It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to tell you that The Jam was influenced by The Beatles. From how they played to how they dressed, almost every piece of the punk power trio could be considered the offspring of everyone from The Who to the Fab Four without needing much as a blood test. Paul Weller could be subtle when he wanted to, but sometimes he wasn’t even trying to hide his influence when writing songs like ‘Start’.
Granted, much of the punk aesthetic was about reinterpreting licks that had come before. The entire lick library of Ramones was indebted to classic rock and pop, and there’s a good chance that Steve Jones got some of his greatest ideas when combing through those early Chuck Berry licks.
Those were still punk bands, but Weller had something else in mind when making The Jam. Sure, some of the roots were the same, but there was still that lingering pop sound that always worked its way into the music, whether that was through ‘A Town Called Malice’ or ‘That’s Entertainment’.
When playing the song ‘Start,’ give a second listen to that bassline. It’s an absolutely classic sound and one hell of a riff to boot. If you’ve ever spun Revolver before, though, that should sound awfully familiar, considering it’s pretty much the exact same melody as ‘Taxman’.
Although George Harrison is credited with the Beatles’ song about shoddy tax practices, hearing Paul McCartney’s Motown-infused bassline is half the reason why it works so well. So, if it worked for one song on the record, why not try to do it again? That wasn’t even the last time The Jam used that same bass riff, even playing it in a different key for the B-side, ‘Liza Radley’.
It appears they knew that it would sound the same, so Bruce Foxton figured that he would be slightly different by adding one little pick-up note to the end. That didn’t work for Vanilla Ice when sampling ‘Under Pressure’, though, and every Fab fan probably knew what they were getting into when listening to this song.
So are The Jam thieves? Hardly. Listening to both songs back to back, Weller’s way of crafting a melody is already fully formed on the band’s debut, including his ability to inject some of his signature gravelly voice into another Beatles cover, ‘Slow Down’. Weller seemed to get away with it, but that might have left the door open for some of the more blatant plagiarists to follow behind him.
Given how much Noel Gallagher loved both The Jam and The Beatles, a case could be made that he saw his mate getting away with cribbing from the Fab Four and tried putting his own Britpop twists on other Beatles favourites. If The Beatles thought that they were going to be able to sue everyone who had ever been influenced by them, though, that would be a pipe dream. This band left its mark on Western culture as a whole, and if that meant a handful of licks got passed on throughout the years, so be it.
