Yes, we could hear you, Clem Burke.

“The Only Mod in the Bowery” has left the building.

Everybody dies. You will. I will. See you in Heck, pal. With that in mind, I want to write less about Clem Burke’s death (after a private battle with cancer at age 70) and more about what matters: how friggin’ inescapably cool he was. He is no longer with us. Yes. But his music, and especially his cool will never die.

Clem was an expert jewel thief, like all great rocknrollers. He knew where the jewels were, and he knew how to make them his own. He stole his hairdo from Pepper era Paul McCartney. He stole his target T-shirt from “My Generation” era Keith Moon. While he was in Keith’s house, he also nicked those rapid fire, thunderous tom fills that were Keith’s trademark, but ingeniously married them to the Brooklyn swing of Jerry Nolan. Then he sped all of that up to ramming speed and made it a whole lot tighter. His was a singular voice on a drum kit. Ain’t nobody stepping up that far these days, as far as I can tell.

If you’ve ever heard the first few seconds of Blondie’s “Dreaming” (perhaps one of the top ten greatest pop songs released in my lifetime), you’ve heard the proof that Clem put in the pudding. First, there are four bass drum thumps that make you prick up your ears, like a strident knock on the front door of your flop house. Then, that machine gun snare goes off, and the song is away. And so are we. Dreaming is free, I’m told, and we all dreamed of being Clem Burke. Him with that cool hair, and that cool red sparkle five piece Premier kit emblazoned with Mod symbols. The expressionless calm as the top half of his body flailed at the toms and snare like they owed him money. If you were a drummer, you were immediately in awe. If you were an air drummer, you could easily sprain something trying to keep up. And I have done so, furiously air drumming to the intro to “Dreaming”, or maybe it was “Union City Blue”. Try it, if you have decent health insurance. I don’t!

In all the tributes that came out this week, one phrase kept getting repeated over and over. The nicest guy in rock and roll. It seems like everyone I know had a pic of themselves with Clem ready to post on social media. He was, by all accounts, a man who joyously celebrated rock and roll every day of his life, and he knew a fellow traveler when he saw one. A gentleman for the ages.

So goodbye, dear Clem. You were the real thing. We will not forget.

-CM