We're not just another wank rock group like Boston or Aerosmith," Joe Strummer said in 1979, the first time the Clash were profiled in Rolling Stone. "What fucking shit." Twenty-four years later, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler sat in the audience at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel ballroom, presumably applauding, as the Clash were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was a bittersweet, typically contradictory moment for the legendary punk band. Strummer, the group's primary singer and lyricist, had died suddenly of heart failure in late December. "We were all very proud," says Clash guitarist Mick Jones, "but it's just not nice to be at something like this without Joe."

"I had no intention of going to the Hall of Fame," says bassist Paul Simonon, the Clash's third founding member. "But when Joe died, I thought we should all go together, for his family, for all of us. I spoke to Joe briefly the evening before he died. He was trying to send me a fax regarding, funnily, the Hall of Fame. It didn't come through." Strummer and Jones had been trying to persuade Simonon to play in a Clash reunion at the ceremony. Simonon didn't even realize the Hall of Fame existed until he got a letter a couple of years ago from the museum, asking for a donation. (He sent the bass he famously smashed during a show at New York's Palladium; the iconic image became the cover of the Clash's 1979 masterpiece, London Calling.) Ultimately, Strummer's death dashed any hopes of a Clash performance. At the ceremony, Simonon and Jones received tributes from the Edge and Tom Morello, but no Clash songs were performed live. "I wish I'd had a chance to express my feelings to Joe," Simonon says now. "He tried to send me that fax again at eleven the next morning. It still didn't come through. I finally got it from his family, when I went to see him lying in state in the chapel."

Emerging from rough-and-tumble West London in 1976, the Clash quickly became, alongside the shorter-lived, far more outrageous Sex Pistols, the standard-bearers of British punk. But musically, the Clash took punk further than any of their peers, moving beyond three-chord primitivism to incorporate reggae, funk and even rap (the not-at-all-embarrassing "The Magnificent Seven") into an increasingly ambitious mix. The Clash drew on the same underclass disquiet as the Pistols, only instead of exorcising this rage through bratty nihilism, they channeled it into a righteous anger, from their first single, "White Riot," through later albums such as 1980's three-record set Sandinista!

"We've got loads of contradictions for you," Strummer said in that 1979 profile. "We're trying to be the greatest group in the world, and that also means the biggest. At the same time, we're trying to be radical — I mean, we never want to be really respectable — and maybe the two can't coexist, but we'll try." In case you think being inducted into the Hall of Fame means the band ultimately failed on the "not respectable" front, a few days after the ceremony, a British Web site printed an item about members of the Clash being asked in the restroom to stop taking the piss out of fellow inductee Sting. "I do remember smoking cigarettes in the toilet, and one of our road crew was talking about that cane that Sting had," Simonon admits, his thick English accent taking on tones of innocence. "I don't remember anyone taking the piss out of anybody. We might have been taking the piss out of ourselves. We were in the toilet."

(As for their other '03 classmates, Simonon speaks with as much tact as Donald Rumsfeld: "The Police and Elvis Costello, they were more like the softer option that turned up after the initial thing: the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Buzzcocks. They were a bit more easy to swallow, a bit more palatable, shall we say. Elvis Costello is a great writer, though.")