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a biography
Reviewer:
Greenway88
It’s
tempting to say that Jackson Browne has had Bob Dylan’s career
inside out: He began as the most personal of songwriters and became
intensely interested in the politics and society of his times.
No one has written more eloquently of love lost and won, the perils
and pleasures of the search for it, and few have been better rewarded
with critical acclaim and commercial success. Yet, at the height
of his fame as a romantic confessional balladeer, Jackson Browne
did the absolutely unexpected. Rather than turning his back on
the world with its “slow parade of fears,” while waiting “to awaken
from this dream” and “this feeling that it’s later than it seems,”
he has refused to be “afraid to live the life I sing about in
song,” and steadily worked to integrate his personal vision, which
no artist could abandon, with a vision of humanity and justice.
Yet all the quotes in the paragraph above come not from the years
of Browne’s direct social activism but from two of the first songs
he ever wrote: “Doctor My Eyes” and “These Days.” In this way,
he is really more like Dylan than unlike him—and I mean that as
the highest kind of compliment—in the way that his vision has
always been integrated, able to see the world in a teardrop, even
if it’s trickling down his own face.
It’s inevitable to write about Jackson Browne in terms of his
lyrics but that’s because his sense of language is itself so musical—the
way lines twist and turn through unlikely metric shapes is one
constant of his work from his debut album, Jackson Browne, through
to his mid-’90s masterpiece, I’m Alive. The settings he uses range
from the near-country rock of the early years, a sound reminiscent
of his allies, the Eagles, through the straight-ahead rock’n’roll
of Pretender, Running on Empty, and their late ’70s and early
’80s successors, his period of greatest popularity, to the more
eclectic material, including hints of the Caribbean, on his politicized
albums of the mid- through late-’80s. His records demand attention
in a way that most contemporary records do not, and their musical
rewards are not always obvious—Ahmet Ertgun of Atlanta Records
famously couldn’t hear it at all, even when David Geffen implored
him to sign Browne because “there was a fortune to be made.” “You
start a label,” Ahmet said, “you make the fortune.” So Geffen
started Asylum Records and he not only made a fortune, his label,
with Browne and the Eagles, became the center of California rock
in the seventies.
Although Jackson has written some of the most profound songs of
our time—including all those already mentioned, “Fountain of Sorrow,”
“For a Dancer,” “Late for the Sky,” “Lawyers in Love,” “Before
the Deluge,” and more—it’s also inevitable to talk about him in
terms of his albums. Unlike almost any other star still recording
today—Don Henley and Bruce Springsteen are probably the most obvious
exceptions—Browne’s albums consist of suites of songs, each of
which makes a statement that adds up to a greater whole. This
sense of the wholeness that emerges from lovingly detailed individual
pieces is exactly what links his artistic vision to his political
idealism, just as the sense of potential introspective apocalypse
that drives early albums like For Everyman and Late for the Sky
leads directly to the courage it took to challenge the rightward
drift of America’s Reagan years, its secret wars in Central America,
the entire apparatus of deceit that lies at the core of his culture’s
everyday public life.
If you look at it this way, the central song of Browne’s career
may well be “The Pretender,” the title track of his 1976 album.
It’s arguably not the greatest song he’s ever written, but it
probably gets closer to the core of his vision than any other.
And it was in the key of his transition from looking at the world
through eyes tinged with fear about his own life to the more open
embrace of the world he was able to achieve over the next decade.
With someone so identified with the confessional lyric, it’s important
to note that “The Pretender” is not Jackson Browne, although there’s
some Jackson Browne in it—but then, there is probably no one who
lived through the 70s in America who could completely deny that
within them there’s a piece of this character, with his blasted
ideals and devotion to the false facade that’s all that holds
him together psychologically. Jackson really sees The Pretender
from a distance, and in a somewhat comical light. (Another problem
with being stereotyped as a confessional writer is that your sense
of humor sometimes goes right past people. But who else in his
generation has written songs as funny as “Redneck Friend,” “Ready
or Not,” “Rosie,” “My Problem is You” and, above all, “Lawyers
in Love”?) In its way, “The Pretender” portrays the life and culture
Jackson escaped when he left stultifyingly conservative Orange
County to go up the road to Hollywood as a teenager: thus the
veterans dreaming at the traffic light, the children waiting for
the ice cream truck, here in the rockribbed heartland of the American
dream “where the ads take aim and lay their claim / To the heart
and soul of the spender.” For this guy to declare himself a “happy
idiot” is to restate what’s obvious in every line of the song.
Yet Jackson can’t view the scene with contempt. He knows what’s
missing here—it’s what he’s looked for in every song he’s written
since he blew out of Orange County. It’s expressed in the last
lines of the final verse: “True love could have been a contender
/ Are you there? / Say a prayer for the Pretender.” He sings this
with immense personal passion, as if he can feel the bullshit
he thought he had escaped creeping up Highway 101 to take over
the sanctuary he and his comrades thought they had created. In
fact, his very next record release after the The Pretender was
Running on Empty, which features he and his friends in flight,
on 101 and in a dozen other ways: “I look around for the friends
I used to turn to pull me through / Looking into their eyes I
see them running too.”
These two songs encapsulate the crisis that confronted the California
soft-rock stars as the 80s developed their sometimes sinister
cast and a crass materialism that made the 70s seem like an innocent
paradise in contrast. Reagan, and what he represented, transformed
the world in which these artists and their music had developed.
There was no longer the slack in the system for purely personal
work—something was dying, while something else slouched into existence.
Browne may have tried to be a Hold Out on his 1980 album, but
his albums of the mid-80s, Lawyers in Love, Lives in the Balance
and World in Motion took on an angry, oppositional cast, best
portrayed, perhaps, in the impassioned “Lives in the Balance,”
though there’s a lot to be said for the satirism of “Lawyers”
where the Reaganite obsession with Russia is satisfied by the
disappearance of the Russian people from the face of the earth.
Browne helped organize antinuclear rallies; he visited Nicaragua
to help publicize the way the United States was subverting the
revolution there, by staging the covert war later known as Contragate.
The albums he made in these years are more mixed in their accomplishments,
and had fewer hit singles than Browne’s early works, but then
that figures: They are about struggle, about lives being torn
apart by external forces too great for the greatest inner strength
to survive. Yet within each of them, Jackson Browne finds a moment
of peace and it is always discovered by pausing long enough to
acknowledge love: “Tender is the Night” and “For a Rocker” (It
was written for James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders), “In the
Shape of a Heart,” “Chasing You Into the Light.” From 1989 to
1993, Browne made no albums. When he returned with I’m Alive,
the focus had again turned inward, to an exploration of love lost,
a direct reflection of his highly publicized (and grievously misreported)
breakup with his longtime lover, Daryl Hannah. Opening with the
title track, a declaration of survival wrenched from a heart bereft
(“I thought that it would kill me / But I’m alive!” he shouts
while standing six inches from the trucks roaring by on 101),
yet set to a backbeat with a hint of reggae, the album peaks with
one of the most beautiful songs Browne—or anyone—has ever written.
“And the heavens were rolling Like a wheel on a track And our
sky was unfolding And it’ll never fold back Sky blue and black.”
This is one time Jackson Browne did his words profound justice
as a singer—it’s simply a great piece of singing, stark, angry,
pained and yet aching more than anything else with love that’s
proven yet again to be insufficient to hold a life together. The
question while this music and the story unfold is not how the
singer will survive—he’s already told us that—but how the listener
will keep his composure long enough to hear it through.
Since then, Browne’s only album has been Looking East, which revisits
much of the same emotional and musical territory as I’m Alive.
Yet it also begins to restore a concern with the rest of humanity,
as well. It begins “standing in the ocean... at the edge of my
country, my back to the sea, looking east... On the edge of my
country, I pray for the ones with the least.” And it ends with
“It is One,” that takes a look at the situation from the vantage
point of a man shot into outer space, from where one can see how
all things are united but also a lonely man, this time in Africa,
who’s also shot but this time, shot down into the earth—gunned
down just for daring to dream.
“It’s not a world of our own choosing / We don’t decide where
we are born,” Browne declares. “This life is a battleground between
right and wrong / One way or another we are torn.” The beat is
reggae; it feels as if the singer has turned around from the album's
beginning, standing now to face the sun. But where he turns his
gaze is less important than that he's still singing, still doing
his best to tell the truth and chew up the lies, to give us the
secrets he’s paid so much to learn. To remind us to love. He succeeds.
You can feel it in your heart.
Copyright 1998, Dave Marsh
SOURCE:
Jackson
Browne.com
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