Tim Jackson obituary recalls Stilettos drummer, artist, and Morristown councilman

Tim Jackson, the Stilettos drummer who later spent three terms on the Morristown Town Council and built a second life as an artist, died April 27 at 77. His story reached far past one scene or one stage: it ran from the bohemian Greenwich Village world of early New York rock to local government in Morristown, New Jersey, and into a late body of visual work made after a stroke paralyzed his right side.

Before he became known in Morristown as a councilman and painter, Jackson was part of a glam and punk-era band called The Stilettos, where he played with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein before Blondie formed. The band moved through the CBGB orbit at a moment when the club was still small and punk was only beginning to take shape. One account places The Stilettos’ first CBGB gig on May 5, 1974; another says Harry and Stein were in the group in the spring of 1974 and left later that year to form Blondie. For drumming fans, that puts Jackson at the hinge point between downtown art-rock and the band that would become one of New York’s defining names.

Jackson’s life outside the kit carried the same restless energy. He studied art briefly at Pratt Institute, spent time in Greenwich Village among artists, and partied with Andy Warhol. His parents, Byron Jackson and Kathryn Jackson, wrote Little Golden Books, a family background that seems to have left him with both a visual instinct and a sense that creativity could be a daily practice, not just a career.

That instinct did not fade when music gave way to civic life. Jackson served three terms on the Morristown Town Council from 1996 through 2007. Mayor Tim Dougherty remembered him as an advocate for tenants’ rights and rent control, and Jackson also used art shows at the Morris County Library to raise awareness. In Morristown, he was a public figure with a painter’s eye and a drummer’s timing, someone whose politics and art were both part of the same larger impulse to make a scene more livable and more alive.

After the stroke that left him unable to use his right side, Jackson taught himself to draw with his left hand and produced new work that friends found fluid, warm and deeply expressive. In the end, that may be the most fitting note of all: Jackson never stopped improvising, whether he was behind a drum kit, inside a council chamber or working at a drawing table.