Now Get This: Manorborn On The Clash And Beckett

Nostalgia: 42 Years Ago Clash Would Not Even Take A Limo From JFK—Took The Subway. NYC Concert Goers Didn't Mind Waiting

In a century where influencers sculpt the zeitgeist of the new century’s emerging generations, I thought about a couple of my own “influencers.” Coming from a family of opera divas, concert pianists and rock musicians, music has been a surround sound over my life. So narrowing the field of my music influencers was not difficult. But even easier was acknowledging the writers.

Throughout college, graduate school and law school, Samuel Beckett is the only writer who mattered. I drew on Beckett to lend illumination to whatever subject I was banging on about or to bail me out when inspiration was blocked.

So it is with tempered expectations that I await the release of the new James Marsh film on the life of Beckett, Dance First.  (The expectation is tempered because I have already been let down in a similar situation. In a three-way call with his sister-in-law who was working for my company, Steven Soderbergh mentioned that he was intending to make a film about Kafka. I kidded with him that I was jealous, as that was a film I dreamed of making. I wished him good luck but as it turned out, the film disappointed.)

If Samuel Beckett had been transmogrified into a post-punk rock band The Clash would be the band and London Callingwould be his anthem.

Hard to believe it was 44 years ago this month that The Clash, the only band that matters, added its title track to one of the greatest albums of all time, London Calling. Each year the critics elevate London Calling another rung higher on the ladder of Greats. It’s easy for them to do when tasked with asking themselves as Eddie Harris asked in Cold Duck Time, “Compared to What?” Really nothing like it in contemporary popular music. How could there be when we’re up to our a** cheeks in this era of Coachella and the colossal regression of mind and soul?

Two years after London Calling’s release, I was at the notorious Clash performance at Bonds International Casino in NYC on the opening night of their iconic American tour. The Clash, true to the Brixton cultural identity they projected, eschewed taking their limousines from the airport and rode the subway to Manhattan. As a consequence, they were over an hour and a half late and the crowd which numbered more than twice as many people as the space legally permitted had already driven the warmup band off the stage. To compensate, The Clash played a three-hour+ uninterrupted set into the wee hours. The following night’s performance was cancelled by the NYC Fire Department and strict safety protocols were put in place before the NYC engagement was permitted to continue.

Seven years after that concert, my coproducer – Oscar winning editor Barry Alexander Brown – and I sought out the author of The Clash tag line, The only band that matters, in an effort to see if he could come up with something equally dispositive for the rock doc we were producing. We met him at his tiny apartment in the West Village where he rambled on stoned out of his gourd for half an hour and after rolling another joint, demanded an advance to begin his contemplation. But what proved to be dispositive was that lightening only strikes once.

As one critic said of London Calling: it’s about, “hurt, anger, restless thought, and above all hope.” Like Beckett’s life and perhaps his signature work, The Unnamable, London Calling’s staccato base punctuation is ultimately about all of those things rising pointlessly above absurdity.  I live by the river; I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Strummer and Beckett; Beckett and Strummer …defiant, unyielding. They’re united by a muscularity of spirit that if nothing else has gifted us a syncopating rhythm to soothe our worn-out repressions.

With Big Ben in the rain and fog and the enduring Joe Strummer howling in nostalgia, the dissonant romance embedded in their video is timeless.

By Manorborn, for The Truth Barrier