Joe Jackson

When I ran screaming from the University of Chicago, I ended up in NYC with my best friend Eric. As it turned out, we were the perfect candidates for NYC – we were young and we were strong and we didn’t know any better. Being fresh out of school with no job prospects and no real plan, it was, not surprisingly, somewhat difficult to find a place to live. We crashed at this guy Bruce’s apartment in the Village – he had gone to Interlochen too and, while I didn’t know him that well, Eric did, and any port in a storm and all that.

After about a week, we did find somebody that was kind (or stupid) enough to rent us an apartment, just a couple of doors down from the storied Chelsea Hotel (although just how storied it was, I wouldn’t find out until later). The apartment was, predictably, a shithole, but, as I said, we were young and strong and stupid and it was the perfect place for us to use as a home base until we could get established – which Eric did in about a week, taking a job at a fast-food pasta place in the newly completed Fulton Fish Market. I had considerably worse luck. I applied to any and everything I could, but nobody was interested in hiring me, although I did get some good stories out of the process. I applied for a job as a runner for a Wall Street bond market newsletter only to be berated by my interviewer for being an only child moving to the big city to suffer while I broke my poor mother’s heart back home. I was rejected as a butler in a clothes store. I was similarly refused a position as a diamond sorter (thank god), and could’ve probably gotten a job selling vibrating pillows door-to-door, but I knew I couldn’t hack it and left the informational meeting early. Finally, my persistance paid off, and I got a job working the counter – and, later, the camera – at an all-night photostat shop (only in New York).

Now that we both had jobs, it was time to find a different place to live. Since we had tried the bad apartment in a good neighborhood ploy and hated it, we decided to go the other route – a nice place in a dodgy part of town. We hooked back up with Bruce, who was tired of living by himself and had the added feature of having a large trust fund so he offered a certain financial security that landlords craved. Eric and Bruce found a great loft in a shitty neighborhood just south of Alphabet Town – around Houston and Avenue B. Because Manhattan is such a finite space, neighborhoods constantly evolve, and the owners of our new building were hoping that the area would start to be gentrified. So everybody was happy – we got a beautiful and spacious loft and he got a couple of young white guys to live in his building.

Living with Bruce was interesting, but Eric and I were in a different world than he was and those tensions sometimes grew pretty thick. For starters, Bruce was independently wealthy and didn’t have to work and spent most of his days spending most of his money. We just couldn’t afford to do the kinds of things that he did and that created a bit of a rift. Also, Bruce was gay. Now, I’ve spent a great deal of time around gay men (I did, after all, grow up in a family of ballet dancers), and have absolutely no qualms about anybody’s sexual orientations, but it did make it awfully hard to meet any girls of the female gender (we met plenty of girls of the male gender at some of the bars and proto-raves that we went to, but that wasn’t exactly what we were after). Plus, Bruce seemed to have designs on us that boiled over one particularly tense night, and I, for one, got tired of waking up to a new GQ cover model eating cereal at the table every morning.

It certainly would’ve made my life a lot easier if I was gay, as I seemed to get propositioned by some guy almost every day that year, but sex with another man never really interested me. I knew what a penis was like and what it did, I was interested in the unknown, the other, the slot B for my tab A (yes, I know guys have a couple of slots, but you know what I mean). Most people I met assumed I was gay because of my living situation or my background as a dancer or my general sensitive demeanor (my wife always thought it a good sign if a guy was “accused” (not the right word) of being gay, it spoke well of his character, she thought). But no matter how much fun it would’ve been or how interesting or how often I would’ve (finally) gotten laid, I just wasn’t gay and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.

But if I was gay, then this would probably be my favorite song.

Joe Jackson ran a roughly parallel career course to British new wave icon Elvis Costello. Both wrote highly intelligent yet somewhat abrasive punk-informed pop. Both took a sharp turn early in their careers to explore different musical tributaries (Costello went country and Jackson went jazz), and both matured into well-respected crafters of sophisticated pop songs along the lines of Burt Bacharach – Costello even going so far as to work with the maestro himself.

Joe Jackson’s first album, Look Sharp, is a wonder of edgy punk-pop and includes such classics as the cynical Sunday Papers and the sparse, broken, Cars-like lurching guitar pop of Is She Really Going Out With Him, the song that first gained him widespread attention. But his best known album is probably the sublime Night and Day, which, in addition to calling up the spirit of Cole Porter in its title, also keys into that erudite uptown sensibility by featuring a picture of Jackson sitting at a grand piano in some expansive, Manhattan skyline-viewing apartment, as drawn by legendary Broadway caricaturist, Al Hirshfeld.

Night and Day is a gentle, sensitive album, full of poignant songs about relationships (with the occasional good-time fling (e.g., Cancer) thrown in just for fun). And most poignant of all is this song about trying to find your way through the labyrinth of social mores, stereotypes and expectations of being a man – any man, but especially a gay man – in America during the '80s. Anybody battling stereotypes can find solace in Jackson’s lament. I especially like the lines