Jackson Browne - C or D?

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.)

O yeah mad love for David Lindley, the eclectic multi-instrumentalist sideman with the ridiculous hair and sideburns who plays with Jackson Browne.

Also for Mark Stewart, the eclectic multi-instrumentalist sideman with ridiculous hair and sideburns who plays with Paul Simon.

For a while I thought there was only one eclectic multi-instrumentalist sideman with ridiculous hair and sideburns who plays live with various well-known folk-rock singer-songwriters. Turns out there were, and are, at least two.

Also for Mark Stewart, the eclectic multi-instrumentalist sideman with ridiculous hair and sideburns who plays with Paul Simon.

LOL, I do not know the name, but I caught Simon's last show and know exactly who you're talking about.

(last tour stop that is)

This was kind of the hit or "hit" off that David Lindley album iirc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URm7Ze9a56o

Here is an almost ten minute long live version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAbbgSKUZB4

Lindley was also in the great (American vs. the British or Mexican) psyche band Kaleidoscope pre-Browne and solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbRcURfROJY

Oh yeah, almost forgot about that.

Yeahhh Kaleidoscope (US) vs Kaleidoscope (UK) vs Kaleidoscope (MX)

...and he's Linda Ronstadt's cousin!

Lindley is great, he put out some “official bootlegs” of live acoustic shows in the 90s that were fun

https://www.discogs.com/master/view/549049

https://www.discogs.com/master/view/549044

& Kaleidoscope were longtime uncredited backing band on Leonard Cohen's debut lp.
Think that only came out over last few years.

Oh yeah there's some pretty great footage of Lindley backing Terry Reid on the Glastonbury Fayre film.
Can't link to it while typing on my phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElzhsMCVlkQ
is the footage I'm familiar with from the Nicholas Roeg film

Chunks (maybe adding up to most/all) of Browne's Newport Folk 2012 set are on YouTube, and his Tiny Desk Concert is on npr.org.

What got me into him, killer cover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HzeX_kh9lU

Also!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx5NkGZr1iQ

not bad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JfWYHAIp-g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qlPrrVnPbs

Bonnie Raitt's covers are usually great. (FWIW, her "My Opening Farewell" on the 1995 Road Tested is better sung than the studio version she did almost 20 years earlier.) But generally she's a much better interpreter than Linda Ronstadt. I love Heart Like a Wheel but a lot of times her covers seem completely misguided - even when arranged tastefully, she oversings them like a popped balloon that's been inflated too much.

Nico's "These Days" the earliest release and still my fave rave version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhr2MlQd7i0

Elton John getting his inner-Jerry Lee Lewis on in the background of "Red Neck Friend" is hitting all the spots this evening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPi_ksFoczI

Oh yeah, used to hear that on Collegetown radio quite a bit, thanks.

Bonnie Raitt's covers are usually great. (FWIW, her "My Opening Farewell" on the 1995 Road Tested is better sung than the studio version she did almost 20 years earlier.)
Thanx 4 tip, birdistheword!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6AgpzsnHo8

Man, I just don't get this guy. Yeah, there are a handful of songs I enjoy, and Late for the Sky is a good mood piece. But he doesn't have the teeth of Warren Zevon, or the grand ambition of Springsteen, or even the gross cynicism/careerism of the Eagles. More than anything else, he just always sounds so bored of himself.

Like, this song was reportedly written for James Honeyman-Scott, but it's such a shameless Springsteen rip that gloms onto his most generic qualities (let alone as lazy tribute a guitarist as special as James Honeyman-Scott). In fact, at first I thought it was a parody, a la "Tweeter and the Monkey Man."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGxZplDXhQU

FWIW, when I think about what I like best about his work, it's rarely something I'd equate with any of those three. In fact, as you've pointed out with "For a Rocker," I'd say his work became much less distinctive when it seemed like he was under Springsteen's influence. (Also when I compare his version of "Take It Easy" with the Eagles', the subtle differences really emphasize what I don't like about the band and what I do like about Browne.)

Late for the Sky may be the only album I genuinely love (and without qualification), but there's probably 20, maybe even 30 tracks beyond that album that I do enjoy, mostly from the '70s.

The only two tracks I like from Lawyers in Love is the title track (at least I find it amusing) and "Tender Is the Night."

Actually, here's a homemade comp I have on the shelf (lots of overlap with his official The Very Best of but tweaked a bit for my own purposes) - I basically listen to this or Late for the Sky:

This Side Of Paradise • The Best Of Jackson Browne (1972-1989)

Disc One
1 Jamaica Say You Will 03:24
2 Song For Adam 05:23
3 Doctor My Eyes 03:15
4 Under The Falling Sky 04:09
5 Rock Me On The Water 04:13
6 My Opening Farewell 04:44
7 Take It Easy 03:35
8 I Thought I Was A Child 03:45
9 These Days 04:47
10 Redneck Friend 03:59
11 Ready Or Not 03:35
12 For Everyman 05:58
13 Late For The Sky 05:44
14 Fountain Of Sorrow 06:54
15 The Late Show 05:14
16 For A Dancer 04:49
17 Before The Deluge 06:21

Disc Two
1 Your Bright Baby Blues 06:06
2 Here Come Those Tears Again 03:40
3 The Pretender 05:53
4 Running On Empty 05:03
5 Rosie 03:41
6 You Love The Thunder 03:55
7 Cocaine 04:56
8 The Load Out 05:35
9 Stay 03:22
10 That Girl Could Sing 04:37
11 Boulevard 03:22
12 Call It A Loan 04:50
13 Somebody's Baby 04:23
14 Lawyers In Love 04:21
15 Tender Is The Night 04:55
16 In The Shape Of A Heart 05:40
17 I Am A Patriot 04:04

I'll have to check some of those songs out. Many of them I bet I've heard, but Jackson Browne just evaporates out of my brain.

I should add, if you like Bonnie Raitt, her covers are usually better than Browne's originals. Raitt's "Under the Falling Sky" completely smokes Browne's.

i don’t fw jackson browne much but late for the sky is so much more than a mood piece. the duet between browne’s vocal and lindley’s guitar is straight-up sublime.

those notes aren’t hard to play but I’ve been chasing the vibe for years, and not to get all TGP but if I could cop just one recorded gtr tone, that would be it.