The last day of my freshman year in high school fell on my fifteenth birthday. My mom gave me twenty bucks and sent me off with my friends, who were headed to Century III Mall to celebrate the beginning of another summer of bad movies and disinterested girls. With that crisp new twenty, I bought a copy of Musician magazine, featuring an article on the making of the new Joe Jackson album, and an LP of the album itself: Body and Soul.
That was my first Joe Jackson album.
He was a good fit for my personal music timeline. He was on top forty radio when I listened to top forty radio. When I was snobbishly and conspicuously avoiding pop music ("Wham? Who's Wham? I'm sorry... I'm not really into Top 40"), he went out of his way to do anti-pop things like release a three-sided live album recorded in front of an audience who was instructed not to applaud, and record an instrumental record with a large ensemble of traditional orchestral instruments, each viola and bassoon another nail in Casey Kasem's coffin. When the people around me were discovering Black Flag and Fear, I could plunder Jackson's back catalog of more aggressive music, which would crackle harshly from my improperly installed car stereo -- making it seem more punk and obscuring the uncomfortable reality that "the man that gave you the hula-hoop" really looked and dressed like an algebra teacher.
As time went on, as I got older and listened to a broader range of music, I firmed up my ideas about what great songwriting was. I became fascinated with Joe in an entirely different way. Here was a man with an uncommonly vast pool of musical influence, a lifetime of world travel and human experience, and yet all of the emotional content of his entire catalog doesn't add up to the strength of a single line like "Together Wendy we can live with the sadness, I will love you with all of the madness in my soul." Why should a Roy Orbison fan from Jersey be more emotionally available than a pale, gawky Englishman? Who could have possibly felt more heartbreak and pain than a man who was in fact showing advanced male pattern baldness on his first album cover, and who, in every publicity photo, however carefully staged, continues to look like a walking asthma attack?
The specimens of Joe's storytelling abilities are rare, but quite good. There's "Dear Mom" from Night and Day II, a tale revealed too elegantly to be an accident. Love at First Light seems to be the tender, sincere ballad he's been shooting for since Be My Number Two. But the starkest, most complete glimpse into his soul comes from a cut on 1994's Night Music, an album that sits at the intersection of basement midi-geek demos and chamber music. In a Faustian construct, Joe is offered a deal by Satan.
Joe's mortal sin is pride. His penance is to bear the crushing weight of his own ego. All of the pieces are in place for him to be admired as a genius alchemist of genre, but he can't resist beating us to it. There are several moments that have made me cringe.
Having said all that, I'm a Jackson loyalist. I listen to whatever he sends down the pipe because he is, in fact, a rare and gifted musician. The blowhard notes on the Jumpin' Jive reissue are there because this madman cashed in his early success, fame and prosperity that might have gone away forever, to release an album of Louis Jordon tunes. And whether he did it just because he loved the music, or, as his detractors suggest, because he wanted the image of a free-thinking new wave renaissance man, he took a very sharp turn and dared his fans to follow him. You can't discount how hard it must have been to be a piano-playing revolutionary amidst the backdrop of the Sex Pistols.
Those of us who have stayed with him this long have been rewarded by a glimpse of Joe unencumbered by the pressing task of proving his own genius, listening to him dig into a cover of a Steely Dan tune or noodling through a Beatles song. And I don't think there was a better recording in 2004 than Ben Folds's reinvention of Pulp's "Common People" for, of all things, the William Shatner album Has Been. Where we see Joe as a team player, an exuberant utility session guy.
Joe has now done a number of shows with Ben Folds, his heir apparent. I've always had the impression that the thing Joe wants most in the world is for someone to tap him on the shoulder and tell him he's an under-appreciated musical genius whereas the deepest joy for Ben must be someone tapping him on the shoulder and telling him, "Hey, I love music too."
The self-inflation that I've been trying to look past for all this time... maybe it's gone. Maybe it was never there. The restlessness within Joe, which I've been interpreting as pretense for all this time, might just be his motor. What I would wish for him is that he find some satisfaction in the sheer acreage of his exploration, that he not be concerned whether his admirers perceive it as purposefully intellectual or cautiously whimsical. He is our overthinking, overreaching avatar striking out across the unconquerable landscape of All Possible Music and, in the name of all that is holy and much that is not, he is never going to stop.
God dammit, Joe. We love music too.
That was my first Joe Jackson album.
He was a good fit for my personal music timeline. He was on top forty radio when I listened to top forty radio. When I was snobbishly and conspicuously avoiding pop music ("Wham? Who's Wham? I'm sorry... I'm not really into Top 40"), he went out of his way to do anti-pop things like release a three-sided live album recorded in front of an audience who was instructed not to applaud, and record an instrumental record with a large ensemble of traditional orchestral instruments, each viola and bassoon another nail in Casey Kasem's coffin. When the people around me were discovering Black Flag and Fear, I could plunder Jackson's back catalog of more aggressive music, which would crackle harshly from my improperly installed car stereo -- making it seem more punk and obscuring the uncomfortable reality that "the man that gave you the hula-hoop" really looked and dressed like an algebra teacher.
As time went on, as I got older and listened to a broader range of music, I firmed up my ideas about what great songwriting was. I became fascinated with Joe in an entirely different way. Here was a man with an uncommonly vast pool of musical influence, a lifetime of world travel and human experience, and yet all of the emotional content of his entire catalog doesn't add up to the strength of a single line like "Together Wendy we can live with the sadness, I will love you with all of the madness in my soul." Why should a Roy Orbison fan from Jersey be more emotionally available than a pale, gawky Englishman? Who could have possibly felt more heartbreak and pain than a man who was in fact showing advanced male pattern baldness on his first album cover, and who, in every publicity photo, however carefully staged, continues to look like a walking asthma attack?
The specimens of Joe's storytelling abilities are rare, but quite good. There's "Dear Mom" from Night and Day II, a tale revealed too elegantly to be an accident. Love at First Light seems to be the tender, sincere ballad he's been shooting for since Be My Number Two. But the starkest, most complete glimpse into his soul comes from a cut on 1994's Night Music, an album that sits at the intersection of basement midi-geek demos and chamber music. In a Faustian construct, Joe is offered a deal by Satan.
"After rubbing my eyes,
I looked all around me,
At the half-finished drivel I'd worked on for days,
And I told him my dream,
Was to live for all time,
In some perfect refrain,
Like the man who wrote 'Danny Boy'"
Joe's mortal sin is pride. His penance is to bear the crushing weight of his own ego. All of the pieces are in place for him to be admired as a genius alchemist of genre, but he can't resist beating us to it. There are several moments that have made me cringe.
- In 1984 (or so), Joe declares he will not be making music videos just as, and seemingly because, everyone else started making music videos.
- On one of the cuts on his first collection of live recordings, Joe is heard screaming over feedback and random drum fills "You know the problem with today's music? Not enough chaos."
- When everyone fell in love with the GAP Khaki ads, Joe reissued Jumpin' Jive with an extensive essay on the cover of the CD explaining how swing music always seems to come back into fashion every few years (yeah, Joe, totally... 1942 and then a few years later in 1997), the subtext being "I'm not just doing this because of those bloody pants commercials".
- The liner notes of Symphony No. 1 begin with the words "I had better say a few words about this before the critics do."
Having said all that, I'm a Jackson loyalist. I listen to whatever he sends down the pipe because he is, in fact, a rare and gifted musician. The blowhard notes on the Jumpin' Jive reissue are there because this madman cashed in his early success, fame and prosperity that might have gone away forever, to release an album of Louis Jordon tunes. And whether he did it just because he loved the music, or, as his detractors suggest, because he wanted the image of a free-thinking new wave renaissance man, he took a very sharp turn and dared his fans to follow him. You can't discount how hard it must have been to be a piano-playing revolutionary amidst the backdrop of the Sex Pistols.
Those of us who have stayed with him this long have been rewarded by a glimpse of Joe unencumbered by the pressing task of proving his own genius, listening to him dig into a cover of a Steely Dan tune or noodling through a Beatles song. And I don't think there was a better recording in 2004 than Ben Folds's reinvention of Pulp's "Common People" for, of all things, the William Shatner album Has Been. Where we see Joe as a team player, an exuberant utility session guy.
Joe has now done a number of shows with Ben Folds, his heir apparent. I've always had the impression that the thing Joe wants most in the world is for someone to tap him on the shoulder and tell him he's an under-appreciated musical genius whereas the deepest joy for Ben must be someone tapping him on the shoulder and telling him, "Hey, I love music too."
At last night's concert in Munhall, Joe showcased amazing new stuff from his new album, Fast Forward, and did a ton of stuff from the old catalog. He played Is She Really Going Out With Him with NO trace of the fatigue you'd imagine after forty years of living with a pop hit on your back. Somewhere in the middle of the show he pulled a scrap of paper out of a hat to select that night's cover tune. He chuckled and said, "Oh. This is a great song," and counted the band into "Knowing Me, Knowing You". By ABBA.
Frickin' ABBA!
I spent four and a half minutes wondering if that was really happening, or if I was in a coma somewhere having some sort of fever dream. Can you imagine what else is possible in a world here the guy who was recording "Throw It Away" in the heart of the disco era has (as I do) abject and unironic love for ABBA?
The self-inflation that I've been trying to look past for all this time... maybe it's gone. Maybe it was never there. The restlessness within Joe, which I've been interpreting as pretense for all this time, might just be his motor. What I would wish for him is that he find some satisfaction in the sheer acreage of his exploration, that he not be concerned whether his admirers perceive it as purposefully intellectual or cautiously whimsical. He is our overthinking, overreaching avatar striking out across the unconquerable landscape of All Possible Music and, in the name of all that is holy and much that is not, he is never going to stop.
God dammit, Joe. We love music too.
I love this text, because you explain my point of view. I fell in love with Joe's music when listening to Body and Soul for the first time in 1988. Since that day, he writes the soundtrack of my life. His diversity of genres, his re-interpretations of songs, even of his own songs, and the lyrics - there is a song for every mood and every situation I'm in. But like you write, he sometimes makes strange statements: I will never forget an interview in 1989 by Desiree Nosbusch on german tv, where she asks him, if the song "19 forever" whould mean, he was afraid of getting old. He just sneered: "Some people can appreciate irony and some can't", turning away and leaving her back with her mouth wide open. I was 18 and absorbed this kind of coolness. Or when he said, also in 1989, that encores are stupid. So no encores on the "Blaze of glory"-Tour. Later he went back to encores, perhaps by thinking of the old Adenauer-quote (Former german statesman): "why should I today care for my prattle (Geschwätz) yesterday!" Joe is constant in going new ways and making new decisions - constant in being unconstant. I'm jealous of what comes next!
ReplyDeleteDude, what I wouldn't give to be able to write like you!! Maybe you should try your pen at a song or two! Thanks.
ReplyDelete