Pen­nie Smith was not a fan. Maybe that’s what made her the per­fect pho­tog­ra­ph­er for The Clash. “She was nev­er par­tic­u­lar­ly into rock music,” writes Rob Walk­er at The Guardian; she wasn’t starstruck or over­awed by her sub­jects; and she also was­n’t even par­tic­u­lar­ly in love with the most famous shot of her career — the icon­ic pho­to of bassist Paul Simonon rais­ing his Fend­er Pre­ci­sion at New York’s Pal­la­di­um, sec­onds before smash­ing it to bits. “I said, ‘it’s com­plete­ly out of focus,’” Smith remem­bers of the image when Joe Strum­mer insist­ed on using it for the cov­er of leg­endary dou­ble-LP Lon­don Call­ing. “But Joe wouldn’t have it. He said, ‘That one is the pho­to.’”

He was obvi­ous­ly cor­rect, though Smith still doesn’t sound con­vinced. “I’m pleased I took it,” she says, “but it’s a bit of a weight around my neck. It keeps com­ing back to whack me on the back of the head — nice­ly in some instances, but aggra­vat­ing­ly in oth­ers.” Hit­ting one in the head — front or back — is the aim of the best album cov­ers in punk, and “punk rock’s rage and dis­sent have always been easy to rep­re­sent visu­al­ly,” says Noah Lefevre in the Poly­phon­ic video above. Tak­ing the per­fect punk pho­to­graph, how­ev­er, depend­ed on a num­ber of vari­ables all com­ing togeth­er per­fect­ly for a once-in-a-life­time shot.

For one thing, Smith had to have made the gig. She near­ly accept­ed an offer to go out with friends instead. She also decid­ed to change it up that night and stand on Simonon’s side of the stage instead of next to gui­tarist Mick Jones. And then, as Lefevre explains, there was the show itself. “In Lon­don, the Clash would play rau­cous punk bars and dance­halls full of stand­ing room crowds. In the U.S.,” dur­ing their first tour in 1979, “they often found them­selves play­ing in the­aters with fixed seat­ing.” The Pal­la­di­um was such a venue. “Bounc­ers would hold crowds back, make sure they stayed sta­pled to their seats.”

The seden­tary crowd killed the vibe. By the end of the show, “Paul’s frus­tra­tion turned to anger,” notes Snap Gal­leries, “and then he lost it com­plete­ly. His watch stopped at 9:50pm.” Smith remem­bers see­ing him sud­den­ly spin toward her. “He was in a real­ly bad mood, and that wasn’t like him.” She was so star­tled, she got the pho­to­graph. “It wasn’t a choice to take the shot. My fin­ger just went off.” That chance moment gave the band an ide­al image for the Lon­don Call­ing cov­er.

It was illus­tra­tor Ray Lowry’s idea to crib the typog­ra­phy of Elvis’ first record, and the font “called back to the roots of punk rock,” born out of the ‘50s rock­a­bil­ly tra­di­tion of sim­ple songs and bare-bones instru­men­ta­tion and arrange­ments. “Punk and rock and roll held the same cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance,” Lefevre says, but The Clash announced them­selves on the album cov­er as puri­fiers of the tra­di­tion, strip­ping out the “pho­ny Beat­le­ma­nia” Strum­mer decried in the title track and replac­ing it with right­eous, if bare­ly-in-focus, rage. Hear the full gig just above, includ­ing the bass-smash­ing at the end at 1:08:10.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Rare Live Footage Doc­u­ments The Clash From Their Raw Debut to the Career-Defin­ing Lon­don Call­ing (1977–1980)

“Stay Free: The Sto­ry of the Clash” Nar­rat­ed by Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D: A New 8‑Episode Pod­cast

The Clash Play Their Final Show (San Bernardi­no, 1983)

The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Com­plete Con­cert

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When William Basin­s­ki released The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops in the years after the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 attacks, it was the sound of decay pre­served for pos­ter­i­ty — record­ings of decades-old tape loops lit­er­al­ly falling apart on their reels, as the World Trade Cen­ter ruins smol­dered across the riv­er from the composer’s Brook­lyn stu­dio. The piece was per­formed ten years lat­er by an orches­tra at the Tem­ple of Den­dur, at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, for the tenth anniver­sary of the attacks. Anohni (then known as Antony of Antony and the John­sons) called it “the most help­ful and use­ful music I have ever known.”

This might mark the first time a piece of ambi­ent music has been award­ed such grav­i­tas and made the cen­ter­piece of a sig­nif­i­cant memo­r­i­al. It seems a long way from the ori­gins of the form in Bri­an Eno’s Dis­creet Music (1975) and Music for Air­ports (1978), in which Eno pushed music to the periph­ery of expe­ri­ence, turn­ing it into unob­tru­sive back­ground stim­u­lus that “cre­at­ed a sort of land­scape you could belong to,” he says above, like the end­less­ly repeat­ing worlds of a video game. In music, how­ev­er, “rep­e­ti­tion is a form of change,” Eno remind­ed us, or as Basinski’s loops sug­gest­ed, writes Sasha Frere-Jones at The New York­er, “rep­e­ti­tion is change.”

Anoth­er curi­ous trait links Basinski’s 21st cen­tu­ry lamen­ta­tions and Eno’s 70s air­port lounge music, one that seems to change the terms of the con­tract that ambi­ent music, as we usu­al­ly under­stand it, makes with the lis­ten­er. We might think of it as music that makes no par­tic­u­lar demands on us and take Eno’s state­ments about it as encour­ag­ing a kind of pas­sive con­sump­tion: ambi­ent music as no more than pleas­ant accom­pa­ni­ment for bet­ter queu­ing-up and calmer shop­ping. (Not that there’s any­thing wrong with stress relief….)

But what Basin­s­ki and Eno both describe in intense acts of ambi­ent cre­ation is more extreme. It begins with a kind of help­less­ness in the face of dis­tress — in the first case an of help­less­ly watch­ing low­er Man­hat­tan burn from the roof of a Williams­burg loft. Eno’s predica­ment was more per­son­al and inti­mate, he tells Riz Khan above, but no less help­less. Con­va­lesc­ing in his bed after a car acci­dent, he found him­self unable to move when a friend put on a record and left him alone. The expe­ri­ence of immo­bil­i­ty became a cat­a­lyst.

The album of “18th cen­tu­ry harp music” was too qui­et. He couldn’t turn it up over the sound of rain out­side his win­dow. At first, Eno says, he was frus­trat­ed by his lack of con­trol over the envi­ron­ment. But as he “start­ed lis­ten­ing to the rain and lis­ten­ing to these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain,” it became for him “a great musi­cal expe­ri­ence…. I sud­den­ly thought of this idea of mak­ing music that didn’t impose itself on your space in the same way.”

In pay­ing atten­tion to a loss of con­trol, Eno dis­cov­ered music that relin­quish­es con­trol over the lis­ten­er. In lis­ten­ing to his own shock and grief, Basin­s­ki dis­cov­ered music that lets itself fall apart, slow­ly and beau­ti­ful­ly over time. What he “pompous­ly called” ambi­ent music, Eno jokes above, “became some­thing I no longer rec­og­nize.” And, yes, it may have come to take up more space than he intend­ed. But it still func­tions as a cre­ative response to cir­cum­stances in which, it seems, there may be lit­tle else to do but lis­ten care­ful­ly and wait.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Bri­an Eno Rein­vent Pachelbel’s Canon (1975)

The Ther­a­peu­tic Ben­e­fits of Ambi­ent Music: Sci­ence Shows How It Eas­es Chron­ic Anx­i­ety, Phys­i­cal Pain, and ICU-Relat­ed Trau­ma

Dis­cov­er the Ambi­ent Music of Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra, the Pio­neer­ing Japan­ese Com­pos­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

It should be clear by now that rock and roll pos­es no dan­ger to the sta­tus quo. Fair enough: It’s going on 70 years since Elvis and Chuck Berry freaked out par­ents of scream­ing teens, and 50 years since Iggy and the Stooges ripped up stages in Detroit and the denizens of CBGB made rock sub­ver­sive again. That’s a long time for an edge to dull, and dull it has. Per­haps nowhere is this more in evi­dence than rock films like CBGB, which “some­how man­ages to make punk rock bor­ing,” and Netflix’s The Dirt, a movie about Möt­ley Crüe that gives us as much insight into the band as a cou­ple spins of “Dr. Feel­go­od,” argues crit­ic Bri­an Tal­leri­co.

Yes, we can chalk up bad rock films to lazy film­mak­ing and stu­dio greed, but there’s also a gen­er­al sense that the cul­ture now under­stands rock only as a mat­ter of ges­tures and anec­dotes: the mak­ing of the music reduced to styl­is­tic quirks and kitschy arti­fice.

This is in con­trast, Radio­head pro­duc­er Nigel Godrich felt, to ear­li­er media like the live per­for­mances on The Old Grey Whis­tle Test. (It’s cer­tain­ly in con­trast to John Peel’s raw ses­sions and films like Urgh! A Music War.) In mak­ing his From the Base­ment series, Godrich said, “I’m a sad fan try­ing to bring the mag­ic back to music TV.”

Just as rock pho­tog­ra­phy was reduced from “total access all the time” to well-kept mar­ket­ing and PR (or so claimed the late, leg­endary Baron Wol­man), rock per­for­mance has become over­pro­duced spec­ta­cle in which it can be dif­fi­cult to tell pre-record­ed tracks from real play­ing. Add to this the loss of inti­ma­cy in live venues in the time of COVID, and we get even far­ther away from the music’s cre­ation. Godrich and pro­duc­er Dil­ly Gent con­ceived of From the Base­ment years before the pan­dem­ic, but it’s almost as if they antic­i­pat­ed a cul­tur­al cri­sis of our moment, the enforced sep­a­ra­tion from the mak­ing of live music.

Like the best Zoom con­certs, From the Base­ment, pro­duced between 2006 and 2009, eschews the trap­pings of host, audi­ence, and stu­dio light­ing for an imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence of live cre­ation. It’s a safe, ster­ile envi­ron­ment — miss­ing are mosh pits, fans swarm­ing the stage, and the sex, drugs, and vio­lence of old. But to pre­tend that rock is dan­ger­ous in the 21st cen­tu­ry is noth­ing more than pre­tense. There’s no need to turn the music into the edgy spec­ta­cle it isn’t any­more (and has­n’t been since “Creep” ruled the radio), Godrich and Gent’s con­cept sug­gests. In doing so, we miss what it is now.

Or as Thom Yorke — whose band got first dibs, play­ing “Video­tape” and “Down is the New Up” in the debut episode — remarked, the show “was excit­ing because it came from the desire to cut out the crap that lies between the music and the view­er. To get plugged straight into the mains. No pro­duc­er or direc­tor egos mess­ing it up.” See From the Base­ment per­for­mances from Radio­head, Son­ic Youth, the White Stripes, and PJ Har­vey above and many more archived at the From the Base­ment YouTube chan­nel here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Archive of 1,000 “Peel Ses­sions” Avail­able Online: Hear David Bowie, Bob Mar­ley, Elvis Costel­lo & Oth­ers Play in the Stu­dio of Leg­endary BBC DJ John Peel

Radio­head Will Stream Con­certs Free Online Until the Pan­dem­ic Comes to an End

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Per­forms Songs from His New Sound­track for the Hor­ror Film, Sus­piria

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness