An Ear for Lyrics and Shades of Browne

When the music of your past continues to chase you through the present, it’s a good idea to sit down and listen. Specifically, I’m thinking of the music of Jackson Browne, which I first heard during my senior year of high school, just before the release of his debut album in 1972.

My best friend and neighbor then, one Jim Sloan of Tustin, bought four tickets to see Browne in San Clemente at the now-defunct Four Muses. Jim always had a keener ear for the good stuff than the rest of us, and he insisted that we find some dates and go.

I remember Browne as a little guy with shiny brown hair, a quavering, uncertain voice and a weird accompanist--David Lindley. The show lasted a couple hours. The music was quite beautiful and melodic, and the lyrics that Browne wrote were intelligent, powerful, humorous, penetrating.

He was almost garrulous on stage. He talked a bit about growing up in Orange County--having spent part of his youth living in Fullerton, attending Fullerton High and Fullerton (then-Junior) College. During intermission, he claimed the urinal beside mine, and I told him I was really liking the show.

“Thanks, man,” was his somewhat hoarse response.

I bought his albums and saw his shows rather diligently after that. His music seemed to accompany me on all my major journeys--college years, young adulthood, first attempts at book writing, a canceled wedding, then an uncanceled one.

I remember walking around in an orange grove off Culver in 1975 with my dog, Pudgy, with whom I was playing hooky from classes at UCI. Browne was playing in my head loud and clear, all those mournful masterpieces from “Late for the Sky.”

On a dissolving love affair, in the title song:

*

The words had all been spoken

But somehow the feeling still wasn’t right

Still we continued on through the night

Tracing our steps from the beginning

Until they vanished into the air

Trying to understand how our lives had led us there

*

On the death of a friend, in “For a Dancer”:

*

Can’t help but feeling foolish standing around

Crying as they ease you down

When I know that you’d rather we were dancing

Dancing our sorrows away

*

Browne seemed as if he was writing about me, personally, which of course was the very quality that made his music popular because so many people felt the same way.

In 1989, he released the unheralded “World in Motion,” which seemed to speak directly to me a few short months later when my mother died. In the song “Anything Can Happen,” he wrote:

*

Time will come when we know what happened here

Change will come in time and make it clear

We learn one thing if we learn at all

In the secret wars we call our lives

Anything can happen

*

Two weeks ago, some 20 years after that show at the Four Muses, I got his new album, “I’m Alive,” and sat down to listen to it.

For those not familiar with Browne’s music or reputation, he penned and sang some hits during the ‘70s, then slid into a three-album slump in the ‘80s during which his popularity and critical status waned. He became active in politics and (on and off) with Daryl Hannah, then more or less fell from public sight.

What a warm, alert, eager, sweet melancholy rushed up through me when I heard his voice on the first song!

*

Now I’m rolling down this canyon drive

With your laughter in my head

I’m gonna have to block it out somehow to survive

‘Cause those dreams are dead

And I’m alive

*

Then the next song, “My Problem Is You”:

*

I wanted to live in the realm of the senses

But you’ve got to know how

And for some kinds of pleasure there are no defenses

I know that now

*

Or, the ninth track, “Sky Blue and Black”:

*

You’re the color of the sky

Reflected in each store-front window pane

You’re the whispering and the sighing

Of my tires in the rain

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

In everything I do

And I’ll never stop looking for you

In the sunlight and the shadows

And the faces on the avenue

*

Now, song lyrics don’t look like much on the page, because they are not (as is often mistakenly assumed) poetry. Poetry draws its rhythms from language, whereas the lyric draws its rhythm from melody. But it would seem remiss not to quote some of Browne’s words here, because they’re so damned earnest.

How nice it is to listen to someone who actually has something interesting to say.

Browne is a folk singer at heart, part of a lineage that traces back to the minstrels of England, the minnesingersof Germany, the troubadors of France.

If the above-quoted lyrics sound like one horizonless bummer, please understand that the music gives to the words an optimism, a sense of meditative grace, a redemption.

Listening to this collection of songs, I got to thinking about their effect on me, and realized that, basically, if you like the music, you’re going to want to participate somehow in what that music conjures up in you.

This is exactly what defense attorneys are claiming when their clients listen to cop-killer rap songs before gunning down police officers, and the attorneys are in many ways correct. If it is possible for art (music, paintings, writings, drama, etc.) to help elevate a person’s emotions and consciousness to a higher level, then it also holds true that art can excite a person’s emotion and consciousness toward the lower acts of violence.

To ignore the power of our popular music today is to miss out on some real beauty, and to deny the call to mayhem coming from any radio on any street corner.

But back to Jackson Browne.

As a writer covering the local scene, I’d like to give Orange County all the credit for his music, a clearly specious argument. He’s done well, and it’s a pleasure to hear him sing of his journey.