The Clash have been voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I am dancing in fields of clover (having used my allergy spray).

One of the reasons it took me so long to switch from vinyl to CDs was the "side" factor: records have sides that neatly divide an album into 20-24 minute halves. After 25 years of listening to records (by 1991), my body clock was attuned to this time frame and sitting through an entire CD without a break made me feel like I was buried alive. Perhaps I exaggerate, but it did bug me.

Clash On Broadway, the career collection, was the first CD I was willing to sit through all the way, and it's a 3-CD set. That's how good it is. Basically it's all here: "White Riot," "I Fought the Law" (live), "Safe Europen Home," "London Calling," "Clampdown," "Train In Vain," "Police On My Back" (written by Eddie Grant), "Magnificent Seven," "This Is Radio Clash," "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go." My only complaints are the lack of "Charlie Don't Surf" and "Lose This Skin" (with vocal and violin work from Tymon Dogg) from Sandanista!, the band's most underrated record.

The Clash are the essential punk group because they survived the original punk explosion and evolved into other contemporary forms, all the while maintaining and elaborating upon their original ideas. Singer/guitarist Joe Strummer was a diplomat's son with an upper-middle class education playing in pub-rock bands with the likes of Graham Parker and Elvis Costello when he heard the Sex Pistols for the first time in early 1976. "It's a whole new thing, man," he confided in reverent tones to Parker, "a whole new thing."

Immediatley thereafter, Strummer quit his pub-rock band and formed the Clash with guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon, and various drummers, including Topper Headon. The Clash's first album - released in England in 1977, but not in the US until 1979 - was an incendiary classic that was at once more melodic and more assaultive the the Sex Pistol's album.

Several songs from the first Clash album (The Clash) are on this collection. The greatest of which is the Clash's remake of the Bobby Fuller Four's "I Fought the Law." Bobby Fuller's 1965 original was a Buddy Hollyesque classic rife with ambivalence and sweet regret. It is more apologetic than antisocial: