Pitchfork

The 25th anniversary reissue of The Clash's London Calling is satisfyingly thick and protected by a thin plastic sleeve. The package sits fat at three stories high; the spine is broad, smooth and silver. Pennie Smith's unfocused, emblematic cover shot remains intact, with Paul Simonon's bass hovering, vertical and doomed, between Elvis-baiting pink and green text. Stacked inside are three separate discs: the original 19-song album, a 21-track disc containing rehearsal sessions for the record ("the long lost Vanilla Tapes"), and a DVD of The Last Testament, Don Letts' 30-minute, after-the-fact documentary about the making of London Calling. Here, neatly lined up: preparation, realization, hindsight. Finally. This is how they did it.

For those who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, calling The Clash a punk band was (and remains) more a matter of affect than honesty-- in 2004, wholly and completely divorced from a context that never fully resonated with a global audience, The Clash are a rock band, and 1979's London Calling is their creative apex, a booming, infallible tribute to throbbing guitars and spacious ideology. By the late 70s, "punk" was more specifically linked with rusted safety pins, shit-covered Doc Martens, and tight pink sneers than any steadfast, organized philosophy; The Clash insisted on forefronting their politics. This album tackles topical issues with impressive gusto-- the band cocks their cowboy hats, assumes full outlaw position, and pillages the world market for sonic fodder and lyric-ready injustice. A quarter-century after its first release, London Calling is still the concentrate essence of The Clash's unparalleled fervor.

As always, London Calling's title track holds steady as the record's cosmic lynchpin: Horrifyingly apocalyptic, "London Calling" is riddled with weird werewolf howls and big, prophetic hollers, Mick Jones' punchy guitar bursts tapping little nails into our skulls, pushing hard for total lunacy. Empowered and unafraid, Strummer reveals self-skewering prophecies, panting hard about nuclear errors and impending ice ages. He also spitefully lodges some of the most unpleasantly convincing calls to arms ever committed to tape, commanding his followers-- now, then, future-- to storm the streets at full, leg-flailing sprints. Even if The Clash were more blatantly inspired by the musical tenets of dub and reggae, "London Calling" unapologetically cops the fury of punk's blind-and-obliterate full-body windmilling, bypassing the cerebral cortex to sink deep into our muscles. From "London Calling" on, The Clash do not let go; each track builds on the last, pummeling and laughing and slapping us into dumb submission.

And now, we get to watch how it fell together: Using only a Teac four-track tape recorder linked up to a portastudio, The Clash inadvertently immortalized their London Calling rehearsal sessions at Vanilla Studios (a former rubber factory-gone-rehearsal-space in Pimlico, London) in the summer of 1979, several weeks before the album sessions officially opened at Wessex Studios. One set of tapes got left on the Tube. Another got crammed into a box.

The intricate (and generally convoluted) mythology of the "long lost recording" is embarrassingly familiar to rock fans-- even non-completists are awkwardly prone to chasing down bits of buried tape with insane, eye-bulging intensity. With precious few exceptions, the anticipation of a hidden, indefinitely concealed secret generally supercedes the impact of the actual artifact. Still, the possibility of stumbling into transcendence keeps the search heated, and sometimes stupidly dramatic. Earlier this month, Mick Jones bravely explained to Mojo's Pat Gilbert exactly how he uncovered the tapes: "I sensed where they were and that took me to the right box. I opened it up and found them... It was pretty amazing."

Snicker all you want at the supernatural, sixth-sense implications, or at the idea of Jones' third eye blazing hot for misplaced Clash recordings-- the 21 tracks that the constitute The Vanilla Tapes are just revealing enough to justify all the smoky mysticism. The tapes feature five previously unheard cuts-- "Heart and Mind", "Where You Gonna Go (Soweto)", "Lonesome Me", the instrumental "Walking the Slidewalk", and a cover of Matumbi's version of Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me", plucked from Dylan's 1970 album New Morning and reproduced in full reggae glory-- and together they reveal producer Guy Stevens' influence on the final sound of London Calling: muddy, raw, and insistently vague, The Vanilla Tapes see The Clash working hard, but also grasping for a muse.

Professionally, Guy Stevens was best known for "discovering" The Who and producing a handful of Mott the Hoople records, but it was his recreational exploits that carved the deepest cut into Britain's collective pop memory. With a frenzied halo of tightly curled brown hair and a penchant for destroying property, Stevens came to rule Wessex Studios, hurling chairs and ladders, wrestling with engineers, and famously dumping a bottle of red wine into Strummer's Steinway piano. Fortunately, Guy was far more concerned with encouraging "real, honest emotion" than with achieving technical perfection (true to form, London Calling has its fair share of slipped fingers), and consequently, the band's determination at Vanilla, coupled with Stevens' shitstorming, led to London Calling's odd and glorious balance of studied dedication and absurd inspiration.

And if The Vanilla Tapes aren't enough to satisfy your voyeuristic tendencies, there's more. For The Last Testament, documentarian/DJ Don Letts (also responsible for Clash on Broadway and Westway to the World) weaves together bits of live footage, interviews with punk pundits and band members (they spout tiny clarifications between snickers and cigarette huffs), promotional videos, and a few small, grainy glimpses of the band recording at Wessex. The studio shots were culled from footage that, like The Vanilla Tapes, had been unknowingly cardboard boxed for years-- in early 2004, former manager Kosmo Vinyl up a crate containing 84 minutes of hand-held footage of the London Calling sessions. Most of the film turned out to be unusable, but Letts salvaged some revealing shots of Stevens in fine form, wrestling with ladders and banging around chairs, in a curious reversal of classic producer/band hijinx.

As an instruction manual, the 25th anniversary edition of London Calling offers up bits of helpful, ordinary wisdom (he who fucks nuns will later join the church, no one gets their shit for free-- and "Balls to you, big daddy!" is an infallible exit line), but the album's biggest lesson is still spiritual. Like a bit of good gossip or a dog-eared copy of On the Road, Clash tapes tend to get passed around, and wind up forming countless intimate, enduring, and cathartic bonds. That Joe Strummer's handwritten lyrics and modest scribblings have finally been tucked into the liner notes is only appropriate: London Calling is just as precious.