I've no prescription for compromised solution.

The Jam story.

I wanted to be a mod, but my hair was too thick. 

This was a moment. A moment with a comb facing the bathroom mirror of the Hoover St. lower duplex apartment that I now shared with my German film school buddy turned roommate, who moonlighted the graveyard shift at a photo lab out past La Cienega. We were both trying to be directors in the post-9/11 world but were doing much better at being shitty guitarists with distortion pedals hooked up to our amps in the living room when the other tenants were at work. The apartment had seen better days. Maybe better decades with some distance between then and now, which showed in the painted-over bars on all the windows and the termite-damaged hardwood floors. The occasional distant POP…POP....POP in rapid succession in the late-night hours from a gangbanger’s Mac-10 helped cut the monotony of being almost perpetually near broke vibe I was putting out. Art school had ended a year earlier, and so had the loan money, and now they wanted it all back on the installment plan. I wasn’t prepared. Graduating college hadn’t helped me grasp any kind of normalcy to living. And without college’s regimented structure of fear of failure, I was having trouble getting out of bed before 2 pm. 

Nicotine was my truest constant companion, and I carefully balanced my cigarette on the edge of the sink while I brought the comb down over my quite uncooperative, unwashed brown hair, combing left, then right, then down. One thing made sense: while The Jam was a good band, Paul Weller, I wasn’t. Everything about my hair signaled “rocker” in the Brighton Beach riot sense of the word. Even if I cut my hair super short, it just spiked itself back up anti-Quadrophenia-style, regardless of sporting my now standard uniform, which consisted of Ben Sherman tennis shoes, tight jeans, and a Northern Soul t-shirt, sometimes a big black sweater depending on the warm L.A. weather. The reason? I figured that I needed to change up my game with a cleaner look, which, in my mind, made me more employable-looking to the average Santa Monica music video production reps who kept handing me the same notes on the way out the door.

“We love you. We just don’t know how to sell your work to the labels. You should go make an independent film, then come back.”

Tall order. And yes, I was trying to write my way out of the problem, but being against the ropes all the time without work seemed to give me near-constant anxiety, hunger, and writer’s block. Drinking six nights a week to self-medicate was a lot easier than facing a blank page and the only way I knew to deal with the perceived setbacks.

While I had known a cross-section of suspect Vespa riding mods from the South Bay a few years earlier, I hadn’t been all that impressed with the mustiness of their sharkskin suits, allegiance to shitty 1990s American ska, predilection for fat underage girls, and the occasional fascist skinhead friend pretending to be an anti-fascist skinhead kicking around high on speed. I was someone else and somewhere else. I had, unlike them, been to London, seen and felt I understood Antonioni’s Blow Up, partied in flats with waify models, gotten right pissed in Camden, and walked Carnaby Street twice, but even with all of that under my belt, my relationship with The Jam’s back catalog hadn’t happened across the pond or even all that easily, the universe had worked to discourage it. I’ll elaborate; I bought The Jam Live Jam CD at The Warehouse after walking out of a forgettable movie in L.A. At that time, I would buy a Nice Price sticker-adorned live album to get a quick beat on a band I was unfamiliar with but interested in, so I’d have a feeling of what songs were good to slyly figure out quickly what albums were worth buying. It was a good strategy as long as the gigs were performed at the height of the band’s popularity and not during some shitty reunion with a different singer.

When I got it home and unwrapped the cd, and put it in the boombox, I soon discovered something was amiss by way of a wailing overproduced cock rock guitar intro. Some good bands had gone through bad phases by the eighties but this was unacceptable. I was in disbelief. I had heard the stripped-down three-chord song In the City which had brought the band acceptance by the early London punk scene on a comp during high school. There was no relation. Not by a long shot. I popped open the player and examined the disc. It was ZZ Top’s overblown opus Eliminator that had been packaged in the Jam jewel case I was holding in my other hand. The same record that brought the world such hits as Sharp Dressed Man & Legs. How could this happen? I looked again and confirmed it a second time. I thought I had escaped those damn Gibbons brothers’ long hillbilly beards and the other guy with the curly hair, the spinning guitars, and the bad fiberglass hot rods ripping it through the desert when they stopped playing their shit on MTV over a decade ago.

What do you do in this situation? Return it, right? No.

I ran through the various scenarios of trying to explain this to a store manager over and over again and it never ended well in my head. The eleven dollars wasn’t worth the pain of potentially being labeled a scam artist and facing down with a cop while in possession of ZZ Top. And I wouldn’t blame them for thinking I was a criminal. It’s just too weird a thing to be faced with while making near minimum wage. Somebody on the assembly line from the labels manufacturer had either fucked up or purposely fucked up to ruin someone’s listening experience. And they had succeeded.

I wasn’t having it. I couldn’t have this dogshit touching my life any longer. I took the ZZ Top CD out to the garage, started up my Thunderbird, threw the transmission into reverse, and backed over it.

Out of spite, I bought The Jam’s Sound Affects. I have zero regrets.

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Waking up from bad dreams and smoking cigarettes
Cuddling a warm girl and smelling stale perfume
A hot summer's day and sticky black tarmac
Feeding ducks in the park and wishing you were far away

That's entertainment, that's entertainment

- Paul Weller

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