The Clash - Live at Shea Stadium

This week's car commute has been paired with the loud, enhanced, cleaned-up recording of "The Clash - Live at Shea Stadium", out this week from Epic/Legacy. [Stream it at AOL Spinner until Saturday)



This recording (along with other Clash shows) has been frequently bootlegged and available on the Web, so for die-hard Clash fans, this isn't that big a deal. When I got heavy into using Dime to find cool old live shows a few years back, I snagged about five Clash live shows from different periods in the band (some of which are listed here). All of those have fantastic performances and a certain historical quality to them, if not always the greatest sonic fidelity. Here's a sample...



What is different with this 'official live' release is the SOUND. That's where the Live at Shea Stadium puts things right. The drums are like gunshots, the bass rumbles as if you're next to the speakers, the vocals are the clearest I've ever heard Strummer sing. And in my car, the guitars sound clear and clean, but not terribly loud and without gain/distortion. I would've liked to hear them a bit louder in the mix, as these recordings are really dominated by vocals. But major kudos to David Bates and Mark Frith, who are credited in the liner notes with tape restoration and mixing. Excellent work.

Setlist
1 Kosmo Vinyl Introduction
2 London Calling
3 Police On My Back
4 The Guns Of Brixton
5 Tommy Gun
6 Magnificent 7
7 Armagideon Time
8 Magnificent 7 (Return)
9 Rock the Casbah
10 Train In Vain
11 Career Opportunities
12 Spanish Bombs
13 Clampdown
14 English Civil War
15 Should I Stay Or Should I Go
16 I Fought The Law

Some of the performances are great, some are weaker than I've heard before. 'London Calling' kicks off the music and it sounds cool, but more like a band warm-up song (remember, the Clash had been playing that song for three years already). I was more thrilled with the anthemic, celebratory "Police on My Back" and "Tommy Gun". "Guns of Brixton" is pretty dull here, Paul Simonon's vocals all over the map (do I go up an octave? or stay low?). "The Magnificent 7" into "Armagideon Time" then back again is swell, the band actually sounds pretty energized by it all. But the middle section of this show lags, with "Rock the Casbah", "Train In Vain" and "Career Opportunities" all sounding a bit too formulaic and poppy, without any of the edgy drive The Clash gave to them previously. The rest is cool, it's great to hear Strummer's in-between song anecdotes flitting across the aural landscape.

But hey! Enough of my yakking. Check out other reviews online from...
* The Times UK
* Rolling Stone
* BlogCritics

Grab some rare Clash live MPs here.