Autumn, 1978: The skinheads and the punks are trading sneers and obscenities across the drafty dance hall. Skins on the right, all sporting number ones, Doc Martens and an unhealthy diet of racism and ultraviolence. Punks on the left, clad in whatever they can steal out of their brother's closet and rip up, barking at the enemy less out of hate than self-defence.

What are me and my two mates doing here, 17-year-old private schoolboys barely out of flares, staring resolutely at the empty stage to avoid catching anyone's eye? We'd driven two hours in a souped-up old Mini from Brighton along England's weather-beaten south coast to Hastings, the soporific town of retired majors, a place where truly nothing of note had happened since King Harold took one in the eye for his country.

Then everything is clear. Four guys from West London take the stage and punks and skins suddenly belong to the same religion, yelling in unison as the tsunami of opening chords from Safe European Home comes thundering forward. We are here for the cause of rock 'n' roll. Or rather, for the future of rock 'n' roll. For punk. For the Clash.

Like millions of teenagers before us, Joe Strummer had once had the same epiphany himself, to infinitely more important effect. It came a few years before, when the diplomat's son -- himself privately educated -- decided to disappoint his parents royally and dedicate himself to the electric guitar. He lived in squats, busked and released one single in 1976 with a pub rock band, the 101'ers, before finding his musical soul mate in Mick Jones and forming the Clash.

And here he is, Fender akimbo, his barfly vocals tearing through (although we didn't know it then) a hall of fame of punk gems -- White Riot, Complete Control, London's Burning, Tommy Gun. After a couple of numbers, Strummer is caked in spit and the anarchic pogoing of the crowd has sparked the inevitable flurry of fists and drop-kicks between the punks and skins. Strummer stops the band, pleads for peace with limited success, and the band plays on.

It is, without a sliver of doubt, the greatest gig I have ever seen. I saw the Clash on other occasions, and will tell my grandchildren that they were the best live band ever to walk on stage. But this night, in this hall, they have rewritten rock history, and signed a personal copy for me.
Together with the passing of Joey Ramone last year, the death of Joe Strummer (né John Mellor in 1952), earned fewer column inches than that of George Harrison, although it was without doubt of greater note. The third Beatle was an accomplished guitarist and hard-working composer but his importance lies mainly in his good fortune at playing in the same band with two giants of contemporary music. Strummer and Ramone knew fewer chords than Harrison, but they could truly say they took action at a pivotal point in the music industry and changed the way it would evolve.

The Ramones were there first, in 1975, and very much set the tone for the DIY sound and ethic of the movement; but after the initial nudge, their two-dimensional approach and Looney-Toons lyrics would eventually limit their reach. But in his role as Clash frontman, Strummer was arguably the most important single figure in punk and new wave -- not just for his astonishingly rich contribution as a songwriter (together with Jones), but for his unswerving role as the political conscience of late-1970s music.

John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), God bless him, may have said "wanker" on prime-time British TV and allowed the tabloids to anoint him as the reviled spokesman for a dispossessed generation, but his political contribution was little more than the musical equivalent of drawing a Hitler mustache on a portrait of the Queen.

Strummer's social convictions, meanwhile, ran right through the Clash's work, from the opening blur of White Riot, the band's first single: "All the power's in the hands/Of people rich enough to buy it/While we walk the street/Too chicken to even try it." This song, and their subsequent debut LP, melded urban poetry with ramrod power to an effect that has never been captured since. That first album remains a perfect historical document of what the United Kingdom was like in those grim, preboom times, when London was "burning with boredom now" and kids were desperate for something more than a stairway to heaven or a boogie night to show them the way out.

The Clash were just too good, and too (relatively) successful, for a backlash to take long. Around that time, Mark Perry, editor of the influential punk fanzine, Sniffin' Glue, said punk died the day the Clash signed with a major label (CBS) in early '77. Such iconoclasm, so little logic: Even as a middle-class boy, Strummer had no need then, or later in his career, to detail his street credentials to naysayers such as Perry. Not only was he in trouble with the law on more occasions than most public enemies of the time, the band also spoke through its music, and the message with regard to CBS was clear: "They said we'd be artistically free/When we signed that bit of paper/They meant let's make lotsa money/And worry about it later."

That song, Complete Control, was a watershed in punk's progression from novelty to credible musical force. Having invented U.K. punk with their first LP, Strummer and Jones (with heavy influence from the reggae-mad bassist, Paul Simonon) reinvented it with this song. For punk, it was the shock of the new, fusing the basic elements of power, rhythmic hook and disassociation with the heavy dub production of Jamaican DJ and producer Lee (Scratch) Perry. Rock writer Greil Marcus raved at the time that it was impossible to hear the song and be the same again.

Although Jones was the melodic chieftain of the band, much of the brilliance of the seminal third album, London Calling (1979), lay at Strummer's door. It was his fascination with Americana, rockabilly, R&B, country and reggae that infused the double LP with its daringly broad sweep of punk's spiritual forefathers. It's the Clash's Sgt. Pepper and deserves to figure on every pop fan's Top 10 albums of all time.

Strummer had almost lost me by the time the Clash followed up with the sprawling 1980 triple album Sandinista (their White Album), even if he did get me and many other armchair socialists interested in the Nicaraguan cause. By the time Combat Rock finally turned on America in 1982, Jones was pushed out and we watched in great pain as Strummer's Clash limped on until 1985. Strummer went on to star in a couple of cult movies (such as Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train), fronted the Pogues for a while, and earned his daily bread with the Mescaleros.

Whatever his sins of those years, Strummer and Jones resisted bags of money to reform the Clash during the 1990s -- and for that we should be both sad and grateful. But how Strummeresque that his last public appearance was with Jones only a couple of weeks ago at a benefit gig for Britain's striking firemen. For a punk, he was strikingly decent bloke.

Joe Strummer did not deserve to die so young, but he had certainly earned the ease with which he did it -- slumped in his favourite chair in his West Country cottage after walking his dogs. Old punks never die, they merely give you the finger and fade away.
Simon Beck is News Editor of The Globe and Mail.