Send "The Clash " Ringtones to your Cell 
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![The Clash - Live At Shea Stadium [Live] review](http://www.sweetslyrics.com/poze/dfdfdsfgsdfsdfsdfdsfsd.jpg) Great live albums are remarkably thin on the ground. Too often the victim of dodgy sound, a patchwork of performances or post-production trickery (take a bow, Live & Dangerous) they’ve earned a reputation as pay-days rather than offerings of recorded greatness. All of which means that the handful which have passed the test of time occupy a rareified position, etched onto the consciousness like rock’n’roll’s equivalent of Mount Rushmore: James Brown Live At The Apollo, The Who’s Live At Leeds, Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison. No surprise to discover then, that The Clash – always rock’s greatest self-mythologisers – seem to have had their eyes trained on that final vacant slot. The only problem being, how to get there? Recorded on the 13th October 1982 – and only discovered by Joe Strummer while packing for a move - Live At Shea Stadium does everything in its power to display The Clash as iconic world-beaters, captured in their pomp. It was here, after all, that the Beatles asserted their domination of America in 1965. No matter that The Clash were actually supporting The Who on the night in question - a bit like finding out Live At Leeds was actually a Jethro Tull gig - or that subsequent single “Rock The Casbah” barely dented the US Top 40....full text |
| Popmasters |
| The Clash were one of the greatest bands of the punk and new wave era, and they tore up many a stage during their reign. Surprisingly, few official documents of the Clash’s live prowess have surfaced over the years. Considering the band more or less dissolved in 1983, it’s incredible that it was 1999 before From Here to Eternity: Live emerged. A good sampler culled from Clash concerts from 1978 to ‘82, it is nonetheless a somewhat dissatisfying experience. While the CD enabled listeners to hear the Clash’s live talents, it didn’t supply that absorbing feeling of having “been there.” Finally, Live at Shea Stadium fills that void. During the fall of 1982—on the heels of what would be the real Clash’s last album, Combat Rock—the band played a series of shows opening up for the Who’s reunion tour. Live at Shea captures in warm, full, and punchy sound the second of two nights the bands played in Queens, New York, at the recently-demolished home of the Mets and (at that time) the Jets. On October 13, 1982, the Clash played 14 songs in just under 50 minutes, as befits a warm-up act. However, based on the excitement of the crowd and the group’s intensity, the Clash don’t come across as a mere opening act. As The New York Post reported at the time, “there were as many Clash fans on those nights as Who fans.”...full text |
| Pitchforkmedia |
| While the Sex Pistols' "no future" became the bumper-sticker slogan of choice for first-wave UK punk rock, their London rivals the Clash built their program on an edict of "no past." As Julien Temple's recent documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, illustrated, the titular Clash frontman went to great lengths to distance himself from his well-established pre-punk/pub-band roots, and perhaps as a result, the Clash railed against classic-rock hero worship harder than most, by taking names ("no Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977!"), stealing sacred riffs (the Who's "I Can't Explain" bastardized into "Clash City Rockers") and redesigning pop history in their own image (the Elvis-swiped cover art of London Calling). So surely these detractors of "phony Beatlemania" must've had a good ol' laugh at the prospect of conquering one of the key sites of the real Beatlemania. Of course, it would take a tour invite from the Who to get the Clash into Shea Stadium on Oct. 13, 1982, but in a way that just makes the story all the more rich: the punks meet the godfathers-- the former at the peak of their commercial ascendancy, the latter on the way to the first of many retirements. But while the two bands were born of different eras, both had followed similar trajectories, having each made their own escapes out of garageland to pursue more ambitious musical plans. And yet Live at Shea Stadium (a popular bootleg now receiving official release on its 26th anniversary) marks something more than just the passing of the torch between two generations of kindred spirits; it also documents the first time class-of-'77 punk-rockers graduated to the American stadium circuit, and the pyrrhic victory contained within. The Shea show was not the biggest the Clash ever played in America (that would be the US Festival in 1983), nor the most incendiary (see: the legendary 17-show string at New York's Bond Casino in 1981), but the set most vividly captures the Clash's most enduring qualities: the triumphs and tribulations of being populist punks. ...full text |
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