RIP Rick Buckler of The Jam

When my older brother was out of the house, I dabbled just enough with his copy of Setting Sons to realize that The Jam made my kind of music. So one day browsing at Streetside Records in St. Louis—when I was in middle school—I stumbled upon a double album that claimed to be the greatest hits of this group. I thought, “If just a regular album can be as good as Setting Sons, and this band has a bunch of other ones, then what would a double greatest hits called Snap! be like?”

I got that thing home and, sure enough, haven’t stopped playing it since. I still own that vinyl, and everything else by The Jam as well as the solo work of its leader Paul Weller. (I just saw Weller for the first time last year.)

So it is with a heavy heart to hear that Rick Buckler, the driving drum beat behind The Jam, has passed away in southeast England after a short illness at the age of 69. He recently said, “None of us were really outstanding musicians in a lot of ways. But I think we were trying to be as inventive as we possibly could, so that we worked well together as a band.”

Buckler propelled the punk-pop-soul sound of The Jam with bassist Bruce Foxton behind Weller’s commanding yet soothing vocals. While Weller is very close to my Mount Rushmore of favorite rock icons, he has supposedly been pretty uncool over the years to his bandmates, especially Buckler, in not giving them the credit they deserve.

I like the way MOJO describes Buckler’s drumming:

Sharp as the crease in a pair of Sta-Press trousers, Buckler’s tightly-wound playing and bursts of snare gave an electric edge to Weller’s songs of suburban life and longing. Just listen to how the nervous interaction between Buckler’s hi-hat and Foxton’s bassline creates a growing sense of dread on “Down In The Tube Station At Midnight,” the melancholy swing he gave “Just Who Is The 5 O’Clock Hero?” or his explosive tour de force on the band’s 1981 single “Funeral Pyre.”

He was the drummer on all six of The Jam’s albums, from 1977 to 1982. After the breakup, he went into production work for a short while before becoming a furniture carpenter. Still later he formed a band with Foxton playing Jam songs and called From the Jam. You can imagine the kinds of asides Weller threw off about this band during the time.

In 2015, Buckler wrote his autobiography That's Entertainment: My Life in the Jam. He wrote that he was pretty sure Weller secretly thinks he made a mistake breaking up the mod superstars at the height of their powers.

As it is, there has still been a lot of The Jam’s music discovered and released over the years and, for my money, Buckler and Company will always be the greatest band of the period 1977 to 1982. Nobody else comes even close, which is saying a lot for such a prominent time in rock history.