The Jam began 1977 without a record contract. By December, they had recorded two albums—In the City and This Is the Modern World, released a mere six months apart—and catapulted from the bottom of the bill to headlining halls throughout England. Much of the trio’s remarkable rise, as chronicled in the four-CD/single-DVD box 1977, can be attributed to the fact that they were an unusually disciplined band. Paul Weller, the group’s lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist, took rock & roll very seriously, especially in those early days, when he treated even trifles like “Non-Stop Dancing” as calls to arms. Good times were a matter of life or death, a sensibility that led Weller, bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler to sound urgent even when the stakes were relatively low.
That signature urgency came through in the quickened trajectory of their career. 1977 was the year punk swept through the United Kingdom, with record labels eager to snap up the latest sensation. But that didn’t mean that everyone was moving as fast as the Jam: The Sex Pistols, for instance, took a full year to deliver the full-length sequel to their 1976 debut single, “Anarchy in the U.K.” During that gap, the Jam cut two albums, made a muddled attempt to break into America, and—once Weller decided he’d had it with punk rock—promptly chose to embrace the mantle of new wave instead.
“Punk rock is a big flashy neon sign which sells commodities, whereas new wave is an attitude,” he told the American late-night talk show host Tom Snyder during a probing October 1977 roundtable on punk that also featured the Runaways’ Joan Jett and Kim Fowley, the L.A. rock & roll huckster whose depravity would be revealed decades later. Asked by Snyder to elaborate, Weller added that new wave is “an attitude of the youth,” echoing a lyric from the Jam’s debut single, “In the City.” On that lacerating song—a two-minute, 17-second blast that makes all the possibilities in this world seem endless—Weller vowed, “I wanna tell you about the young ideas,” explicitly positioning the Jam as ambassadors of adolescent culture. Compared to their punk peers, it was a fair claim. British punk was filled with pub-rock refugees—guys on the other side of 25 who decided to don leather and rush the tempo upon hearing the Sex Pistols. And while Foxton and Buckler were the same age as most of the Pistols, the Clash and the Damned—all hovering somewhere in their early 20s—Weller was 18 when his group signed to Polydor. He sounds keenly aware of his age on the band's early catalog, composing rallying cries of teenage rebellion and romance, and happily conflating the two emotions in his songwriting and performances.
Even now, some 40 years after its recording, the music collected on 1977 feels charged and vital, particularly on the whiplash live show recorded at London’s Nashville club on September 10 of that year. Speedier on stage than on record, the Jam don’t flail; they slash with precision, drawing fuel from their own racket. Early punk rarely retains its power in concert recordings—it’s often sloppy and diffuse—but the Jam are so furious here that they seem to exist entirely within the moment.
The visceral kick in the Jam’s music can obscure the fact that they were considerably more musically conservative than the rest of the class of 1977. The thick book included with this box set is full of reminders that the British press viewed the Jam primarily as a latter-day version of the Who: A March 1977 story from Sounds is titled “Maximum New Wave,” with an even less subtle subheadline of “People try to put us down just because we sound like the Who.” Then again, the trio themselves never hid their hero worship. Quite the contrary: the Jam flaunted their influences, savoring the idea that they belonged to a storied rock & roll lineage. Their haircuts were styled after the Small Faces, their suits borrowed from the nattily tailored Yardbirds. They loaded their setlists with oldies, mixing Motown (Martha & the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave”) up with Stax (Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”), and they loved the Beatles so much, they excavated “Slow Down,” an old ’50s R&B hit by Larry Williams that the Fabs had covered on a 1964 EP.
Prior to the Jam’s arrival in 1977, rock bands generally didn't dwell on the past in such an explicit fashion. The Beatles covered girl groups and the Rolling Stones played blues, but that was part of their complicated attempt to interpret American culture for English audiences. The Jam, on the other hand, helped establish the revolutionary idea that there was a British rock & roll tradition to be upheld—a notion that became rock sacrament, with a legion of bands mimicking the Jam’s ’60s mod revivalism by the close of the ’70s. (Later, in the ’90s, the same aesthetic helped propel the rise of Britpop, turning rock & roll into a retro hall of mirrors.) Yet despite the Jam’s evident love of yesterday, they managed to dodge the usual pitfalls of nostalgia. Weller listened to new music alongside his old favorites, getting turned on not just by the Sex Pistols, but by the hard, clean attack of Dr. Feelgood, the Canvey Island renegades who made traditional values seem lethal. The Jam followed suit, pushing so hard that even the rare ballad on their first two albums—such as the aching “Away From the Numbers”—twitches like a live wire.
The Jam would soon expand their range, with Weller sharpening his observational eye on 1978’s All Mod Cons and the group leaving punk definitively behind on 1979’s Setting Sons, but the fevered concentration they had in their first year is intoxicating. The music on In the City and This Is the Modern World may not be multidimensional, but it is potent, with Foxton following Buckler’s manic rhythms and Weller bashing his guitar above their clamor. As fresh as those albums still sound—particularly compared to the razor-thin Polydor demos collected on disc two, six of which are previously unreleased—the most revelatory part of this box set is the final CD and accompanying DVD, both of which gather live performances from throughout 1977. On their two Peel Sessions, recorded on April 26 and July 19, the Jam are coiled and precise, a focus that can also be seen in clips from “Top of the Pops” and “Marc,” the short-lived variety show hosted by T. Rex’s Marc Bolan. Watching this footage, it’s startling to see just how young the Jam are—particularly Weller, who has the fresh face of a teenager and the steely determination of a righteous adolescent. It’s a fitting look for the eternally youthful music his band was making.
