Jackson Browne

The road and sky collide, with drums

A songwriter comes up with a brilliant idea, comes up with half a dozen striking new ways to capture the sounds. And yet the most haunting parts of "Running on Empty" turn out to be the ones that contain no music at all.

I keep thinking about the first 30 seconds before the start of the opening (title) track. Bear in mind that "Running" is a fantastic song, certainly the best rocker JB ever wrote, both thoughtful and fiery, captured in a performance that is both stripped down and simply blazing. Holy shit. But it's that silence that sticks with me.

Actually, it's not silent at all. The band is onstage, gearing up to play a new tune. You can sense that the lights are low, you can hear the crowd get restless. Voices bellow song titles. "The Road and the Sky!" a woman shouts. "Ready or Not!" a guy honks. Other voices form a kind of wordless chorus - the sound of expectancy, of demand. Finally another guy finds the bridge between impatience and resignation. "Play what you want!" It's like a signal. A foot stomps, a hand chunks a rhythm on tamped guitar strings.  Then.......Boom.

A two-chord riff for piano and guitars, a simple bass line, David Lindley's jet-engine slide guitar. The drums pounding a hard stutter rhythm. Blazing and roaring.

"Lookin'' out at the road rushing under my wheels. . . .I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels..."

Remember the place where the road and the sky collide? This is it. And the point of "Running on Empty," the album, is to find a way to tell everyone else how it feels to be the man on the road. The poet as object of desire. The troubadour on the run. JB came up with a brillliant way to do just that: by recording an entire album of new songs on the road - onstage; offstage; in the hotel; on the bus. The whole experience, from the good (the glow of the stage) to the bad (cooped in the bus on an all-night ride) to the hideous (wired so tight on coke that even the stupidest ideas seem brilliant).

Brilliant in concept, less so in execution, "Running on Empty" is both a huge step forward and a lurch toward self-destruction. Funny how those two things can happen at the same time.

 Remember last week when I said that I'd be gone for a week and would post more Jackson Browne retrofit pieces when I returned? Turned out to be all true, except for the part where I get back to posting the second I got back. . . Give me a day or so, and we'll have "Running on Empty" re-digested, de-constructed and posted for your blog-reading pleasure. In the meantime. . . a series of fun facts:

1. Jackson Browne's real first name? Clyde. Which makes me wonder: If he'd stuck with that (which is in some ways far cooler and rock-y than the archaic/literary/formal Jackson) would he have turned into a different kind of writer/musician? I'm thinking a heavier backbeat and grungier guitars and far fewer acoustic musings on sleep's dark and silent whatever. Clyde Browne rocks.

2. When hiking through a dense Hawaiian jungle everything seems slightly surreal and full of meaning: Thank you, "Lost"!

Editor's note: Despite promises to the contrary, this week-long special will take the rest of the week off, then resume on Monday. Also, the spelt bag described in the review of "Jackson Browne" is almost certainly some kind of water bag, as per the sharp eyes of California outdoorsman Michael "Dusty" Mooers, who provided something like half a dozen pieces of photographic evidence to prove his point. Way to fact-check, Dusty!

“THE PRETENDER” (1976): Produced by Jon Landau, fresh from co-producing “Born to Run” and already girding the for legal battle that would make him manager/producer/comptroller of the Bruce Springsteen empire, this album was designed and executed to catapult JB’s gold-tinted success to something closer to solid platinum. Now the spelt-flecked raw edges were smoothed down, stacked neatly into shimmery, airy mixes with far more sonic depth and clarity. This could have been disastrous (and indeed, the impulse toward shiny surfaces would eventually render JB’s albums all but hollow). But given the terrible straits the man fallen into (his wife Phyllis, also the mother of his young son, committed suicide during the early weeks of 1976) the neat production only clarifies the confusion and angst roiling inside.

Whether Phyllis’s suicide was a function of their relationship or in spite of it is not the stuff of public discussion. It took him nearly a decade to approach the subject in anything close to literal terms (1986’s “In the Shape of a Heart”). But the shock of the tragedy -- the grief, the guilt, the emotional numbness finding form in reportorial observations and/or assertions of whattk and/or existential gloom -- shadows the entire album. What results still seems striking, if not exactly the instant classic it seemed when it was new.

“The Fuse” leads off, taking us back to the empty highways that so often set the stage for JB’s albums. A technicolor re-envisioning of “Colors of the Sun” (check the similar chord progression in the verses), this time the sun-baked invocations of eternity take flight into affirmations: Whatever it is you might think you have/You have nothing to lose;  then layered voices describing a post-mortal world where “...there’s a part of me (that speaks to the heart of me)/that’s never far from me (though sometimes it’s hard to see)/ Alive in eternity/That nothing will kill.” The words of bereaved widower, you might say, and being Jackson Browne he projects his own resilience (real or imagined) to the world around him: Look out beyond the walls of Babylon, he shouts. I’m gonna be around/When the walls come tumbling down!

You can look at this in a variety of ways: JB is either veering toward easy affirmations, or else the narrator he’s created is still stumbling through the Kubler-Ross steps of grief.  Is the heart of the world empty (“long distance loneliness”) or buzzing with promise (“you are what you choose to be”)? Ultimately he leans toward the tumbling walls and immortal souls, swept into being with a neatly reversed chord pattern that trades a minor progression for a stirring major ascent and a chorus of background vocals.

“Your Bright Baby Blues” stays on the road, this time in the company of Lowell George, whose own distinctive slide guitar (like a truck shrieking down a steep, curvy road, according to one indelible description) and background harmony give the trip a cosmic cowboy shimmer. Fellow Little Feater Bill Payne provides the churchly organ, and the song floats above the road enroute to a realization that all these highway stories maybe promise more than they can ever deliver. “No matter where I am, I can’t help thinking I’m just a day away/From where I want to be,” JB admits, which anyone’s therapist would confirm in a heartbeat. The anti-drug appeals (“...when I looked down I was standing on my knees”) probably come a decade or so too early (just wait for “Running On Empty”), but realization is out there somewhere, and with Lowell pitching in with a high harmony the white boy highway blues feels as grounded in down-home smarts as it is in hopes and dreams.

The mariachi ballad “Linda Paloma” strikes me as musico-tourism, a tequila-laced trifle whose elegant arrangement (exotic instruments set into place by impish musical genius Van Dyke Parks) can’t quite hide the emptiness at its core. It mostly serves as a diversion enroute to the side-closing “Here Come Those Tears Again,” a kind of will-to-power breakup tune  whose bereft title and opening verse (“...just when I was gonna make it through another night/Without missing you...”) explode into powder via a sleek, white-boy gospel arrangement that (again) takes flight thanks to Craig Doerge’s surprisingly funky piano. You might expect a bleaker take from the recently widowed, but this is straight-up romantic busines: the singer is making a stand, casting his faithless, yet ambivalent ex from his life. “Some other time, baby,” he snaps, “When I’m strong and I’m feelin’ fine, maybe. . .” Be gone, woman. And don’t let the backbeat hit you on the ass.

So ends the album’s first side, and also the mood of stubborn resilience (or escapism, as per “Linda Paloma”) together. From here “The Pretender” stops denying its own dark heart, finally confronting the grief and confusion at its core. No wonder, then, that the next four songs answer life’s thorniest riddles and sorrows with the same not always beleaguered response: surrender.

“Late for the Sky” (1974) An unapologetic triumph, and the increased prominence of Lindley in the mix is the least of it. The music works perfectly -- a crisper, yet still understated production; great playing all around -- but these tunes would work just as well if they were performed solo, "Nebraska"-style, a lone voice and instrument captured on a simple reel-to-reel.

Here the man's eyes are wide open, his pen tracing the most complex puzzles of life and living. The good ol' emotional/intellectual dialect; the twirl between thinking and feeling, the urge for escape and the impulse toward social responsibilty.

Start with the title track, a simply-wrought piano ballad, paired with Lindley’s sizzling slide guitar and a series of verses describing romantic delusions of all sorts. No finger-pointing, no self-recriminations, no self-adoration. Merely a portrait of the mismatched: “You never knew what I loved in you/I don’t know what you loved in me,” he sings. “Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be.” The next song, “Fountain of Sorrow” steps up the rhythm (despite the forlorn-sounding title) finding some comfort in even the most misbegotten connections: “You could be laughing at me, you’ve got the right/But you go on smiling, so clear and so bright. . .”

“For Everyman” (1973): Two words: David Lindley. The hippie-freaky-super-accomplished multi-instrumentalist (slide guitar, violin, bazouki, etc.) joined JB’s band just before the sessions for his second release, and what a terrific match it was: Now the maestro’s romanto-solipsisto yearning came with unexpected filigrees and skronky, drone-like textures; a raw lyricism that acknowledged more than Jackson’s measured words would ever say on their own.

The album kicks off with Jackson’s dusty take on his own “Take It Easy,” already a smash hit for the super-slick Hollywood cowboy   Eagles, but here the emphasis is on dirt roads and a yearning for escape that seems far less plausible than it could in the freon-cooled studio world of the Eagles. The journey ends - or detours into - the dreamy  desert ballad “Our Lady of the Well,” which moves back through time (months? centuries?) to describes a romance with Maria, who transcends time in some mysterious and yet viscerally captivating way. "There is a dance we do in silence/far below this morning sun," JB begins, introducing us to a primoridal love affair that is both far removed from ("Here we stand and without speaking/Draw the water from the well...") and a direct result of modern society's failures ("Across my home has grown the shadow/Of a cruel and senseless hand...")

Christ! It was like Jackson Browne knew my high school's principal! By the time I picked up this one (thank you Cellophone Square, and quite possibly its star salesman, Scott McCaughey) I was the editor of the Garfield Messenger, thus a leader among young men, and more than eager to strap on my own backpack and do some water dancing beneath the sun with Maria or anyone who would find me in the shade wide awake or in a dream (it's hard to tell). These worlds existed, not just in "Our Lady..." but also in "Colors of the Sun," the even moodier and more cryptic primo-eco-mordial tune that comes next. "Awake to understand you are not dreaming," JB begins, amid a swirling organ, a meandering bass and dueling, occasionally harmonizing acoustic guitars. I'd read about peyote somewhere. I had to imagine its effects sounded a bit like this: lost, but lovely; floating through time and space in pursuit of some undefined transcendence that was immediately available. . . but only if you weren't looking for it. "Leave me where I am, I am not losing/If I am choosing not to plan my life. . ." All that, plus a great tan (all that sun), wandering tribal chicks and a spelt-rich diet of natural grains, wild honey and home-dried peyote buttons. 

Sad, sweet, smart, sulky, sexy, and full of spelt.

To start this week-long exami-blog on the charms and failures of California's uber-singer/songwriter of the 1970's, if not beyond, we'll do the appropriate thing and start with a confession: It was the fall of 1978, another damp night in Seattle, and I was sulking in the corner of high school party. Kids dancing, kids laughing, kids flirting and having so much fun that none of it made sense to me. So I grabbed my coat, slunk out the door and made for the safety of home, and  “Late for the Sky.”

“How long have I been sleeping?/How long have I been drifting alone through the night?”

I was 15 years old, and every word of this, every cry of the slide guitar, every simple, stately chord on the piano, rang with truth and beauty.

“How long have I been dreaming I could make it right/If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might to be the one you need?”

Could loneliness ever sound more thoughtful? Could melancholy ever sound more romantic?

With the headphones clamped to my ears those elegantly composed confessionals of Jackson Browne (so handsome, dark-eyed and shy on the back of the album cover) filling my head I had access to a whole new world, peopled by the moody, the sensitive, the smart. And sexy chicks, too. Sigh. I wanted to go to there. I still do.

This is crazy talk, I know. But I’ve been listening to all those old Jackson Browne albums again, and wondering again if my affection for them -- my love, really -- is a matter of nostalgia, aesthetic wrongheadedness or. . .just maybe . . . because they actually deserve it on their own terms.

We'll work chronologically, starting with "Jackson Browne," the auteur's debut album. So dig into your old vinyl collection. Blow the dust off your turntable and consult the optometrist (Doctor, my eyes....)