review

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.

“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. . .”