Jack Lee - Jack Lee's Greatest Hits
#717
1981 Housekeeping
Jack Lee
Jack Lee’s Greatest Hits
Genre: Power Pop
4 out of 5
Highlights:
Good Times
Come Back and Stay
Hangin’ On the Telephone
Paper Dolls
I debated whether we should cover this, since it’s a “greatest hits” collection. But, the Nerves never put out an actual album despite being part of the architecture of modern Power Pop. And I’ve suffered a lot through 1981. It’s nearly broken me.
You couldn’t get away from The Nerves stuff on Soulseek back in the P2P days. For good reason, they were songsmiths.
Paul Collins’ Beat and Peter Case’s Plimsouls get all the kudos but, dammit, Jack Lee was a dynamo in his own right and, honestly, I haven’t heard most of these songs.
He’s not a singer but that nasal almost New Wave Ridgeway sound is perfect for these songs. The recordings are all a little tinny for my taste but, inasmuch as Grant Hart is the better songwriter of the duo that was Husker Du (don’t bother fighting me, I’m right), Jack Lee gives Case and Collins a run for their money.
Paul Young would score a hit with “Come Back and Stay” and Blondie would explode with the brilliant “Hanging on the Telephone” but these are done by the master and he’s just as talented, if not suffering from mediocre production.
R.E.M. owes their entire early career to two songs: The riff from “Paper Dolls” and The Records’ “Starry Eyes”.
Peter Case plays bass on this thing so it’s allllllmost a Nerves record. How we all deserved a proper one of those.
Where did you go, Jack? Did you buy a house somewhere off the royalties from those two massive hits? Are you combing the Malibu shoreline with a metal detector? I guess we’ll never know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7dqJ7KNVwk
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