Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

The Clash garnered the title “The Only Band That Matters,” and for the last few years of the 1970s, they very nearly were. The band fulfilled the promise of its name with the visceral patois punk of their debut album, drawing energy from the riotous street-level alliance between skinhead and dreadhead, a white-hot white riot informed just as much by Big Youth’s Screaming Target as by the Ramones. No other band would, or could, rail with equal ferocity against the dreary employment and stagnant career mobility facing lower-class British youth (”Career Opportunities”) and the slicked-back trebly rootslessness of touring Jamaican reggae acts (”White Man in Hammersmith Palais”). The Clash’s punk burned not with the safety-pin-pierced, amphetamine-fueled rage of the Sex Pistols, but with the rumbling, woofer-rattling, Babylon-incinerating dread roiling within reggae’s dark heart, dread sooty with the ash of a nation in flames. Never Mind the Bollocks was a fist through a window; The Clash was a fist in the air.

And then, of course, after the hard rock excursion Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the Clash dropped London Calling, an album which screamed iconic from its cover to its last fading note. A maelstrom of disparate musical styles, revolutionary rhetoric and snatches of Americana, it is a testament to the Clash’s deific powers that they not only spun Cadillacs, Federico Lorca, Stagger Lee and dreadlocks into a cohesive artistic statement, but created one of the greatest albums of all time. It deserves its own post. It deserves its own book.

After London Calling, the Clash could have announced an album of sea chanteys and inspired only breathless anticipation. Instead, in the biggest of an endearing series of “fuck yous” to their record company, they announced the release of a 3 LP set for the price of a single album.

Enter Sandinista!

At 2 and a half hours, with 36 tracks sprawling out over three records, Sandinista! made the lengthy and stylistically diverse London Calling look like an EP. It was nominally the Clash’s dub album, but to call it so would overlook the stylistic pandemonium etched into the wax: rap, ’60s soul, political disco, rockabilly, rock, waltz, cocktail music and haaaard reggae (and that’s only disc one). But in their admirable effort to make as much Clash music as possible available to fans, the band overreached slightly; nobody really needed to hear the snarling “Career Opportunities” recast as a sing-along by the children of Clash organ player Mickey Gallagher, and drummers generally aren’t singers for a reason.

So the conventional critical wisdom about Sandinista! is that somewhere in those three discs lies a truly classic Clash album. This may be slightly unfair - most of the songs on the album have at least something to recommend them - but for the purposes of this post, we’ll go with the conventional wisdom. I have endeavored to divine the location of the musical Avalon hidden in the sea of Sandinista!, a fat-and-”Lose This Skin”-free version of the Clash’s most controversial album. And no, I didn’t just pick all the dub songs.

Play the Ideal Sandinista! tracks uninterrupted, in sequence (52 minutes):

1) Police On My Back

A hard-charging rocker that, save for far more reggae-inflected production values, would fit in perfectly on The Clash, “Police On My Back” is a killer opening number.

2) Corner Soul

The Clash at their melodic best.

3) The Crooked Beat

A sequel of sorts to “Revolution Rock,” “The Crooked Beat” is another loving Clash paean to the redemptive power of reggae. It’s also arguably the sickest drum and bass Topper and Paul ever laid on wax. Subwoofer a must.

4) The Magnificent Seven

And you thought Run-D.M.C. was old school? Keen observers of the musical scene, the Clash realized that the still-nascent rap developing among New York City’s black youth was the wave of the future. In keeping with other early rap milestones like “Rapper’s Delight,” nobody has any idea what the fuck the lyrics are talking about. Italian mobstah shoots a lobstah!

5) Something About England

Just good old-fashioned Clash songwriting.

6) Somebody Got Murdered

My pick for the second-best rock track on the album, after “Police On My Back.”

7) The Equaliser

In an album chock full of experimentative dubs, “The Equaliser” is the most successful, combining a potent political message, swirling violin (an instrument rarely heard in the genre) and the shuddering echoes and electronic bloops which constitute the hallmarks of dub.

8 ) Washington Bullets

Not only the most pointedly political track on the album - an indictment of the United States’ hand in various brushfire conflicts and revolutions around the world - but also the only Clash calypso song I’m aware of.

9) Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)

More proto-rap!

10) One More Time

One of the several Mikey Dread-assisted reggae tracks on the album, concerning that most classic of reggae topics: misery and the youth.

11) Charlie Don’t Surf

I reckon this song is in reference to the notorious surfing scene from Apocalypse Now. If Charlie did surf, it would be to this song.

12) Living In Fame

A declamatory Mikey Dread toast graces this version of “If Music Could Talk,” offering advice everyone could stand to take to heart: “If you say you a selector, you have to have good selections.” Not only is it a great track, the mysterious query at the end (”Who holds the key that winds up Big Ben?!”) makes it the perfect album closer.

Taste is of course subjective, so to encourage reader participation, I’d like to hear some other versions of the ideal Sandinista! I know at least a couple you own it, so drag it out and make your choices. Try to keep it to 12 tracks or less (i.e., one third of the album) and pay attention to sequencing. Then report back! It will make me happy…