled book on Jerry Lee Lewis, Rockin’ My Life Away, can be lawfully downloaded from Guterman’s website).  I had never really warmed to the original album.  If you are of a certain age, you might recall it – Sandinista!, a triple-LP issued by The Clash in 1980 that was chock full of musical styles (dub, reggae, gospel, rap, children’s songs, rockabilly, rock, and more), overfull most thought:  it was called an okay triple album that could have made a really good double album or a monster single album, if only there had been judicious cutting.  Indeed, there are websites, even today, that try to answer the musical question, what would you put on a single-LP version of Sandinista!?  (Oddly, few have noticed that such a single-LP version was actually issued as a promo by the band, which sort of answers the question, but never mind.)
 
Anyway, Guterman’s excellent “project” consists of cover versions of all 36 songs from Sandinista!, in order, in versions by about 36 different artists that often sound startlingly different from the originals.  A country and western feeling prevails in parts of the remake.  Intrigued, I dug out my old CD re-issue of Sandinista! by The Clash, and played the first half of it repeatedly.  Today, 29 years later, nothing sounds quite like “The Magnificent Seven,” Joe Strummer’s foray into rap at a time when only The Sugar Hill Gang and Grandmaster Flash were rapping; which said Flash, and his Furious Five, opened for the band at the first of the famous Bond’s Casino gigs in Times Square in summer 1981, only to be roundly booed by impatient, and I might add witless, punk fans from New York.  “Vacuum cleaner sucks up budgie!”
 
But something was wrong:  the sound on my old (1990) CD was sludgy and awful, though my car stereo is pretty good.  I knew that the record company had remastered Sandinista! and the rest of The Clash catalog in 1999, so, sighing, I bought Sandinista! yet again.  Totally better – blasting out of the speakers, decibels akimbo, Paul Simenon’s base smack in my solar plexus:  a glimpse of sonic heaven.  This was one remaster seriously worth it, I think – and I am not really a “sound” guy, having grown up, quite happily, on compressed, awful sounding AM transistor radios that told me that rock and roll was not something for audiophiles but was instead about how it made you feel.  And so I finally began to appreciate Sandinista!.
 
Take it out and play it again, would be my advice.  Don’t listen to it all at once (it’s too long), but don’t skip any songs.  The messiness is a good thing.