Before the Clash, Joe Strummer Had a Squat and a Pub Band. The Tapes Survived.

Picture a terraced house in Maida Vale in 1974, the West London kind where the front door sticks and the rent is whatever you can get away with not paying. Number 101 on Walterton Road was a squat, and one of the young men living there still answered to Woody Mellor. He had a guitar, a lot of opinions and a house number that would make a decent band name.

The band came together in August 1974, played its first show that September and called itself the 101'ers, which tells you most of what you need to know about the marketing budget. It was a pub band in the plainest sense: nights at the Elgin on Ladbroke Grove, a residency at the Nashville from October 1975, R&B covers and early originals shouted at people holding pints. Somewhere in there, Woody became Joe.

Then came 1976. In April, the 101'ers shared a bill at the Nashville with a new band called the Sex Pistols, and by most accounts, Strummer's included, it rearranged his head. In June, Chiswick Records put out the 101'ers' only single, "Keys to Your Heart." The band had already played its last show, on June 5, with Mick Jones and Paul Simonon watching from the crowd. On July 4, Strummer was onstage in Sheffield with the Clash, opening for the Pistols.

He didn't look back. The tapes did.

Dark Horse Records, the label George Harrison founded in 1974, releases "Joe Strummer 003: The 101'ers Years 1974-1976" on Nov. 20. The deluxe edition runs 48 tracks across three CDs, bound into a 48-page hardback book: studio recordings on the first disc, basement tapes and demos on the second (among them "Full Moon," which Strummer recorded alone at the squat) and live sets on the third. Producer Paul Hicks restored the demos and live tapes from the original cassettes and soundboard sources, and a double LP covers the highlights. Until now, the band has lived mostly on bootlegs and "Elgin Avenue Breakdown," a 1981 compilation. Archive digs are having a good year anyway; the Brickbats recently dug up the album they buried in 1999.

The live disc is the one to know about. It carries an early "Junco Partner," which the Clash later cut for "Sandinista!," and "Lonely Mother's Son," the song that grew up to be "Jail Guitar Doors." Hearing a song before it knows what it'll become is the closest rock gets to baby pictures. Glen Matlock, who played bass for the Pistols in 1976, writes the foreword, and drummer Richard Dudanski tells the band's story.

We keep saying the best rock histories start in rooms nobody photographed, from punk pubs to the Seattle clubs where Tina Bell was making grunge before it had a name. The 101'ers are that room for punk's most quoted frontman: a pub band that sounded like a pub band, which is the point. You can hear Strummer learning, in public, how loud he could get.