To me, Joe Strummer should not be referred to in the past tense. He should be alive and well and doing great music even now. But in December 2002, he breathed his last breath, and the world is a lot sadder for his absence.
I think Strummer's death was the most shocking "celebrity death" I can recall in terms of someone that I was a fan of, up until Adam Yauch's passing a little less than ten years later. Both men excelled at their craft, making the music style that they were known for (Strummer in punk, Yauch in rap) so much better than had they never lifted their voices to begin with. Granted, you could argue that Strummer made his most vibrant music twenty years before his death, with the Clash, and that everything since the band's dissolution had been window dressing on a well-earned reputation as a punk icon. But for the sheer force of his personality, Joe Strummer remained important right up to the last hour of his life. It's hard to believe that the Clash would've cashed in and taken the easy route (a reunion tour like the Police), but we'll never really have that option again, now will we?
I blame Sid Vicious, though perhaps I could put Buddy Holly, Johnny Ace, and (going way, way back) Thomas Chatterton, Shelley, and Keats for the world's fascination with rock stars or literary figures who are gone way too soon, but by punk standards Joe was an "old man" of fifty. Many of his contemporaries who didn't meet an early grave (Vicious, Ian Curtis, etc.) didn't manage to hang on much past the turn of the century (three-fourths of the original Ramones died within a three- or four-year span of one another). It could be the heavy drug culture that surrounded the scene in the late Seventies (punks did their fair share), though some of the forefathers of the movement (Iggy Pop, Lou Reed) took rhino-sized portions of cocaine and other goodies and live today as revered father figures. John Lydon, the former "Johnny Rotten" of the Sex Pistols, is another survivor of that era, and when I first read his takedown of Strummer as being "inauthentic" as a source on punk for the movie Sid and Nancy, I took him at face value. Early on, I preferred the Pistols to the Clash, and the myth of their rise and fall in less than two years was more attractive than the Clash's solid ten-year existence (though I later learned that existence was anything but solid, especially after Mick Jones left the group in 1982).
Like a lot of things I believed in when I was young, the notion of what makes someone "authentic" when they claim to speak for something has changed. Sure, Strummer (real name: John Mellors) came from a fairly posh background, as the son of a diplomat, while Lydon's parents were poor Irish living in squalor in London. But Strummer, like a punk-rock Buddha, came down from his heights to survey how the less-well-off were living. And he embraced the young audience for punk in a way that Lydon never has and never will. The Pistols were notorious, and attacked because of it; the Clash were beloved.
I guess I can see how Lydon might rankle a bit at the idea that Strummer was better at the punk game than he was (after all, the Pistols started the whole damn thing, whether or not it really was just a ploy by Malcolm McLaren to get more people buying in his clothing shops), but the Clash were the one group to emerge from that initial wave to rival and, in time perhaps, surpass the masters. They stayed together longer, put out more music, evolved in their style (none of the original punk bands would be considered "punk" in the didactic, rigid sense of what "punk" is as believed by people who don't know better), and made the world safe for rap with their single "The Magnificent Seven." In my leaner economic years, I sold the "best of" CD that had this song on it, and I regret it to this day. I still have the dynamic first album (which includes "Police and Thieves," the song I was going to write about until I changed my mind), but there's not enough Clash in my record collection right now. I hope to right that wrong soon.
Strummer wasn't "authentic," but he was intelligent enough to speak for those who couldn't pick up a guitar and speak for themselves. The Clash really did care about their fans. In an article he wrote in three installments for NME in 1977, Lester Bangs described the band's close relationship with their fan base (which often included sleepovers, not in the dirty groupie "rock star" sense but genuinely decent acts of kindness). You know that such relationships can't exist today, despite the so-called "connectedness" of our digital age. You think Belle and Sebastian would invite me in for tea if I just showed up at their rehearsal space (okay, maybe they would, they're nice people, but you get my point). The world lost something when it lost Joe Strummer, and I doubt we'll ever see it again. But we have the music, and thank God (and Joe Strummer) for that.
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