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)
-
Should I Stay or Should I Go? (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
Ghetto Defendant (Sound System)
Sean Flynn (Sound System)
-
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)

-

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

Derek and the Dominos - One More Chance (1971)

Derek and the Dominos released their first album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, in November 1970 through Polydor Records. The band had formed after lead guitarist, vocalist and main composer Eric Clapton met keyboardist and vocalist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle, and drummer Jim Gordon while on tour with Delanie and Bonnie, and decided to form a group with those three, having just quit his last group, Blind Faith. The group's first recordings were made in May 1970, as a backing band to George Harrison in his triple All Things Must Pass album, with Phil Spector as the producer. From there, the band recorded their first single, with Spector as the producer (the single, "Tell the Truth" b/w "Roll it Over", ended up being canceled before release), played their first gigs, and stayed at Clapton's house to write the material for their first record. Once they'd gathered up some material, the band went to Miami's Criteria Studios, met guitarist Duane Allman, and well, the rest is history. What we got was one of the best double albums in the history of rock and roll, and probably Clapton's finest hour as a singer, guitarist, and composer. Following a tour (without Allman, who decided to stay with the Allman Brothers) that dragged on until December 1970, the band was looking forward to recording a follow-up to the Layla album, and cementing their reputation as one of the best live acts around.

However, not everything was roses within the band. All four of them were dealing with substance abuse issues and addiction, while drummer Jim Gordon was especially hard to deal with, mostly due to his then-undiagnosed schizophrenia in addition to his drug issues. There were also some creative issues at stake, more notably because Gordon wanted to write some of the band's repertoire, an idea that wasn't well-received by Whitlock and Clapton. It was with such tension and fracture that they entered Olympic Studios in London, in March of 1971, to record what would be the follow-up to Layla, and what we know now as the band's final recording sessions. They managed to record some 14 backing tracks, some of them with promise, others just meandering jams, and six more-or-less finished songs: "One More Chance", "Snake Lake Blues", "High", "Evil" (a Willie Dixon cover), "Mean Old Frisco" (also a cover, by Arthur Crudup) and the best of the bunch, "Got to Get Better in a Little While", which they'd also debuted live back in October 1970. However, the band's issues got the best of them, leaving all of this material unfinished and breaking up the band by that July. After the sessions inevitably broke down, the band splintered, with Gordon going on to tour with Traffic, Radle going back to being a session musician, Whitlock releasing solo albums, and Eric more or less going into hiding until 1974.

But what if Derek and the Dominos had finished their second album? Luckily for us, the Crossroads box set of 1988 already features a side's worth of material that comes from the 1971 Olympic sessions, five songs that give us a blueprint as to what that album would sound like. With that, all we have left to do is to assemble a second side, giving us a roughly ten-song-long album. When it comes to what can be included, it's ok to include solo Clapton or Whitlock songs, but they have to have a clear connection to the band and not simply feature other members of the Dominos, as many solo Bobby Whitlock songs did. Layla outtakes are fair game as well, so long as they too have a clear connection to the second album or were still performed live after the album was released. "Devil Road", a Renée Armand song with the foursome as her backing band, will not be included here, as it wouldn't really make sense to have a solo spot by someone outside the band on their album, even though this is quite a riveting performance of the song. Also, none of the very unfinished instrumentals from the sessions that can be found in bootlegs such as Substance will be considered, as they're nowhere near the level we'd expect from a Derek and the Dominos album, sounding much more like meandering jams than the finished songs we found on Layla. With that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Got to Get Better in a Little While (Crossroads)

Evil (Crossroads)

One More Chance (Crossroads)

Mean Old Frisco (Crossroads)

Snake Lake Blues (Crossroads)

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High (There's One in Every Crowd)

Mean Old World (Crossroads)

Country Life (Bobby Whitlock)

Roll it Over (Crossroads)

Motherless Children (Crossroads)

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Derek and the Dominos - One More Chance (1971)

Clapton during rehearsals for the Concert for Bangladesh, August 1971.

Side one, as presented here, was issued in that very same order in the Crossroads box set in 1988, comprising the only five completed masters from the March/April 1971 Olympic Studios sessions. With two blues covers, an instrumental, and two new songs, it's certainly not much to write home about, but it has its moments. With this side of music already put together for us, we are halfway there to getting a second Derek and the Dominos record. But the second half will be a lot more difficult, as we've just about run out of completed studio tracks. Our first inclusion for side two will be one of the easiest, "High" from There's One in Every Crowd. It was first recorded during the '71 Olympic sessions as an instrumental backing track, and resurrected by Clapton for his third solo album in a version with vocals. Since we already have an instrumental on the album, I'll be including the vocal version of the song, even though it only features Clapton and Radle of the Dominos. Another song that later made a Clapton solo album, but had its origins within the Dominos was his cover of the Blind Willie Johnson song "Motherless Children", a staple of the Dominos' late 1970 gigs. Unfortunately, no good quality live recordings exist of the band performing the song, so we will have to substitute the solo Clapton version, which uses the exact same arrangement but again only features him and bassist Radle of the band.

Since keyboard player Bobby Whitlock co-wrote more than half of the Layla album, and had a solo lead vocal on "Thorn Tree in the Garden", it's only fair that he be awarded the same opportunity here. So filling his lead vocal quota is "Country Life", a song he recorded for his first solo album in early 1971 with Domino Carl Radle on bass. It was one of the few new songs the Dominos played live in their final tours of late 1970, which makes me think it would have been a contender for their second album, given the little material they had. The same opportunity will not be extended to drummer Jim Gordon, who recorded several demos in 1971 with songs such as "It's Hard to Find a Friend" and "Till I See You Again". Even though he contributed the famous piano coda to "Layla", none of that material comes even remotely close to the level of that piano part, and since he didn't write any songs on their first album, I doubt he'd get any on this second album as well. By now, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel, and we'll take Layla outtakes "Roll it Over" and "Mean Old World", and make them part of the record as well. Our reasoning is again taken from their live repertoire, as by late 1970 they were still strongly featured in their setlists, which leads me to believe Clapton hadn't given up on the two yet.

Clocking in at 41 minutes with two roughly twenty-minute long sides, One More Chance is a clear step down from the heights of the Layla album, but is nonetheless a strong record that actually points the way quite clearly to Clapton's solo career in its mix of laid back originals and choice cover cuts. And given that Eric spent 1972 and 1973 as a recluse who barely even touched a guitar, getting this album instead would have been a great thing, its actual quality notwithstanding. As for a lead single, the obvious and easy choice is "Got to Get Better in a Little While", by far the greatest of the finished songs, and already a live staple by the time it made it to the studio. I can see it getting quite a lot of airplay on FM radio in the 1970s, and pushing the album towards some pretty respectable sales. The artwork is another painting by the same artist who provided the Layla artwork, painter Fradsen de Shomberg. Instead of a lovely blonde girl, the artwork here has some darker undertones, to reflect Clapton's downward spiral toward heroin addiction and the intra-band conflicts that had become commonplace by then. It's a shame Clapton's greatest band only lasted for an album and a half before collapsing in a haze of drugs and in-fighting, as given the level of their live performance and the greatness of the Layla album, the Dominos certainly deserved at least one more chance.

Sources:

- Eric Clapton - Crossroads [Box Set]

- Eric Clapton - There's One in Every Crowd

- Bobby Whitlock - Bobby Whitlock