The first time Jackson Browne's sideman extraordinaire David Lindley stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight, it was to sing the falsetto vocals on Running On empty's "Stay". In April of 1981 Lindley did it again with his debut album, the US#84 El Rayo X. Produced by Browne, it is a winning collection of mostly covers, both well known and obscure, recorded in new styles (Tex-Mex, reggae, Cajun). On a hot Summer afternoon in New Orleans, this was a favorite album of mine to play. It remains one of the great party records.
Lindley toured the album, opening up for Joe Walsh in the Summer of 1981. Commercial FM stations played "Mercury Blues", a minor hit, but my college radio station preferred "She Took Off My Romeos" and "Your Old Lady".
His high pitched nasal voice takes some getting used to, but Lindley made a great album that finished #27 in the Pazz and Jop Critic's poll
On December 6, 1977 Jackson Browne released the best album of his career, Running On Empty. I didn't ever feel a need to buy a copy of the album. It was blaring out of speakers pointed outside dorm room windows throughout my teenage years. But it's only when you listen to the entire album that you realize what a cool concept this is: A live album about a musician's life on the road, recorded onstage, in rehearsal rooms, in Holiday Inn suites and on a bus. Only complaint: David Lindley's lap steel guitar is almost too present on the record.
This is the 70's so it should be no surprise how often cocaine is mentioned :
In "The Road ": Coffee in the morning cocaine afternoons
In "Cocaine" : Cocaine, running all 'round my brain
In "Nothing But Time : I got a broken white line (I'm still sober)
From Rolling Stone's Paul Nelson: As our finest practicing romantic, Jackson Browne has been stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again for so long that the road probably looks like a realistic way of life to him. Whether or not he knows it, he's been writing about highways and their alternate routes since his beginnings, so the subject matter of Running on Empty aren't all that different from those of his first four LPs. But the approach is. This time, Browne has consciously created a documentary, as brightly prosaic as it is darkly poetic, with a keen eye for the mundane as well as the magical. Running on Empty is a live album of new material about life on the road as conceived and recorded by a band of touring musicians in the places they spend most of their time (onstage, backstage, in hotel rooms, even on the bus). Since there are two separate concepts here, the audience gets an unprecedented double feature: ten songs they've never heard Browne sing, and a behind-the-scenes look at the "the show they didn't see." Ostensibly, the Gawain of rock and roll has scaled down his heroic obsessions, re-covered the Round Table with Formica and invited us in for a cup of truck-stop coffee, thus proving a point we knew all along: that small gestures can be just as meaningful and revealing as large ones. Ironically, when Browne tries for specifics, he achieves both facts and universals. But his inclination to ease up makes sense here because he's really running two different, very dangerous races: one positively mythopoetic (the Road and its metaphorical implications), the other presumably maudlin (musicians on the road). The first can barley be done justice to within the confines of a pop record, while the second has rarely risen above its inherent cliches.
If a full-fledged mythology of the road didn't exist, we'd undoubtedly have to invent one, but the job has already been done by the same people who gave us the sky and the sea: i.e., practically every artist and thinker who ever lived. On the road, there's that old gray magic, asphalt camaraderie and the special language of musicians who mark time by gigs and guitar cases. Section guitarist Danny Kortchmar's "Shaky Town" captures perfectly all the desperate exhilaration of playing "a thousand bands" on "those one-night stands," and Browne raises the hair on the back of your neck with his passionate singing. There's "Nothing but Time" on the bus and "Cocaine" in the hotel room, both recorded on location. On one song, tour photographer Joel Bernstein sings harmony on the chorus. Funny things happen when you're subtle, rueful and witty "Rosie" (written by Browne and his production manager, Donald "Buddha" Miller), a groupie the sound mixer craves leaves with a star, so the mixer must, if he wants any loving that night, once again take himself in hand. In "You Love the Thunder," Browne forges a temporary relationship with a kindred spirit, only to realize "You can dream/But you can never go back the way you came." Browne looks back on his life in "Running on Empty," a pragmatic hobo's lullaby and the hymn of the Harvard cowboy. It's what daydreamers have nightmares about: Sixty-nine I was twenty-one and I called the road my own I don't even know when that road turned onto the road I'm on.... You know I don't even know what I'm hoping to find Running into the sun but I'm running behind. Best of all, there's a finale. "The Load-Out" is Jackson Browne's tribute to and summation of every aspect of live performance: the cheering audience out front, the band playing hard-nosed rock and roll, the backstage crew loading up the trucks -- and, always, the road to the next town. Packed to capacity with the data of first-rate reporting and with music so warm and soaring it belies the album's title, this song flows triumphantly into Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs' "Stay," where Browne tells us he doesn't ever want it to end. What I really like about Running on Empty probably has little to do with the generosity or genius of its dual concepts, with the songwriter's craftmanship skill, with how much I admire the music of David Lindley and the Section, but rather with Jackson Browne himself. In other words, as impressed as I am with Jackson Browne's art, I'm even more impressed with the humanity that shines through it. Maybe they're inseparable, but I doubt it.
From Robert Christgau's B+ review ( the best scire he would give any Jackson Browne album):
Out of the studio -- this was recorded on tour -- Jackson sounds relaxed verbally, vocally, even instrumentally. He cuts his own meager melodies with nice ones by Danny O'Keefe and Danny Kortchmar. He does a funny and far from uncritical version of "Cocaine" and a loving and far from unfunny version of "Stay." I consider this his most attractive album. But his devotees may consider the self-effacement a deprivation.
From Billboard:
Presented here are 10 new selections from this gifted singer/songwriter, all recorded live onstage, as well as in hotel rooms, from a recent cross-country tour. The material deals mainly with experiences of the brief road encounters, loneliness and roadies -- all done with Browne's evocative, haunting and penetrating insight. Music is a mix of soft rock ballads and pounding, uptempo tunes with the Section (Craig Doerge on keyboards, Danny Kortchmer on guitars, Russ Kunkel on drums, Leland Sklar on bass, as well as David Lindley on electric fiddle and lap steel) supporting Browne's piano. Best cuts: "Running On Empty," "The Road," "You Love The Thunder," "Love Needs A Heart," "The Load Out."
In November of 1976, Jackson Browne released The Pretender, his first album since his wife Phyllis Major, a beautiful but troubled model, committed suicide in March by taking overdose of barbiturates. Devastated, Browne spent much of the year caring for their son Ethan and inside Hollywood’s Sound Factory composing songs in this raw state of grief.
If you’re looking for songs about his wife, Browne says there is only one, “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate” with its lines “The times when we were happy/ Were the times we never tried” and “Oh God this is some shape I’m in/ When the only thing that makes me cry/ Is the kindness in my baby’s eye”. “Here Comes Those Tears Again” was actually written earlier with some lyrical help from Major’s mother.
Browne had no shortage of friends helping him through his grief and to record the album. David Crosby, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley and the ever present David Lindley were all on hand. Jon Landau produced. The highlight of the album for me is the title cut, a classic rock staple. While I can only pretend to play the happy idiot at odd intervals, I do board a train every morning to face my daily struggle for the legal tender.
Robert Christgau:
This is an impressive record, but a lot of the time I hate it; my grade is an average, not a judgement. Clearly Jon Landau has gotten more out of Browne's voice than anyone knew was there, and the production jolts Ol' Brown Eyes out of his languor again and again. But languor is Browne's best mask, and what's underneath isn't always so impressive. The shallowness of his kitschy doomsaying and sentimental sexism is well-known, but I'm disappointed as well in his depth of craft. How can apparently literate people mistake a received metaphor like "sleep's dark and silent gate" for interesting poetry or gush over a versifier capable of such rhyming-dictionary pairings as "pretender" and "ice cream vendor" (the colloquial term, JB, is "ice cream man")? Similar shortcomings flaw the production itself -- the low-register horns on "Daddy's Tune" complement its somber undertone perfectly, but when the high blare kicks in at the end the song degenerates into a Honda commercial. Indeed, at times I've wondered whether some of this isn't intended as parody, but a sense of humor has never been one of Browne's virtues. B
Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone :
Like most performers who transcend their genre, Jackson Browne often seems more a symbol than an artist. Singer/songwriter fans find in him the fulfillment of the style's promise: Browne's songs really do merge poetic vision and rock. But there are also those (like my friend who suggested that this albums's proper title is The Pretentious) who find the genre symptomatic of all of rock's current weaknesses. Browne is the epitome of everything they find disagreeable, both lyrically and musically.
It is odd that Browne is surrounded by such certainty of opinion, for ambivalence is the hallmark of his style. He has managed to make confusion an advantage, partly because he never hedges: he knows he doesn't know. The Pretender, the most complete development of his music, is bounded by contradiction. In "The Fuse," the record's first song, Browne professes: "There's a part of me.../Alive in eternity/That nothing can kill." In "The Pretender," the final number, he dismisses such spiritual hope: "I'm going to be a happy idiot/And struggle for the legal tender." Both of these statements are naive; for Browne they are equally true and false. So he admonishes his son, in "The Only Child": "Let your illusions last until they shatter."
If Browne has been heralded as a songwriter, this is due mostly to his lyric gift. The music itself has usually been ignored (at least by his admirers) and for a good reason. His three earlier albums are sluggish and cluttered, a hodgepodge of California studio effects, without a solid center.
The Pretender uses identical rudiments, but focuses them. The results are often moving and compelling. The album's spareness is accentuated by passages of almost dreamy lushness (the strings on "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate") and echoing vocals, which are a recurrent mannerism. Part of the improvement can be attributed to producer (and Rolling Stone collaborating editor) Jon Landau, although it is also indicative of the artist's increased maturity. Browne's voice is notoriously weak, for instance, but the strength of the rhythm section forces the signing past its limits. On "Sleep's Dark," "The Pretender" and "The Only Child," the vocals have a new passion, equal to the themes.
Still, much of this album is the mellow California rock of which the Eagles are the alternate prototype. If Browne's music has more backbone than the rest, the genre itself is not very challenging. There is a tendency to blandness, even in a song as strong as "Your Bright Baby Blues." So "The Pretender," which uses the same musical conventions to achieve the dramatic force of Rod Stewart's "The Killing of Georgie" or Bob Seger's "Night Moves," is all the more remarkable.
If Browne were a different sort of performer, one might think he's outgrowing his environment. But all his music, perhaps even the singing, is functional. The focus is always lyrical. The arrangements and performances are successful precisely to the degree that they bring our full attention to the emotions and ideas he articulates.
And it is Browne the lyricist who is often taken as a symbol, and most often misunderstood. He has been condemned as a rampant sexist, and with good reason: cowriting the Eagles' chauvinistic anthem, "Take It Easy," was inexcusable. But his romantic perspective is considerably more complicated. His affairs are never casual, not even when he's dismissive, as in "Linda Paloma." And in "Here Come Those Tears Again," he uses his confusion to greatest advantage. The role of the singer isn't clear: is he anticipating the return of a lover who has jilted him, or is he imagining the reaction of a lover he's just jilted? Perhaps both. For this song, at least, his vision of love turns on something rare: friendship.
Browne may also be the apocalyptic visionary, the questing hero in search of the Big Bang of final romance that his hardcore cult sees him as. But as someone who's always had reservations about admiring him, I find that Jackson Browne touches me most deeply when he's most specific, least cosmic. Writing about mortality and parental roles, he is as mature as any writer in rock, and more cogent than most. The metaphysics are there, all right, but it is the characters and experiences on which they are based that make them compelling.
The most striking songs on The Pretender are concerned with death and parenthood, subjects not necessarily unrelated (see the earlier "For a Dancer"). Often, his apocalyptic imagery is merely a way of getting at his feelings of mortality -- the crumbling towers of Babylon in "The Fuse" are as much about the inevitable erosion of time as anything else. And parenthood is seen as a symbol of the middle-class life he has experienced: it's both a joy and a trap. In "Daddy's Tune," he reaches out to his father, long ago alienated in order to share with him the turmoil of advising his son in "The Only Child." In a way, this is his ultimate dilemma -- to be a father, or to be a son. And his ultimate triumph is to realize and reconcile the parent and the child in each of us.
Such song-to-song concordances are not unusual. Lines and images overlap: the drum in "The FUse" and "Daddy's Tune," and the opening lines of "Your Bright Baby Blues," and "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate," which is about both the horror of a marriage gone bad and man at his most mortal: "The only thing that makes my cry/Is the kindness in my baby's eye." And all of these cross-references come rushing to a climax in "The Pretender."
"The Pretender" is a breakthrough. Browne has always had traces of cynicism in his writing, but about romance he has remained firm. Love can make a difference, all of his songs say. But "The Pretender" is a song about why even that won't work, in the long run. In its most shattering moment, the hero imagines what he and his dreamlover will do, if ever they manage to meet:
And then we'll put our dark glasses on
And we'll make love until our strength is gone
Daniel Blank, the irrational murderer of Lawrence Sanders' novel, The First Deadly Sin, also made love wearing sunglasses. This is what he found: "For me, it was a revelation, a door opening... I can never forget it. It was the most sexually exciting thing I'd ever done in my life. There was something primitive and exciting about it. But it shook me. I wanted to do it again." The next week, he begins strolling the streets, murdering strangers with an ice ax.
"The Pretender" cruises a similar street, but with a different aim. As a romantic he wants only love, but as a modern, middle-class southern Californian, he's unsure what to do with it. Clawing at the world, trying to make sense of something, one choice seems almost as good as another. The happy idiot who struggles for the legal tender is finally as free as the romantic fool who waits for love to change everything -- and both are equally trapped. Each has only one certainty: "Get up and do it again. Amen."
This is the prayer we are asked to say for the Pretender, "who started out so young and strong/Only to surrender." It is a prayer for Everyman, as much as any other prayer. What makes the song work, though, are its specifics, the way that even the junkman, pounding his fender, becomes a part of this cosmic cycle. The images are tied to a time and a place, as the best of any writer's work is -- and the horror is in just such detail: the house beside the freeway, the packed lunch, the work, the endless evenings. Getting up and doing it again, seen this way, is not so very mystical, but simply the way each of us -- even the artist -- lives his life.
Repeating this inhumane cycle, which defines humanity, we are left with very little. Perhaps only that particle: "Alive in eternity/That nothing can kill." Jackson Browne's contradictions, his ambivalence, are not resolved, but they are reconciled. One might say that this is the end of the hero's quest. But there is no end to searches such as this. They repeat themselves from generation to generation, year to year, day to day. Just as all of our illusions last, until they shatter.
1976 Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critics Poll
1. Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key of Life (Tamla) 292 (25)
2. Graham Parker and the Rumour: Heat Treatment (Mercury) 234 (22) 3. Jackson Browne: The Pretender (Asylum) 232 (22)
4. Graham Parker and the Rumour: Howlin' Wind (Mercury) 215 (19)
5. Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Kate and Anna McGarrigle (Warner Bros.) 208 (16)
6. Steely Dan: The Royal Scam (ABC) 182 (14)
7. Joni Mitchell: Hejira (Asylum) 169 (16)
8. Ramones: Ramones (Sire) 153 (15)
9. Rod Stewart: A Night on the Town (Warner Bros.) 150 (15)
10. Blue Oyster Cult: Agents of Fortune (Columbia)
“I grew up in the apricot orchards that later became known as Silicon Valley, and was lucky enough to have my young spirit infused with the social and artistic revolution of the day called rock and roll. It has never left me.”
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was in his mid teens when most of his top ten albums were released. That is a sweet spot for most of us. Jobs was obsessed with Dylan, collecting hundreds of hours of bootlegged shows from 65 and 66. ( His fave Dylan song: "One Too Many Mornings"from The Times They Are A-Changin) By the time Some Girls came out in 1978, Jobs was two years into Apple and probably far too busy to listen to a lot of new music with the same passions he had in his teens.
1.Bob Dylan : Highway 61 Revisited
2. Cat Stevens : Tea for the Tillerman
3. The Grateful Dead : American Beauty
4. Glenn Gould : Bach -The Goldberg Variations
5. Jackson Browne : Late for the Sky
6. John Lennon : Imagine
7. Miles Davis : Kind of Blue
8. Peter Paul and Mary : Around the Campfire
9 Rolling Stones : Some Girls
The young man fumbling his way through love and life has long been a great source of inspiration for books and movies. Who can't identify with that image at any age? On Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky, released in September of 1974, the 26-year old artist shares his own stumbles through heartaches of various stripes.And it's a winner.
If Joni Mitchell's Blue was the great consoling friend for women in the 1970's, Late for the Sky is the earnest male friend who bought the next round and hopes his tales of woe will provide you with hard-earned wisdom
This is a "grower". Like the best albums, Late for the Sky gets better with repeated listens. The music gets better and so do the lyrics. While the title cut and "Fountain of Sorrow" ( supposedly about a short-lived love affair with Joni Mitchell) are the best known tracks, "Farther On" might him home the hardest.
In my early years I hid my tears, and passed my days alone Adrift on an ocean of loneliness my dreams like nets were thrown To catch the love that I'd heard of in books and films and songs Now there's a world of illusion and fantasy in the place where the real world belongs Still I look for the beauty in songs To fill my head and lead me on Though my dreams have come up torn and empty As many times as love has come and gone
In your teens and twenties, every relationship has an epic quality. THIS is the stuff of great literature, plays and films.With enough experience, you realize the ideals that you've established are unrealistic and that with time, she won't be who you think she is...and you won't be who she thinks you are. The relationship enters Phase 2 where the drop out rate is greatest.
Life is full of heartache and Jackson Browne would know more than his fair share. But on this singular album, he eloquently, and with perfect enunciation, provides comfort for millions because he's been there too.
In October of 1973, Jackson Browne released his second album, For Everyman, a collection of songs old and new, recorded with some of the West Coast's most talented musicians including David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Elton John ( who, as "Rockaday Johnnie", played piano on the single "Redneck Friend").
Among the older songs is "These Days", first recorded by Nico , then Tom Rush, then The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Gregg Allman. It was Allman's version that inspired Browne to slow down the song and let the emotion , and the extraordinary slide guitar of David Lindley, carry the tune.
For Everyman received all kinds of well deserved critical praise. If you believe author Mark Bego 's Jackson Browne: His Life and Music a lot of the songs are more sexual in nature than you'd guess ...even after years of listening to the record. "Redneck Friend" is apparently Browne's nickname for his penis. (" Honey let me introduce you to my red neck friend") "The Times You've Come", sung with Bonnie Raitt, has a line about lying" in the ruins of our pleasure". And "Ready or Not" is the autobiographical tale of his meeting, defending and impregnating Phyllis Major, the baby who's feeling funny in the morning and having trouble getting into her jeans.
The Allman Brothers were working on their first #1 record Brothers and Sisters at the same time Gregory ( as his friends call Mr Allman) was cutting Laid Back, his first solo album with Johnny Sandlin producing. In his autobiography, My Cross to Bear, Allman writes
"I told him that I wanted it to sound real swampy, with the image of moss hanging off the trees, alligators and fog, darkness, witches, and shit. That's what I told Johnny, and we took it to the swamp, man."
With Scott Boyer on steel guitar and Allman supplying his own harmonies, this version of "These Days" is more soulful and darker than Browne's. After all, the depths of despair Allman had experienced by the time he recorded the song (with the deaths of brother Duane and bassists Barry Oakley) was deeper than Browne had so far experienced.( Though God know Browne would have his share)
Allman makes one lyrical change at the end of the tune: from
Don't confront me with my failures/ I had not forgotten them
to
Please don't confront me with my failures/.I'm aware of them.
Allman was still experiencing his pain...despite the presence of new wife Janice Blair ( seen below on the Laid Back sleeve)
Jackson Browne claims he wrote the song when he was 16 years old. He would have been just 19 when the Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico recorded the song for her first solo album, Chelsea Girl, in early 1967.
It is her version that appeared in the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums.
Long Island hard rockers Blue Oyster Cult made their debut in January of 1972 with what Rolling Stone critic Lester Bangs called an "authentic boogie beast". To sell the record, BOC went on one tour that made sense: opening for Alice Cooper ...and another that didn't: with Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Though he was still in his early twenties when this album was released, Jackson Browne had already written songs for The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Tom Rush and Linda Ronstadt and apparently had an affair with Nico, a woman ten years his senior. "Doctor My Eyes" was his highest charting single until 1982's "Somebody's Baby" from the Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack.
Deadheads did not have to settle for the Grateful Dead's mediocre Europe '72 album. The smart ones picked up Garcia ( released 40 years ago this month) featuring Jerry playing everything but drums. Garcia was a man who really knew how to play with himself. ( what?) This is a great record, with lyrics from Robert Hunter. No wonder several of the songs wound up in the Dead repertoire.
