It was sad to read about the passing of Rick Buckler, drummer of the legendary popular beat combo outfit The Jam. While I liked the band – and I really did like and admire them – they weren’t quite my thing and I bought just the one Jam record, the double A side of the homoerotic Ray Davies song David Watts and A Bomb In Wardour Street, the former remaining my favourite of their records. Paul Weller was always destined to become a rock and roll legend, Buckler’s drumming and Bruce Foxton’s bass playing were both essential components of the band’s sound. The fact that so many fans are upset about Buckler’s death, some 43 years after The Jam split up, tells you all you need to know about the affection in which they were, and still are held, by a generation of people.
I am not sure what follows will make a whole lot of sense, but here we go. I saw bands like The Jam as from a slightly different generation. Not that I was exactly ancient when they came along but I was no longer a teenager. I was half a generation ahead. My teenage years had been consumed with many artists, especially T. Rex, and by the time the New Wave came along I had already moved on to the love of my life at the time, American rock music, especially the likes of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. Of the British bands at the time, The Clash were, to my mind, the greatest in that era and if I am being honest I rarely looked beyond them, but I always understand the love for The Jam and the despair when they split up. The death of one member changes everything. I have felt it myself many times over the years.
For example, when Walter Becker died, so did Steely Dan. The Dan were Becker and Donald Fagen and that’s it, regardless of who has ever played with the band. When Carl Wilson died, so did The Beach Boys. When David Crosby died, so did Crosby, Stills and Nash (and Young). When John Lennon died, that was the end of The Beatles (and bearing in mind Lennon was only 40 when he was murdered, this was almost certainly the saddest band death of them all).
You can carry on following the death of members, as The Rolling Stones did following the retirement of Bill Wyman and the deaths of Brian Jones and Charlie Watts and still be that band but it doesn’t always feel that way.
For music fans from half a generation behind me, the death of heroes will happen more and more. The rock and roll stars who they expect to live forever never do. The feeling they have following the death of Rick Buckler will not be an isolated occasion. It is the natural order of things. For rock and roll, read everything and everyone in your life.
Jam fans are now in their fifth decade without the band and while they all knew that the band was no more, some I suspect always hoped that they might perform just once more. That hope is extinguished now but that’s okay because the music is still there and it will always be there.
