So I recorded an EP of acoustic country covers of Clash songs (technically Clash and Clash-associated songs, since two of them are songs the Clash themselves were covering). I’m really proud of it. I’d like you to take a listen at one of the links above, and if you feel like downloading the MP3s, please feel free.
I started out the year planning on recording an Awesome Boys* album, but the plan was for it to be all noise rock, continuing the sound of the EP I recorded in 2019. But as the work started on that in February, I realized that my musical mood was shifting back towards country-rock (no doubt affected by all the time talking about Uncle Tupelo for We’ve Been Had). And then the pandemic hit, and the world full-on caught on fire, and I just couldn’t escape the feeling that we were living in Strummer Times. And that was just when the pandemic kicked off; in May, when Minneapolis burst into flames after a police killing and took the rest of the country with it, it seemed even more applicable. The first verse of “Know Your Rights” could be about George Floyd, for fuck’s sake. So the idea of an EP of country-style Clash covers gained a foothold in my brain and just kept taking up more and more space.
Uncharacteristically for me, I spent about a month rehearsing and working out arrangements for the songs I picked (my neighbor must have gotten so tired of hearing me work on “Straight to Hell” on my front porch). And I decided early on that I’d need to edit some of the lyrics. Which felt sacrilegious, given that Joe Strummer was a towering figure and I’m just a guy, but some of the words are so specific to his life and outlook that they didn’t work for me. Or, in the case of the second verse of “Know Your Rights,” the dystopian situation described by the Clash in 1982 is actually too supportive and generous to sound bad in the dystopian situation of 2020.
I spent about a week in early July recording basic tracks in my home studio setup, and then another few weeks mixing. My starting point for the target sound was the way Peter Buck produced Uncle Tupelo on March 16-20, 1992, but I wound up wandering a bit from that, especially because covid quarantine meant that I had to do all of this myself instead of being able to organically have a band vibe develop.
For cover art, my wife, Rebecca Collins, is a great collage artist who had recently started exploring punk-aesthetic collages. So it seemed like a natural thing to ask her to make a cover. We talked a bunch about what I wanted it to evoke: the Midwest, menace, humor, death. her results speak for themselves; and now we own several cut-up vintage copies of Guns and Ammo.
So, yeah. Check it out, and I hope you like it! Some day when live music is a thing again, I’d love to perform these live.
*You might point out that it’s confusing and stupid for me to record music in the real world and attribute it to The Awesome Boys when that’s the name of the fake band in my old webcomic that I always insisted wasn’t autobiographical. And you’d probably be right. But it seemed funny in 2011 and at this point I’m just kind of used to it.
