Posted By:
Jeff LichtmanOk, I'm going to say this one last time and please take this as gospel because it is 100 percent accurate:
The Clash is first on any of these lists, plain and simple. Yes, the Ramones came before...but if you go by that then you'd have to include the Velvet Underground which was probably the most influential band not just in the area of Punk but Metal as well (though the Ramones certainly started the scene in NYC). Indeed, the Velvet Underground and Nico might be the greatest album of all time (I named a dog Nico in reverence). As luck will have it, I had a friend who was close with Laurie Anderson and arranged a dinner for me with Lou and Laurie in NYC a few years back. I'm not ashamed to say that it was one of the greatest nights of my life. To be able to ask Lou question after question about lyrics, albums, concerts, artists was to die for. He was completely open, completely cool and answered every single sycophantic question I could muster. Example: favorite solo album: Magic and Loss. We ended the night smoking cigars and Lou showed me how to properly dump my ashes. As for the Clash, as I was about to pick the jury on the biggest case of my life I sat in court with Guns of Brixton blasting in my ears. I swear I had tears in my eyes after listening to that song and getting ready for battle. Barry, Combat Rock, which contains "Rock the Casbah" was, incidentally, the end of the Clash as we know it. While there were some great commercial songs on that album you could see that the band was being ripped apart by the Jones-Strummer artistic differences. Also, one Clash footnote: Elvis Costello wrote "Watching the Detectives" after listening to the Clash's first album for 24 hours straight.