Spotlight to Fall on Songs of Nicaragua, Thanks to Jackson Browne

Adversity is a subject that fascinates Jackson Browne. He has written about the death of close friends, the ending of love affairs, the threat of Apocalypse and, most recently, war in Central America.

In adversity, he has found irony, particularly the kind that leads to music. On several trips to Nicaragua, the 39-year-old singer-songwriter has been struck by what he calls the serenity of a loving people.

War has pulled them closer, he said, in a way that “consumeristic” Americans might find difficult to comprehend.

An avowed movie buff--he lives with actress Daryl Hannah in Santa Monica--Browne alluded to a scene from “Starman.”

“Jeff Bridges is about to go back to the planet he came from,” Browne said, “so he says to his friend, ‘You know, you’re right. You earthlings are at your best . . . when life is at its absolute worst.’ ”

Browne sponsors three Nicaraguan singers whose art has flourished, albeit in a climate of war, amid fears of U.S. intervention. Guardabarranco--a brother and sister act featuring Katia and Salvador Cardenal--and solo act Salvador Bustos are in the midst of a 16-city North American tour organized and financed by Browne. The only albums done by the singers were produced by Browne and recorded at his home in 1985, with Browne and his L.A. rock band playing backup.

The Cardenals and Bustos perform tonight at the La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas. Browne, the host of both performances, calls the shows significant for the week they fall in--the start of a Central American peace plan that took effect Thursday. The Cardenals and Bustos are “symbolic of peace,” he said, a feeling he sees threatened by American interests.

In a rare interview, Browne said that Bustos and the Cardenals--whose uncle is the country’s minister of culture--are “hardly shills for the Sandinistas.” He said their music “speaks to life, which happens to include politics.”

He said the tour is political in the sense that “the Contras are an army we support with tax dollars.” Because of what Browne labeled “Reagan’s obsession with an army that shouldn’t exist,” he said Americans labor under a false impression of Nicaragua’s most precious asset--its people.

“War and the politics of war have a way of circumventing the beauty of humanity,” he said. “You realize we are talking about people down there. Because of what’s happening, because of the upheaval, Nicaraguans are portrayed as warlike, a threat to their own country. It’s as though we, or at least our leader, know what’s best for them.”

Browne, who journeyed to Nicaragua with Hannah and others on personal “fact-finding missions” in 1984 and 1985 and again recently, sees Nicaraguans as “working to reconstruct themselves. They only want peace. They wish to develop in a natural, productive way.”

As a musician who has recorded eight albums, dating back to 1972, Browne said he is amazed by the renaissance of music in a land so small it “defies credulity that the United States would wish to oppose it. But then, we’ve made that mistake before.”

Browne first heard the Cardenals and Bustos at a party. Their music--soft, soothing, folk-flavored but sounding almost Elizabethan at times--is not protest music, nor is it soulful laments about the horrors of war. It deals with many of the same themes Browne has covered--love, the loss of love, death and rebirth.

“These people are much more unabashedly poetic than I am,” he said. “These people write really fine poetry.”

He quoted verses from a Salvador Cardenal song called “La Hoja (The Leaf),” which sounds like a spiritual sister to a Browne ballad, “Jamaica, Say You Will”:

The leaf falls, falls, as if unwilling

Its knife blade body parts the air into shells

And at last it nestles, calm, just as the grass wanted

So I fall from your thoughts, from time to time tangling myself in your hair of grass.

Salvador Cardenal, 27, said he and his sister, 24, and Bustos, 29, are part of Nicaragua’s volcanto music movement. Nicaragua is a country known for volcanoes, and canto is Spanish for song. (Guardabarranco is named for the country’s national bird.) He said volcanto is the Nicaraguan version of Latin America’s Nueva Cancion, or New Song, movement, of which Browne has been a promoter in this country.

Cardenal developed a love of music from his grandfather, who for half a century ran the country’s only classical music radio station. The love grew during his study with the Jesuits, whom he joined at 17. He describes himself as “just a Christian” and the country’s revolution as “not a Communist revolution but a Christian one.”

“You can’t believe how bad it was before,” he said. “Somoza was awful.”

Bustos might render a more radical interpretation. He worked as a grocery clerk through the Somoza years and moonlighted by organizing Sandinista militias and brigadistas in literacy campaigns.

Guardabarranco and Bustos were slated to perform in May at a series of benefits sponsored by Browne. Visa problems forced the cancellation of the trip, so Browne replaced them with Sangre Machehual, a Nueva Cancion group based in Los Angeles. He and David Lindley also performed in benefits for the Christic Institute and the San Diego Interfaith Task Force on Central America.

Browne said he is intrigued by San Diego.

“It’s on the frontier of a fight,” he said, referring to border issues shared with Tijuana. “Immigration, growth issues . . . there’s a lot happening down there.”

Browne’s earnestness and seriousness are sometimes interrupted by flashes that strike quickly in conversation and take a listener by surprise. Suddenly, the rock star many perceive as enigmatic and reclusive sounds like he likes to have fun.

“I don’t know a lot about San Diego,” he said in the context of immigration and growth, “but you know, I love to surf. And when I was a kid growing up in Fullerton, I couldn’t wait to drive down there to surf at Del Mar.

“Del Mar is a great, great place to surf. But you know, now the drive kind of saddens me. It used to be miles and miles of orange groves. Now it’s industry and development and a nuclear power plant. But hey, the surf is great.”

And later: “You won’t believe the kids in Nicaragua. They love American rock. There was this one little girl, she sounded just like my little sister, a little Val (Valley Girl). Amazing, man, just amazing!”

Intrigued by the contrast between the Nicaraguan people’s flowering esprit de corps and the apparent apathy of Americans, Browne bristled at the thought of calling this country shallow.

“I love this country,” he said. “And in defense of our culture, I hasten to note that it is free. You can go beyond the apparent shallowness and find incredible depth. We have brilliant artists in every field in this land--in popular and classical music, jazz, art, drama . . . but we are inundated by an avalanche of materialism.”

As “a spiritual person,” Browne said he is troubled by the selling of Christianity. He calls it indicative of a greater problem, one related to Central America.

“We’ve surrendered our grasp of history in this country,” he said. “The Christians of early times, who risked lives and property for what they believed in, were noble, beautiful creatures. Some so-called Christians of today just aren’t. They make a fortune milking people. They’re out for a killing. If we had that better grasp--which comes through education--maybe we’d learn to appreciate the values of others a little bit more.

“Maybe we’d see Nicaragua in a whole different light.”