With the death of drummer Rick Buckler, chances of the mod revival powerhouse that was The Jam ever getting back together have gone from unlikely to never. Front man, guitarist, singer, and songwriter Paul Weller — along with Buckler and bassist / singer, songwriter Bruce Foxton — crafted some of the catchiest pop songs of the punk / post-punk / new wave era. But Weller consciously chose to disband The Jam in 1982. Sadly, Buckler and Foxton seemed to want a reunion, but as Buckler would put it in a 2017 interview, “I think Paul came up with all sorts of funny ideas about how it would make the band mean something if we split it up.”
Formed in Surrey, England in 1972, The Jam released their first single, “In the City,” in 1977. It reached #40 on the UK Singles chart and was the start of an incredible streak. Their next 17 singles would chart in the UK. Among them, 1980’s “Going Underground,” would be their first number one. They would have three more: “Start!” “Town Called Malice,” and “Beat Surrender.” When The Jam disbanded, their first fifteen singles were re-released. All placed within the top 100.
While not as shocking like contemporaries The Sex Pistols, angry as The Clash, or gloomy like Joy Division (with whom they shared a stage on a 1979 airing of “Something Else”), The Jam were just as culturally relevant as those bands; they were at the forefront of a mod revival, and among the only artists of that period with a punk pedigree that still possesed pure power pop sensibilities.
Beneath “Start!” there’s a Paul McCartney-esque bass-line. In the rhythmic beat and trilling organ of “Town Called Malice,” one can clearly hear Mowtown. And on covers of The Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing,” The Who’s “So Sad About Us,” and The Kinks’ “David Watts,” there’s tribute to the mods that inspired them.
Tailored suits. Two-toned brogues. A Rickenbacker guitar covered in comic art. The Jam were at the center of a mod revival. Beat music with the energy of punk. Melody. Harmony. Politics. Fashion. Rock and roll. Rhythm and blues. Undeniably catchy and undeniably cool. The Jam’s influence on indie music has been cited by artists like Oasis, Blur, and The Strokes. Any discussion of mod culture of the twentieth century must include them. The mod style did not stop with the end of the 1960s. It merely evolved.
Weller would go on to form the less influential and all but forgotten Style Council upon The Jam’s breakup in 1982. He vowed that The Jam would never reunite. It’s “against everything we stand for,” said Weller in a 2015 interview with The Daily Mirror.
Only a precious few attendees got their hands on this magnet from Halloween 2000.
It was October 30, 2007 at Philadelphia’s Trocadero that my wife and I last saw Type O Negative at Halloween. The show was one of several that the drab four held in Philly on or near Halloween — going all that way back to the mid-nineteen nineties. A tradition, really. For my wife and me. For the band. For all the goths and doom metal heads in attendance. For the theater itself (wondering if its days hosting burlesque were any worse than this). And for the city that hosted it all.
But October 30, 2007 would be Type O Negative’s final Halloween show at the Trocadero. They would play two more shows at the Troc before Peter Steele passed away, on April 14, 2010, at the age of 48. Without him, the band would not continue. As for the Troc? It would hang on for a few more years before closing its doors in 2019.
The perfect home for punks, goths, and metal heads from the early nineties to the 2010s, Philadelphia’s Trocadero, located in the heart of its Chinatown, was the smallest, largest venue in the city. So small that a roll of toilet paper could be thrown from the front of the stage to the back row of the balcony (more on that later). Yet it looked like it had once been grand. A fine example of American Baroque. With a history shared with so many other similar theaters across the USA. A history of heyday, and decline.
Special Collections Research Center / Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.“The Queen of Exotic Dancers” Tempest Storm regularly performed at the Trocadero.
Known by several names since its opening in 1870, the Trocadero at first hosted vaudeville acts and musical comedies. It began staging burlesque shows around the turn of the century. Can-can dances. Frilly costumes. Light comedy. In the nineteen fifties, popular comedians like Red Skelton would even perform there. But by the late fifties and early sixties, burlesque had long moved on to striptease, and the Troc hosted “burlesque queens” like Mara Gaye, Tempest Storm, Georgia Southern, and Blaze Starr.
It would close in 1978, as its regulars moved on to porno theaters for more explicit offerings.
By the mid eighties, after hosting opera for a short time, the Troc fell into disrepair, only to be remodeled in 1986 for use as a concert hall.
Type O Negative. L to R: Kenny Hickey (guitar), Johnny Kelly (drums), Peter Steele (vocals, bass), and Josh SIlver (keyboards).
Goth/doom metal band Type O Negative formed three years later, in 1989, out of the ashes of frontman and bassist Peter Steele’s earlier efforts in Fallout and Carnivore. Well known in Brooklyn for playing clubs like L’Amour, Type O Negative was the perfect band for the Trocadero. At first playing venues like City Gardens in Trenton (1991) or opening for Motley Crue at Philadelphia’s Tower Theater (1993), Type O would play its first gig at the Troc on December 1, 1994 (in place of Christian Death, who canceled). They were a metal band that — while the epitome of doom and gloom —delivered as much romance and melody as they did aggression and melancholy.
And their passion belonged in an old theater like the Troc.
“It’s like a disease every Halloween we play Philadelphia,” Peter Steele commented to the crowd at the October 31st, 2000 show at the Troc. “And I have no fucking problem with that.”*
Type O Negative and Halloween go together like black leather and dark eyeliner. With songs like the tongue-in-cheek “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare All)” and the gloom-inducing “All Hallows’ Eve,” no other band owned Halloween like Type O Negative in the 90s and 2000s. Peter Steele loved the holiday as a kid and trappings of Halloween were evident in dozens of their songs.
In the aforementioned “Black No. 1” — a song about a goth girl hesitant to go out on October 31st because her roots are showing — Steele sings, in his unbelievable low baritone…
Now it’s All Hallows Eve
The moon is full
But will she trick or treat?
I bet she will
She willllllllllllllllllll
(followed by a whisper of “Happy Halloween, baby” that is inexplicably excised from the video)
Live, the crowd would sing along with him. Not like crowds sing along at most shows (insipid parroting when you would otherwise want to just here the performer). Instead, it was more of a ritual, like invoking some kind of spirit to inhabit the concert hall. A celebration not just of a band, but of a holy day for goths and doom-metal heads where every freak can be normal for just one night.
People would come in all sorts of costumes. Zombies. Dominatrixes. Devils. All purpose ghouls. Most popular were the girls who fancied themselves vampires (or victims). Dreaming of the 6′ 8″ Steele sinking his dentally implanted fangs into their necks, many of them had come as much for the man as they did the band, waiting outside by the tour bus when the show was over. Peter Steele was a magnetic presence who commanded a stage with self-deprecating humor and rock-star charm.
Alongside him were Kenny Hickey (guitar), John Silver (keyboards) and Johnny Kelly (drums), Together, they transformed the Trocadero into a metal church whose worshippers read from the book of Black Sabbath. Their chemistry as a unit was something to behold, drowning the audience in saturated bass, thunderous drums, a howling guitar, and a keyboard that often sounded like a church organ, beckoning the faithful to some kind of black mass in a temple consecrated by decades of burlesque performers stripping on its stage.
Yet it was a black mass that never took itself so seriously. The equivalent of a harmless strip show — titilating for a couple of hours, but nothing transgressive. A show that more times than not ended in countless rolls of white toilet paper being thrown back and forth from band members to crowd. Peter Steele was front and center, taking the brunt of the unfurling barrage of tissue.
Like the burlesque queens before them, Type O Negative teased depravity but, in the end, provided only fun — an outlet for the darker desires of the audience fulfilled by the performers on stage. A vicarious thrill only the best rock stars can offer. At least for one evening. One show. One Halloween Night. One memorable experience.
