As fate would have it, Jackson Browne performed in Manhattan, the adopted hometown of Tom Wolfe, the week the legendary writer passed away. Among countless other accomplishments, in 1976 Wolfe coined the phrase “The ‘Me’ Decade” to describe the ‘70s, which he perceived to be more selfish than the more socially conscious ‘60s. Based on some of Browne’s material from that time, it would seem he agreed with the dapper journalist, best exemplified by the opening song, “Before the Deluge,” from his 1974 masterwork Late for the Sky.
It was a perfect way to start the show, and perhaps the best of Browne’s many hymns for the disillusioned. Written in the shadow of Watergate, it’s about when your ideals and values are tested by the challenges of reality, and how easy it is to surrender, summed up by the line “And in the end they traded their wings/For the resignation that living brings.” That’s a beautifully poetic way of expressing how the idealism of ‘60s youth counterculture didn’t end with a bang or a whimper, so much as a weary shrug.
The heavenly Booker T. organ of keyboardist Jeff Young and the weary rural Americana lap steel work of Greg Leisz made “Before the Deluge” sound as elegiacal as ever. It also helped that the song is even more powerful in the context of present day America, where there’s no discernable difference between reality and madness.
In the ‘70s, Fleetwood Mac, Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, and Browne were just a few of the acts making contagious pop music edged in country gloom, radiating sunny Southern California highways and bleak honky-tonks. “You Love the Thunder” is one of those songs, a catchy sing-along that portrays life on the road as a significant impediment to relationships. Appropriately enough, you could hear the tears emitting from Leisz’s lap steel.
“The Long Way Around,” from his most recent album, 2014’s Standing in the Breach, took on a whole new life at the Beacon, with Val McCullum’s ambient guitar evoking seagulls swooping down on an empty beach at dusk. With this rendition, you could hear Browne paying tribute to acts he influenced like Wilco, My Morning Jacket, and especially The War on Drugs.
Unfortunately, the lyrics are more applicable now than they were just a few years ago, in particular the line “It’s a little hard keeping track of what’s gone wrong/The covenant unravels, and the news just rolls along/I could feel my memory letting go some two or three disasters ago.” In the middle of the song, two fiftysomething women sat down in my row, the one next to me asking, “This isn’t Jackson Browne, is it?” Maybe she thought he was an opening act performing one of Browne’s songs, who just happened to look and sound exactly like Browne? Recent times have taught us that nothing is too absurd.
Browne went behind the piano for another gem from Late for the Sky, “Farther On.” It’s one more song for the road that looks forward, while also eulogizing the past, with Leisz’s lap steel conveying that notion as powerfully as the lyrics. On “Doctor, My Eyes,” McCullum did a memorable extended solo at the end, on par with the original from the late Jesse Ed Davis. Browne, who was only 23 when the song was released, had articulated the fatigued state of someone way beyond his years.
That shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise, as demonstrated by the next song he performed, “These Days,” written when Browne was just 16. By the time he was 18, Nico (who he was dating at the time) recorded it for her 1967 debut album Chelsea Girl. It’s remarkable that Browne could write something like “Don’t confront me with my failures/I had not forgotten them,” at such a young age. It was a moving experience seeing Browne sing that line at the Beacon, particularly with the realization that he turns 70 in October. McCullum’s ghostly desert guitar helped increase the sense of desolation emanating from the 50-year-old lyrics. The last song of the first set was “For a Dancer” from Late for the Sky, a contemplation on death. And on that note, the mostly older crowd stood up, stretched, and purchased some beverages.
During the break, there was a family of three walking back to their seats. The parents and their teenage daughter all wore the same shirt, which featured the album cover for Browne’s 1972 self-titled debut. The parents were smiling beatifically, as if they had found Utopia, and the daughter had a look on her face that seemed to reflect both embarrassment and pride.
After the 20 minute intermission, Browne and his band came back with “Looking East.” McCullum and Leisz took part in an impressive guitar duel, where the latter channeled the ragged heavenly beauty of Duane Allman’s work on “Layla.” The entire theatre got on their feet for “Somebody’s Baby,” from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was actually somewhat affecting witnessing the mainly grey-haired crowd dance as if they had found the Fountain of Youth, temporarily going back to their selves from 1982. Looking back, it’s odd to hear how much “Somebody’s Baby” sounds uncannily like another hit from that year, Rick Springfield’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers.”
For the older couple in front of me, the dancing continued during 1973’s “Redneck Friend,” as they did silly dances in their seats, including moving left and right at a comically fast pace, like they were on The Muppet Show. The original had Glenn Frey on vocal harmony and Elton John (credited as “Rockaday Johnnie”) doing his best impression of Jerry Lee Lewis on piano. In a catalog full of introspective brilliance, it was good to see Browne spotlight a song that conjures up a scene from a lost ‘70s film where Burt Reynolds, James Caan, and Nick Nolte are in the middle of a riotous bar fight with the locals.
“Shaky Town,” written by his one-time guitarist and iconic sideman Danny Kortchmar, was a welcome deep cut off the classic sonic travelogue Running on Empty, which was released at the end of 1977, amidst the luminous neon disco swirl of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and the brilliantly black and white goofball fury of Rocket to Russia by the Ramones. Running on Empty turned out to be the musical equivalent of Stephen Shore’s photographs of rural America from his July 1973 road trip. (It’s possible that during his time with Nico, the paths of Browne and Shore crossed, as both Nico and Shore were affiliated with Andy Warhol in the late ‘60s.)
In the summer of ’77, Browne and his band performed what were then new songs in concert and even where they were staying, with “Shaky Town” recorded at a Holiday Inn in Edwardsville, Illinois. Over 40 years later, it sounded just as good at the Beacon, with Leisz’s lap steel bringing the pastoral Midwest to the Upper West Side.
Now in the homestretch, Browne played two songs from his extraordinary 1976 album The Pretender: “Linda Paloma” and the title track, yet another anthem acknowledging the wide gulf between one’s ideal life and real life. The second verse Browne sang especially stood out: “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.” The irony about Browne’s disappointment in the ‘70s is that it fueled his best work, which in the end (along with an endless amount of other artists) helped make that musically dynamic decade the greatest of the rock’n’roll era, even surpassing the ‘60s, the decade that haunts so much of Browne’s writing.
Warren Zevon was an indispensable part of the ‘70s, and Browne paid tribute to his late friend and collaborator with “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” from Zevon’s 1978 album Excitable Boy, which Browne co-produced. The crowd appeared to get a substantial charge out of the final line “The shit has hit the fan.” Back in ’78, you’d frequently hear “Lawyers, Guns and Money” alongside “Running on Empty” on the radio. At the Beacon, when Browne sang about “running into the sun,” the image called to mind Icarus as 70’s rock God.
“Running on Empty” got one of the more vociferous responses from the crowd, as it’s the anthem Browne’s most associated with, one that spoke to and for a generation that, because of the societal and musical advances of the ‘60s, had more liberties than previous generations. Despite (and in some cases, because of) these developments, relationships were just as complex as ever, as Browne reflected in the unforgettable line “Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive/Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive.”
To end the show, Browne continued the theme of driving out on the open road by performing “Take It Easy” (and later segueing into “Our Lady of the Well,” just like on For Everyman). It was written with his one-time neighbor Glenn Frey, who admitted in the stellar 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, that Browne’s steadfast work ethic inspired him to be a better writer. One imagines Frey would’ve been very happy that seemingly everyone at the Beacon was singing along. Given the last few years, could you blame us?
With that in mind, it was the opening song, “Before the Deluge,” that served as a prayer for these days, specifically the lyrics “Now let the music keep our spirits high/And let the buildings keep our children dry/Let creation reveal its secrets by and by/When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky.”
Amen.
Matt Leinwohl