Jamie-Andrea Yanak, Associated Press Mick Jones, left, and Terry Chimes view the new Clash exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, in Cleveland. Click photo for larger image. 'Revolution Rock: The Story of The Clash' Where: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland. When: Through April 15; 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily; till 9 p.m. Wednesdays. Admission: $18; $14 seniors; $11 kids 9-12; www.rockhall.com; 216-781-ROCK. Related coverage Some Pittsburgh rockers weigh in on The Clash

CLEVELAND -- Little Stella Jones might be the world's youngest Clash fan. The 2-year-old with dark wavy hair is darting around the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, chased by various family members, wearing a little black skirt and black Clash T-shirt.

"Where do you find a Clash T-shirt that small?" I ask her father, Mick, the man who wore one of the guitars in that band.

He leans close like he's going to reveal a secret.

"You can get them at Henne's," he says, with an incredulous look on his face. "Do you believe it?"

Mick Jones sounds almost embarrassed that you can buy a Clash T-shirt for a toddler in the giant British retailer that's been called the "IKEA of clothing stores."

Then again, he never expected to find his guitar, white leather jacket and other shreds of Clash history behind glass in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"It's pretty weird," he says, viewing the new exhibition on the fifth floor. "It's strange being alive and getting to museum level."

"Revolution Rock: The Story of the Clash," which opened last weekend, is the first major examination of a punk rock band at the Hall of Fame in Cleveland. To assemble it, the curators had Jones clear out his closet of stylish military-punk attire and rummaged through Joe Strummer's garage for hand-written lyrics, press clippings and guitars.

"Craig [Inciardi, one of the curators] said, 'You have all this stuff that needs to be looked after and needs to be preserved,' " says Lucinda Mellor, Strummer's widow, "and he sifted through damp boxes full of endless sheets of lyrics and bashed-up guitars and old carrying cases and he said, 'This stuff is worth putting in a museum,' and I just couldn't believe it."

Among the items sure to grab Clash fans are the vintage poster designs. But one that stood out had no color and no graphics at all. It was simple black lettering on faded white paper announcing a gig on Aug. 29, 1976, at the Screen on the Green in England.

The bill: The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Buzzcocks.

If anyone can get their hands on a good time machine, let's go!

LONDON'S BURNING

They were "The Last Gang in Town" and "The Only Band That Matters."

OK, CBS Records said that, so it was just hype, but as the '70s were coming to a close, it wasn't far from the truth.

The Sex Pistols got there first and combusted in a blaze of infamy, but The Clash were Britain's greatest punk export, starting as an outfit deemed too "crude" for American audiences and then living on to expand the possibilities of punk over a decade-long run.

Sitting in a back meeting room at the Rock Hall, Mick Jones, a lean figure in a pin-striped jacket, white shirt and gray slacks, sips a Heineken and recalls the band's early years. At 51, his mop of hair is mostly gone, and what's left is streaked with gray and combed straight back. He's soft-spoken and quick to smile, the kind of guy who treats you like a friend upon first meeting.

Jones says that back in the mid '70s, his mom, a Russian Jew, was living in New York and sending him home copies of Creem magazine, where he kept tabs on American punks like the Ramones, the New York Dolls and Patti Smith, who were offering an alternative to the excesses of ELP, Pink Floyd and other prog-rock bands.

"[The Ramones album] was a big influence on us in the early days of the Clash. But the Sex Pistols definitely made an impression. The first time you saw them it was like, 'This is it.' They truly were a revelation. You knew that everything that came before was over."

Jones had been playing in a hard rock band called the London SS, but was looking to form a new one. He taught his friend Paul Simonon to play the bass and, along with guitarist Keith Levene and manager Bernie Rhodes, they went looking for a singer.

"I'd seen him play quite a lot around town 'cause he was playing in a band called The 101ers," Jones says of Strummer. "They were kind of lumped in with the pub rock scene, but they weren't really. He and his band were all squatters. You'd see them play around town a lot. So, we were looking for a singer. We auditioned a couple guys and we had one who was OK named Billy."

"Billy" didn't get the job. Instead, they pried Strummer away from The 101ers and that band's covers of "Back in the U.S.S.R." Born John Graham Mellor, Strummer was the well-traveled son of a foreign service diplomat and had a nice middle-class, boarding-school upbringing compared to Jones' more roughneck working-class roots. Strummer was a converted hippie and leftist who related to a certain American folk legend so much he called himself "Woody" Mellor.

Then he saw the Pistols open for The 101ers in April 1976.

According to Mojo, when Strummer joined up with Jones and the gang he toughened up his image and "subjected himself to a crude punk make-over," complete with dyed blond hair, an ugly sneer and a violent streak that may have been sparked by the suicide of his brother.

Unemployment and youth dissension was raging in England and Strummer, so named for his furious guitar style, set out to be its mouthpiece with songs like "White Riot," "London's Burning" and "Career Opportunities." While Johnny Rotten just seemed to be flipping everyone off, Strummer looked like the guy who would lead you into battle.

"We weren't political like 'political party' political. We wouldn't form our own party like the White Panthers or anything," Jones says, referring to Detroit's MC5. "It was more like personal politics. We started to write about what affected us and our own concerns. People say, 'You guys were political,' but really we were only writing about what was going on around us."

Terry Chimes (a k a Tory Crimes), the Clash's original drummer, didn't care what Strummer was going on about -- in fact, he probably couldn't even hear it with all that racket. Along for the exhibition opening, Chimes says, "I was less aware of that than the others. I wanted the loudest, fastest, most energetic band going, and they were that."

	Jamie-Andrea Yanak, Associated Press Above: A concert poster for "The Clash" and "The Ramones." Below: Terry Chimes looks at some of his old clothing from his Clash days. The clothes are part of a display at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Click photos for larger image.

The first Clash gig was opening for the Sex Pistols on July 4, 1976, at the Black Swan in Sheffield. Jones remembers riding there bouncing around with the equipment in the back of a "removal truck."

"It went all right," he says. "Paul didn't stop one number and just carried on playing. We were a bit nervous. Then when we came back a week later in Melody Maker there was a letter and it said, 'I saw the Clash in Sheffield last week and they were awful.' And that was the letter. We were all thrilled -- 'cause we were in the paper."

After another gig or two on the Anarchy tour, a second publication, On the Road, declared the Clash: "The First Band to Come Along Who'll Really Frighten the Sex Pistols."

Jones says that was never the goal, but Chimes remembers it differently. "I remember feeling, 'They're the ones we've got to beat. We've got to be better than them.' And I remember Mick saying, 'I don't see it that way. We're just different.' And I remember Joe saying, 'I'm with you. We've got to be better than them!' "

The Clash signed to CBS in the fall of 1976 and recorded its first album over three weekends later that year with the aim of simply getting the powerful live set on tape. "The Clash" is a set of raw, guttural, politically charged punk without even the polish of the Pistols' "Never Mind the Bollocks." The rhythms are rushed and erratic, and the two singers offer a yin-yang quality, with Strummer's sandpaper vocals offset by the high harmonies and melodic sense of Jones.

"We didn't want to know anything about production," Jones says. "We just wanted to get in, get it over with and just do it. That's why it sounds unlike anything else. It hasn't been tampered with in that way. It has a purity to it."

It was released in England in 1977 with the single "White Riot," but CBS considered the production too "crude" for American ears and released it here in modified fashion two years later, during which time it was snapped up as a hot import in indie record stores.

"The label didn't know what it was," Jones says of "The Clash."

The raw sound was cleaned up by producer Sandy Pearlman (Blue Oyster Cult) for "Give 'Em Enough Rope," the first Clash album to hit the States and the troubled middle child between the debut and the tour de force to come.

By the time they got to "London Calling" in late 1979, the Clash had moved well past the limitations of punk. The double-record set, named the No. 8 album of all time by Rolling Stone, found the band blending punk with rockabilly, funk, ska, dub and even disco in Jones' hidden track and first American hit "Train in Vain."

Was the band just bored with punk?

"Not really," Jones says. "We were always reaching out and responding to what was going on around us and playing the music we liked and we gradually developed into that. We were very instinctual in what we did. We knew we didn't want to do the same thing twice. We were very influenced by jukeboxes. There was one in our rehearsal studio, and it had a lot of old reggae on it."

If the record wasn't all punk, the cover photo of Simonon smashing his bass certainly was. It was shot at the Paladium in New York in 1979, the only time Simonon ever actually did that. The exhibit includes the broken bass and explanation: "The frustrating thing was the sound wasn't good and the audience wasn't allowed to stand up and dance. When you're angered you tend to smash things. Well, I do ..." In the end, he regretted doing it, because after that, he had to play the spare bass which was a lot lighter and didn't have "the guts."

The Clash became even more ambitious (read: self-indulgent) in 1980 with the sprawling, militantly left-wing and dub-heavy triple album "Sandinista!" which managed to alienate the punk base even further. The placard at the Rock Hall quotes Strummer saying they released it as three records "even though it would have been better as just a double album ... or a single album ... or maybe an EP! Who knows?"

By the "Combat Rock" sessions, Strummer and Jones were barely talking, drummer Topper Headon was addicted to heroin, and they couldn't even agree on what country it would be recorded in. Jones said at the time, "If you record in New York, I'll turn up," to which Strummer commented, "So we got a studio there so the Emperor could attend."

"Combat Rock," which brought the band to Pittsburgh for the first time in 1982 (Stanley Theatre and then Carnegie Mellon University) was the last real Clash album (no one counts "Cut the Crap") and the best-selling with two non-punk hits -- "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go" -- that still get airplay. During that year, the band was also managing to get booed off the stage opening for The Who.

In September of 1983, Strummer and Simonon fired Jones for "drifting apart from the original idea of the Clash."

"Those 'musical differences' -- that's what they always say -- were just part of the whole thing," says Jones, who left before "Cut the Crap." "You must remember we'd been together for six years every day. We all got fed up, and we didn't really have a holiday. And there was other stuff going. But we soon became friends again."

THE NEXT BATTLE

Jones went on to drift away from the original idea of the Clash with the cut-and-paste funk-pop band Big Audio Dynamite, an obvious influence on Beck and his ilk. Recently, he's busy raising Stella and her sister, in addition to older daughters, producing the Libertines and working with old London SS mate Tony James in a new project called Carbon/Silicon that puts its music on the Web for free.

Crimes/Chimes went on to become Dr. Chimes, a chiropractor practicing in England. The bio on the Chimes Chiropractic Web site begins, "After a successful career in music ..." without even mentioning that he was the on-again/off-again drummer for The Clash and later toured with Black Sabbath.

Asked if his patients are aware of his punk roots, he says, "This is amusing, 'cause some people are, other people say, 'Did you play for a band or something? Which one?' And I say The Clash, and they kind of look at me, like, very apologetic. They don't know who they are. Especially older ones. And then I say, 'And I played in Black Sabbath,' and they say 'Ahh, I know them' and they're kind of relieved and happy that they know it."

While The Clash may be an obscurity to some older back patients in England, they have no shortage of fans at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where the band was the first British punk representative inducted in 2003. Jim Henke, the VP of curatorial affairs, wrote the cover story on the band for Rolling Stone in 1980. Warren Zanes, VP of education at the Hall and former member of Boston post-punk band The Del Fuegos, says he and brother Dan grew up as big Clash fans.

"The Sex Pistols I understood and loved as an idea," he says. "I understood and loved these guys as a band. For us it was like Tom Petty, The Clash, Chuck Berry, Dylan and the Band. For us, it was part of the same fabric. There was something continuous there."

Howard Kramer, curatorial director at the museum, doesn't need to rely on Rancid, Anti-Flag and half the bands on Warped alone. He can gauge the enduring popularity of The Clash by the T-shirts that walk through the door.

"You see a fair amount of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, AC/DC and the Stones. But you also see a lot of Clash T-shirts. Kids are still drawn to them because their music is real. There are a lot of punk bands out there that are a pale imitation of what The Clash did. They were a great band, had a great look, made great records and it's immortal, and I think the Clash should have an afterlife like Led Zeppelin did. They weren't around for a long time. They had a small body of work and everything's great."

The Clash also managed to resist the inevitable itch to tamper with the legacy. While most punks -- even the Pistols -- were trotting out the rotting corpse for reunion tours, The Clash stayed home, although there was talk that the band might play together for the induction ceremonies in March of 2003.

"Joe and I both wanted to do it," Jones says. "Topper would have done it as well. Paul strongly objected and so we were at that point. But we never reached an agreement on anything, so ... there you go. It just wasn't to be."

Strummer died of a heart attack just months before his Hall of Fame moment in December 2002. His last gig was a benefit concert in London on Nov. 15 with his worldbeat band, The Mescaleros. Jones had joined him on stage for encores of "Bankrobber," "White Riot" and "London's Burning."

Jones says of Strummer, "He was serious and he meant what he said and had a great heart."

Chimes, who left the band after working on the first album and returned to the fold a few times over the years, remembers Strummer as an intense character and bandleader.

"The band was never comfortable being comfortable. We always had to argue about something. Joe was never happy sitting down and relaxing, having a drink and enjoying himself. He never wanted to stop and enjoy the fruits of labor. He always wanted to fight the next battle."

Unable to deal with that torrid pace and disinterested in the band's politics, Chimes left and left again. "I suppose it was a selfish thing to do," he says, looking back at his first departure. "I suppose my leaving disrupted things. And Joe never forgave me for it, really. He used to say to me, 'You should have never left the band,' years and years later.

"I used to think the two of us would be 80-year-old men on the bench and he'd say, 'You should have never left the band.' And I'd say, 'For God's sake, give that one up!'

"I always thought that would happen," he adds, turning pensive, "and I'm a bit disappointed that it won't."