Some of you might remember a couple of posts I did about Japan and Judas Priest not too long back, all of which concerning photographs of the respective bands by one Michael Putland. Well, in doing a bit of research for those posts, I came across a series of shots he did of the Clash circa 1978, most notably this one of them above, depicted standing manfully on a New York City pier, looking quite literally like they just got off the boat moored behind them. It’s a cool shot, but with the exception of the cover of Combat Rock, one was hard pressed to take a bad photo of the Clash. Love them or hate them, you can’t say they weren’t effortlessly photogenic.
In any case, I started thinking about that photo, wondering which pier it might have been snapped on, and then almost resigning myself to giving it up. There are hundreds of piers around the island of Manhattan — it could pretty much of been any one of them.
Then I was struck by a particular detail.
If you look on the left hand side of the photo, right behind the late, great Joe Strummer’s head, there’s a bit of industrial latticework on the neighboring pier to the band’s right that sort of juts out suddenly. I'm talking specifically about this....
I then remembered a photo my kids had snapped of me in about 2009. This was taken on the pier that extends into the Hudson just off Christopher Street in the West Village. Here’s that picture now. Look to the right of my head.
See it? It’s that same bit of latticework.
As such, the kids and I tried to replicate the Clash shot today … with middling success. Suffice to say, the pier in question has changed considerably since 1978. Here's our then & now...
Whoohoo.
Here, meanwhile, is The Clash circa the same era....
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