Atlantic City Weekly

Joe Jackson's name might not frequent the Top-40 or MTV like it did when hits like "Breaking Us In Two," "Steppin' Out," "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" and "You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)" made him a star more than 20 years ago, but these days the British singer-songwriter isn't overly concerned with commercial success.

"I have no expectations at all about how my music will be received," Jackson told the Toronto Star in March. Truth be told, Jackson has never seemed concerned with the commercial aspects of the music business, preferring to follow his creative muse. Slapped with the new wave/punk label when his debut album, Look Sharp! was released in 1979, he disregarded expectations and explored the swing (Jumpin' Jive), jazz (Night and Day), and classical genres (Symphony No. 1) on subsequent albums.

Touring in support of his latest album, Rain, Jackson makes his A.C. debut Saturday at the Trump Taj Mahal's Xanadu Theater. Thea Gilmore opens the show.

For both the album and tour, Jackson reunited with two-thirds of his original band -- bassist Graham Maby and drummer Dave Houghton -- who worked with Jackson on his first three albums Look Sharp!, I'm the Man, and Beat Crazy.

"I'm having a lot of fun this tour, especially playing with two old friends," Jackson tells AC Weekly, "and they're playing better than ever."

For the Rain album and tour, Jackson wanted to explore the piano-bass-drums trio format. "It's something that I've wanted to do for a few years," Jackson says. "I think it's interesting how wide-ranging you can be using just the minimum of resources -- just the trio."

The material on Rain touches on nearly every musical style Jackson has explored in the past, with the bulk of the songs falling close to the pop/jazz flavor of Night and Day, his most popular album. Fans who come to the Taj show can expect to hear a generous mix of new material, the older hits, and fan favorites.

Jackson says he doesn't mind playing his oldest hits for his fans. "You can get a bit fed up with playing the same songs over and over again," he says, "but I think it's important to give the audience some familiar landmarks, so to speak. We do quite a long show, so we do a lot of new stuff as well as old."

In the first four years after being signed to A&M Records, Jackson released five albums and an EP. He kept up that prolific pace throughout the 1980s, but has made a conscious decision to slow down in recent years.

"I'm much less of a workaholic now than I was early on," he says. "I think in the early part of my career, I made too many records and put out too much stuff that was just not as good as it could have been. I think now I'm a lot more particular. I think I've come a long way as a lyricist."

Over the years, Jackson has branched out creatively. In 2000 he published a well-received memoir entitled A Cure for Gravity that he calls "one of the best things I've done." A few years later, he became a bit of a social activist, campaigning against the public indoor smoking ban now in effect in many American and British cities. His most recent endeavor is Stoker, a play he co-wrote about author Bram Stoker and his process of creating Dracula.