DROWNED OUT BY THE SOUND

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, many of them no longer considered that it had. What exactly had happened in the meanwhile? Was it simply that these people were now buried under a pile of toddlers?

— Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers in Soviet Russia spent long hours helping the camera to falsify reality ... The physical eradication of Stalin's political opponents was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence.

— David King, The Commissar Vanishes

The air was sweat-soaked and electric. Five musicians could barely be glimpsed amid a mass of humanity. Three men flayed acoustic guitars, while a fourth pounded drumsticks against the metal and plastic of a chair.

The fifth — a flame-haired singer in a green T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves — exhorted the crowd from a slightly elevated perch. Dog tags jangled as he sang without a microphone, his head nearly touching the low ceiling of the cave-like space.

The vocalist provided a visual center to the happening, but his voice was lost in the din. The unamplified guitars were similarly submerged, with only the rhythm cutting through to the back of the small room.

Such technological shortcomings seemed to matter little. Hundreds of voices howled as one: "Breaking rocks in the hot sun / I fought the law / and the law won / I needed money 'cause I had none / I fought the law / and the law won."

The song echoed poverty's desperation, its doomed protagonist reduced to "robbing people with a six-gun." If evoking a mythical American West, its theme also fit with the present locale: Sunderland, a port city in northeastern Britain.

Once Sunderland had been "the largest shipbuilding town in the world," according to the BBC. Now, the ships were gone, factory gates padlocked and rusty, with the area also hemorrhaging mining and other industrial jobs. A battle waged over the past two years to forestall an even bleaker future had not ended in victory.

Yet if the lyrics were grim, the spirit in the Drum Club discotheque on this evening in May 1985 was anything but. Joy met defiance as crowd and band became one giant chorus, spitting in the eye of a cruel fate.

We may have lost, the voices seemed to say, but we are not defeated.

A British rock band called The Clash was the catalyst for that rousing Sunderland night. By the time the group performed this audacious impromptu concert, they had become the single most popular unit to rise out of the UK punk explosion, thanks to their 1982 breakthrough album Combat Rock, with its hit singles "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go."

Over the ensuing decades, The Clash's stature has only grown, with commentators regularly placing them in a rock pantheon next to an earlier generation's demigods such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This development — including their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — is not without irony, given the band's populist, antistar stance. Nonetheless, as an Arabic version of the antifundamentalist "Casbah" by Algerian rocker Rachid Taha suggests, The Clash's global cultural influence is vast and spreading, as befits a band that consciously strove to think in planetary terms. In the fall of 2013 — nearly thirty years after that Sunderland show — The Clash released Sound System, a massive box set. While the long-defunct unit had been the subject of several such compendiums, this one was clearly meant as the final will and definitive testament of one of the twentieth century's most important rock groups.

Described by Rolling Stone magazine as collecting "all of its albums," Sound System was a vast and weighty document. Designed to resemble that 1980s urban icon — the boom box cassette deck — the set also contained unreleased music and videos, a poster, a book, magazines, badges, stickers, even Clash dog tags. "I'm not even thinking about any more Clash releases. This is it for me, and I say that with an exclamation mark!" band cofounder Mick Jones told Rolling Stone at the time.

Yet, for all of Sound System's vaunted completeness, there was a striking omission: the band's sixth studio album, Cut the Crap. Although the record cracked the UK Top 20, with a similarly high-ranking single, "This Is England," it was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any mention that a final version of The Clash, without guitarist Jones and drummer Nicky "Topper" Headon, had played 120-plus shows, nearly 20 percent of the band's total gigs.

Perhaps this shouldn't have been a surprise. The film Westway to the World and its companion tome The Clash — the other two volumes that, with Sound System, effectively comprise the authorized Clash canon — also omitted the same for all intents and purposes. None of the final two years of concerts — such as the Sunderland show — were included in the comprehensive list in the big pink coffee-table book, which credited "Strummer Jones Simonon Headon" as its authors.

It's true that two of those four — Jones and Headon — were absent from Cut the Crap. Nonetheless, the record's exclusion was extraordinary, only justifiable from a narrow perspective that has hardened over the years. This view not only dismisses the album but the band's last version itself — popularly known as "The Clash Mark II" — as lead-footed punk pretenders unworthy of serious scrutiny.

According to one Clash biographer, Marcus Gray, The Clash Mark II was drilling out "heavy metal" versions of the unit's classics, "reducing every tune to a primitive staccato stomp ... with its original melody, subtlety, texture, and meaning hammered into the ground." They are deemed "a Clash cover band" by another, author/ filmmaker Danny Garcia. One wag even recorded a reworked version of their latter-day anthem "We Are The Clash" as "We Aren't The Clash."

A few brave souls have dissented from this chorus of dismissal, most notably writer Jon Savage, who described Cut the Crap as a "moving state of the nation address." Savage even singles out "This Is England" as "the last great British punk song" in his magnum opus, England's Dreaming. Such voices, however, have largely been drowned out by the sound of a naysaying echo chamber.

Over time, the ripple effects of this critical razzing have taken a toll. Ironically, Cut the Crap's roundly panned "electro-punk" production...