The Jam Album: “Greatest Hits”

As cocky and short-sighted as Oasis with twice the energy, the Jam was completely ignored in the USA. That's a shame, because America missed out on one of the best short careers in Rock.

Their early career was hobbled by fairly blatent attempts to recreate the first 2 or 3 Who LPs, but when they hit their stride the Jam was hard to top. On this Greatest Hits package, the change begins with "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight," and carries right through a series of fantastic singles that raced up and down the British charts: "The Eton Rifles," "Start!," "That's Entertainment," and "Going Underground," possibly the greatest Pop/Rock single never heard by most Americans.

Latter-day Jam dipped a little too heavily into blue-eyed soul and French pop for my taste, but the representative singles here--especially "The Bitterest Pill" and "Beat Surrender"--are still better than most of what you heard on American radio at the time.

Was the Jam a Who knock-off or the second coming of Mod? And does it make any difference? Debate that if you want, but enjoy the music.

Just as the Kinks get lost behind the Beatles Stones and Who and Animals [and Yardbirds, for all you hep cats] when one talks about the British Invasion, the Jam get lost behind the Ramones, Pistols and Clash when one mentions punk.

Bono once said that seeing the Jam in Dublin, seeing and hearing Paul Weller ripping into that Rickenbacher 12 string is what started him on the idea of a band. Yes, the Clash were "the only band that mattered" but the Jam were just as important to the punk movement as the "garage band" simplicity of the Who was to the early Mods.

Kicking off with a ferocious blast like In the City [think the venom of Elvis Costello kicking of with Welcome to the Working Week] to The Modern World to the Kinks cover David Watts and the tales of the scary subway, Down in the Tube Station at Midnight and the driving, Beatles [Good Morning, Good Morning] of the new kid in town, Strange Town, the Jam run full throttle at you RIGHT UP TO Paul Weller embracing funk and soul [the same way the Clash embrced Raggae and rap] starting with Start! [so like XTC!], the beautiful, That's Entertainment, the super funky Absolute Beginers, Town Called Malice anf the closer Beat Surrender.

And like the Clash, the lasted five years, said their piece and were gone.

If there is a complaint, it is the missing B Side "Buterfly Collector" and the sound is thin at times, often leaning on the treble.. maybe this is a problem with being a three piece, perhaps this was/is corrected on later remasters. But if you're looking for the next band to fill in your "original punk singles I have lost" section, try this.

The Jam...what a magnificent band! Poetic, political, and altogether too much for America to comprehend. Americans: this is the greatest music that you've never heard. From the punky "In The City" to the groove-filled "Town Called Malice", this is a set of amazing tunes, none less than wonderful. One obviously can argue about whether "Precious" and "Just Who Is The Five O'Clock Hero" are on this collection rather than "Man In The Corner Shop" (one of the Jam's five finest songs ever) and "Carnation"...but look at the title, this is "Greatest Hits", not "Best of..." No one disc is going to neatly sum up the Jam, but this one does as good a job as possible, and is recommended (along with the more-heavily-B-sided "Collection" which neatly complements this set) for absolute beginners to the Jam legacy.

The Jam were such a huge phenomenon in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s, yet such a colossal bust in America, that I felt compelled to acquire this CD and try to figure out why. As a life-long Who fan and someone who has been fascinated by the Mod subculture since first seeing the film adaptation of "Quadrophenia," I admit that I also thought this CD would be right up my alley.

However, in his Jam days, Paul Weller wrote almost exclusively to the British experience, and he never compromised in his ironic (sometimes acerbic) approach, even deliberately singing in his at-times-unintelligible, working-class-Brit accent. All of that, and the fact that some of his Jam-era songs--even some of the hits--lack any discernible hooks or catchy rhymes, made it inevitable that they would never get far in America.

Nonetheless, the Jam did produce some marvelous tunes, especially "Going Underground," "All Around the World," "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" (check out that bass riff), "That's Entertainment," and "Town Called Malice." Listening to those cuts now, it's easy to see why the youth of Britain glommed onto them and made them their own.

a great British band that never caught on in the USA . . pity . .they were quite good . . . Oasis got a lot of their attitude from the Jam . . .