Review: Vinyl Reissue of Joe Jackson's 'Body and Soul'

Joe Jackson started his career as a high-quality Elvis Costello clone, and like his fellow punk-adjacent, angry somewhat-young man, Jackson seemed to tire of rock and roll quickly to suffer a bit of an identity crisis. But while Costello was dithering with flaccid country covers that didn't suit his fiery style and ill-conceived gestures toward mainstream contemporary pop (complete with guest appearances by contemporary pop-superstar Darryl Hall), Jackson went in a much more interesting direction, rejecting any semblance of relevance to set off on the path that classical pop and jazz composers laid down fifty years earlier. Costello did experiment with this style a bit with compositions such as "Almost Blue" and "Shipbuilding", but he didn't commit to it the way Jackson did on his smash 1982 album, Night and Day, which yielded two elegant, adult pop hits: "Steppin' Out" (which went top-five in the U.S.) and "Breaking Us in Two".

Review: 'Punk Post Punk New Wave'

From the late seventies through the eighties, Michael Grecco photographed nearly every artist that mattered: The Clash, The Ramones, Talking Heads, The B-52s, Devo, Joan Jett, Billy Idol, Dead Kennedys, Lene Lovich, Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joe Jackson, Buzzcocks, Nick Lowe, Madness, Adam Ant, and on and on. A new collection of his work, Punk Post Punk New Wave, is as much a testament to Grecco’s great taste in music as it is a display of his talent behind the lens.

Review: Joe Jackson's 'Summer in the City: Live in New York'

In August 1999, Joe Jackson performed at tiny Joe’s Pub in NYC, his voice and piano accompanied only by Gary Burke’s drums and Graham Maby’s bass. Considering the lack of guitar and the fact that the show took place amidst Jackson’s retreat from pop, one might assume the performance had some sort of jazz trio pretentions. But with Burke’s hard hitting and Maby’s trademark vicious attack, the set was pure Rock & Roll. It also formed the basis of a CD called Summer in the City: Live in New York released in 2000.

With Jackson looking back on his rocker days, it was appropriate that his original selections not only relied exclusively on the seventies and eighties, but that they also included oldies by The Beatles, Yardbirds, Steely Dan, and as the CD’s title reveals, The Lovin’ Spoonful (though there are nods to jazz in his covers of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and The Ramsey Lewsi Trio version of “The In Crowd”). Refreshingly, the covers and the punkish early cut “One More Time” retain all their thrust in this stripped down setting. This is in no small way due to the awesome Maby. With his 5-string bass, he supplies all the strings any Rock band could need as he adds some (in Joe’s words) “very deep bass” to “Fools in Love” and whips off a thrilling solo on “Another World”. All hail Graham.

Because it was recorded in the dedicatedly digital age, Summer in the City: Live in New York may seem an odd choice for the audiophile label Intervention Records (who’d previously reissued Jackson’s Look Sharp!, I’m the Man, and Night and Day), which normally goes to length to use a completely analog process in its reissues.* But even with only “high quality files” from the original DATs available, this double-vinyl release sounds superb with Maby and Burke rattling the floorboards and Jackson’s voice soaring over them with remarkable clarity on quiet 180-gram vinyl.

*Update: Shane Buettner of Intervention Records had the following to say about the process of mastering Summer in the City: Live in New York:

“I definitely specialize in 100% analog mastering, because so few labels do that. However, my ethos is to be truest to the master source. For this project there was analog tape, but as the master source was native digital, the digital sounded best and that’s what I used. In this case it’s important to note the HUGE impact of going from the 16-bits of the CD to the 24-bit source files we used. 24-bits is 256 times the resolution of 16-bits! In addition, the original CD had several dB of dynamic compression whereas we didn’t employ any.”

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Joe Jackson's First Two Albums

Joe Jackson started his career as a blatant Elvis Costello clone, doing everything but copping Declan’s trademark specs when cooking up cynical, punky power poppers like “Happy Loving Couples” and “Fools in Love” and aggro-Anglo reggae like “Sunday Papers”. So what? Elvis is great and Look Sharp! and I’m the Man are too, and along with Armed Forces, they helped make 1979 a year of riches for nerdy, jilted angry young(ish) men.

Look Sharp! is the favorite Jackson LP, and it is indeed a fierce set with such signature bitter pills as “Is She Really Going out with Him?”, “Sunday Papers”, “One More Time”,  and the title track. I’m the Man is not as cluttered with hits, but for my money, it’s the better album because it’s where Jackson starts finding his own voice with an absence of songs that could spark copyright suits and because phenomenal bassist Graham Maby is so front-and-center. The title track is a hilarious and ferocious crap-culture critique, “Geraldine and John” is Jackson’s most underrated reggae splash, “The Band Wore Blue Shirts” and “Amateur Hour” are masterfully executed mood pieces, and “It’s Different for Girls” is his most incisive piece of sexual politicking, taking the atypical-for-1979 position that some women actually just want to get laid without all the romantic goo men demand.

Last year Intervention Records reissued Joe Jackson’s first two records on vinyl (as well as his fifth, Night and Day, which I did not receive for review purposes). Using a completely analog process, Kevin Gray mastered each album from safety copies of the original master tapes. Played against my original copy of I’m the Man, I can guarantee that it sounds totally authentic and particularly forceful in the low end and whenever Dave Houghton gives his snare drum what for. I didn’t already have Look Sharp! on vinyl, so I could not make a similar comparison, but I can confirm that it sounds warm and wonderful on Intervention’s new vinyl nevertheless.

Since Intervention uses heavyweight plastic inner sleeves for all their releases, I’m the Man has been upgraded to a gatefold with the lyrics and photos (can’t live without that shot of Maby in his mesh tanktop) printed inside the gatefold. Look Sharp! comes in a the same kind of slightly textured sleeve as its first UK pressing. These are vinyl reissues made with love… and not a trace of the delicious cynicism found within their grooves.