Saturday, February 29, 2020

POP-A-LOOZA: The Jam



Every Friday, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza runs a post from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. This week's Boppin' Pop-A-Looza looks back to 1977, when I discovered the music of The Jam.

For those in search of some supplemental reading, "No Time To Be 21/This Year I'll Be 22" recalls my favorite music circa 1981 and '82, the period of my most pronounced interest in The Jam; that was the final chapter of a six-part series called Imagining/Remembering The Music That Played, an attempt to reconstruct what would have been my all-time Hot 100 lists when I was aged 16 to 22, and I later gathered the whole thing together here. The subject of Paul Weller and Joan Jett's 1977 TV appearance with Tom Snyder comes up again in the Bomp! magazine chapter of my series He Buys Every Rock 'n' Roll Book On The Magazine Stand



The Runaways thread in the Jam piece continues in my Virtual Ticket Stub Gallery reminiscence of seeing The Flashcubes, Runaways, and Ramones live in 1978, and "My 1970s" discusses the music I was listening to during the Me Decade. The Jam are among the many, many acts mentioned in passing in my extensive power pop retrospective "The Kids Are Alright! The History Of Power Pop."



Finally, I will eventually be returning to subject of The Jam some time in (I hope) the near future, with a Love At First Spin celebration of my favorite Jam album, Setting Sons. Previous Love At First Spin pieces have examined my adoration of Drop Out With The Barracudas, The Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man, and The Ramones' Rocket To Russia. I've begun writing a Love At First Spin spotlight on The Ramones' Road To Ruin, and I'm looking forward to concocting a Setting Sons piece.



But that's in the future. Right now, let's go back to when a campus radio station introduced me to a new British band that would become one of my fave raves. It's The Everlasting First: The Jam, this week's Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.



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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

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