469. Morgan Neville on The Clash 'Sandinista!' (1980)

Jeremy Dylan (0:30)

Hello and welcome to My Favorite Album. My name is Jeremy Dylan. I'm a record producer and documentary filmmaker, and each week I talk to a guest about an album they love and the impact it's had on their lives. My guest today is an Academy Award and Grammy winning documentary filmmaker, with a brilliance for finding the essential humanity beneath cultural and cultural icons like Paul McCartney, Lorne Michaels, Fred Rogers, Keith Richard and Anthony Bourdain amongst many others.

I have a very vivid memory of seeing his film, Can't You Be My Neighbor, at the Arclight Hollywood in 2018, and looking around at a sea of tear-stained faces when the lights came up at the end of the screening, myself included. Our jobs as documentarians, he has said, is to foster empathy and understanding. Morgan Neville, welcome to My Favorite Album.

Morgan Neville (1:14)

Thanks for having me. This is fun.

Jeremy Dylan (1:15)

I've been looking forward to this conversation and it's always interesting when I approach people about doing this show, a lot of people say, oh, that's an impossible question, my favorite album or they give me like six albums, they can't decide between and get me to choose. But you wrote back and said, I don't have to think about what my favorite album is because everybody who knows me knows. Well, which album is that?

Which album we're talking about today, Morgan?

Morgan Neville (1:39)

Sandinista by The Clash.

That is an album. Yeah, I could turn to my wife and say, you know what my favorite album is, my kids. You know what my favorite album is. They all know it's Sandinista by The Clash.

Jeremy Dylan (1:52)

So Sandinista with an exclamation point, we should be specific about that, which you're holding, I don't know, which vinyl copy you're holding there. Is this the original copy that you had or is this a?

Morgan Neville (2:03)

This is not my original copy, which was Lost to the Winds years ago. But I did buy another original pressing of it that has the sticker on the front saying yours from Music Plus for 1149 So that's still has that. So this is the original US pressing, which would have been on Epic Records. Epic, you see it there. It's an album that has changed as I've grown older, but it's an album that's been with me almost my whole life. I'd bought London Calling not long after it came out. So London Calling was released in America in January of 1980

My dad was a big music head and bought all kinds of things, and he and I would talk about music.

There was this one record that a lot of people were talking about, but it wasn't quite my dad's thing to be into The Clash. But I'd heard enough about it that I spent my money on buying this double album. It was the soundtrack of my freshman year of high school. I loved that record. Then Sandinista came out a year later, which is incredible. Twelve months later, they put out, after a double album of London Calling, they put out this triple album of Sandinista.

I didn't know what to make of it. It's that kind of an album. It's an album that I didn't love when I first heard it, but I couldn't put it down. I kept coming back to it again and again. It's an album that has grown with me throughout my life more than any other bit of music, and now it's an album that I can't live without.

Jeremy Dylan (3:33)

That immediately brings up an interesting question, which is you say this is an album that you didn't click with immediately on first listen, and obviously you've now grown to have this intense loving relationship with it. How much of that was in 1980 when this record came out? You had the records you had. If you bought a record, you had invested money in it. You had a limited number of records at home that you could be listening to.

Now I feel like maybe if people listen to a record and it's a bit challenging, they go like, well, I could listen to any other piece of music that's ever been recorded. So I'm just going to dial something else up on Spotify.

Morgan Neville (4:11)

Completely. Completely. It is a product of slow culture in the best way. That, yeah, sure enough, you bought Sandinista, famously priced as a single album, even though it was a triple album. But once you had it, you just kept coming at it and you're like, I spent the money and I loved The Clash. So I was interested in it and there were nuggets. It's not that I didn't like it, it's just I didn't love it. But there were songs in it that grabbed you. There were songs that connected to the old Clash, to the London Calling Clash and even the Clash from the first two albums. My high school band, we actually covered Police On My Back, which is a cover that The Clash play on this album. It's not like the album wasn't making any impression at the time. I even remember a couple of songs, Somebody Got Murdered, Rebel Waltz, which is just such a weird thing at the time that I loved, and Charlie Don't Surf because I was a big Apocalypse Now fan. There were a few things that stuck with me from the beginning, enough to make me keep coming back to the record. But the record is chock full of influence. But when you're a 13-year-old, you have no idea what that influence is. It's an album that over the years has revealed itself in its layers again and again.