I didn’t believe the rumors when I read them. It was December 22, 2002 and a rumor was floating around that Joe Strummer had died. But until an official news source reported it, it wasn’t true. I went to bed confident that there would be no news in the morning.

But still I woke up early. And sprawled on CNN’s web site was “Clash star Joe Strummer dies.” The rumors were true. The man I had idolized for years was gone. The man my sister and I planned to fly to England for was gone. The man who formed my political beliefs was gone.

His personality seemed perfect to me. He was punk rock and he was me. The Clash railed against groups that bragged about their number of groupies. In A Riot of Our Own Joe told roadie, Johnny Green, “I can’t figure out why people have to pamper beautiful models, just for a shag, or to impress people. The end result is just superficial. Why do people do that?” It was through Joe’s magnetic personality I loved The Clash and their politics.

But The Clash were more than a way to understand the politics of the 70s and 80s. It was through the ringing chords of London Calling that I would learn about Elvis Costello & the Attractions and The Specials.

As the frenetic notes of Ted Leo & the Pharmacists’ “Where have all the Rude Boys Gone?” rang through my TV, I heard references I knew. In Ted’s mourning of the two tone beat on Late Night With Conan O’Brien I felt like I was in on an inside joke. I knew he was talking about The Specials.

When I got to Hearts of Oak’s track 4, “The High Party,” it made me uncomfortable. All I could hear were the words “too drunk to turn the lights off” and I felt like it didn’t apply to me. But it did.

When I was in high school I had made the conscious decision not to drink. I felt as though it was a forced rush to adulthood. I embraced innocence. I couldn’t understand the appeal of getting drunk or how anyone in high school had problems big enough where drinking was the answer. And beer tasted like shit.

The myriad of pleas for me to drink because I’d be “hilarious” only made me more passionate. I became militantly anti-drinking, disappointed in my friends and crushes who did drink. I forced those closest to me to be part of my anti-drinking movement without ever telling them. And as they would tell me they had started drinking I would feel betrayed. They had lost the way.

And so had I.

It was in my self-imposed struggle I realized what “The High Party” meant. It was a condemnation of being ignorant. It was a condemnation of wasting your time getting drunk when you could be doing something more useful. It was The Clash.

As my sister flipped through an issue of Jane, she handed me the magazine, pointing at Ted Leo’s picture. It was a brief column of indie rockers that were at one point straight edge. Ted facetiously described how he had gone straight edge after drinking too much at the age of 15.

Inspired by this, I emailed Ted Leo asking him if he was still straight edge. A couple days later I received a lengthy response from Ted describing his days of being straight edge. While the email is lost in the annals of an Outlook Express .dbx file, I still remember his decision not to drink being part of his protest of the “hypercapitalism” of the beer industry. However, he stated he was no longer straight edge, but he was glad to remember that time. At the end he thanked me for bringing it up.

And “The High Party” meant the same to me. I interviewed Ted Leo in 2005. I had told him that I thought Hearts of Oak was on the same level as London Calling. He timorously accepted the compliment. But still, I thought of Ted Leo as the next Joe Strummer.