Hearing the opening chords of the Clash cover of “Pressure Drop” in the new Nissan Rogue ad does not send me running for the barricades the way some have. “Hell hath frozen over” said one post on the Daily Swarm, while another pointed out that the band had already licensed “London Calling” for a Jaguar spot and the world had not stopped spinning on its axis.

For many Clash fans, such signs of the apocalypse leave them asking, “What would Joe do?” Such loyalists are convinced that the late great Joe Strummer would have been the standard bearer opposing the fascist corporate blah blah from exploiting the music of the Only Band That Mattered (even if the song was written by Toots & the Maytalls and the lyrics are open to interpretation), had he not been felled by what turned out to have been congenital heart failure in 2002.

But Joe was not so simple, as we learn in Chris Salewicz excellent biography Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer. He was, in fact, a ball of contradictions. Born John Mellor in Turkey, where his father, in the British diplomatic corps, was serving, Joe acted the scruff later in life: living in squats, letting his teeth rot in his head, calling himself Woody. It was the kind of act that really gets under the skin of some Brits (far worse to act lower class when you were born upper than the other way around, it seems) but here in America we think it your birthright to be the person you imagine yourself to be.

Sure, some people still haven’t forgiven Dylan for changing his name, let alone telling people he’d been out riding the rails and doin’ lots of hard travelin’ when he had just taken the bus in from Duluth. But by and large we buy the myth, and let the facts take care of themselves. Joe might have been happy to have more people hear even thirty seconds of the Clash, in hopes that it would open their ears up to the rest of the band’s catalogue. He liked building bonfires and passing around the guitar (as well as the bottle and the spliff) and I like to think that Dylan was inspired by Joe’s long running radio show, London Calling, when he began his own Theme Time Radio on XM.

You can hear excerpts from Joe’s show on the soundtrack to Julien Temple’s documentary The Future Is Unwritten. He loved to play his own songs but everyone else’s too: Elvis Presley, Tim Hardin, MC5. His was a generosity that could have embraced even Madison Avenue.

But let’s hope Toots and the Clash are seeing some money.