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Deluxe reissues

The Clash, London Calling: 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition (Epic)

Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: L.A.’s Desert Origins (Matador)

In years to come, musos will continue to argue over which album by each of these bands is the most "important" or "crucial" or whatever. But you could make a strong argument for both London Calling and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain being particularly significant because in each case you have people coming together to become more than the sum of their individual parts and simultaneously breaking free from genre constraints. In the case of the Clash, London Calling was the album on which they left punk rock behind or, as I prefer to see it, redefined the boundaries of punk until it could be viewed as a folk or roots form that could and would live on long after the band broke up. This deluxe 25th-anniversary edition of the album is a three-disc set that includes the legendary "Vanilla Tapes," which amount to the demos for London Calling, though they’re really more. As the band reveal on the third disc, a DVD that features extensive interview footage, including the late Joe Strummer, the sessions at the Vanilla studio were an opportunity for the Clash to realize they’d become a real rock-and-roll band and to test themselves while having fun reworking old tunes like "Remote Control" (included here). In the end, though, "The Vanilla Tapes" are flat-sounding and in that regard a tribute to the work that the notorious producer Guy Stevens did to pull a classic album out of the Clash when they’d finished the demos. There’s footage on the DVD of Stevens smashing chairs in the studio, but whatever he did brought the band together in a way that would never happen again.

A decade and a half later, Pavement had reached a crossroads when it came time to record a follow-up to their critically acclaimed Slanted and Enchanted, a disc that did as much as any other to make lo-fi part of the indie-rock lexicon. Pavement could have remained something of a studio project led by Spiral Stairs and Stephen Malkmus; instead, they got rid of hippie drummer Gary Young, found a real drummer (Steve West), and made a rock-and-roll album as a real band. Although some still lament the vaguely commercial, song-oriented direction Malkmus took them, it’s hard to deny the musical breakthrough that Pavement experienced during Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. This deluxe edition includes all the B-sides that came out on all those British and Japanese singles for "Cut Your Hair" and "Gold Sounds" along with the full album on disc one. And disc two offers a glimpse of what might have been by including eight tracks — among them, "Range Life" — recorded with Young on drums. The rest of disc two is fleshed out with a plethora of studio experiments. With Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement became a band whose impact will be felt for generations.

DVDs

Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (abkco)

Another State of Mind (Time Bomb)

If Gimme Shelter was the film that captured the end of the peace-and-love ’60s, then Rock and Roll Circus is one of the documents that caught the emergence of the "fun" ’60s in midstream. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, this is swinging London at its most playful and ridiculous. The extras include Pete Townshend as well as members of the Stones recalling the event, a circus-style show shot in a studio as a TV special with an audience, and featuring Jethro Tull, the Who, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and, of course, the Stones, along with a few actual circus acts. And the smirk on Townshend’s face belies the sense of absurdity that pervaded the Circus. Fortunately, the performances are the real raw deal, with the Who introducing their rock operetta "A Quick One While He’s Away" and pulling it off without any special effects, Lennon jamming with Eric Clapton and Keith Richards on a blues that they don’t appear to have put too much rehearsal into, and the Brian Jones version of the Stones having something of a last hurrah.

There’s nothing playful about Another State of Mind, a low-budget rockumentary released in 1984 that caught the burgeoning American hardcore punk movement at a particularly vulnerable time. The film follows the horrible Youth Brigade and a very promising band called Social Distortion on a poorly planned North American tour filled with all kinds of mishaps, including a stop by the infamous Dischord house in DC to visit Minor Threat. Its central device, and what makes it so moving, is that Social D frontman Mike Ness is in the midst of writing what will become one of his seminal anthems — "Another State of Mind" — throughout the band’s journey into the heart of America’s punk darkness. This is a pre-tattoo Mike Ness looking innocent and vulnerable as he dodges stage divers, tries to find comfortable corners to sleep in, and, finally, opts to head back to LA after most of his band quit on him. Although the film ends on a low note, Social Distortion went on to become a viable band, as Ness made the connection between the Clash and Johnny Cash and got a whole lotta tattoos.