JACKSON BROWNE

Jackson Browne is an L.A. guy who puts out music with deep philosophical content and soft-rock orchestrations (in a wide variety of styles), often with an overproduced electronic jive that grates a bit. He hangs with David Crosby and Bonnie Raitt and that LA soft-rock bunch. He's one of the lead artists for a significant tradition of rock-star social activism, most prominently visiting Nicaragua during the Sandinista era of the 1980s. He's not afraid to sing about politics in earnest tones, which he started to do during the '80s with Lives In The Balance, and this tendency is sometimes what gets him in trouble with critics I don't know what their problem is -- maybe they don't like the tunes that go along with the politics, or they disagree and don't want to say it in so many words, or whatever.

I first heard this stuff checking a used vinyl record of The Pretender out of the L.A. County library system, I thought the title track was great but not really caring for the rest of the album. About ten years later I bought Lives In The Balance while trying to survive in Sacramento CA -- it was a fun listen, some of the album kind of hard to swallow though, but it didn't bring much solace to my existence as it was, back then.

Nowadays I think that Jackson Browne is a key piece in the puzzle of what Los Angeles is. The difficult thing to understand about LA is how people like this guy could exist there and indeed be a product of the area itself -- for those of you who have never set foot in southern California, it is this vast urban jungle of individualistic survival and commercialized entertainment, a privatized suburban concrete jungle of working-class humanity as it is ruled by the culture industry and regulated by a vast network of roads and freeways and businesses in strip-malls. The "inner city" out here is totally dwarfed by the suburban sprawl, all the way from Thousand Oaks in the west to Yucaipa in the east and down to San Clemente in the south, it's something to see in aerial photography, or simply go into the hills or mountains above the vast zoo of human activity and stare at it all, its beehive of cars and trucks on freeways extending to the horizons by day, its panoply of lights consuming the globe's fossil fuel reserves by night.

Jackson Browne, OTOH, puts on this act of being a sensitive guy (and what's more, he backs it up with action, he IS a sensitive guy), while at the same time singing about what it's like to care about people within that context. The significant question that pops up in my reading of Browne's lyrics is this: what's there to be sensitive about, in southern California? Why care so deeply? Everyone's got their business, here, why even bother, why not just attend to one's own business like everyone else is doing? The $64,000 question.

Here I will comment only on the albums I have found in the used bins -- my search for the genuine Jackson Browne will have to remain within a budget that refuses to cough up $18 for a new CD. I am currently looking for the more political Browne CDs, Lives In The Balance or World In Motion. Read on.

--Samuel Fassbinder

Post your comments about Jackson Browne

THE PRETENDER (1976)

(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)

A couple of these songs come off as dull indulgence, but beside that, The Pretender is the 1970s American Top Forty version of "art." The melodramatic moments are well-done; a lot of this lyrics/music reads as family conversation set to pleasing music. Lots of major chords dominate each tune. Nevertheless, Jackson Browne keeps the lyrics interesting throughout, and the tunes do not grate. "The Fuse" combines an interesting lyric ("Through every dead and living thing/ Time runs like a fuse/ And the fuse is burning/ And the earth is turning") with an obnoxious disco-beat refrain. The song switches back and forth between four different moods in a way that's hard to enjoy.

"Your Bright Baby Blues" combines a pleasant (if routinely pop) soft-blues-rock (with five different chord changes, instead of three as in straight blues) melody with great lyrics ("No matter how fast I run/ I can never get away from me"). "Linda Paloma" is pseudo-Mexican music, written by gringos for gringos. Browne's deep poetic take on such a genre ("If tears could release the heart/ From the shadows preferred by the mind") does not quite save it. "Here Come Those Tears Again" has a great tune but a lyric I just couldn't get into (apparently Browne's wife committed suicide around the time of the making of this album, I'm sure it's a personal thing). "The Only Child" is written in the voice of a father talking to his son, tenderly, with another pleasant tune. "Daddy's Song" and "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate" put me to sleep, frankly, but are otherwise innocuous reflections upon life.

All of that stuff serves as prelude for the title track at the end. "The Pretender" is a song that will resonate for anyone who has had romantic fantasies while trapped in a concrete jungle, it's what saves this album. This is about the struggle in the heart "Caught/ Between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender" -- I suppose there's another way of viewing it, that the struggle for the legal tender makes the longing for love possible, but sure, there's so much more to love than money-making. Or let's put the dichotomy another way -- romantic dreaming as a social surplus above and beyond the ideology of capitalist discipline, or differently, love as something extra beyond our lives as workers and consumers. Browne invokes images of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," (a story about the fantasy life of someone bored with his work) and of the scariness of life outside of love (under capitalism):

"Ah the laughter of the lovers as they run through the night

Leaving nothing for the others But to choose off and fight

And tear at the world with all their might

While the ships bearing their dreams, sail out of sight"

So yeah, we hear this refrain, and we feel the alienation of life as Jackson Browne feels it. From there, the dichotomies resolve themselves, in the "surrender" of the Pretender, the pleasure principle, to (what I read as) the reality principle. That's the Freudian reading. There's an element of celebration of this surrender in these lyrics, esp. if you block out the lyrics I blockquoted. Sure. Especially if you let those G major and C major chords go to your head. The song celebrates the working people's participation in everyday life, like in the recently-aired Budweiser commercial, but, well, there's some heavy irony going on throughout that part of the song that confuses that verdict bigtime. So if you teach literature you might want to play this song for your students, let THEM hash it out, tell you the true meaning for themselves.

The melody is great, backup harmonies are by Crosby and Nash, great piano by Craig Doerge, annoyingly muffled drums by Jeff Porcaro. The whole thing has something of a symphonic sound to it that renders it profound, if you can excuse the thudding noise made by the drum set. There's something of this in every song on this album, it's just that it only really gels in the title track. If it bothers you that "The Pretender" is on an album of comparatively mediocre songs, if it bothers you that Browne likes syrupy melodies and can't come up with lyrics this great on every song, you may wish to buy Jackson Browne's recently-released greatest hits album.

OVERALL RATING: 7

Post your comments / reviews for this album

RUNNING ON EMPTY (1977)

(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)

I bought this album on a used tape for two dollars. I'm afraid that after my review of World In Motion, my commitment to further review of Jackson Browne is going to take the low road. At any rate, my mission in reviewing this release is to say for sure whether or not Running On Empty deserves all of the accolade that it gets in Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews. Well, actually, there's something fun about this album. All of the songs are either live, recorded on tour, or recorded in motel rooms while on tour; one was (the sleeve claims) recorded on the bus while en route to a date. Each of them is smooth and listenable; maybe some of that has to do with the fact that Browne enlisted lots of musical co-writers to push through this concept-album.

Side one starts with "Running On Empty" which is, of course, good Seventies Top Forty stuff, the foundation of old-school stadium rock. "The Road" features David Lindley on fiddle, "Rosie" dominant Craig Doerge piano, both serious and sensitive and acoustic. "You Love The Thunder" moves us back to the band and the Top Forty. "Cocaine" was, of course, written by the Rev. Gary Davis, I think Eric Clapton did this one too. Side Two has more of the same, extended blues progressions "Shaky Town" is a solemn song about truckers, there in the era in which "Convoy" was on the American Top Forty. Wasn't there something about this on "That '70s Show"? "Love Needs A Heart" is a song about heartache, "Love needs a heart and I need to find/ If loves needs a heart like mine." "Nothing But Time" another tough song about life on the road, fades out for "The Load-Out" which fades dramatically into "Stay," which has that annoying David Lindley falsetto "Won't you stay/ Just a little bit longer", and which allows one to reminisce about the old "No Nukes" compilation benefit album, one of the crowning works of the '70s, and Jackson Browne's performance of "Stay" on that.

With all this pomp and profundity we reviewers might be asked to produce a sign of what it all means; after all, Joni Mitchell's album Hejira, another concept album about travel from the same era, has a philosophy. A friend once told me that there was a rumor running about that Jackson Browne was a womanizer; to tell the truth one can't really say from reading his lyrics (conveniently located at http://www.jrp-graphics.com/jb/jbalbums.html) whether this is or isn't the case. There's nothing here more profound than "This Bud's for you." The closest to philosophy this one gets is that salute in "The Load-Out" when he sings:

"Now the seats are all empty / Let the roadies take the stage / Pack it up and tear it down / They're the first to come and last to leave / Working for that minimum wage / They'll set it up in another town / Tonight the people were so fine / They waited there in line / And when they got up on their feet they made the show / And that was sweet-- But I can hear the sound Of slamming doors and folding chairs / And that's a sound they'll never know / Now roll them cases out and lift them amps / Haul them trusses down and get'em up them ramps /'Cause when it comes to moving me You guys are the champs"

Here I wanted some voice from backstage to boom out: "Hey Jackson, how about a _raise_ for all that trouble you put us through?" Once again, we have (as I said in my review of Joni Mitchell's Ladies Of The Canyon) compassion expressed with privilege; but for all the dramatic intensity of its moment it could just be a salute, maybe for the sake of squeezing more labor out of his minions. Three Top Forty tunes and a lot of salute in between. Tuneful and prettily sentimental if a bit short on humor.

OVERALL RATING: 7

Post your comments / reviews for this album

WORLD IN MOTION (1989)

(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)

Many critics remember the 1980s as an era of bad politics and bad music -- however, the 1980s did indeed see several decent albums of politicized mainstream rock music, and to be honest I liked a lot of it. Jackson Browne's World In Motion has got to be the most painfully difficult listen of all of these albums, however. Wilson of Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews (http://www.warr.org/) claims of this album that, even tho' it's blatantly political, "the irony is, he's completely selling out on a musical level, standard corporate rock with painful synthetic drums" and that:"It seems he couldn't be bothered to write any real melodies". Wilson is dead on. The lyrics of this thing are very nice for one like myself who sympathizes with his perspective, and it's encouraging that Browne can appreciate Tomás Borge's poetry and all, but there really are no serious melodies here -- it's basically one typical Jackson Browne riff after another repeated in monotonous procession as if doing that made up a song.

Worsening this dire situation is the fact that the instruments making the music are basically synthesizers and electronically-tweaked guitars that seem purposely done to create an atmosphere that is acoustically dead. Now, this was tolerable when I was listening to the drums on The Pretender, but when all the instruments sound like this over the length of a whole album, well, you get the point. I'm not even going to bother to summarize each song except to say that the first song, the title track, has a nice jumpy beat and is the best of the Jackson Browne compositions here. "When The Stone Begins To Turn," reggae-flavor, with Sly and Robbie on backing vocals, is OK. "My Personal Revenge," the song with the Borge lyric, could be a good song if it were performed with acoustic instruments, outdoors out of a studio. "Lights And Virtues" is a tolerable ballad. I'd say about 40% of this album is redeemable, thus a rating of 4.

Not surprisingly, the best melody of this whole album, by a long shot, is in the song "I Am A Patriot," Browne's cover of a Little Steven tune. Somewhere along the line Jackson Browne temporarily forgot that mainstream rock's embrace of the political message somes in the form of a musical genre called the anthem, and that the most redeeming quality of an anthem, besides its political lyrics, is that one can actually sing along with it. That, in sum, is the charm of anthems, it's why it's so much fun to listen to the Jefferson Airplane's "We Can Be Together," it's the charm of Country Joe and the Fish's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die-Rag," it's what makes Bruce Cockburn's "Dust and Diesel," Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," John Lennon's "Imagine," Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning," U2's "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" and any number of Phil Ochs songs great songs, that you can at least hum or whistle or remember their tunes, and it's what makes Little Steven's "I Am A Patriot" pretty darn hard to ruin. Jackson Browne does NOT succeed in ruining "I Am A Patriot," not on this album, and not when he sung it at the Ralph Nader for President Rally in Long Beach, California, just before the 2000 Presidential Election.

In David Crosby's book "Stand And Be Counted," a book about doing benefit concerts for political causes, Jackson Browne is said to have complained something along the lines of, I told the public all about what they were doing, the whole CIA drug-dealing thing and the nasty little wars in Central America, and they went and re-elected the operation's accomplices. It's going to hurt to read this, Jackson Browne (if you're out there reading this, may I do the honor of addressing you directly, as a fan of yours), but maybe the public heard the synthesizers on World In Motion and stopped listening. You, for your part, you did name names, you identified the problems correctly, you can be praised for that. I'll be sure to hunt down and buy the Tomás Borge lyric if it exists in some poetry book in Santa Monica's Midnight Special bookstore. Couldn't you please rerelease these songs with better melodies and acoustic instruments?

Everything else on this thing, well, let's see, good lyrics, compañero Tomás Borge, and Little Steven, well, here's my recommendation. If you want '80s rock politics at its finest, buy Little Steven's album Voice Of America. Buy Neil Young's Freedom, esp. if you dig Crazy Horse or that wailing guitar of his. Buy Joni Mitchell's Dog Eat Dog or Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm, these are totally underrated albums which unpleasantly surprised the critics. Buy Bruce Cockburn's album The Trouble With Normal or his later Stealing Fire or World Of Wonders. Buy Jackson Browne's earlier album Lives In The Balance. Buy Midnight Oil's 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Red Sails In The Sunset or Diesel And Dust. Get The Clash's two-CD Sandinista! album., or buy the Dead Kennedys or Crass if you like '80s political punk. But skip this one.

OVERALL RATING: 4

Post your comments / reviews for this album

LOOKING EAST (1996)

(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)

This album was released after the political moments of Browne's 1980s music - the albums Lives In The Balance and Worlds In Motion. Looking East is uptempo, it rocks. The title track is the first track, it charges forth with its melody -- I guess the images of Jackson Browne's darkened face on the cover and the waves underneath the CD booklet give you the image of someone looking out over the US from the West Coast and telling what he sees. The title track asks the questions "How long have I left my mind to the powers that be?/ How long will it take to find the higher power moving in me?" This is a pair of questions that boggle the mind to answer, on the level of Lennon's "How can I go forward if I don't know which way I'm facing?" It doesn't go with a melody that's as memorable as anything on Lennon's Imagine album, though that could change over time. The rest of the title track doesn't really make sense of those questions, either. It seems that Browne just wants to hit us with powerful images to lodge a spiritual criticism of America, that it's a place of all beauty and little soul. Oh well.

"The Barricades of Heaven," the next tune, reminds me of earlier Browne, before he started composing political tunes in the '80s, great melody, wistful memories. Still can't figure out why heaven needs a barricade, though. "Some Bridges" is about the hard life felt by the working classes (romanticized?), "Information Wars" doesn't have a great melody, but its lyrics are extremely clever, Jackson Browne makes fun of lots of big corporate slogans and media spin, very right-on. "I'm The Cat" is a love song, kind of funny, "Culver Moon" has a bouncy beat and is a funny song about LA: "When the ghostly specter of Howard Hughes/ hovers in the smoke of a thousand barbecues"..."How Long" is a lover's complaint, kind of boring, though still it's listenable. "Niño" is a song about a kid from LA, some of the lyrics are in Spanish, salsa beat in the background. "Alive In The World" tries to answer why Jackson Browne cares so much, "I want to live in the world/ Not inside my head." "It is One" is Jackson Browne's stab at reggae, it's kind of corny, the tune is listenable, tho' the repeating bass line in the background is annoyingly monotonous in its repetition.

All of the tunes are catchy in this album, a lot of it is fun, and some of it is quite meaningful. This album combines all of the elements of a decent Jackson Browne album; love and disappointment and humor and reggae and pseudo-Mexican music and philosophy and astute observation of LA street life and politics, it's even got Browne's trademark whiny pedal steel guitar. It's as if Browne blended everything into only one set of songwriting grooves and refined and touched up those grooves over the years so that they sound neat and professional.

OVERALL RATING: 7

Post your comments / reviews for this album

Back to main