A Cure for Gravity Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

A Cure for Gravity Book

Something more than a journeyman and less than a superstar, Joe Jackson has a reputation for being a reclusive and prickly character. But he refuses the low road with A Cure for Gravity, a resolutely non-lurid autobiography of a man who considers music to be a noble calling. It matters not that the author was once lumped in with England's insurgent first-generation punks and new-wavers; here Jackson insistently focuses on his development as a composer, player, and performer, approximately in that order. Born to modest means in a setting where a sickly, creative youngster such as Jackson was regarded with suspicion, if not contempt, the young Brit was trained in the classics and developed his keyboard skills, playing everything from cabaret to progressive rock before finally setting off on his own as a sharp-tongued, ska-influenced Angry Young Man. A more sophisticated musician than his rag-tag running mates (he's recently released an ambitious fusion of pop, jazz, and classical elements dubbed Symphony No. 1), Jackson revels in the intricacies of his craft--as much or more than he does in telling his own up-from-the-gutter tale. Old new-wavers who remember the author from his 1978 Look Sharp! debut and devotees of his more stylish early '80s recordings may be caught off guard by the short shrift Jackson gives his actual recording career; indeed, he shrugs off a couple decades in the final pages of the book. But the articulate, idiosyncratic author is clearly more interested in addressing what makes a musician than what happens once a musician has it made. --Steven StolderRead More

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  • Product Description

    A renowned composer and one-time pop star's charming, funny, inspiring memoir of becoming- and evolving as- a musician.

    Since the release of his first smash bestselling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music business fashion. He has also been a famously private person whose disdain for the rituals of celebrity has led some to call him effete and self-important.

    That reputation is bound to be shattered by A Cure for Gravity, Jackson's enormously entertaining and self-revealing memoir of growing up musical, from a culturally impoverished childhood in a rough English port town to the Royal Academy of Music, London's punk and new wave scenes, and the brink of pop stardom. Jackson describes his life as a teenage Beethoven fanatic; playing his first piano gigs to audiences of glass-throwing skinheads; and life on the road with long-forgotten club bands. Throughout, he finds a hundred excuses to share his thoughts on musicians past and present, on record companies and critics, on why music is like both sex and religion (and why it isn't), why he loves Shostakovich and The Prodigy and hates Brahms and Brian Eno, and how music saved him from becoming "one of those sad bastards you see milling around outside the pub at closing time, looking for a fight."

    In 1992, Jackson decided to "retire from the pop world." This book evolved as he tried to figure out what to do next. Far from a standard-issue celebrity autobiography, A Cure for Gravity is an intelligent, passionate book about music, the creative process, and coming of age as an artist.

  • 1891620509
  • 9781891620508
  • Joe Jackson
  • 1 October 1999
  • PublicAffairs,U.S.
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 285
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