POP MUSIC REVIEW : Browne Proves There’s Plenty on His Mind

Singing an updated rendition of the old blues song “Cocaine” on Saturday at the Universal Amphitheatre, accompanied by his pal David Lindley on violin, Jackson Browne brought along a few new verses to fit his coke-free, consciousness-raised life style: “I wouldn’t have been a user even one more day / If you’d shown me how I was helping turn a profit for the CIA,” went one couplet. And: “Look at me, I’m as sharp as a tack / Except for a few million brain cells I wouldn’t mind having back.”

Ah, but Browne’s memory is still in dandy shape. At one point he good-humoredly brought up a review that suggested one of his Central American-themed compositions sounded “more like a speech than a song.” This was a review that ran in The Times nearly three years ago to the day, mind you.

In the intervening 36 months, Browne’s new material has only gotten more, not less, pedantic. Which doesn’t mean that it’s never effective. That’s been three more years to get used to the idea of his shift from a confessional style to a sharply oratorical one; more significantly, three years of disturbing congressional hearings to make his protest songs seem less paranoid and more palpable.

Fans cheered the pre-social conscience oldies loudest, which is understandable; seven nifty numbers on which opening act and longtime cohort Lindley guested were reminders of just how listless much of Browne’s Lindley-less arrangements have become. Even so, when he introduced “Chasing You Into the Light,” a tender song about a lover plagued by bad dreams, and kept being drowned out by party animals yelling out lines from “Nightmare on Elm Street V,” one had to wonder just how many uncommercial, political albums Browne will have to release to lose the beer-guzzling yahoo element.