THE BEAT GOES ON: What Made BAD so Good

The Rolling Stones are often mistakenly regarded as Mick Jagger’s backup band, the thinking being that Jagger is the most important creative force behind the “world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll group,” and that he could have been served just as well with other players. Indeed, over the course of the decades, the Stones have gone through numerous personnel changes without any great sacrifice to sound or personality.

Of course, there has been one constant in the band beside Jagger: guitarist/songwriter and occasional vocalist Keith Richards. And we did, in fact, get a glimpse of what the Stones might have been like without Richards, when Jagger made a string of solo albums in the mid-1980s and 1990s. (Remember those? My point exactly.) And when Richards finally got around to making his solo album, Talk Is Cheap (1988), it was so funky and soulful it made some wonder if the Stones would have been even greater had Richards been the frontman—or as one critic wrote, “It’s hard not to see who the real musical force was in the Stones after hearing Talk Is Cheap.”

A similar misunderstanding of the role of a creative co-equal afflicts the perception of that greatest of rock bands coming out of the English punk movement of the late 1970s, the Clash, which is often thought of as the creative plaything of the group’s nominal frontman, the late Joe Strummer. There’s no question that Strummer’s angry voice, manic energy, rebellious attitude, political commitment, and force of personality were to a great extent responsible for the Clash’s success. But to think of the Clash as Joe Strummer’s band would be as woeful an error as to think of the Stones as Jagger’s group, Richards be damned. No further evidence need be submitted than the Clash’s final album, Cut the Crap, made after Strummer’s own Keith Richards—guitarist/songwriter and occasional vocalist Mick Jones—was kicked out of the group.

That last desperate attempt to keep the Clash alive was so bad that even Strummer eventually disowned it. And, in the wake of Strummer’s failed post-Jones effort, Jones himself responded with his own creation, 1985’s This Is Big Audio Dynamite, which, like Richards’s Talk Is Cheap, proved that Jones was an essential, if not the essential, creative force in the Clash, as it took the best of the group’s late-period music, particularly its crowning opus, Sandinista!, pushed it to the next level, and had as great an influence on the popular music of the next quarter-century as the Clash’s 1977 eponymous debut had on legions of bands to come, including, most notably, Nirvana and Green Day.

Jones, in fact, was Strummer’s creative co-equal, writing and singing his share of the Clash’s greatest hits, including “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” “Train in Vain,” and “Hitsville UK.” But the twenty-fifth anniversary re-release of This Is Big Audio Dynamite, in a two-CD set featuring a newly remastered version of the original eight-song album plus a second disk of a dozen remixes, dub versions, edits, outtakes, and B-sides, is as good an excuse as any to reconsider the legacy of Jones’s contributions to the Clash and his work with his post-Clash group—which underwent several incarnations over the years under the names Big Audio Dynamite, Big Audio Dynamite II, just plain Big Audio, but known always the way Jones intended it, merely as BAD—and its phenomenal and mostly unsung influence over modern rock.

While BAD’s sophomore effort, 1986’s No. 10, Upping St., which temporarily reunited Jones and Strummer, and BAD II’s 1991 effort, The Globe—which produced the group’s biggest chart hit, “Rush”—garnered more widespread critical and commercial acclaim, the band’s debut established the group’s template and holds up a quarter-century later as a masterpiece of minimalist collage, picking up where the Clash left off with Sandinista! and the rock-rap fusion impulses of “The Magnificent Seven.”

It was Mick Jones who discovered rap while the Clash was hanging out in New York City in the late 1970s, turned on by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, among others. In BAD, Jones combined these impulses with movie samples, triggered and found sounds, Jamaican dub, and dance floor beats, in songs that carried on the Clash’s dialectical critique of politics and culture by decrying latter-day colonialism, materialism, statism, corporatism, Reaganism, and Thatcherism—the whole litany of political punk-rock—but with a wit and intelligence that belied Jones’s art-school background (much like his contemporary and fellow experimenter in combining world rhythms and samples, Talking Heads’ David Byrne, also a product of art school).

The re-release only underlines the visionary impulse behind this work, whose ambitions were to combine the Clash’s atavistic punk with the rhythmic pulse of dance music. BAD was also unique in that it was one of the few rock bands at the time—ever, really—that boasted an interracial lineup, with the cover of its debut album featuring Jones, holding a bunch of dynamite, flanked by the dreadlocked Don Letts (the Clash videographer who contributed lyrics, vocals, and samples to BAD) and West London bassist Leo “E-Zee Kill” Williams (from Jones’s short-lived post-Clash outfit, TRAC).

Jones and Letts were a remarkable duo, creating avant-rock as dance floor music, trailblazing a rock-rap fusion that would inspire the Beastie Boys, Peter Gabriel, and Beck, in dizzying, melodic tracks such as “Bad,” which jump-cuts from Hitler’s invasion of Poland to Jerry Lee Lewis to Clint Eastwood to Jesus to Hawaii Five-O to fast-food to Ronald Reagan. The music is constructed like a patchwork quilt, with dialogue, gunshots, themes  sampled from Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti westerns, and newscasters warning of a “Japanese air attack.” The overall effect mimicked the urgency that fueled so much of the Clash’s best work, but brought it forward into the post-punk era and gave it a more global reach, culturally and musically, at a time when only David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts had attempted such an ambitious use of audio collage.

As the Clash’s lead guitarist, Jones was already considered one of the most influential musicians of the punk era. U2 guitarist The Edge owes his signature, chiming rhythms to Jones, which he presumably acknowledged when U2 brought BAD along as the opening act on one of its world tours. In particular, Jones’s work with pedal effects, including phasers, flangers, delays, echoes, and gates, was innovative and seminal—what we now take for granted were new and futuristic sounds when this album was released in 1985.

At age fifty-five, Jones continues to be an influential if quiet force in rock. A subsequent band he led, Carbon/Silicon, was one of the first to embrace the technology of the Internet and file-sharing, as implicit in the group’s free download, “MPFree.” More recently, he has collaborated with Damon Albarn’s supergroup, Gorillaz, along with his former Clash-mate, bassist Paul Simonon.

One of the sampled phrases of dialogue on an early BAD song goes, “Rhythm is both a song’s manacle … and its demonic charge.” It’s an apt summary of the challenge that Jones seemed to take on as his own from the beginning of his career, through his work with the Clash, BAD, and in subsequent projects. Mick Jones is a name that rarely appears on lists of the Top Ten most important musicians in rock history. Perhaps the re-release of This Is Big Audio Dynamite might rectify that oversight, and credit will devolve to Jones where credit is due—as one of rock music’s great visionaries. [JUNE 2010]

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and cultural critic and the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet.

THE GOODS

Big Audio Dynamite
This Is Big Audio Dynamite: Legacy Edition
Columbia/Legacy