Sandinista!

I realized for the first time earlier today that December will be the 30th anniversary of the release of The Clash's sprawling (to put it mildly) three-record Sandinista!  Luckily, that gives me another coupla months to come up with my "single album" version, although in listening to it now part of it's charm might be that you can't really pin it down to a single album. I remember reading a quote from Mick Jones once that the album was meant to be skipped around, and that if it had been released in the cd age it's legacy would be different.

I'm so old that while in college I actually called Rolling Stone magazine and told them I wanted to write a college paper on the Clash. They were so baffled that they actually SENT mimeographed copies of every article on the Clash that had been in RS, along with a personal note "Greg - hope this helps, let me know how it goes." I still have the stuff they sent me; doing something like that in today's internet age is pretty unthinkable.

As crappy as THIS PAPER I wrote probably really is (I'm scared to crack it open and look), I'm still proud of a lot of the shit I wrote about my super-slice of superslices, Lose This Skin.

I bet I'm the only person you know who spent 4 pages documenting the racial significance of Lose This Skin, a super-slice nobody ever fucking talks about. Of course, it was written and sung by Tymon Dogg (who taught Joe Strummer how to play guitar, thank you very much, and was in Joe's band when he died), but still. Slice of super-slices.

Come with me, I thought he said
But that's not him, anymore he's dead

Also, their cover of The Equals' Police On My Back on the album, besides worlds colliding re: two of my favorite bands of all time, has to be on the short list of Greatest Covers of All Time.