I never really got into The Clash, but they influenced a huge number of my favorite bands. I’m sure punk wouldn’t be the same without them.
I’m really sorry to hear this.
That’s sad. He’s not any older than my dad.
:(. This sucks.
In my hometown, there was this club from the mid 70’s to the early 80’s. I was in my late teens then. The club, which was at the street #54, was aptly called: “The 54.” A lot of the new bands were touring Europe, trying to build an audience. So over just a few years, this small club, able to fit maybe 300 people, featured: The Clash, Sham69, Buzzcocks, Blondie, Ramones (IIRC), Simple Minds ASF.
To bad I was caught up in Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes, Zappa at the time and didn’t get all that punk ‘shit’.
When I finally understood it, and got into it. The bands were to big and never came my way again. Many times of the past 20 years, I’ve felt so stupid to miss this opportunity. I feel twice as stupid and sorry now, hearing about Strummer.
BTW, try to find his recordings with The 101ers which was his band before Clash.
R.I.P. Joe.
Rolling Stone actually did me a big favor by reviewing “London Calling” so entheusiastically that I went out and bought the double album. That’s at a time when I never did anything like that (and my music tastes were more along the lines of Styx, Supertramp, Elton John and Yes).
That shit blew me away. They rocked, but they also knew about Montgomery Clift and the Spanish Civil War. They ripped up my world, and while I kept listening to the old stuff, I added Tom Robinson, Sex Pistols, and after that the barn doors were opened and I listened to <i>everything</i>.
Thanks, Joe. Wish I could see you in rock ‘n’ roll heaven.
(BTW, didn’t that Harrison guy die this year too? Wasn’t he in some big band?)
I heard it around lunchtime today. I knew someone here would remember. I was just reading this about him:
Crap. Got my Clash members confused. I’ll go hide now…
Personally, I thought (passively, not that the thought really popped into my head) that Topper would be the first to go and that Joe would be a 100 year old wise old man of rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, Joe just seemed so stout, like he could go on a three hour rant and not break a sweat (whereas Topper… well, did you see him in Westway To The World?). Frankly, him dying is much bigger than Dee Dee (no offense meant by that, BTW). The world just lost a giant.
I just heard this from my baby brother (I introduced him to The Clash in 1980 when he was 9).
Sad news.
I saw the Clash in 1979 at the Paramount Theater in Seattle on their London Calling tour. I grew up in Puyallup, WashingtonÑa small, agricultural town 40 miles south of SeattleÑand I was one of only two or three people in my high school who had even heard of the ClashÑlet alone having seen them. The Clash were enormously important to me when I was in high school and college, and London Calling changed the way I listened to rock ‘n’ roll.
This is a bittersweet day for me: today my wife and I gained custody of our adopted son, and today I learned of Joe’s passing.
My se–orita’s rose was nipped in the bud
Spanish bombs
Yo te quiero y finito
Yo te querda
Oh my corazon…
I’m really starting to hate this time of year. Two years ago, it was Kirsty MacColl. Last year, Stuart Adamson of Big Country. This year, Joe Strummer. The whole playlist of my college radio days (“The Only Show that Matters”, KHDX, FM 93.1, Hendrix College, 1982-1986) is disappearing. MacColl and the Clash remain among my four or five all-time favorites, but my love of Kirsty MacColl was the product of musical tastes that really began to develop when I bought London Calling in the meagre record section of Consumers Grocery in Fayetteville, Arkansas a couple of months after it was released. I promptly dubbed a cassette copy and started trying to drown out the other kids’ Loverboy and Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes with my boombox on band trips to away football games and the like.
One of my most treasured possessions all through high school and college was a t-shirt from the shows at Bonds in NYC; Sandinista! cover art on the front, “The Clash in New York” and the dates on the back in red, on a black shirt. I wore that, and my white shirt with the first album cover art, practically every other day my senior year of high school in Harrisburg, Arkansas, where I was without question the only person who’d heard of them until “Should I Stay or Should I Go” started getting some airplay on MTV at the very end of the year. (Just to keep people guessing, on the other days I usually wore a sport coat and knit tie with a white dress shirt, though with Stiff Records, Clash, Sex Pistols, and The Jam buttons on the lapels). Pretty tame stuff, I realize, but for the time and place it was completely unheard of. That’s what the Clash meant for me at the time – the mere fact that they existed and did what they did made it possible to think of living and doing things in ways I’d never have imagined otherwise.
Joe Strummer must have known to some degree how many other musicians he influenced, but I wonder if he had any clue how many people who never played in a band he also had a huge impact on. Let’s hope he did.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
FUCK.
So sad, such a good person, Joe Strummer. The Clash was the galvanizing political force of the punk age. I saw 'em several times, and yawndave, was at the same SF Civic Auditorium show back -in- the- day as you. Joe Strummer was the real deal; a forceful voice with a true good heart.
Pax, JS, and know you made a lot of angry melodic difference in the world.
I’m actually sheding a tear or two right now. The CLash practically got me through high school and have always been THE soundtrack of my life. I can’t even remember a day that has gone by in the last 6 or 7 years where I haven’t blaired the Clash from my car speakers or record player. RIP Joe.
A little piece of me died with Strummer.
Fuck-a-doodle-doo.
My husband and brother are really depressed now. My brother saw Joe play last summer at Hootenanny and loved it.
The Clash was arguably one of the most influencial bands of the last 40 years (drop in Bob Dylan and The Waterboys while yer at it).
Decades before “Cop Killa” there were the “Guns of Brixton.” How you gonna come?
“With your hands on your head, or on the trigger of your gun?”
I saw the Clash opening for the Who at their L.A. concert on their “farewell tour”. (Farewell to the Who, not the Clash yet!) Mick Jones was still in the band, Joe was sporting a Mohawk, and the stage was swarming with girlfriends and groupies. This was late '82.
That was my senior year in high school. The next year I went to college and it turned out my Poli Sci professor (a Marxist) had been at that same concert. He called it “the Clash concert,” because some people had left without seeing the Who.
When Joey Ramone died, Joe was asked where he thought Joey was now and he said, “In heaven.” The interviewer asked, “Do you believe in heaven?” and Joe replied, “For me I don’t know, but for Joey Ramone hell yeah!”
Well, if there’s a heaven, I guess Joe and Joey are in it together now.
I always had a warm place in my heart for Joe. This really does suck. At least I got to see him back in day. San Fran in 79 and (I think) 80. Damn.