Boy, those shoes. Everybody wanted them. We heard the songs, we saw the button, we saw the album cover, it was just a closeup of these shoes in a spotlight. Nobody knew what Joe Jackson looked like. Most of us expected him to look like something between Link Wray and Willy DeVille. So he played the Whisky, and here's this tall, roundfaced redhead weird piano player from England. Good showman, good storyteller, just nothing like what the shoes suggested.

He had a song about the Sunday Papers, which apparently, in England, were the equivalent of the Enquirer here, all scandal, fantasy and hoax. I remember him tearing up sheets of newspaper behind his electric piano and throwing them around. He had a big white cast on one foot which pretty much made a joke of the "shoes" image. I also remember his debut album having probably the worst guitar tone ever recorded. Thin, harsh, metallic, trashy, hideous. If a fingernail, a chalkboard, a scrap of aluminum and a shard of glass all had a communal love child, and made it into foil, and then smashed it to pieces, that's what this guitar tone was like. I thought Jackson needed his head - or least his ears - examined for playing with such unlistenable tone. What a surprise when he turned out to be a piano player, not a guitarist , kind of a jazzer, and pretty good, too.

There was a pimp store on Hollywood Boulevard (Mr. B's?) that had the sharpest, tackiest, most streetslick, oldschool pimp shoes and threads of all time there. You could buy Stacey Adamses there. After the Joe Jackson shoe revelation, I discovered this place for the first time and started buying all my you-gotta-be-kidding-me clothes there. I had some olive-green metallic, alligator, slip-on pointy toed jobs with side buckles. Wore them down to dust.