Marcus Gray knows the Clash. His history of the band, Last Gang In Town, is one of the most exhaustive band histories I’ve ever read. Fact of the matter and a personal admission here: I owned Last Gang In Town for two years and never made it further than 100 pages in. It’s a dense tome.
Gray’s new book on the band, Route 19 Revisited: The Clash and London Calling, while an in-depth examination into the making of the Clash’s magnum opus that leaves no stone unturned, still manages to be a rather easy read. Over 500 pages devoted to the making of one album might seem overkill, but at no point does Gray exhaust the possibilities of what can be explored.
Route 19 Revisited is divided into six sections. There’s the lead-up to the band, with brief biographies of each member, as well as a punk history primer. Then there’s a section on the band covering their history leading up to the album, followed by the recording of the album. London Calling is then dissected, track by track, followed by a section on the promotion of the album, as well as one on its lasting effects.
The real meat of the book is the middle half, with the segments on recording, analysis, and promotion. The recording section, “Highway to Highbury,” is a gear geek’s dream. You want to know Topper Headon’s exact drum set up? It’s as follows:
“A slightly customized silver Pearl drum kit: 24 x 17-inch bass drum, 14 x 10 top tom-tom, and 16 x 10 and 18 x 10 floor tom-toms. He’d found that the Pearl snare didn’t stand up to the beating he gave it when tuned as tight as he liked it to be, so used a Ludwig Black Beauty instead. His drum heads (skins) were Evans Hydraulic. All his cymbals were Zildjian: two 15-inch Heavy Rock hi-hats, plus a 16 and an 18 crash. His stands were Premier Lokfast Trilok, and he got Baker to bulk order the military-style premier sticks he liked…”
Fucking A, right? The same detail is given to every bit of the book. If you wanted to, it’s entirely possible to recreate the exact sound the band had at the time of recording. You’ll know everything but the brand of tape to which the album was recorded.
The track-by-track analysis covers everything: how the evolution of lovers rock applies to the song of the same name, what exactly “Clash Spannish” is, the historical provenace of the Death’s Head, et al. If you’ve got The Vanilla Tapes, you could in theory trace the evolution of the songs from demo to completed number. It’s astounding to see how Gray manages to take all of this material and still have it seem cohesive.
Gray’s best idea is the division of the book into sections. The story of the band, into the album, into its production and eventual place in the historical record would be enough, but the examination of each track allows for greater depth of understanding. Unfortunately, coming as it does smack-dab in the middle of Route 19 Revisited, it’s just awkward. Relegating it to an appendix would ensure that it wasn’t really read, and it helps to read about the specifics of each track immediately after the story of their creation. In terms of content, it makes sense. In terms of storytelling, it’s a pace-killer.
I know I tend to hammer on this point whenever an album history is published, but until someone figures out a way to analyze an album and place it within the story without it seeming like it’s something anomalous, this is going to be a prblem for me. Gray does it better than most, however, making each track have its own little story. Any of those could easily have been a magazine article on their own.
Route 19 Revisited: The Clash and London Calling comes out next month from Soft Skull Press.