Jon Landau

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.