by Joe Jackson
New York: Public Affairs, 1999
285 pages
Joe Jackson's A Cure for Gravity was published in 1999, but I'm glad I waited until now to read it because my own experience playing music during the last decade made me better able to appreciate the many wonderful, hard-earned insights about music's power and mystery Jackson serves up throughout the book. It was also a joy to re-acquaint myself with Jackson's voice, as distinctive on the page as in his songs, and to be reminded of just how long I'd been listening to it. Allow me to digress a bit.
In the spring of 1979 I was a 14-year-old high school freshman. The last several years had been mostly unhappy following a move at age 7 to a new neighborhood where I had trouble making friends. Socially awkward and not much interested in sports I retreated from the torment and ridicule of the kids on the block by becoming a TV addict, which was its own form of hell. Then my father contracted terminal cancer and I hit rock bottom when he died in 1978.
Throughout these years my one consistent source of inspiration and enthusiasm was music, an obsession dating from early childhood when I was lucky to catch the final years of music programming on AM radio. But by the late '70s New York music radio had grown narrow and conservative and I was bored by what I heard.
I was starting to find out about punk and new wave music - to an isolated kid in suburban New Jersey the distinctions between the two were not meaningful, especially when either was set against the bloated corporate "rock" that saturated the airwaves - but nothing really connected with me until I heard Joe Jackson's Look Sharp, released in the U.S. in April 1979. The music was ferocious, intense, and lean, and the songs were tuneful and catchy. Jackson's delivery of his often funny, ironic lyrics was perfectly suited to every song, whether he was crooning over a gentle reggae rhythm or screaming over the cacophony of guitar-thrash workouts like "Throw It Away" or "Got The Time." Some of the songs even got radio play.
As it happened, the album's release was timed to coincide with Jackson's first U.S. tour, a blistering romp in which he managed to do some 34 gigs in 52 days before having to stop from an attack of laryngitis. By an incredible stroke of good fortune, one of those gigs was in New Jersey, and at just the kind of venue where a 14-year-old kid could see it: the Great Adventure theme park in (heh-heh) Jackson, NJ. I begged my mother to take me there and off we went. Jackson performed two concerts in the "arena," a venue normally used by the park for faux rodeos and chariot races. The shows were dynamite: fast-paced, energetic, and fun. Jackson announced from the stage that the audience - which filled the arena - was the largest he had ever played for up to that point, and he closed with a wonderful cover of Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame." For my first rock concert, this set a high standard; only in retrospect do I realize how much my expectations at subsequent shows were shaped by the experience of seeing Jackson.
I didn't know it at the time, but Jackson had already finished recording his second album, I'm The Man, just prior to the U.S. tour and when it was released in October I quickly snapped it up. It picked up right where Look Sharp left off, and after that Jackson began the first of his many experiments with different musical styles. I saw him several more times in the 1980s and continued to listen to him even when his work strayed far afield from the sound on his first albums.
Jackson's musical restlessness and ambition - his "determination," as he frequently calls it in A Cure for Gravity - has often left people with the impression he's a grim, humorless figure, but if one listens closely it's easy to see this is not true. As Jackson explains, he has spent his entire career seeking to make a connection with people through the singular passion he has sustained for music. If he hasn't always succeeded it's not been for a lack of effort or an unwillingness to play to an audience's expectations. In fact, Jackson spent several years before recording his debut album doing work other musicians might have refused as beneath them, though it all proved excellent preparation for the success he did enjoy, and Jackson's telling of the story makes for fascinating reading.
A Cure for Gravity is really two books carefully interwoven into one. The narrative structure is provided by Jackson's memoir of his life from childhood up to the release of Look Sharp in 1979, but much of the book is given over to his reflections on music - as muse, as art, as taskmaster, as a career, as a means of communication, as a cultural and quasi-religious force, and as something with the power to reach across every barrier that might otherwise divide people from each other and provide some unity and emotional or spiritual resonance. What ties the two parts of the book together is Jackson's use of various episodes in his life to illustrate some of his more abstract points about music - this richly textured use of detail proves a wonderful means of bringing the reader into Jackson's many enthusiasms, and if you're not already acquainted with the music of Beethoven, Sibelius, Stravinsky, or Shostakovich (to name a few of the composers he discusses) you may get the additional benefit of seeking out and appreciating their work after reading the book.
Jackson was born in 1954, the oldest of three sons, to a British working-class couple and grew up in the southern coastal city of Portsmouth, a rough-and-tumble place filled with drunken sailors and other coarse, colorful characters. From an early age he was self-conscious of being different from other kids and even his own family, with an artistic and inquisitive bent that drew him to writing, an interest he first pursued by writing his own comic book series with a like-minded schoolmate. Jackson characterizes his childhood in Portsmouth as marked by a stifling cultural parochialism where there was little exposure to art and few expectations for working-class children other than growing up to be "useful" and conforming to established habits of life. Nevertheless, Jackson managed to hear Beethoven and the British rock groups of the early 1960s, and both gave him a strong sense there were horizons far beyond the Portsmouth coast calling him. By age 11 he began taking violin lessons in school and at 14 he acquired a piano (the free donation of an elderly couple in town), teaching himself to play in a cramped corridor. He also found opportunities to play timpani and other percussion in his school orchestra.
During these years Jackson focused primarily on classical composers and paid less attention to the pop charts, continuing his formal training by studying scores and learning the basics of orchestration, or what in popular music is called arranging, a skill that is instantly apparent from his earliest recordings. With little encouragement or support from anyone in his social circles, Jackson turned inward to find the motivation and discipline to develop his musical abilities - for a budding pop/rock star, the very fact that he was obtaining a "proper" education in music made him unusual among his peers. He notes:
"Around the same time [I was learning to read music], some of my peers must have been making their first assaults on guitars, and most of them still don't read music. They use all kinds of strategies to avoid it, and only make things more difficult for themselves in the process. Some of them have confessed to me a fear that reading 'the dots' would take away their 'feel' or their 'soul.' Where do people get these ideas? you might as well say that learning the alphabet will hamper your ability to write poetry."
As Jackson moved into his final years of secondary education he grew more committed to a career in music and managed to earn sufficient grades in the university matriculation exams to gain admission to the Royal Academy of Music in London, no small achievement for a provincial working-class kid in a Britain where university-level admission was still highly restricted. He even passed an additional exam in music to earn some financial support, but like the practical-minded, aspiring professional he was becoming Jackson wanted to start working in music, not least to earn money. He spent his scholarship grant on portable equipment and began working as a piano player in pubs, restaurants, and clubs, solo or in small combos. Some of these experiences were good, while others were dreadful, like Jackson's stint with Portsmouth pop group The Misty Set, whose "repertoire consisted of all the wimpiest, most inoffensive pop tunes you could think of....They were like some bland and smiling master-race of a dystopian future, genetically engineered to remove every last spark of passion or originality."
Jackson might have hoped his Academy experience would prove more inspiring - at least he was now among fellow musicians who shared his youth and possibly his enthusiasms - but he quickly became disillusioned. His instructors were mostly unsympathetic or unsuited to his interests, he found many of his fellow students unbearably pretentious, and he could not embrace the highly theoretical and abstract tendencies in composing that dominated the Academy in these years. Atonal and serialist works left him cold, and much of this music has proven to have little lasting influence. Jackson judged these compositional styles self-referential and self-indulgent to a fault, with their greatest sin being the abdication of any concern for what the music sounded like to an audience. He completed his studies and earned a Licentiate Diploma in 1975, but it was a very bittersweet conclusion given his high hopes at the outset.
Jackson realized he had come full circle, from being perceived as an elitist in Portsmouth to being a populist at the Royal Academy, and not quite at home in either setting. Unhappy with the institutional contexts and connotations that had changed the meaning of "classical" music in the late 20th century, and unwilling to forsake the possibility of finding a contemporary audience for the music he wanted to write, Jackson resolved to establish himself as a popular songwriter and performer. Toward this end he joined the Portsmouth pop group Edward Bear and spent three years attempting to achieve success by transforming the group from a cover band playing local clubs to a professional group playing original songs, releasing records, and getting radio play. Through personnel changes, internal band conflicts, numerous lousy gigs, hostile or indifferent audiences, surly DJs and club owners, and problems with managers, agents, and record companies, Jackson tried to stay focused and positive, but even his drive could not push the band to success with a mass audience and the experiment had run its course by late 1976.
Unwilling to give up, Jackson returned to steady work as a small-combo pianist at the Portsmouth Playboy Club, backing a wide variety of mediocre (but sometimes amusing) entertainers and then taking a job as musical director for a touring cabaret act seeking to cash in on notoriety they had attained by winning a competition on a television talent show broadcast nationwide. At the same time, however, he became an enthusiast of the punk rock scene exploding in London and elsewhere, catching shows whenever he could get time off and slowly working on new compositions that were rooted in the vitality of punk. He put together a small, energetic rock band to back him, rehearsed the new songs, and began booking a few shows to see how the material would be received. Thrilled by the positive response, Jackson fully embraced punk's do-it-yourself ethos and recorded an entire album with his backing band, hoping to secure distribution with a record company or, failing that, putting it out himself. But London in 1978 was the right time and place for his music to generate commercial interest, and he managed to sign with A&M.
This is where the narrative ends, but along the way Jackson wrestles with questions that many struggling musicians confront, such as: Why am I doing this?, What is the proper relationship between musician and audience?, and What to do to keep something you love from becoming tiresome and boring? Jackson doesn't always provide answers and is the first to admit they may not exist, but his passion for music and his generosity of spirit - that lasting desire to connect - make A Cure for Gravity a rewarding journey, and maybe in the final analysis that is the point.
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