When Joe Strummer died on December 22, 2002, no one could believe it...first of all, the guy was only 50...second, this was a guy who ran marathons...third, he’d been strict vegetarian since 1971...
And fourth, it was Joe Strummer, one of the toughest and most uncompromising musicians in the history of not just punk, not just alternative, but rock period, full stop...
Yet it happened in his kitchen in Somerset, England, just after he finished walking the dog...cause of death?...heart attack, caused by an undiagnosed defect in his heart that had been there all along...sudden heart failure...he immediately lost consciousness and never woke up...
To be specific, he suffered from an “intra-mural coronary artery”...this is when one of the main vessels supplying blood to the heart ends up growing inside the heart muscle as the person grows older...it is an exceedingly rare condition with fewer than 100 fatal cases recorded worldwide in the last 50 years...
That’s what took Joe from us?...what are the odds?...I guess I just told you...
But even though Joe has been gone for 20 years, he’s still remembered and still revered as an iconic figure—and someone whose work has been discovered by generations since he died...
To help that along—and to commemorate 20 years since his passing—I’ve come up with something I call “20 short stories about Joe Strummer”...
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