In terms of seeing live music, I’ve often been at the right place at the right time. When I was in my teens, I was lucky enough to be visiting San Francisco in 1975 procure a ticket and settle in near the stage at a Rolling Stones concert (in the general seating section). A few years later, jazz saxophone legend Art Pepper made a comeback after years of prison and of fighting addiction, and I saw two of his great shows at the Village Vanguard. While I worked at the New York Philharmonic in the mid-1990s, I witnessed Kurt Masur conduct Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and chanced upon the Maestro in an elevator a couple of days later, where we briefly talked about the grand performance. But I don’t think there was any luckier musical day in my life than when I was working in London in 1978 and witnessed The Clash playing at a venue called The Music Machine. London was deep in punk and new wave and the place went mad as the band did their magic. For the encore, a couple of The Sex Pistols joined The Clash to bring the whole thing home. Performances of The Clash at The Music Machine can be seen in a film called Rude Boy. For all I know, they may have filmed the night I was there (I remember exactly where I stood and there is a pan of the audience that in a millisecond shows a silhouette of a bloke with bad posture, that may just be yours truly).

From the 1980s to the 1990s, I enjoyed listening to U2 and I liked Grunge for a bit, but popular music began to leave me cold in the long run. By 2000, I’d reached the unhappy realization that music was degenerating and that the craft of writing a complex rock or soul song was vanishing. Around 2003 or 2004, I was browsing CDs at a Borders bookstore when I saw one called Global A Go-Go by ex-Clash member Joe Strummer and his band, The Mescaleros. I previewed a couple of songs and really liked what I heard. I brought it home, and loved what I heard.

Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros released a total of three CDs and one of those was put out after Mr. Strummer’s death from a heart condition in 2002. The second two are the stronger of the releases, Global A Go-Go and Streetcore. Joe Strummer had been deeply influenced by world music and he’d had an international radio show featuring all genres of music. The music of his last band reflects the joy in coalescing all he’d learned from world beats with original tunes that bounce along either quickly in joyful abandon or to a slow meditative texture. Much of the music shows a great sense of humor with clever plays on words as well as provocative lyrics: “God sure baked a lot of fruitcake baby/When Adam met the Eden lady,” and “There’s too many guns in this damn town/The supermarket you gotta duck down/baby flak jackets on the merry-go-round/London is burnin’.”

Joe Strummer was always a political artist and after seeing two documentaries focused on him, one can see he was deeply committed to inspiring people to love life as a gift, and to help those oppressed gain the opportunity to enjoy and explore life; while as part of The Clash, he was angry and lamented the future of young men and women with no real chance to reach their potential. With the Mescaleros, he continued to present ideas on the oppressed, and mixed it with beautifully composed songs with great arrangements and with a more optimistic bent. Watching the documentary Let’s Rock Again, which focuses on his time with the Mescaleros, I was deeply moved by Mr. Strummer’s commitment to his fan base, by his deep love of music, and was awed by the great passion that drove his positive attitude towards the time one is given in this world. It’s a terrible thing that his time was cut so short, especially as he was peaking with his new band and enjoying a somewhat settled family life. His fresh and startling attitude is sorely missed.