Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Mick: You know why they have a second album crisis every band?
Well, every one was a crisis with us but when you have the second album crisis,
when you do your first album, you've been playing all that material for a while
before you go into the studio you know.
But the second one, it's like you have to start from scratch. It was like can you go
somewhere and write the new album
Joe: What do you mean, second album? We weren't really ready to make a 2nd album.
I think it took so much out of us to make the first album.
Mick: So we went to Jamaica to do some songs and
we were just so overwhelmed
by being there that we didn't
actually do very much writing.
Joe: We came up with some tunes for the second album "Tommy Gun", "Safe European Home"
what-have-you
but mostly I remember trying to find Lee Perry in Kingston.
I don't know how we weren't
filleted and served up on a bed of chips
because me & Mick wandered around the harbor. I think they mistook us
for sailors, merchant *** because
we're walking around Kingston dressed up in our full punk regalia.
They must have just let us pass
because they probably thought we were madman or something.
But me & Mick didn't have a clue what we're doing there or
we didn't know anybody or anything, we were just wandering around in Kingston
like lunatics and we never found Lee Perry either.
Paul: What I realized is when they were sent there, I was going 'hold it a minute I thought
I was the Jamaican fanatic in the band' but
anyway so I got a cheap ticket to go to
a package tour to Moscow and then
I came back with all these stars
which became adopted by the Clash
so something came positive out of that.
Joe: Behind the scenes I think they were pressuring Bernie to
bring in something, they wanted to bring an American end into it
and Bernie selected Sandy Pearlman
off a list of producers that was presented to him as
likely candidates by Columbia.
I got a message from Dan Loggins who used to be the head of
A&R at CBS and he said 'Hey, we need you to come to London
as soon as possible and we're gonna take you around the country
and show you a bunch of bands.
And if you're interested in producing any of them, groovy.
So we went in and I was there with a bunch of guys from CBS
and apparently the sound dude signalled the Clash that I was in the house.
So they began by announcing 'We're going to play a song
and we want to dedicate it to Journey and Ted Nugent.
I think they left Bruce Springsteen out but they mentioned a bunch of big
AOR-ish bands that were big in the late seventies
and most of all the Blue Öyster Cult.
This is 'We're so bored' or 'I'm so bored with the USA' and there we are.
Topper: I really enjoyed working with Sandy Pearlman.
It's the first time I'd been to record an album in a proper studio
and he was very complimentary about my drumming which meant
that maybe there was an affinity between us. And he got a great drum sound.
Sandy: In the case of Topper we had one of the greatest drummers ever to be dropped
upon the face of the earth. I called him the human drum machine
but that was unfair to him. He was beyond any conceivable, even 21st century evolution
of the concept of a drum machine or virtual drum machine. He was awesome.
Paul: Sandy Pearlman you know he's a great fellow
and he's good at his job being a producer, but for me
I suppose it sort of showed my flaws in my bass playing because when
I first met Mick I never played an instrument in my life.
And that record is probably what, six months before we
did our first live show so I was quite sort of rough.
Sandy: One of the things I pride myself on is getting
good or great performances out of everybody
no matter what their skill level might have been before I walked in.
And I said 'well I'm just gonna,
we'll just have him play it and he'll get it right and it'll be great'.
And, I'm biased of course
but I think we got a really great result in and nothing was replaced.
Paul: Come the time we did the second, or the third album "London Calling"
I had made a mistake, I told Guy Stevens: 'Guy, I slipped up on "Brand New Cadillac"
and he said 'It sounds great, it sounds like a Cadillac going out of control", so
I had more affinity with Guy Stevens than Sandy Pearlman.
Sandy: I'm really happy to have mistakes and imperfection.
It's just, it should sort of resemble the scale that the rest the stuff is in.
And so you know that's really where I pushed the button. It was not like...
I'm not a fanatic about that. In fact, I,
on "Guns on the Roof", Joe did not.. at the end of
a particularly great take he burst a blood vessel in his mouth.
and he said, 'This time I will try and reproduce the accent",
got blood in me mouth' if you listen to the recording it's there
and I put it in, I kept it and he didn't want it kept.
I said this is awesome, I'm not throwing this out. These are the things that
make doing this kind of stuff worthwhile.
Joe: By the second album it wasn't a case of bashing the stuff out.
It was getting more like a rock scenario where you're churning it out.
It was getting a bit dull so
Paul somehow got ahold of a projector and some World War II footage and we'd
play them on the studio wall
but then he got into running them backwards which
sort of took the edge off it because it became .. you'd see implosions and
Zeros coming out of destroyers and battleships.
It was generally mad, the whole thing.
Sandy: I came out of the control room for some reason
and I noticed that all the potted plants in the studio
had been dumped on the ground in this big common room
and the plants themselves, all of the soil from the potted plants,
and the plants had been artfully placed around the room.
They had created a trials course
or something and they were riding these ..
we couldn't really hear it because of the soundproofing
in the studio, in the control room,but they were riding these trail bikes
around the course they had created.
And I think it was the third day and I said to Mick and Joe,
'Anything we're going to do here I think we need to finish
by about 3 o'clock in the morning,
4 o'clock because I don't think we will ever be let back in this place.
Mick: Joe and I we went to San Francisco
and we were going to do the overdubs and we did in San Francisco at the Automat there
with Sandy but we were getting fed up as well and we were like
'Listen, we're going on strike unless these two can come over. Otherwise we're laying down tools now'.
Topper: "Give 'Em Enough Rope" is kind of an overlooked album to a certain extent for us, but
I was surprised when Mick said they only wrote a couple songs in Jamaica .. Mick: Yeah
Topper: because "Julie's in the Drug Squad" was great, "Tommy Gun" was great.
I'm just wondering where they came from.
Sandy: "Tommy Gun", of course I loved the lyrics, the guitar sounds great.
We had, really, our little odyssey in recording and mixing this
which finally brought us to New York in the Record Plant
and they had built an overdub room as I said, and the overdub room had
a huge thick glass window, thick glass window into the control room,
hardwood floors and hardwood walls, maybe some drywall as well. It was extremely reflective
and more to the point since the building had a steel frame
you could get the frame to resonate, you could get the whole room the resonate
if you turned things up hideously loud.
Topper, he had an awesome, awesome drum sound including, you know, his snare sound
so we turned the tape over and played him the tape backwards and he
played the snare drum to the backwards tape which gave, if you're familiar with
the song, if you remember it, it has this fantastic sucking crunching sound
at the leading and trailing edge of each snare strike and that was why it was done.
Joe: Didn't even realize how the first album sounded weird really to American record company
people and they weren't keen to release it at all.
And so they released the second album and then the first album,
but the audience was way beyond them, the audience was already well into it in America,
far more than the executives knew.