As we’re leaving Bogart’s after the band’s soundcheck, several of the Jags are momentarily drawn to the display window of The Cupboard, Cincinnati’s immemorial, tireless merchandiser of psychedelic sleaze. I watch the Jags stand there, comic-strip question marks and exclamation points frozen over their cosmopolitan English skulls, as they stare at a whole windowful of ugly pink plastic, penisshaped hash pipes, under the cryptic legend: “Remember Father’s Day, June 15”.

But what can this be? the Jags must wonder. Warner Bros, didn’t warn us about dildo-fetishism reigning as a rite of paternity in the States, though to hear this bloke Ted Nugent...Finally one of the Jags turns to another, the first Jag’s face as bright with discovery as if he’s just deciphered a new Rosetta Stone and found references to Nick Lowe among the hieroglyphics: “It’s an ’ead shop. That’s what it isj”

Ah yes, my credulous Jags, here in the States the mists of time often part to reveal just such antique reminders of the hippie corruption still plaguing us, and since this is your first tour of the U.S., and Since you and I are equally committed to the divine principle df Mod Above All, I’ll be glad to... But as my time with the Jags unfolds, I find them apparently already several generations beyond .my ^cherished ’66/’77 punkitude. j

When we stroll into the Norwood Quality Inn, Jags John Alder arid Mike Cotton immediately dart for the gift shop off the lobby. I follow, assuming they’re in quest of virtuoso Americana souvenirs; I grew up worshipping English rockers like Eric Burdon and Keith Moon, who compulsively romanticized the U.S. and its pop culture, and these Jags can’t be much different. I’m certain they’ll exit the shop laden with dayglo statuettes of B.B. King, and Confederate-flag-emblazoned dog dishes, to wow the rockabilly/blues-crazed true believers back home.

But no, inside the gift shop John Alder is down on hi? knees, carefully examining and comparing the fine-print ingredients and relative staying-power claims inscribed on cans of U.S.-manufactured Sure, Secret, Right Guard, and Ban. I peek into Mike

Cotton’s sack as he leaves the cash register, counting onhimfor at least an autographed 3-D postcard of Elvis the King, but it’s the same story as Alder form follows function with these neo-Mods. “Just deoderant, mouthwash, teeth stuff,” Mike admits. “Well, that’s typically American enough,” I concede. “Typically English, too,” he responds, with a wink at our Anglo-American concord at not letting any moss grow under our collective armpits.

Well, this /s the modern world, after all, as the Jam were already enlightening your crusty Yank reporter,-well before the Jags were even founded. The Jags’ history really is that recent; Nick Watkinson and John Alder formed the group in the summer of 1978 (the Sex Pistols had already broken up, but Sid Vicious was still alive, to refresh your tattered chronology), the Jags signed to Island Records in 1979, and here they are in mid-1980, touring the length and breadth of North America in support of their debut album,; Evening Standards, and its initial U.S. single, “Back of My Hand,” which has already made some noise on our domestic radio .

Not that everything has gone perfectly according to the r’n’r fairy tales these English lads tell each other back in their perpetual art schools; because of strikes and other distributionproblems, Evening Standards is not yet out in England as I talk

with the Jags, even though each successive U.K. single. “Back of My Hand,” “Woman’s World,” and now “Party Games,” has done progressively better on the charts. The Jags fully appreciate their profound cheekiness at touring America as triumphant London-beaters when their debut set hasn’t yet been subjected to the busy-littletypeface aesthetic scrutiny of the English rock weeklies, hasn’t yet been found worthy of a cultural-exchange visa. “Yeah, we’ll probably get slagged back home,” sighs John. I attempted to buck up the Jags by telling them how Foghat learned to love (and be loved by) their adopted U.S., a moral anecdote that loses much of its punch when I have to explain to the Jags just who Foghat are.

So just how young are these Jags? Well, when the newest Jags, bassist Mike Cotton and keyboardist Paddy O’Toole, join me in the hotel bar, they set a bottom line that could frighten John Lennon biick into another decade of hibernation. O’Toole is pulling rank on Cotton tonight because he was clever enough to enter the world in I960, a whole psychic eon later than Cotton’s 1959. Having just left fellow Bournemouth band Interference in April of ’80, to join the Jags, O’Toole and Cotton Speak of primeval Jags Watkinson and Alder as i/elative Methusalehs, and it’s no surprise to me to learn that Nick and John were born during the Late Cretaceous Period of 1955-56 .

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O’Toole advises me that Nick Watkinson’s none toothrilled about having his singing and writing continually compared to Elvis Costello’s, as all of us unimaginative Stateside reviewers persist in doing. “I saw ‘Costello’ in your notes,” says Paddy, “and it’s not that at all. Nick came up liking Brinsley Schwarz, and it was that influence that got into his music.” I can’t for the life of me get it through my thick Yank skull why anyone would mind being compared to the hyper-progressive Costello—"it’s not like I was linking him to Jerry Garcia-era dodos, after all—but it gradually dawns on me, as I listen to the exuberantly youthful O’Toole and Cotton, that they consider Costello something of a given, if not a cranky old fogey; Christ, he must be all of 27 by now! Paddy O’Toole suggests that I dispense with all the misguided Elvis Costello references, and simply characterizeihe Jags’ music as “60’s beat with 80’s sophistication. ”

Mike Cotton innocently twists the blade deeper into my sense of contemporaneity. He speaks about hearing Beatles songs like “She Loves You” on the radio as he toddled around at an impressionable four and five, and thus having those British-rock archetypes locked into his conciotfsness years before he started buying his own records. “Yeah,” says Mike imparting another of the Great Ages of Man to me, “I finally went to see McCartney & Wings in ’75, and it was like, ‘It’s really him up there, he’s still alive.’ And we saw the videocassette for McCartney II in New York, and he looked so young in that.” Roll over Graham Parker, and tell Trouser Press the news.

Leaving me mired in the double-digit inflation of my own 33 seasons'in the sun, Cotton and O’Toole retire to their rooms to shower and to shoot up with anti-perspirant for tonight’s show, and are instantly replaced on the bar stools by head Jags Nick Watkinson and John Alder, with brightorange-haired drummer Alex Baird standing by to provide incidental percussion as necessary.

Even if the Jags have resisted my well-meaning effort to link them with Elvis Costello as the avatar of modem English rock, they’ve at least indulged my preconceptions of which Jag is which, formulated from several bedsitter sessions of staring at the jacket of Evening Standards and its neat art deep railway building, 'whilejistening to its even neater music. These Jags may have beery born just yesterday, but sure enough they lined up on the cover of their album in traditional r’n’r instrumental pecking order —left to right on the front it’s lead vocalist/ lead guitarist/bassist/drummer—handed down from the Beatles or earlier. When I met the Jags earlier this evening, I was gratified to confirm that the Jag 'with the dark-brown pompadour, as intricately carved as a 50’s tailfin, really was Nick Watkinson, that the curly-blondehaired Jag really was John Alder, and that the Jag with the shades really was Alex Baird. (Bassist Steve Prudence, the close-cropped, earlypunk-’do Jag illustrated on the cover of Evening Standards, departed the group a few months back, leading to the induction Of boy wonder Cotton and O’Toole.) There’ll always be an England, as long as her rock musicians maintain these enshrined album-cover traditions.

Except that the cover of Evening Standards wasn’t completely upfront about Nick Watkinson’s eyes; instead of being intense, all-seeing solid brown dots, they actually have light-colored, sarcastic little irises, which Watkinson has trained on me more than once already. When I was introduced to him back at Bogart’s, as the author of a certain Rock-a-Rama of Evening Standards, he locked those irises on my aspiring Yank carcass, and commented bemusedly, “Thqt was one weird review!” Thanks, don’t mind if I do...

Then he zeroed h|s beady orbs in on my official CREEM T-shirt which I’d worn to buffalo Bogart’s bouncers, and smirked, “What’s all this ‘Boy Howdy!’ shit?” (As I later learned, the Jags had visited CREEM Wprld Headquarters just the day before, and had participated in the solemn photo

ritual of posing with those grimy. Boy Howdy! beer cans fingered by so many famous digits over the years.) I attempted to explain R. Crumb and hippie comic-art to the perplexed Jags, though I’m sure something was lost in the translation.

Now that Watkinson and I are planted here together at the bar, I’m mindful of the . junior Jags’ admonition not to bring up the dread E. Costello, but I can’t help kidding Nick about the Knackisms I also hear in “Back of My Hand”, both in the teenagepickup subject matter, and in the singsong rhythms of the chorus. “Back of My Hand” still strikes me as a wonderful joke on anybody who singles out the Knack for aesthetic/character assassination, as it proves that even an English band, working out of all the grand cultural traditions of the » Rock ’n’ Roll Empire, can come up with an i unconscious (but virtually identical) parody “ of the Knack’s presumed L.A.-Babylon | power pop. Which also happens to sound ^ fine on the radio, whatever other rockcritic| al issues it stirs up.

? I mention the Knack-aspects of “Back of, | My Hand” to Watkinson, and instantly he’s off on a rant he could’ve read in Rolling Stone just yesterday: “But the Knack were a put-together band, like the Monkees, or the Partridge Family!” “No,” I counter, “The Knack’ve been overwhelmingly (anti-) hyped, but they are a real band, underneath all that.” Nick again: “The Knack made fools of themselves in all their interviews in England. What is that guy’s name?—Fingerman? Fiegelman?—the one who looks like Paul Simon, with a Jewish nose and all?”

“Paul Simon?!? Nah, Nick, you Limeys cure gonna have to take credit for this one, his name is Doug Fieger, and he looks like your own Peter Townshend, to me.” Watkinson and Alder consult their storage & retrieval systems for their musty images of Grandaddy Cool, and decide that, yes, Fieger may indeed resemble the venerable Pete. But Watkinson’s not granting me an inch on finding Knack echoes in the Jags’ “Woman’s World”, with that charming line, “And a woman don't think straight,” partakes of the same sexism as certain of t|ie sleazier Knack tunes. But Evening Standards seems so intelligent and witty in general that I’d prefer to keep believing that “Woman’s World,” is a very subtle (“Costelloish,” even) satire of some particularly obnoxious male attitudes..

John Alder rescues us from this impasse with his comment to his Jag-mates: “Did you know there’s a ‘tornado warning,’ or a ‘drizzle warning,’ on tonight? We’d better get on over to Bogart’s.” For several minutes a hefty, salesman-looking American beside us at the bar has been taking in our conversation, his inquiring ears much interested in . the Jags’ obviously British accents, and their tales of the rock ’n’ roll life in London flats and U.S. hotel lobbies. So this guy picks up on Alder’s meteorological observation, and interjects a detailed explanation of the precise differences between a “tornado watch” and a “tornado warning,” and provides a helpful inventory of what the Jags may have to fear from either.

This opening made, our newfound pal Confirms that the Jags are indeed English (he admits Indianapolis origins), and then pops the big question of the evening to these world travelers: “Tell me, what have Dire Straits done lately?” Watkinson and Alder and Baird glance at each other with beautifully Hard Day’s Night countenances, quizzical and hip at once, ponder this most unfathomable of mysteries, and finally Alder says, “Uh, Communique. Yes, [British accent growing thicker by the second] I believe that’s what it’s called, ‘Communique’.” It’s a wonderfully Monty Pythonesque moment, one that endears both the Jags, and the eternal Dream of England, to me, one more time.

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Back at Bogart’s, the Jags put on two good sets bf rock ’n’ roll , 60’s beat with 80’s sophistication, as I seem to have heard somewhere else. Even at the close of the second set, when the Jags get a bit rushed and sloppy (it’s well past midnight, and they’re looking forward to a nice Tong van ride to Chicago in the A.M.), the magic’s-inthe-music archetypes persist.

Genial Jags road manager Ramus (a kind of Ray Davies/Peter Bonerz cross) stands in the wings, coaching his charges to remember their stage presence at all times, but they seem well-supplied. Nick Watkinson crouches over his guitar and snaps out his lyrics with a flair that makes me wanna be young and look sorts like Johnny Cougar, too. John Alder plays his guitar in the antique left-handed style of Paul McCartney, and chimes in with Watkinson’s vocals at all the right places. Alex Baird pounds all the frustrations of motel life right out his drum k}t, while Mike Cotton and Paddy O’Toole, who cast their lot with the Jags just in time to jet off to the New World, have assimilated the clever textures of Evening Standards (O’Toole’s keyboards, in particular, fill in -for the albumlighted horn section the Jags couldn’t afford to drag around America).

Costelloish or not, the Jags’ music is certainly as full of the best Britrock traditions as that beautifully suggestive line from their own “Tune Into Heaven”: “Pull up a tea chest by the radio radio!” Nope, I’m not sure what these Limeys keep in their tea chests, either, but I did read all those accounts of English rockers getting started out in their mid-1950’s skiffle groups, complete with “tea chest basses”, and it’s hard to miss the way the Jags sing “radio radio” tag of their lyric, with you-know-who’s intonation. The eldest Jags are exactly as old as British rock ’n’ roll, and they don’t seem to have missed any of its epochs. ' ^