Despite decades spent building a solid career in the industry, including chart-topping hits as well as critical success, Joe Jackson is a name that tends to fall through the cracks of most popular music histories, and it’s not too hard to understand why. In addition to having the gold standard of generically forgettable names, his music has for 40 years stubbornly refused to be pinned down with any accuracy, largely eluding the simplistic categories that marketing types and journalists rely on to quickly convey what an artist is all about. Instead, he tends to be filed away under one of those nebulous non-genres such as “new wave,” “singer-songwriter” or just “pop,” mostly because his stylistically adventurous, piano-driven compositions fail to fit in anywhere else.
Monday night at the Pabst Theater, however, that ill-defined sound came into sharp focus throughout a career-spanning retrospective, which managed to pull off the difficult trick of looking backward without ever really lapsing into any schmaltzy nostalgia. Even the die-hard audience, whose general age and enthusiasm suggested they had followed his career for some time, seemed equally excited to hear unfamiliar material as they were the tried-and-true hits. From the moment his road-tested backing band started filtering on, slowing filling in a metronomic beat with the seductive textures of the brand-new “Alchemy,” the crowd was with them lock, stock and barrel. The public was quickly rewarded with a pair of early classics, “One More Time” and the ubiquitous radio-staple “Is She Really Going Out with Him?”
While horribly overplayed, the latter still packs a punch in the hands of Jackson and his crack support crew (of course, it doesn’t hurt when everyone in the room knows exactly when to provide backing vocals). Once it was out of the way though, he settled in and, after apologizing for being rained out at Summerfest his last time in town, explained the layout of the evening’s program, a decade-by-decade look at his eccentric body of work peppered with fresh tracks from this year’s The Fool. While relevant new cuts like the punky “Fabulously Absolute” largely held their own, the older outings, like “Another World” (1980s), “Stranger Than Fiction” (1990s) or his brilliantly inside-out version of The Beatles’ already-reversed “Rain” (2000s), inevitably stole the show.
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Reaching the present, Jackson and company jumped into a less chronological encore, the standout of which had to be a meticulously recreated version of his 1982 classic “Steppin’ Out,” a track built wholly in the studio and as such largely impractical to faithfully pull off live. Here however, in addition to wheeling out a glockenspiel, Jackson went so far as to lug out the same Korg drum machine used in the original recording, hoping against hope that tonight wasn’t the night it gave up the ghost. While a high point, the crowd-pleasers didn’t stop there, gradually winding to a rest with a reprise of the first song, neatly wrapping up a night of music that was incredibly easy to enjoy, if equally hard to categorize.
