The Clash Mauls a Teddy Bear and Plays Two Songs on The Tom Snyder Show (1981) — openculture.com

The Clash’s Sandinista!, their fourth and final studio album (let’s not talk about Cut the Crap) inspired critical rhapsodies and rose to the top of lists everywhere in 1981. When I encountered it almost ten years later as a young fan, I didn’t give it much of a chance, except for a song with the same name as my beleaguered hometown’s NBA team. In hindsight, it was my loss, but it’s also true that nearly every generation of Clash fans, including the very first, has put their finger on the band’s moment of either “selling out” or sharply declining. Maybe for me it was what a Rolling Stone review called Sandinista!’s “mainstream moves” and “studio sophistication.” Maybe it was the “whiff of grandeur” of the triple album. It think it also had to do with what Tom Snyder, in his 1981 interview with the band above, says of them in his introduction: they preferred to be identified “not so much as a Rock and Roll group but as a ‘News-giving group.’”

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