I Fought the Law

Breakin' rocks in the hot sun, and the law still wins. That is the whole argument of "I Fought the Law," and The Clash never bothered to dress it up. On The Cost of Living, the four-song EP that landed in British shops on May 11, 1979, Joe Strummer spits the chorus like a man who has already done the arithmetic and does not like the total. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon lock into a riff that feels like a siren that refuses to turn off. Topper Headon drives it with the kind of straight, impatient snare that turns a twenty-year-old rock and roll song into a punk record without sanding off the original grain. If you came up on freeform album radio, this is the cut that proves a cover can be a statement of intent rather than a souvenir.

The song was not born in a London squat. Sonny Curtis wrote it. Curtis was the Texas guitarist who had come up alongside Buddy Holly and who stepped into The Crickets after the plane crash that took Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. He has said he knocked the thing out in about twenty minutes in his living room in West Texas during a sandstorm, hearing it first as a country song. On the way to New York to cut In Style with the Crickets, he sang it in the car. J.I. Allison put rim shots on the front, they flattened the feel into straight eights, and the Crickets cut it around the turn of the decade. It was a good record. It was not yet the record.

The version that stuck in American jukeboxes belonged to The Bobby Fuller Four. Fuller, out of El Paso and working the Los Angeles circuit, took Curtis's song in late 1965 and pushed it into the Billboard Top 10 in early 1966, with that rat-a-tat drum pickup and a cleaner, West Coast snap. Fuller was found dead in a parked car in Los Angeles in July 1966. The official ruling was suicide by gasoline. Friends and writers have argued about that ruling ever since. The mystery hangs over the lyric. A young rock and roller sings about losing to the law, then dies under circumstances the law never really explained. Curtis later called The Clash's reading a terrific record. He was right to.

The Clash found the Fuller single the way a lot of great covers get found: on a jukebox, by accident, while they were supposed to be doing something else. In 1978 they were in San Francisco at the Automatt, cutting Give 'Em Enough Rope with Sandy Pearlman. Jones later wrote, in the notes for the Clash on Broadway box, that the Automat jukebox carried Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" and the Bobby Fuller Four's "I Fought the Law," and that he and Strummer wore the thing out. A lot of the outside songs The Clash cut were simply the songs they were living with at that moment. Headon was not impressed by the first pass. He has said that when Jones and Strummer played it to him on acoustic guitar he refused to do it, because it sounded terrible. Electrified, with drums under it, it sounded like The Clash.

They cut the finished take at Wessex Studios in Highbury, London, with Bill Price in the chair alongside the band. Price already knew how to get a room to sound like a room. The EP runs a little over thirteen minutes. Side one is "I Fought the Law," credited to Curtis and timed around two minutes and forty seconds, then "Groovy Times." Side two is "Gates of the West" and a new "Capital Radio." The sleeve was a gatefold. CBS put it out in Britain on May 11, 1979, the same season as the general election that put Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. The American single followed on July 26. None of that is an accident of scheduling so much as a band that understood a release date could be part of the lyric.

The other three tracks tell you where the group was headed. "Groovy Times" and "Gates of the West" are outtakes from the Give 'Em Enough Rope sessions, looser and more American than anything on the 1977 debut. "Gates of the West" walks from Camden Town station to 44th and 8th, which is about as plain a map of the band's ambitions as they ever printed. Harmonica on the EP is credited to "Bob Jones," a pseudonym for Mick Jones, and an extra-high vocal goes to Dennis Ferranti. "Capital Radio" had already existed as a 1977 mail-order flexidisc bundled with the NME, a jab at London's commercial station and at playlists that would not touch the band. By 1979 original copies were selling for collector money. Re-recording it was a practical decision and a political one. A song attacking licensed radio had no business existing only as a trophy for people who could afford the trophy. The EP even closes with a mock hard-sell spot, Strummer barking that The Cost of Living is available at your nearest Clash showroom, then slamming back into the "I Fought the Law" chorus. They were mocking the industry with the industry's own voice.

The song stayed in the live book for the rest of the band's run. Strummer kept singing it later, including stretches with The Pogues. It showed up on the American issue of the debut album, on Black Market Clash, and again on Super Black Market Clash. For a lot of listeners it simply became a Clash song, the way "Summertime Blues" became a Who song and "All Along the Watchtower" became a Hendrix song. That is the cleanest compliment a cover can get.

The band behind it had been together only three years and already sounded like a group that had outgrown the scene that named them. Joe Strummer, born John Graham Mellor, had come out of the 101ers. Mick Jones had been through London SS. Paul Simonon was the bass player Rhodes and the others taught the instrument on the understanding that attitude could be schooled faster than theory. Terry Chimes drummed on the first album. Nicholas "Topper" Headon took the stool in 1977 and gave the group the pocket that let reggae, rockabilly, and soul sit inside the same set. Manager Bernie Rhodes pushed the famous line about liking the tunes and not caring for the movement. The debut, The Clash, arrived in 1977 on CBS. Give 'Em Enough Rope, louder and more American in the production, followed in 1978. London Calling, the double album that blew the doors off whatever "punk" was supposed to mean, came in December 1979, seven months after this EP. Sandinista! and Combat Rock carried them into the early eighties. Headon was gone by 1982. Jones was gone by 1983. The group dissolved in 1986. Strummer died on December 22, 2002. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted them in 2003.

What The Cost of Living catches is the hinge. They were done being a singles band that shouted at tower blocks, and they were not yet the band that could put "Lost in the Supermarket," "Rudie Can't Fail," and "Clampdown" on the same side. "I Fought the Law" is the handshake between those two versions of the group. It is short. It is mean. It respects the writer. It also makes the older record sound cautious. Curtis supplied the title and the moral. Fuller supplied the jukebox ghost. The Clash supplied the temperature.

On THE ZOO we still play it as album rock, not as a museum piece and not as a slogan. The deep cut sitting next to it on the same slab, "Gates of the West," belongs in the same hour. So does the Fuller original, if you can find a clean copy, and the Crickets take if you want to hear the sand still in the vocal. The law won in the lyric. The record did not lose.

The catalog and the surviving members' estate keep the official trail at theclash.com, with the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For set lists, studio notes, and the long on-stage history, the fan archive at Blackmarketclash is still the working file.