Jackson Browne - C or D?

Prescient!

Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capital
The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will
Now we've got all this room
We've even got the moon
And I hear the USSR will be open soon
As vacation land for lawyers in love

I was about to say!

this morning's Times:

"When Professor Jackson-Brown began teaching in the 1990s, most students respected her authority. But in recent years, that deference has waned (she blames the informality of social media). “I go out of my way now to not give them access to my first name,” she said. “On every syllabus, it states clearly: ‘Please address me as Professor Jackson-Brown.’ ”"

Late For Class

I'll never love him, but I came up with a decent list, I think.

Running on empty is still getting AirPlay somehow and it’s the sound of 70s exhaustion. I’m sitting in a bar in ‘76 and yeah, I’m just gonna give up ok

Lindley’s amazing on it tho

Something Fine is a gorgeous wistful tune from his first disc.

Working with musicians from Haiti for his new album, according to Afropop Worldwide!

I do my best.

p sure “I’m Alive” was a single, no?

Tested positive :(

mild symptoms! he did a really wonderful interview with rolling stone

Agreed. Rather charming and chipper.

FWIW:

https://t.co/evhB3Tm5aS pic.twitter.com/goLjDSvgpJ

— Jackson Browne (@SongsofJBrowne) March 25, 2020

Thankfully the symptoms are very mild. If it's been this long, he's probably close to a full recovery, but he makes an excellent point about how easily it has and will spread in group settings in close quarters, even when individuals are exercising a lot of caution like swabbing mics and avoiding physical contact like handshakes.

Re: his music, first three albums have his best songwriting. The following two albums have better singing and arguably a better sound/production. After that, the albums get really spotty, but the singles are still generally good, all the way up to "The Shape of a Heart" and Little Steven's "I Am a Patriot" (which lyrically is corny, but Browne sings it with great conviction). Still wrote the occasional gem after that, like "Sky Blue and Black."

Beginning with 'Running on Empty' (where much of the material was co-written or written by someone else), his strengths as a performer (and by extension an interpreter) really began to show while his songwriting became more inconsistent and weaker.

booming and largely accurate post. I think the super-political stuff of the 80s has sometimes aged well -- and his gift for delivering JUST the right vocal take on even a middling song ("I'm the Cat") ascended into some ascended-master level stuff

The Fuse is a killer opener on pretender. v. Springsteen.

that album as a whole is maybe a little messy, but Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate is also up there with his very best...(and saddest by far)

Before The Deluge is really something

I heard it for the first time last year on Springsteen's radio show, back when his playlists were specifically pandemic-themed, and because I first encountered it in that context, it's now permanently associated in my mind with pandemic literature. I'd love to hear it played over the credits of a film adaptation of Station Eleven.

Those opening lines - "Some of them were dreamers, and some of them were fools/ making plans and thinking of the future" - remind me of this passage from the beginning of The Plague: "Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything was still possible for them, which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free as long as there are pestilences."

omg

love that passage of the plague and now it will be permanently associated with one of my favorite jackson browne songs

I like the idea of Before the Deluge, but JB's melody, singing and arrangement are so colourless that the song vanishes.

Did I only imagine that there was a "Running on Empty" vs. "Against the Wind" TS?

I can't find the discussion despite trying various Search stratagems.

Feels like there was some unpacking of a specific thematic strain of Boomer nostalgia and vague regret, where did things go wrong, etc.

Compare: "I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through" vs. "Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends."

Or maybe was it vs. "Night Moves"?

Or perhaps I am imagining a thread that could have existed but didn't.

I really love Late for the Sky. He really works the water motif throughout the album, but not too much and it never gets academic or schematic. I really think it's the apex of his songwriting, and after an impressive development across those first three LP's, he became much spottier as a songwriter. To be fair, the next two albums were better-made - his singing grew more confident, the bands sounded muscular, and the production was more polished - but lyrically The Pretender had quite a few lapses that he wasn't prone to before, and there was a lot of outside help on Running on Empty (i.e. co-writers and covers).

Paul Nelson really sold me on those early albums. He loved Browne just as much as the New York Dolls, but he lamented that it was very difficult getting peers to see the virtues of both. Everyone he preached to typically fell on one side or the other.

Greil Marcus, Ira Robbins and I think Robert Christgau have been very vocal about their distaste for the soft, early '70s SoCal sound. Marcus associates it with Browne's label, Asylum Records ("a famous home for self-pitying narcissists"). I'm not in disagreement - I'm no fan of the Eagles or most of Ronstadt's work among many others. The most common remarks I see from Browne's detractors are reflective of that entire scene, so I can't say their observations are wrong. But the handful of records I like most - those first three LP's, Ronstadt's Heart Like a Wheel, Warren Zevon's first LP - do sound like great records to me without sounding like they came from anywhere else, and I think it ultimately comes down to the songwriting and the performances. An old Eagles record will sound antiseptic and gutless to me, but Late for the Sky never felt that way. With Browne's early records, I find myself laser focused on his voice and words, and on something like Late for the Sky I'm completely drawn in. If I have to sit through an Eagles song, it's like the opposite experience, where the words are so off-putting I'll end up focusing on something else just to make it tolerable.

"Take It Easy" is famously shared by both artists. Browne wrote most of the lyrics while Frey wrote a verse that was inspired by one of Browne's experiences - it's the one about the girl checking him out, and even though it's Browne's experience, he never made the choice to put it in, it was Frey who was inspired to do so. I think that says a lot, but a more telling moment is the line "I'm lookin' for a lover who won't blow my cover / she's SOOOO hard to find." That's the Eagles version, and every time I hear Frey singing that, I feel like rolling my eyes. Browne tweaks it to "she's just a little hard to find," and on top of that, he doesn't sound like an asshole when he sings it (i.e. he doesn't turn it into a whining, self-entitled complaint). The Eagles may have better voices, but I think Browne's a much more palatable interpreter.

That brings up the other common complaint - those early records have a plainness that puts detractors off, and I guess colorless is not a wrong way of putting it. But ordinary feels more apt to me, and not in a way that's synonymous with colorless - for me it actually winds up working in favor of the songs, making them equally complicated and universal.

I want to see this documentary:
https://paulnelsonfilm.com/trailer

He was pretty remarkable. I think he pretty much lost any future in the music business when he went to the mat for the New York Dolls, but I can't think of a better way of burning your bridges. (The "demos" he produced are still my favorite New York Dolls recordings.)

I find the received wisdom about this era by Robbins, Marcus, Christgau, etc. so tedious that I had to play the other HLAW and SD dreams albums by Ronstandt for weeks to clear my brain of the doctrinal obstinance.

John Rockwell was the outlier on that front, iirc.

Paul Nelson also put together one of my faves of and in the 70s, the Velvet Underground's 1969 Live In Texas, which extended my sense of them from the original studio albums, incl. "roots" in sometimes bluesy 50s-early 60s rock, prev unheard by me except in Cale's Tex-Mexoid organ solo in "Sister Ray" and the backing track to his reading of "The Gift" (later legit-released as the stand-alone instrumental "Booker T")--fascinated by the way they Velvetized this inflection, befre Cramps and Gun Club (hearing all the jams later, I thought Nelson chose pretty well from those tapes)(this was the 2-LP, later on 2 sep CDs).
In the same era, he astutely assembled Sir Douglas Quintet's Rough Edges, really essential for headz (much later, some of these tracks were breadcrumb/catnip bonus tracks across import reissues, also on The Complete Mercury Recordings OOP CD box. but MP3-only reissue is in Amazon Digital Music Store.

He refused to choose between Browne and the Dolls, unusual at the time, it seemed.
Was not particularly interested in Patti Smith or any other female artist, far as I recall. Do recall that he always seemed to be into heroes, esp. Browne and Young and some West Coast--associated writers like Ross Macdonald---very compatible w Rolling Stone for a while, dunno what their falling out or his leaving the media was all about, although xgau's profile, prob still on his site, seemed pretty plausible.

Come to think of it, he was probably struck by the way the Dolls used oldies too.

And here's what he said in RS when The Ramones came out:
Ramones
By PAUL NELSON

If today’s Rolling Stone were the Cahiers du Cinema of the late Fifties, a band of outsiders as deliberately crude and basic as the Ramones would be granted instant auteur status as fast as one could say “Edgar G. Ulmer.” Their musique maudite — 14 rock & roll songs exploding like time bombs in the space of 29 breathless minutes and produced on a Republic-Monogram budget of $6400 — would be compared with the mise en scene of, say, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly or, better yet, Samuel Fuller’s delirious Underworld U.S.A.

And such comparisons would not be specious. The next paragraph is an almost literal transcription of something the American auteurist, Andrew Sarris, wrote about Fuller in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. I’ve just changed the names and a few terms.

The Ramones are authentic American primitives whose work has to be heard to be understood. Heard, not read about or synopsized. Their first album, Ramones, is constructed almost entirely of rhythm tracks of an exhilarating intensity rock & roll has not experienced since its earliest days. The Ramones’ lyrics are so compressed that there is no room for even one establishing atmosphere verse or one dramatically irrelevant guitar solo in which the musicians could suggest an everyday existence…. The Ramones’ ideas are undoubtedly too broad and oversimplified for any serious analysis, but it is the artistic force with which their ideas are expressed that makes their music so fascinating to critics who can rise above their aesthetic prejudices…. The Ramones’ perversity and peculiarly Old Testament view of retribution carry the day…. It is time popular music followed the other arts in honoring its primitives. The Ramones belong to rock & roll, and not to rock and avant-garde musical trends.

How the present will treat the Ramones, proponents of the same Manhattan musical minimalism as the New York Dolls who preceded them, remains to be seen. Thus far, punk rock’s archetypal concept of an idealized Top 40 music — the songs stripped down like old Fords, then souped up for speed — has unintentionally provoked more primal anger from than precipitant access to the nation’s teenagers, and the godheads of AM radio don’t seem to be listening at all. Why? Do you have to be over 21 to like this stuff? Doesn’t “Blitzkrieg Bop” or the absolutely wonderful “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” mean anything to anyone but an analytical intellectual? Until now, apparently not.

Where’s your sense of humor and adventure, America? In rock & roll and matters of the heart, we should all hang on to a little amateurism. Let’s hope these guys sell more records than Elton John has pennies. If not, shoot the piano player. And throw in Paul McCartney to boot.

the way the Dolls used oldies

Cf.: David Johansen covering "Build Me Up Buttercup," "Reach Out (I'll Be There," and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" on Live It Up

He refused to choose between Browne and the Dolls, unusual at the time, it seemed.

Yeah, I was stunned to hear him talk about that. Obviously they're very different in a lot of ways (or rather anything related to punk and "singer-songwriters," a misleading genre label I never liked), but across the '90s and '00s, there was no shortage of good artists drawing inspiration from both. It didn't seem the least bit surprising when I came across a Paul Westerberg bootleg where he sang "These Days" without a drop of irony.

And Nico's version has always blown me away---hers was the first release, far as I know (backwhen he was her jailbait bf)
Re Dolls' oldies, was thinking of "Stranded In The Jungle," about which we had quite a lively discussion on some thread---also "Showdown," "Pills," pron some others, blending with and inspiring originals.

Well maybe not jailbait, but v young (according to something long ago in Goldmine---an epic trek into the early daze of BOC and Soft White Underbelly etc---Meltzer and classmates. one of whom was from Cali. seized control or some of it of the campus concert committee, so first East Coast shows of several Frisco bands and the Orange County Three, Buckley, Browne, and Steve Noonan---and Browne stayed around and hung out with Meltzer, Pearlman, and so on, eventually meeting Nico (I think that was it).

(They may have been advertised as the Orange County Three, but sep sets on the same bill, I believe.)

Oh yeah, here's the 1968 Cheetah Magazine consideration of thee so-called Orange County Three:
http://galacticramble.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-orange-county-three.html

Cover model Michael J. Pollard!

Second two-page spread of that piece eerily foreshadows Yacht Rock

birdistheword, I do find that attribute (that I might call plain-spokenness) in some of Browne's work, like The Only Child on The Pretender.

I've wanted to read the Paul Nelson compilation/biography, but haven't encountered it yet.

XP ...and the final paragraphs provide a harbinger of Browne's asshole friends.

Ah, okay, here's Noonan, and some stuff about the "Three"'s origins, in Unterberger's liner notes for reissue of s/t debut: he and their high school buddy Greg Copeland wrote "Buy For Me The Rain," Top 40 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band hit. also, Noonan, very extensively quoted here, says that he and Browne wrote things first recorded by Tom Rush etc., attributed to JB only, and he mentions "The Fairest of the Seasons," which I know is on the Nico LP and I think is the one w typo, "Browne-Copland,"confusing me until I heard of Greg Copeland: with all them strings and the melodee, it had me wondering if based on something by Aaron C. Noonan mentions seeing boy Browne as accompanist for Nico and El Cohen (singing together, I hope): http://www.richieunterberger.com/noonan.html

Here is Xgau writeup on Paul Nelson- and Ellen Willis! https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bn/2011-11.php

Jackson Browne gets a back-handed swipe.

He was always kinda-sorta on Browne, going by his Consumer Guide takes over the decades. Would still kinda like to hear this, speaking again of Greg Copeland:
Revenge Will Come [Geffen, 1982]
Producer Jackson Browne has gone after absolutely predictable midtempo studio rock, but with a tough edge that's augmented by Copeland, who sounds like (of all things) Jackson Browne with a tough edge. Propitious--if Copeland can move his mentor's personalist millenarianism far enough left to write protest lyrics that surrender neither psychological dimension nor American mythos, I bet other young rock mainstreamers are thinking the same way. B- He also liked some of Browne's 80s protest lyrics, so Copeland did turn out to be a good influence maybe.

Maybe they wrote together again? When Browne eventually did get back into a lot of co-writing.

“Together Again”? Buck Owens?

I had to double check because I was pretty sure Christgau wasn't much of a fan of any Jackson Browne album (except maybe Running on Empty), but it looks like he does have some nice things to say about the '80s political albums. I have a lot of admiration for Browne's activism, but I don't think he's recorded a whole lot of good protest music. Off the top of my head, the best ones I've heard him do were covers, the multi-artist "Sun City" single and the "Lawyers in Love" single which feels a bit like an outlier for being a satire. Maybe it's not something that clicks with him musically, who knows.

Also, while looking him up in CG, I forgot about his great guitarist David Lindley. He actually put out an acclaimed album in 1981 called El Rayo-X (Christgau gave it a B+, Marcus put it on his top ten of the year.) Looks like a Ry Cooder-type project, with some interesting, humorous covers. Will have to check it out, but regardless Lindley is probably the most essential component of Browne's best recordings.

(I see Horace Mann mentioned this upthread way back in 2004: I'll give him props for producing David Lindley's awesome El Rayo-X and providing good back-ups thereon.)