The Clash - Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg (1981)

The Clash released their fourth studio album, Sandinista, on December 12, 1980, through Columbia Records. A triple album, it saw the band going further in their pursuit of different rhythms and sounds, which started with the release of London Calling the previous year. Received mostly with confusion, it failed to capitalize on the momentum of their previous album and didn't sell very well, probably on account of being a triple LP. However, critical acclaim was still considerable, and the album topped the Pazz and Jop poll of 1981, the best record of the year according to the critics. Their label wouldn't fund an American tour, so the band booked a now infamous residency of the Bonds casino in New York, and underwent a European tour in mid-1981, a band at their live peak promoting their brand new single "This is Radio Clash". Paul Simonon and Joe Strummer also felt the band's management was too boring and professional, and decided to hire back first manager Bernie Rhodes to reinstate the "chaos" and "chaotic" energy they felt they needed. Mick Jones was strongly against this, he didn't trust Rhodes and had many issues with him while he was their manager in 1977, but was forced to go along with it as he was outvoted. Meanwhile, Topper Headon was on a hundred-pounds-a-day habit of heroin and cocaine, probably oblivious to all of those issues and to the fact that the band was thinking of firing him because of his ever-escalating unreliability. It was under those circumstances that the Clash entered the recording studios in September 1981, to record their fifth studio album.

Already having "Sean Flynn" and "Car Jamming" in the bag from the sessions for the "Radio Clash" single back in April, the Clash recorded some eight additional tracks at the People's Hall in London that September, followed by a further ten at New York City's Electric Lady Studios between November and December. As they returned to England on New Year's Day 1982, the group had the makings of yet another multi-disc release in their hands. Mick Jones, who had acted as the de facto producer during the 1981 sessions, assembled an acetate of a double album, entitled Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg that January. Fifteen songs and seventy minutes long, the Clash had for the first time recorded songs that broke the five-minute barrier, and it was Jones' idea to showcase this as one of the main features of their new album. The others still weren't convinced, however, and the band went on their Far East tour of early 1982 still undecided about how to release this material. By the time they returned, it was decided to scrape the double album idea and instead release a single record, with shorter songs and only what they considered the best of the sessions. The man tasked with this was classic rock producer Glyn Johns, who in April remixed the twelve songs they considered best and assembled Combat Rock. With it, the band achieves the greatest commercial success of their career when "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" become hits, but at the cost of intensifying intra-band conflicts, with Headon fired in May and Jones in 1983, spelling the end of their classic lineup.

But what if The Clash had released Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg? It might be easier thank you think, as we know the tracklist as assembled by guitarist Mick Jones, we know the specific mixes he would have used, and we even have a drawing by Paul Simonon of what the cover would've been, where Bragg is curiously spelled as "Brag". That means all the harder issues are already solved for us and all that's left to do is to assemble the record, but there are some smaller problems we'll need to address nonetheless. The first is that we will be not including anything from the late 1981 sessions such as "Midnight to Stevens", "Walk Evil Talk", "Hell W10", "He Who Dares or is Tired" that doesn't have any clear link to the Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg album, as we'll be trusting Mick and the band's artistic vision for it, and considering that anything they didn't find worthy of the original list was probably going to end up in the cutting room floor nonetheless. The same goes for "This is Radio Clash" and its b-side of the same name, which as great as it is, was always meant to be a standalone single, and so it stays. While Glyn Johns did do a fantastic job when he was eventually put in charge of the project and assembled Combat Rock, we will always consider a vintage 1981 Rat Patrol mix over a Glyn Johns mix, unless no Mick Jones mix exists, in which case they're fair use. The same goes for the tracklist itself, we will not interfere with the 15-song list unless it's absolutely necessary for the goal of this reconstruction. With that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Straight to Hell (Sound System)
Know Your Rights (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
Rock the Casbah (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
Red Angel Dragnet (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
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Should I Stay or Should I Go? (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
Ghetto Defendant (Sound System)
Sean Flynn (Sound System)
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Car Jamming (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
The Fulham Connection II (Sound System)
Atom Tan (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)

First Night Back in London (Sound System)

Long Time Jerk (Sound System)

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Overpowered by Funk (Combat Rock)

Inoculated City (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)

Death is a Star (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)

Cool Confusion (Sound System)
Idle in Kangaroo Court W1 (Sound System)

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The Clash - Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg (1982)

Simonon, Headon, Strummer, and Jones during their Asian tour, January 1982.

While low-fidelity copies of the original Mick Jones mix of Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg have circulated as a bootleg for quite some time, the first time anything from it was officially released was on the Sound System box set in 2013. There, the original versions of "Straight to Hell", "Rock the Casbah", "Ghetto Defendant", "Sean Flynn", "The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too", "Fight Night Back in London", "Cool Confusion" and "Kill Time" were included as part of the Extras disc, half of the album finally available in good quality. The other nine mixes would prove elusive, however, as the 40th Anniversary box set of Combat Rock outrageously didn't include any of those songs. It seemed as if the jarring experience of combining the Sound System tracks with the awful cassette leaks was as close as we'd ever get to the album, until in May 2021 an acetate from January 24, 1982, containing the original Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg showed up for auction. With it, mp3 files of what the acetate contained were made available for download. As easy as that, nearly forty years of searching ended in the most unexpected way possible! And sure, mp3 rips of an acetate aren't the master tapes, but when cleaned up correctly, it's good enough to be listened to alongside the Sound System tracks without distracting you too much. With that, we now have the vintage Mick Jones mixes of "Know Your Rights", "Red Angel Dragnet", "Should I Stay or Should I Go?", "Car Jamming", "Atom Tan", "Inoculated City", and "Death is a Star". And with that out of the way, the album has other problems we need to solve as well.

While it's a well-known fact that Mick Jones' original tracklist for Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg was fifteen songs long, starting with "Straight to Hell" and ending with "Idle in Kangaroo Court W1". A lesser known fact, however, is that Jones also planned for there to be a bonus 7" single that would come for free with the album: "Overpowered by Funk" b/w "Long Time Jerk". This practice was not new for the band, who intended to do the same with "Train in Vain" and "Armagiedon Time" on the London Calling album. However, they ended up scrapping the idea at the eleventh hour, with "Train in Vain" ending up as a hidden track. With that in mind, I believe that the same would have ended up happening here, as the bonus single really isn't practical for mass production, and the second disc of this record would be painfully short had we followed Jones' sequence faithfully. With that, we can add "Long Time Jerk" as the last song on side three and "Overpowered by Funk" as the first on side four and still end up with a 38 minute disc, compared to the 37 minutes of the first disc! Since "Long Time Jerk" as released on the "Rock the Casbah" single was already a Jones mix, we needn't worry about it. But since "Overpowered by Funk" only exists as the Glyn Johns mix from Combat Rock and a later dance remix, we'll have to break the rules and include the Combat Rock version of the song, as no Mick Jones mix is available. With those two inclusions, all the songs recorded during the Rat Patrol sessions for the album have made the cut, and we've fixed two of the main issues of the album at once. Not bad!

"Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" would certainly still be the two lead singles off the album, remixed by Glyn Johns for single release only. His are the versions sent to radio stations and included in the 7" singles, while Mick's are the ones that make the album. A "best of both worlds" scenario, where CBS gets its hit singles, The Clash gets its sprawling, weird double album and everyone is happy with the results. Single mixes/edits of album tracks were definitely nothing new by 1982, so I really don't see why this compromise couldn't have worked. Meanwhile, "Radio Clash" and "Midnight to Stevens" are their own thing, serving the same purpose to Fort Bragg as "Bankrobber" and "Stop the World" did to Sandinista, a stopgap single and a non-album b-side. There's no mistaking that on the account of being a double record, this would sell considerably less than Combat Rock, but lifted by the aforementioned singles, could still do some pretty good numbers. Certainly better than Sandinista, which pretty much sunk without a trace since it didn't have a clear lead single And while Combat Rock is certainly a much more concise and accessible album, I can't help but feel that Rat Patrol is the superior album out of the two. Call it overindulgent, call it over the top, but these seventeen songs are the logical conclusion of a trilogy beginning with London Calling and Sandinista in a way Combat Rock never seemed able to be, taking the world music influences and overall weirdness of the Clash to its logical limit, overpowered by a million different genres and by their own issues. 

Sources:

- Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg [Acetate]

- Sound System [Box Set]

- Combat Rock