Joe Jackson Looks Sharply at His Roots

About six months ago, an old musician buddy who occasionally pulls out his Stratocaster when he isn’t teaching decision theory at Emory, turned me on to the music of the English composer and pop songwriter Joe Jackson. He sensed a compatibility because so many of Jackson’s musical precursors were heroes of mine--from the violin-led Curved Air, through the eclectic brotherhood of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, to the jazz-drenched Steely Dan and bourbon-soaked Little Feat. Even more, Jackson’s irony-tipped lyrics and experimental urge to spike his pop with a jigger of classical music has driven critics to link him with my favorite Grand Inquisitor, Elvis Costello.

So it was with a similar curiosity that I turned to Jackson’s “A Cure for Gravity,” a memoir that takes him from his birth in 1954 up to the recording of his first album, “Look Sharp,” in 1979. And in many ways, Jackson’s literary precursors are as compelling as his musical ones. After all, one would hardly expect a sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll tell-all from an artist whose 1997 CD, “Heaven and Hell,” mixed the voices of Suzanne Vega and Dawn Upshaw with lyrics from the Balkans and violin riffs from the casebook of Jean-Luc Ponty. But one might be forgiven for expecting a more pointillistic exercise, the kind of autobio dictated by a star short of time, like the highly entertaining but slapdash “Real Frank Zappa.”

Instead, Jackson has produced a thoughtful inquiry into his own journey as a stranger born in a strange land. The son of working-class parents, Jackson grew up in the Channel-side town of Portsmouth, sharing a bed with one of his brothers and feeling out of place. “In the earliest photo I have, I’m eating a boiled egg, aged 6 or so, with quietly hideous gray ‘50s wallpaper in the background. . . . Above my head is the one piece of decorative art we possessed: a plastic fishbowl, like a glove sliced in half and bolted to the wall.” A sickly, asthmatic kid, Jackson was separated from his football-mad contemporaries and discovered the piano, occasionally accompanying his classmates on the ancient Bechstein in the assembly hall as they “jumped over wooden horses and skipped with ropes . . . like some kind of surreal ballet.”

The piano led him into a variety of scratch bands in a variety of pubs. But it also led to a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London. After graduation, Jackson shuttled through the ‘70s, bouncing between the sublime and the ridiculous, between writing songs influenced by meditations on Shostakovich and Sibelius and playing piano in the Portsmouth Playboy Club. Eventually, of course, a record company signed the sublime, and the rest is history--or at least grist for a second volume.

Such bouncing naturally leads to philosophical inquiry. And Jackson’s philosophy on the nature of music--and the music business--is neither deep nor original. But the impression the book gives is compelling, of a thoughtful and gentle questor, trying to make sense of his world and himself. It is a portrait of an artist as a young man, with Portsmouth subbing for Dublin and the Royal Academy subbing for the Jesuits. Joe Jackson is a literary brother to that other peripatetic philosopher, Holden Caulfield. They are birds of a feather, a couple of Icaruses yearning to fly clear of earthly hypocrisy, searching in words and music for a cure for gravity.