Action, Jackson

He always said it wouldn't happen, because it couldn't happen. Joe Jackson, you see, has never been a nostalgist fond of looking back, because there was always the risk of tripping over an abandoned corpse. The future lay dead ahead, beckoning with the promise of unmade music and unheard magic. All the past had to offer were things done, and undone, a very long time ago, when he was a young man pretending to be someone he never really was. Just look at those old publicity pictures--that toughie sneer, that tell-off finger wagging in your face, those pointy shoes and skinny ties, all not quite lies but not quite The Real Deal either. He made compromises way back when, hiding his musical education in pub-rock bars and punk-rock bands, playing stupid when he was smarter than all of 'em put together.

Then he ditched the band and broadened his palette; he was using thousands of oils, instead of just a handful of crayons. He dipped a toe and then a foot and then a leg into salsa, wrote soundtracks and symphonies, became a new-wave star on the pop charts, played dress-up jazzer, lost his love for all music then slowly found his way again by making gentle night music. He made albums on which others sang his words, albums on which no one at all sang over his music. He lost his way, lost some (OK, most) of the fans, rebounded with what he believed his best album...and, then, with no warning, climbed into the Wayback Machine to play music with men he'd left behind. Ten years ago, five years ago--damn, one year ago--he said it would never happen. Then it did: Joe Jackson looked back to see from where and with whom he had come, and he didn't turn into a pillar of salt after all.

"This is great fun," says the man for whom wistfulness is more foreign language than foreign concept. "It really is--we're just having a great time. This band had a great chemistry, and it just came back so easily. I think we're all a little bit surprised actually at how well it's worked."

On March 11, Rykodisc will release Volume 4, the first album featuring the Joe Jackson Band since 1980's Beat Crazy. All the boys are back, looking like middle-aged men and blowing like a second wind: the thin and gray Jackson, behind the keyboards and mike; Graham Maby, on bass as he's been on and off for Joe all these years; Gary Sanford on guitar; and Dave Houghton behind the drums. Returned, as well, is the sound they made more than two decades ago--that melodic mishmash of pub reggae and cocktail jazz and Broadway-bound jive and Surrey punk (punk, that is, made by a Steely Dan and Beatles fetishist) that coursed through the throbbing veins of Look Sharp! and I'm the Man in 1979 (though the former was cut in '78) and Beat Crazy and the Tilt EP in 1980. The band was short-lived, busting up after a show in the Netherlands on December 15, 1980; years later, even Jackson would be surprised in retrospect how quickly things had ended.

Mere months ago, Jackson would have "scoffed" at the notion of reunions. To him they seemed silly and sad, the last stabs and last gasps of men trying to jar the memories of fans who'd forgotten about them. They reeked of last chances and lost dollars, money-grabs staged by rock-and-roll thieves running short on opportunities. Christ, the notion of Getting the Old Band Back Together--the stuff of bad movies, the coda of every other Behind the Music horror story--repulsed him. Till one day...

One day, Jackson got to thinking that 2003 would be the 25th anniversary of the recording of Look Sharp!, and he began to believe every man should, on occasion, take a step back before leaping forward. He wondered if the guys would be interested; he doubted they would. He was wrong, and the Joe Jackson Band started playing again in September 2002, at the Marquee in London and the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth; they started over, started older. They played the old songs, the beloved hits: "Is She Really Going Out With Him?," the standard; "It's Different for Girls," the classic; "I'm the Man" and "Got the Time," the rockers; "One More Time," which said it all.

The shows were captured on tape and included as a bonus disc in Volume 4, but Jackson refused to stay in yesterday; he had half a dozen songs he was going to record alone, but felt they would be right for the band. So they went in the studio and emerged with a record that sounds as though but days have passed since last they shared stage and studio. No mere exercise in what-if and what-was, Volume 4 is a perfectly viable release--a little bit of then, a little now, a lot of what Joe did in between.