The Jam, "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight"

I don’t know a ton about the Jam. A while ago I bought their Greatest Hits compilation. Couldn’t say exactly when, but my computer tells me I ripped the CD in January 2002. Over the years I’ve played these songs on and off. I had them close enough to front of mind that in August 2011 I was able to quote “Strange Town” (Apple Music, Spotify) in an email of thanks to the Oxford Street Day Care Cooperative, for the ongoing love and attention they were giving my kids:

On the walk over to the Center, Paul Weller sang a line on my iPod about “trying to find a friend in Oxford Street.”  I hadn’t cued that up on purpose: I was just in the mood for the Jam today.  But happenstance brought me that line, and it had me smiling:

We'll never have to try hard to find a friend in our Oxford Street.

I have been keeping my eyes open, sort of, for good copies of the studio albums on vinyl, but I’m not seeing any of them in my usual haunts—or for that matter when I’m traveling. This most certainly reflects the fact that the Jam were an exceedingly English band, with four consecutive LPs certified gold and charting in the Top 10 in the UK, between 1978 and 1982. By contrast, only Sound Affects and The Gift cracked the Top 100 in the States, and at a measly 72 and 82, respectively.

Re the American question, it probably didn’t help that the Jam fit imperfectly within the fiercely doctrinal punk scene that was rising up around them. Timing is everything—think of the hundred bands with distinctive sounds and brilliant songs whose careers stagnated in the ’90s, while a thousand Nirvana and Pearl Jam imitators colonized the charts. The Jam came surging into view in early 1977, like so many other hard-charging guitar bands in Britain, except that at their core they were mod revivalists, more comfortable in suits than in ragged sweaters and bondage gear. Front man and guitarist Paul Weller had grown up in the suburbs admiring the Who and the Kinks, and he later would have named his son after all four members of the Small Faces, if only the kid’s mother were on board. Mid-’60s influences weren’t anathema among the punks—the Pistols’ cover of “Substitute” (Apple Music, Spotify) was a staple of their live shows around this time—but even so, Paul et al. were lagging behind the zeitgeist.

Their first single was “In the City” (Apple Music, Spotify). Issued on Polydor in April 1977, the song describes an upwelling (up-Weller-ing?) of positivity and promise among urban British youth:

In the city there’s a thousand faces, all shining bright. And those golden faces are under twenty-five. They wanna say—they wanna tell you about the young idea.

To be sure, Paul is clear-eyed about what he is up against: Also in the city are a thousand men in uniforms, and I’ve heard they now have the right to kill a man. We wanna say, we gonna tell you about the young idea … and if it doesn’t work, at least we said we’ve tried.

There was just enough intergenerational conflict in the message here for the Clash to invite the Jam on their White Riot tour, starting in May. But even if the Jam and the Clash were expressing similar outrage about all these narrow-minded adults keeping them down by force, the two bands were telling markedly different stories about the youth explosion, as Paul termed it. The Jam sang about finding a new direction, called for their listeners to inflate creation, and promised foundations for us to explore (Apple Music, Spotify). By contrast, the Clash, at least at this point in time, defined their mission largely by what they ruled out—I hate the army and I hate the RAF. I hate the civil service rules. I won’t open letter bombs for you (Apple Music, Spotify)—with little thought to what they would build up, if they could.

(On this subject I think a lot about Franz Ferdinand’s “Dark Side of the Matinee” (Apple Music, Spotify) in which Alex Kapranos takes a lesson from his paramour:

I time every journey to bump into you accidentally. I charm you and tell you of the boys I hate, all the girls I hate, all the words I hate, all the clothes I hate, how I’ll never be anything I hate.

You smile, mention something that you like. Oh, how you’d have a happy life, if you did the things you like.

Let me assure you: I’m as big a fan as anyone of rock ‘n’ roll negativity. It’s nourishing and perfect and the bread and butter of my days. By contrast, the notion that someone holding an electric guitar might stand for something is nothing short of shocking to me, but by the same token refreshing: i.e., just the kind of thing to get me thinking. But don’t make a habit of it, rockers.)

Now it could be that as natives of suburban Surrey—forget Springfield: imagine the kind of hell the American right would rain down on a town called Woking—the Jam were new arrivals in Said City, so that they couldn’t help but find it positively teeming with possibilities. Whereas jaded Londoners in the punk scene, growing and grown up amid unreconstructed bombsites and garbage strikes, were all but tapped out. The Jam were surely wide-eyed on their travels through the UK with the Clash, the Slits, Subway Sect, and others in ’77. And it was probably an acute sense of not belonging that prompted Weller to tell an NME reporter he supported the Tories and the monarchy. Speaking the unspeakable won the Jam a measure of separation from the smothering punks in their orbit. The price of this was time spent in the wilderness, and only the band’s knack for songcraft, stolid commitment to the work, and (I’d say) abiding Britishness restored them to the good graces of the UK record electorate.

Which brings us to All Mod Cons, the third Jam album, and the one that broke them big. By this time it was late 1978, and the UK punk scene had already burned out. Punk’s “Year Zero” sensibility was in the rear-view mirrror, too—not that it was ever perfectly observed, and I’ll mention again the Pistols’ cover of “Substitute” here. But we’d toggled back to a place where a band could release a Kinks cover as a single, and up up up into the charts it would go. And good old “David Watts” (Apple Music, Spotify), pure and noble breed that he was, could reach down from his heights and give a hoist to the next 7-inch, which was “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” (Apple Music, Spotify).

“Tube Station” is extraordinary for all sorts of reasons, starting with whatever-the-hell post-jazz give-and-take business the rhythm section is giving us for the first sixteen bars of Verses 1 and 2. In these segments the guitar tiptoes through the mix—playfully, stealthily: you choose which. Then the band snaps into a rock groove, power chords follow, and it’s easy enough to imagine Weller doing windmills over the strings, like Townshend before him. All fine and good—wonderful, even—but the key elements here are in the vocals, and specifically, Weller’s evocative storytelling and the spitting rage and pathos he delivers in the climactic fourth verse.

Two tragic tales are told here—first and more straightforwardly, about the first-person narrator’s mugging by a neofascist gang on a train platform, and second and more generally, about the fallen condition of England as of October 1978. What’s especially interesting about the micronarrative is the perspective Paul chooses to occupy here, which is that of decent, unassuming city dweller—the sort of person who lives generally in contentment, follows the law, and sets himself apart from the nation’s perpetual class conflict. It’s a weekday, we suppose, and he’s clocked out late from work and is bringing Indian takeout home to his wife. And indeed the first verse finds Our Narrator in a decidedly middle-class frame of mind—alternatingly making benign observations about the universality of human experience:

The distant echo of faraway voices boarding faraway trains to take them home to the one they love and who love them forever.

… and fretting about events in the news:

MR. JONES GOT RUN DOWN. Headlines of death and sorrow, they tell of tomorrow. MADMEN ON THE RAMPAGE.¹

Now a bought-in, cog-in-system figure like this one typically has no standing in rock music, other than as object of derision or pity. In a Blur song this character would necessarily be living a life of quiet desperation, one final provocation away from bulldoz[ing] down the house he lived in (Apple Music, Spotify) or incanting BLOW, BLOW ME OUT I AM SO SAD I DON’T KNOW WHY (Apple Music, Spotify) in a heap on the ground. And to be sure, the Narrator of “Tube Station” does have a right thrashing ahead of him in his song, but as will shortly be explained, this isn’t an earned come-uppance for his complicity with the System. There’s nothing gratifying at all for any fair-minded listener to take from it. If he committed any offense, it was in offering this too-twee response to the several goons on the platform suddenly asking him, HAVE YOU GOT ANY MONEY?

I’ve a little money and a takeaway curry. I’m on my way home to my wife. She’ll be lining up the cutlery—I know she’s expecting me, polishing the glasses and pulling out the cork.

That rendition of domestic bliss earns him a fist, and then a kick, and it all goes downhill from there. And putting aside the fact that I favor Diet Coke over wine and I don’t take public transit, so that I’m both less and more posh at the same time—we’ll call it a wash—I feel here and now that the Everyman on the ground getting kicked to within an inch of his life might as well be me. And it could have been me twenty years ago when this song first hit me like a ton of bricks, not even six months after 9/11. Not that you’d expect Islamist radicals to jump you on the MBTA, necessarily, but these days? Not Weller’s National Front per se, but there are plenty of itchy-fingered folks roaming the landscape, reeking of right-wing meetings and looking for a fight.

(I continue to sweat the fact that after media outlets called the 2020 Presidential Election for Biden, I sent a glibly-phrased triumphant text to friends, and one of them posted it online, crediting me by name. In the weeks that followed this quote achieved low-level virality, with my name on it, so that if the Proud Boys are writing up a proscription list, I’ll likely be on it.)

But this was Weller’s point. We tend to see street violence as exotic and outré—gangs in their colors throwing down in parts of town we don’t visit, two teams’ hooligans meeting by appointment in an alley. If you’re down and bleeding on the asphalt, then you must have made a mistake or a choice. Not so here. The story of “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” is wrong place, wrong time, could happen to anyone. Whatever vicarious thrill you felt watching Alex and his droogs take on Billy Boy’s crew in a fair fight in that (hint-hint) disused theater—and let’s be clear, I did thrill on this (see “Title Music from A Clockwork Orange”)—there’s nothing fun or fanciful about the Jam’s report of this beating.

As Weller tells it, the boots knock Our Narrator nearly senseless:

My life swam around me. It took a look and drowned me in its own existence. The smell of brown leather—it blended in with the weather. It filled my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It blocked all my senses. Couldn’t see, hear, speak any longer. And I’m down in the tube station at midnight.

These lyrics are a splash too much for me. Aiming for poetic and ending up as more than a mouthful. On the far side of the drum solo Weller will put his gift for writing on full display, and unsurprisingly you’ll see it in the details of his stage-setting, rather than in gobbledygook. But there’s enough here to put the listener at least somewhat in the moment, so you can almost see the Narrator’s perception reducing Looney Tunes-style to the smallest pinprick. That could be the end of the song, but it’s not. The pinprick widens, treating the Teller and his audience together to a most bitter irony, as Weller serves up the final verse:

The last thing that I saw as I lay there on the floor was JESUS SAVES painted by an atheist nutter. And a British Rail poster read HAVE AN AWAY DAY—A CHEAP HOLIDAY: DO IT TODAY!

This is Allen Ginsberg-level stuff, as far as I’m concerned, except augmented by the music and Weller’s barking vocals. And the worst of it is yet to come:

I glanced back on my life and thought about my wife. ’Cause they took the keys—and she’ll think it’s me. I’m down in the tube station at midnight. The wine will be flat and the curry’s gone cold.

Don’t want to go.

Powerful messaging, and entirely out of nowhere on that Jam compilation. Sure, “That’s Entertainment” (Apple Music, Spotify) is a bit soured on the city, too, with its smash of glass and the rumble of boots, lights going out and a kick in the balls. Not the youth explosion we were looking for, as it turns out. But “Entertainment” doesn’t hit me one tenth, one hundredth as hard as “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight,” and really, I struggle to think of any single song in my library—off the top of my head I certainly can’t summon one—that guts me like this one does. And I think that’s in large part because for all that rock ‘n’ roll’s principal objective is to express the hopes, dreams, grievance, and disgust of the insurgent generation, the Jam were taking time off here to aim for something different. Rather than GET PISSED! DESTROY! (Apple Music, Spotify), Paul Weller was looking across the destruction others had wrought upon Britain and writing from that anger. Not on behalf of the yoof, but for all of us who stand for decency in this life.

Whether he actually ever voted for Margaret Thatcher, we’ll never know. But “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” describes a small-c conservatism that increasingly appeals to me, with so many of our heedless grubbing “leaders” spending their days and our money tearing down our institutions brick-by-brick, preening and taking selfies as they go. It bears asking: What do you expect will be left, once these projects are finished? Why, ass-kickings on train platforms, of course.

1. Twenty years ago I was moved enough by this song to borrow these very headlines for use in New Jersey’s Turnpike Witch (see “Here Comes Alice”):

She drank coffee and Diet Coke to the point of mania, starved herself delirious to stretch out the cash in her pocket, and to pass the time she wandered among the Dining Area tables, arbitrarily taking seats opposite strangers and engaging them with unsolicited and unenlightening monologue:

“Don’t pretend you weren’t looking at me. You know and I know that everyone in this world is one blown fuse away from living in the street. There WAS an ANcient MARiNER who STOPpeth ONE of THREE—”

Newspapers flashed up like curtains to screen her out. She read their headlines aloud and supplied her own editorial glosses:

“MR JONES GOT RUN DOWN/ KNICKS LOSE FIFTH STRAIGHT/ MADMEN ON THE RAMPAGE are you SURE you want to go back out there?”