As a documentary of rock & roll teenagers battling first for good times and then for survival in a blasted urban landscape, the Clash's debut album [The Clash], released in England in 1977 but never made available here, had an astonishing immediacy. You got the feeling that it was recorded virtually in the street, while the National Front marched and the threat of riots flickered all around. And yet the story the LP told—with rage and humor—was as complex, as varied and finally as universal as the American tale of the eternal outsider that critic Greil Marcus found in the music of the Band. Perhaps more than any album ever made, The Clash dramatized rock & roll as a last, defiantly cheerful grab for life, something scrawled on the run on subway walls. Here was a record that defined rock's risk and its pleasures, and told us, once again, that this music was worth fighting for. (p. 76)

By patching together tracks from the first LP along with the later, obsessively self-referential singles made before last year's Give 'Em Enough Rope, the American version of The Clash tries to tell two stories at once: a gritty journalistic account of one nameless punk's 1977 journey through England side by side with the tale of the not-so-nameless, self-consciously embattled punk stars the Clash later became. It doesn't quite work. Because the Clash is a band that redefines itself with each new release, hearing the songs out of chronological order is maddeningly disconcerting—especially to American audiences unfamiliar with the original context.

Though the tunes omitted here were the lesser ones on the British edition of The Clash, they added a lot to that record's vivid sense of wholeness, to the feeling of a single dramatic moment caught in all its shifting facets. The new version, by contrast, is scattershot and marooned—full of worthwhile nuggets but lacking a center. Its double focus is confusing in more ways than one: you hear the band wrestling with its legend without ever quite being allowed to hear the music that created the legend in the first place.

And yet, after all that, what we are left with is still extraordinary. This music has a barbed urgency that no one else has ever matched: sparse, coarse, lunging and extreme, it's always—barely, almost desperately—held under control. The later material grafted onto the U.S. Clash is richer and fuller, exchanging the flinty, humorous lower-depths eye of the earlier numbers for a flailing melodrama that's layered with doubt and ambiguity…. There's absolutely no loss of tension, however. In the chilling "White Man in Hammersmith Palais," the corruption of rock & roll mirrors the disintegration of a whole society—destruction accumulates by bits and pieces, voices shout and whisper distress signals in the background. Then the horror crystallizes and hits you full in the face: "If Adolf Hitler flew in today," Joe Strummer accuses, his voice a corrosive welt of rage and terror, "they'd send a limousine anyway."

If the centerpiece of the original album was "Janie Jones" …, the thematic core of the new edition is the Clash's cover version of … "I Fought the Law." Though its lyrics admit defeat, this song's greatness has always been that it explodes with a triumphant, transcendent pride…. Strummers digs into the vainglorious words with a meaty gusto that makes it sound as if he wouldn't have it any other way. "I Fought the Law" is flamboyantly self-aggrandizing in a manner that the group's older material would never have allowed. And yet the performance is terrific, savagely exuberant in the face...