LISTEN: Joe Strummer's London Calling

When I was about eleven or twelve I went on a record buying CRUSADE. I'd already had a good solid base with my dad's record collection. But I needed more. We had a good player and they were much cheaper to buy than CDs so naturally I bought everything in sight.

Back then there were three places I got my records. Sound Exchange had awesome stuff - bootlegs, rarities, imports, everything. But it was so overpriced I rarely was able to buy anything. For a while Flipside II Records was my go to spot. Run by a guy named Don Diego, who more than once tried to get me to join his self started religion of which the revered deity was none other than Don Diego himself, had all kinds of good stuff and was cheap. But I stopped going there when Don Diego refused to sell me a signed promo poster for Social Distortion's "Somewhere Between Heaven & Hell" that I had found buried in the bowels of the store. He didn't even know he had it, it was buried in there since the damn album came out. The last place was this local record show that was held on Sundays in the local fire department rec room (they held some semi legendary Jersey basement shows there too) and I would bug the hell out of my mom to let me check it out after church. They had everything, it was cheap, and most importantly it was close enough to walk back to if my mom refused to stop. Later on I'd graduate onto the big leagues and make the trip to Curmudgeon or Vintage Vinyl but most of my early record purchases came from that show.

Maybe that's where London Calling first came into my possession. I'd like to say I was walking down the aisle of some record store and a beam of light from heaven came down and showed me the path to salvation but really London Calling just kinda came into my possession. It wasn't immediate love at first listen. It's alot of music to ingest and while the cool kids may have been enamored from first listen, it had to grow on me. But pretty soon after it was all Clash all the time. Singles, imports, demos if it had The Clash written on the cover I bought it.

Like everyone else, I was totally captivated by Joe Strummer not only by his words and music onstage but in his interviews offstage. Strummer had a way speaking that made you want to get up, get out and do something. The rhythm and the cadence of his speech held pure unfiltered passion. He completely understood the power of radio and television as a mean of communication, a purpose it is used for less and less today. If Joe Strummer was being interviewed on the radio you could be damn sure he had something to say.

Instead of going to college I worked in a independent record store for six years, not some Coconuts. Even with our knowledgeable clientele, I was surprised to find how many people didn't know The Clash. We'd put it on both customers and some employees would ask "What's this?" It was almost guaranteed that if The Clash was playing on the overheads, someone was gonna by one of their records. When Joe Strummer passed in 2002, my friend Joe Porter and I played Streetcore everyday for two weeks.

In his years post-Clash, Strummer wandered the world soaking up it's peoples and cultures. Always with ears wide open, Strummer kept his finger on the pulse of music. His solo work and collaboration with the Mescaleros brought an eclectic mix of world music, punk, and rock&roll. But it was it BBC World Service radio program London Calling that showed us just how amazing a soul Joe Strummer really was. His combination of hand selected tracks, nimble wordplay and vaudevillian antics made for an endlessly entertaining half hour. It was the most logical step in Joe Strummer's quest to bring the sound of the streets and it's people to the masses.

If you go on Itunes you can download for free, the Americanized versions of Joe Strummer's London Calling BBC radio show. While it is eight parts long, it's a condensed and edited version of Srummer's original broadcasts. We all know Joe Strummer was great but we don't need the announcer telling us that every five seconds. So gathered here are all known recordings of the unedited original broadcast versions of Strummer's London Calling on the BBC World Service. At times the audio quality leaves something to be desired but the content is undeniable:

DOWNLOAD: BBC World Service: London Calling with Joe Strummer

I'll close this little tribute with a quote from Joe Strummer that closes the end of Julien Temple's beautiful documentary, The Future Is Unwritten. It all right there in a couple of sentences, the soul of the man and it brings me to tears every time I hear it:

"I'd like to say people can change anything they want to; and that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks. I am one of them. But we've all gotta stop... just stop following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything; this is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other; it's because they've been dehumanized. It's time to take that humanity back into the centre of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed... it ain't going anywhere! They should have that on a big billboard across Times Square. Think on that. Without people you're nothing."

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