For Everyman: The Wisdom of Jackson Browne

One of the architects of the Los Angeles folk rock scene in the 1970s is having a birthday in a few weeks.  Jackson Browne, along with the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, established the quintessential L.A. blend of country, rock and folk that led to decades of influential music and lyrics while inspiring generations of poets with guitars.  Browne will turn a ripe old 71 on October 9^th.  In 2004, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was given an honorary doctorate of music by Occidental College in Pasadena.  He has been nominated for Grammy Awards but has not won, clearly an oversight that must be rectified.

Born in Germany to an American serviceman father and a mother from Midwestern stock, Browne came of age in Los Angeles and began making an impact on the music scene in historic clubs and venues like The Troubadour.  He wrote songs for other artists like the aforementioned Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Eagles before signing with Elektra Records as a songwriter.  More artists, like the Byrds, recorded his music.

In 1971, Browne left Elektra for Asylum Records, and his fame as a singer-songwriter grew.  Classic albums like Jackson Browne (1972), For Everyman (1973), Late For the Sky (1974), and especially, The Pretender (1976) and Running On Empty (1977) set the standard for L.A. folk rock.  He also became an environmental activist, showing up to protest against nuclear power, American policy in Central America, and in support of Farm Aid, Amnesty International and Occupy Wall Street.  His endorsement of Democratic candidates is legendary; he performed in support of John Kerry, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.  He successfully sued John McCain for illegally coopting the song, “Running On Empty” which McCain used to suggest that Obama was too young and inexperienced to be president.  The suit was settled with an undisclosed payment but more importantly, the McCain campaign was forced to issue a public apology.  Browne’s last studio album, Standing In The Breach was released in 2014.

I first encountered Jackson Browne and his music in the late seventies when I was in high school.  I was a diehard jazz fan into groups like Weather Report and Return To Forever.  Browne was not on my radar when I took a class in religious studies (it was a Catholic school) with the Dean of Students.  In class, he tried to explain the power of Browne’s album, The Pretender and the influence the music had on his own life.  The record was made shortly after the death by suicide of Browne’s first wife, Phyllis Major.  The couple had one son.  The title track is written in the voice of a man who has lost his soul to commercialism and capitalist greed.  Now, the speaker gets up in the morning and goes to work each day, living a seemingly empty life, longing for change and deeper meaning:

I want to know what became of the changes

We waited for love to bring

Were they only the fitful dreams

Of some greater awakening

I’ve been aware of the time going by

They say in the end it’s the wink of an eye

And when the morning light comes streaming in

You’ll get up and do it again

Amen

Browne is known for his prescient lyrics.  I understood what my teacher was telling us, even if I would not experience that sense of emptiness and longing for something more for years to come.  Browne has always been an old soul, his music aching with wisdom and a touch of melancholy.  He ends the song with a dark request:

Are you there?

Say a prayer for the Pretender

Who started out so young and strong

Only to surrender

I decided I needed to check this artist out, and at the time, his most recent album was a live record:  Running On Empty.  This collection has now become legendary.  Browne eschewed conventional wisdom and recorded all new songs live.  Usually, artists do a live album of their greatest hits.  Here was Jackson Browne performing music with which his audience was not familiar.  Even more ground breaking, not all of the recordings were done during concerts.  He recorded on the tour bus and back stage; drummer Russell Kunkel played a cardboard box with his bass drum petal attached; on one track, the tour photographer sings back up.  The result is a classic album of total, sheer, somewhat improvised magic.

I used to listen to the cassette of the album lying on the floor in my parents’ tiny living room with headphones clamped so tight around my head that I got headaches.  I did not want my conservative Catholic parents to hear what I was listening to, specifically, two songs:  “Rosie” (about masturbation) and “Cocaine (for obvious reasons).

One song that profoundly affected me was on The Pretender album.  “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate” is written in the voice of a man moving from youth to maturity, looking at his life and wondering how things became the way they are.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder

Where my life will lead me

Waiting to pass under Sleep’s dark and silent gate

He sings in the bridge his assessment of his life as it stands:

Sitting down by the highway

Looking down the road

Waiting for a ride

I don’t know where I’ve been

Wishing I could fly away

Don’t know where I’m going

Wishing I could hide

Oh God this is some shape I’m in

Browne excels at the world weary troubadour persona.  Songs like “These Days” (believe it or not, written when he was a teenager) and “For Everyman” speak to the battles and scars of life and the wisdom gained.

Well I’ve been out walking

I don’t do that much talking these days

These days

These days I seem to think a lot

About the things that I forgot to do

For you

And all the times I had the chance to

[…]

Now if I seem to be afraid

To live the life that I have made in song

Well it’s just that I’ve been losing

For so long

[…]

Don’t confront me with my failures

I have not forgotten them

In the song, “Sky Blue and Black,” Browne speaks of a lost relationship

You’re the hidden cost and the thing that’s lost

In everything I do

Yeah and I’ll never stop looking for you

In the sunlight and the shadows

Browne resists explaining his lyric choices and adamantly denies a link to his own life events.  Browne will discuss what he was going for in the composition, but he wants the listener to develop his or her own connections to the songs.  He wants them to inform the listener’s history, not his own.  On albums like I’m Alive (1993), one of his more personal records on which “Sky Blue and Black” appears, he lets his lyrics speak and will not elaborate.  In this way, he cements his troubadour status, a bard for our times, and yes, an Everyman.

In the song, “The Barricades of Heaven,” we are again treated to Browne’s reflections on how he came to be where he is.

Running down around the towns along the shore

When I was sixteen and on my own

No, I couldn’t tell you what the hell those brakes were for

I was just trying to hear my song

Hearing the song has taken him around the world and through a kaleidoscope of experiences, all on that “stretch of road running to L.A.”  He goes on to write:

Better bring your own redemption when you come

To the barricades of Heaven where I’m from

It is Jackson Browne’s wish to find the “Hope that never ends” as he continues to turn the pages of his life, “Pages torn and pages burning.”  Jackson Browne is the soul of Los Angeles as well as possessing the wisdom of Everyman.  For those of us who listen, his is a profound and singular gift.

The Case of the Red Shoe Intruder

One Friday night, we went to our friend Art’s apartment to help him bid farewell to the place he has called home for 26 years.  The thing is, we once lived in the same building for eleven years.  We had actually moved in first and when another apartment became vacant, we gave Art and our friend Sharon a shout and they wound up taking it as roommates, so we all lived on the same top floor of a building filled with middle-aged or elderly people.  We were the youngest tenants.  Together, we had weathered a major Los Angeles earthquake that left several of our neighboring buildings red-tagged.  Ours still stood proud the day after.

This year when Art decided to move out, we were already on our second apartment since that building and Sharon had relocated up north out of Los Angeles.  Art was the only one left from the original tenants who occupied the place when we first moved in.  In effect, we were now the middle-aged people.  Everyone else was dead or gone.  The management was different, the building was more run down, but the owner was the same.  He was the one who took offense to one sentence in an essay I wrote about apartment living in the Los Angeles Times in 2003 where I labeled him “an absentee landlord.”  I actually wrote I liked living in the apartment, but I guess he didn’t read that part.

And so it was that we came to our old stomping grounds to help Art give it a fond farewell.  We planned to take him to dinner to celebrate both his birthday and his exit from the old place, and when we arrived, we noticed that the entire building was surrounded with scaffolding.  It was a mess with debris and tools and dust everywhere.  They were repainting the building and putting in new windows, something that “absentee” owner promised a long time ago and never got around to doing.  Someone else was moving in or out—it was difficult to tell—and the workers had propped open the security door.  We rode the elevator to the third floor and walked into Art’s apartment.  He was standing in the living room looking perplexed.

“This is weird,” he said.  “I took the last few boxes to my new place and when I returned, someone had been in the apartment.  They smoked a cigarette, opened all the cupboards, and they left a pill bottle in the bathroom.  I left the door unlocked because there’s nothing left, but I wonder if they were already showing the place.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” my wife said.  “You don’t live here anymore.”

“Yeah,” he said a bit wistful.  We walked through the empty rooms looking out the windows at the scaffolding with bits of plastic blowing in the breeze.  From his second bedroom I could see the pool, which was dirty probably from the sandblasting and painting.

“Twenty-six years,” we all took turns saying.  “Twenty-six years.”

“Do you think one of the painters climbed through a window to use the bathroom?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” we responded.  “You don’t live here anymore!”

We walked down the hallway to the elevator.  On the way, we passed our old apartment.  “I can’t believe we used to live here,” my wife said.

After we had moved out well over a decade ago, Art kept us up on building gossip.  We also could read all about it in the newspaper.  Two or three guys moved in to our old place, young twenty-somethings who did not seem to have steady, regular employment or steady, regular hours.  Art started noticing strangers riding up the elevator.  Sullen.  Not friendly.  Rough around the edges.  They would go to our old door, knock and mumble something and then be quickly admitted.  One day, I was surfing the L.A. Times website and their crime statistics and saw our old address listed as the site of an assault with a deadly weapon, possession with intent to sell, burglary, and kidnapping.  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I literally shouted to my wife in the other room.

It seems those gents who occupied the place after us were dealing out of the apartment.  One evening, some gun-toting ruffians knocked on the door and shoved their way in.  Everyone got proned out on the floor while the dudes ransacked the place threatening to blast anyone who moved.  The occupants got tied up and left on the bathroom floor while the thieves fled with cash and drugs.  We wondered if the tight-ass owner even painted the place or changed the locks before he rented it out again.  (If he didn’t like the Times essay, he won’t like this one either.)

Once we were in the elevator, Art told us he would meet us in the lobby as he wanted to drop off his keys and garage door remote with the manager.  Once out on the street, my wife and I looked up at the building with all the scaffolding and construction mess, both of us lost in memory.  Since we had been gone, there had been two major fires in different units, more drug dealers, and rumors of ghosts in one particular apartment.  It was at that point that something distracted me.  It was a guy with red shoes.  Red tennis shoes, to be exact.  It was weird because he looked to be middle aged but he was wearing a high school student’s shoes, dark pants and a red shirt.  He looked like a punk but greying at the temples.  He definitely did not seem to belong, yet he was walking all over the place outside the building, first on one side of the street and then the other, crossing over to the grass median and back.  He did plant himself on the next building’s front stoop, but he was there only momentarily before he was on the move again.

Two guys came out of our old building and went to the moving truck.  One looked us up and down and made me a little uncomfortable, so we decided to wait for Art in the car.  I forgot about the red shoe guy.  Later, at the restaurant, Art told us he asked the manager if he had shown the apartment already, but the manager said no, so Art told him that someone had been in the apartment and that he should tell the painters not to go into the building to use the facilities even if the apartment is vacant.

“YOU DON’T LIVE THERE ANYMORE!” we pretty much shouted at him.

A few days later, my wife talked to Art on the phone.  He said the manager called him to tell him there had been someone in the apartment.  He did a check on the third floor and as he was walking down the long hallway to Art’s former place, he saw a guy come out and duck into the stairwell.  He followed him all the way down to the lobby and out of the building.  It was clear the guy was not part of the work crew and also that he was not staying with anyone in the building.  The manager followed him down the street snapping pictures and calling 911.  The cops got him a block away.

Once he was handcuffed and in the back seat of the patrol car, the cops told the manager that the guy was on parole for robbery.  He had climbed the scaffolding and kicked in a screen on one of Art’s open windows since the door was now locked.  He had been squatting in the apartment until he saw the manager and ran.  In the pictures, which the manager sent to Art, and Art forwarded to us, I immediately identified the guy in cuffs as the red shoe intruder.  Only, now he was wearing the same style of tennis shoe but in black.  Somewhere, maybe in the apartment, there were hidden red shoes.  Evidence, to be sure.

“Can you believe that?” Art asked.  “I wasn’t even out of the building yet and someone was trying to squat in my apartment.”

“That’s so dangerous,” my wife told him.  “What if you had walked in and he was there?”

“Good thing HE DOESN’T LIVE THERE ANYMORE!” I shouted from my reading chair across the room.