While the Sex Pistols' "no future" became the bumper-sticker slogan of choice for first-wave UK punk rock, their London rivals the Clash built their program on an edict of "no past." As Julien Temple's recent documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, illustrated, the titular Clash frontman went to great lengths to distance himself from his well-established pre-punk/pub-band roots, and perhaps as a result, the Clash railed against classic-rock hero worship harder than most, by taking names ("no Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977!"), stealing sacred riffs (the Who's "I Can't Explain" bastardized into "Clash City Rockers") and redesigning pop history in their own image (the Elvis-swiped cover art of London Calling). So surely these detractors of "phony Beatlemania" must've had a good ol' laugh at the prospect of conquering one of the key sites of the real Beatlemania.
Of course, it would take a tour invite from the Who to get the Clash into Shea Stadium on Oct. 13, 1982, but in a way that just makes the story all the more rich: the punks meet the godfathers-- the former at the peak of their commercial ascendancy, the latter on the way to the first of many retirements. But while the two bands were born of different eras, both had followed similar trajectories, having each made their own escapes out of garageland to pursue more ambitious musical plans. And yet Live at Shea Stadium (a popular bootleg now receiving official release on its 26th anniversary) marks something more than just the passing of the torch between two generations of kindred spirits; it also documents the first time class-of-'77 punk-rockers graduated to the American stadium circuit, and the pyrrhic victory contained within. The Shea show was not the biggest the Clash ever played in America (that would be the US Festival in 1983), nor the most incendiary (see: the legendary 17-show string at New York's Bond Casino in 1981), but the set most vividly captures the Clash's most enduring qualities: the triumphs and tribulations of being populist punks. Fittingly, the Clash's Shea Stadium coronation would come in a downpour of very English rain. But where the Who might use such a backdrop to dramatize a typically blustery version of "Love, Reign O'er Me", for the Clash, the soggy weather was an ideal way to make a ballpark feel more like a sweaty dive. Following a humorously crowd-baiting opening spiel from Clash cohort Kosmo Vinyl, Joe Strummer introduces "London Calling" by declaring "welcome to the Casbah Club!" It's the first of many quips that Strummer uses to downsize the stadium spectacle into more club-like dimensions ("shhh… would you please stop talking at the back, it's too loud!"), and he's also careful not to turn his elevated podium into a pulpit; rather than use the spotlight to educate the American masses on the urban unrest that inspired "Guns of Brixton", Strummer simply offers, "If you don't know what's goin' on, just ask the person standing next to you."
Foreshadowing the BBC Radio Global a Go-Go broadcasts that would define his later career, Strummer sounds happiest playing cruise-leader to his band's genre tourism, talking the audience through a live mash-up of Sandinista's rap-rock prototype "The Magnificent Seven" and Willie Williams' reggae standard "Armagideon Time" like he was holding a bus megaphone: "This is a black New York rhythm we stole one night...so while we're here doing our little thing, I'm gonna take you to Jamaica...so hold on, fasten your seatbelts, extinguish all reefers!"
But while Strummer's stage banter frequently highlights the seeming absurdity of the Clash playing a venue the size of Shea, the set list more than justifies their promotion to it, adhering as it does to the time-honoured stadium-rock tradition of playing the hits and playing them often; even the band's current release at the time, Combat Rock, is represented only by its two popular singles (which means there's no "Straight to Hell" to lure in newly arrived "Paper Planes" chasers). Highlighting the staggering procession of classic singles the band had amassed in just five short years, the incredibly well-preserved (or greatly refurbished) Live at Shea Stadium recordings make the contradictory concept of stadium-punk seem like a natural state: if anything, the lock-and-load riffs of "Tommy Gun" and the shout-and-response reworking of Eddy Grant's "Police on My Back" sound like they were originally designed with the bleachers in mind.
Live at Shea Stadium, however, also provides a glimpse into the existential quandaries that would afflict agit-punk progeny from Rage Against the Machine to Against Me! onward: that is, the inherent difficulty of reconciling your activist politics with your growing bank balance. As the lone Clash original featured from their 1977 debut, "Career Opportunities" seems like a particularly odd choice to play at Shea, if only because these sorts of gigs forever distanced the Clash from the dole-line doldrums detailed within (a notion the Clash themselves seemed to have already addressed with Sandinista!'s cheeky kiddie-choir cover version). You can also hear the band's simmering tensions play out in the rather hollow version of "Rock the Casbah", which suffers from both the physical and spiritual absence of Topper Headon, the drummer who came up with the song's rhythm and its indelible piano-rolled hook, but whose chronic drug problems got him ousted from the band on the eve of the Combat Rock tour (to be replaced by original Clash drummer Terry Chimes). As a result, the Clash's most effortlessly funky tune is rendered as a rather joyless, standardized guitar rocker-- one that betrays the flagging enthusiasm that would eventually send Mick Jones packing less than a year later, and force Strummer to deep-six the band for good following 1985's roundly derided Cut the Crap, the only band that matters silenced with barely a mutter.
In a cunning premonition of their own impending collapse, the Clash bid Shea Stadium adieu with their signature cover of the Bobby Fuller Four's "I Fought the Law", the ultimate fight song for those who got no more left in them. The Clash may have showed up at Shea to inherit the Who's torch and create a new model of the thinking person's rock star for the 1980s, but they ultimately flubbed the hand-off-- and a group of Irishmen were more than happy to swoop in from the sidelines and run away with it.
