It was on this day in 1979, February 7th, when The Clash finally played their first American gig. The show was held at the Berkeley Community Theatre in Berkeley, California. Frontman Joe Strummer wasn't thrilled about playing a college campus. He famously told Time magazine “We shouldn’t have played here, it’s a university town. They’re boring snobs.” The band kicked off its show with the ironic “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.” because as Strummer said "we wanted to find out if they had a sense of humor in America, and the answer was that they were double into that number. They loved it, because we were saying we were sick of the cheap rubbish on TV, all the substandard cultural imports that came out of America. The kids were as bored as we were with all that rubbish.”
You can hear the audio from that gig above, though the quality is less than stellar. There's also audio from the following night, 2/8/79 in San Francisco.
