Jackson Browne reconsidered

I will conclude my romantic comedy series soon. But first...

OK, so maybe I was a little harsh towards Jackson Browne last year. I have had cause to reconsider Jackson Browne when I stumbled into Anita Gevison's memoir about her relationship with Warren Zevon, which contains this:

"Before seeing Warren, I had to participate in group therapy, so I would be prepared for our new life together once he got out. I thought it was touchy-feely bullshit. I’d been through this with my sister before she died, overdosing on scotch and liquid methadone. You can’t save people, you just can’t. And needy doesn’t turn me on. Needy does not do it for me, even if it’s me someone needs. I did not want to see Warren like this. When I finally did, in group therapy, he grabbed me with sweating hands, and my heart was breaking. Apparently he’d told everyone in the group all about me, and my picture had been hanging up on the wall in his room. As we went around the room, each story was worse than the one before it. When it came my turn to “share,” I took the gloves off. 

“I just don’t see how this whole thing is going to work,” I said. “How are any of you going to be able to walk out of here and resist the urge to drink or do drugs just because you had a little warm-and-fuzzy session with the rest of the derelicts?” Not exactly what any of them needed to hear.
Warren ran to his room. I followed. I sat next to him on the bed. He pulled one of my t-shirts from under his pillow — he’d taken it out of my drawer before he left. I told him I just didn’t think it was going to work and he shouldn’t come back to Philly. But I remember thinking that if I left Warren there, he wouldn’t die on my watch. 

Somehow, Warren didn’t see this coming. He asked me to leave. I went to the counselor’s office, and they asked me who I knew that could replace me as Warren’s “co-dependent.” There is only one person to call, I said, one person who is un-fucked-up and responsible enough to handle this. 

“Call Jackson Browne.” And then I packed up my shit and got on the plane.
So Jackson took over and made living arrangements for Warren out in Hollywood after he got out of rehab — in Oakwoods, the place where all the rock stars wind up after their divorces.

So good on you Jackson Browne. And this is especially since, as reported by Gevinson, Zevon resented Browne's success and they were not on great terms at the time Gevinson recommended him as Zevon's caretaker:

I always hated bringing Rolling Stone home. At that point, a good article about Jimmy Buffett or Randy Newman would set him off on a jag and he’d be back in his robe, padding around the apartment for days, rudderless, full of vodka and ruin. He was on the outs with Jackson, and anything good that happened to Jackson Browne was bad, bad, bad. Warren was pea-green with Jackson envy. Who didn’t want to look like Jackson Browne? Everything was so hard for Warren that was so easy for Jackson and Don Henley. Out of nowhere he would just blurt out to me: “You know, Jackson’s first name is Clyde, and Henley gets all of his ideas from the phone book, you know that, doncha?” I’d just roll my eyes.

Poor Warren Zevon. He died from cancer at the age of 56, eleven years ago. He was a fine looking man when Gevinson was with him, so I did enjoy this especially intimate moment in her memoir:

...And then there was the night in Philly when we came out publicly as a couple, and I introduced him to the crowd at the Brandywine, and before I could get offstage he ran out from the wings with his guitar and slid across the stage on his knees, trapping me between him and the microphone. Warren kicked into Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” The crowd went ballistic. I just stood there smiling, not knowing where to look. At him? At the audience? Do I put my hands on my hips? Or at my sides? Finally it was over and Warren escorted me off the stage, and I collapsed in a heap on a chair. Then he walked up to the mike and said, “There’s a certain Philadelphia girl that I’ve been in love with, and tonight’s my night to show it,” and then he started playing Alan Toussaint’s “A Certain Girl.” I was putty in his hands after that. 

Which is the only explanation I have for why I wound up agreeing to walk down the aisle with Warren. We were making love one night after a concert in Denver when he proposed — how do I put this delicately? — in mid-stroke. “Will you marry me?” he asked, and then thrust his pelvis for emphasis. I don’t know why — I guess because deep down, I really was in love with the guy — but I responded with a breathless “Yes.” So we got done having sex, and Warren went to the bathroom. I was lying naked in bed and already starting to have second thoughts...

Court and Spark

Court and Spark introduced Joni's new jazzy sound. It was her most successful album, commercially and critically. It was all downhill after this.

This album was so popular that I first heard it at my school friend Lynn's house - her parents owned the album. Admittedly her parents were hipper than my parents - but who wasn't?

The CSNY presence is still there. Nash and Still were both credited on "For the Roses" and Crosby and Nash both get background vocal credits on C&S. But members of the jazz fusion L.A. Express are here too. Mitchell would tour with them and they'd be a big part of her live album Miles of Aisles.

Not every song does it for me on this album. And much of it is sort of slow and contemplative and she has only one really upbeat pop-rock type song in here, Raised on Robbery and it's a departure musically with its Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy vibe.

She's still surrounded by fame and famous people and famous boyfriends of course  - a crazy guy shows up on her doorstep in the title track Court and Spark. Free Man in Paris is reportedly about David Geffen, wishing he wasn't so big and important and famous. People's Parties is full of glamorous jet-setters, although I do like the groove at the end of that song, with "laughing it all way." Same Situation features another famous guy with groupies.

Help Me was her monster top 40 hit - I heard it so often on the radio back when I feel like I can't really hear it any more.

At the time I first heard this album my favorite track was Mitchell's cover of Twisted which featured Cheech and Chong doing a brief cameo in the background. Like all kids then I was familiar with Cheech and Chong through their immortal Sister Mary Elephant routine. (Also immortal, Earache My Eye.) I liked Twisted so much I memorized it, and can still do the whole thing, including the Cheech and Chong bits, by heart to this day.

And Twisted makes a nice match with the song that comes before it, Troubled Child which is basically Mitchell's take on the same topic as Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb."

I find I appreciate Just Like This Train more now. I like the metaphors and the descriptions of people on the train. You have to wonder why Joni is on a train since planes are more her usual mode of transportation. There's a great bitchy line in this song: "dreaming all the pleasure I'm gonna have watching your hairline recede my vain darling." As a teenager I didn't realize the importance of this particular type of schadenfreude as I do now.

"Raised on Robbery" was a huge revelation for me. The song appears to be about a not especially successful prostitute, since the last line is "hey where you going? don't go yet, your glass ain't empty and we just met." But innocent-school-girl me didn't get the prostitute angle, at first. I understood the beginning of the song - a guy is in a bar watching TV and gambling on The Maple Leafs - I even knew this was a Canadian hockey team. And a "lady in lacy sleeves" approaches him. But this section confused the hell out of me.

I'm a pretty good cook, I'm sitting on my groceries
Come up to my kitchen I'll show you my best recipes
I try and I try but I can't save a cent
I'm up after midnight cooking, trying to raise my rent,
I'm rough but I'm pleasing I was raised on robbery."

Now if you think, as I initially did on hearing this, that she's an actual chef the lines don't make any sense. So here's me thinking it over:

Why would she be cooking after midnight? How weird. Do they do that in Canada? And why would she be sitting on her groceries? Wouldn't they get squashed? Maybe that's why she can't save a cent, she squashed all her groceries? Wouldn't she be uncomfortable sitting on her.... oh! Ohhhhhh! Her groceries are... her... the thing that she uses to cook... oh my God this is about sex!!!

I was so proud of myself for working this out. I thought I was quite the sophisticated lady.

Here's a live version with poor beautiful talented Jaco Pastorius (wearing the red headband) who ended his life mentally ill and homeless. He died from wounds received from a bouncer in 1987.

I only just realized how odd it was that I blamed Jackson Browne for not enjoying some of "For the Roses." I don't know how I didn't know this until today, but between Roses and Court and Spark, Joni and Jackson Browne were an item - Browne was an opener for Joni's tour and then they got involved.

Here I thought that Joni's song which was a barely disguised attack against Browne, "Not to Blame" was purely based on the rumor that Browne had beat Daryl Hannah. That may have been the impetus but apparently Browne had hit Mitchell, according to the book Girls Like Us. So if anybody might believe that Brown beat Hannah it would be Joni.

Also according to the book, several of the songs on Court and Spark are about her relationship with Browne, especially Car on a Hill. And Mitchell took the break-up with Browne very badly, attempting suicide and ending up in therapy, apparently the inspiration for Troubled Child. Oh my prophetic soul - Jackson Browne is to blame for so many reasons.

Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon

I've mentioned musician Jackson Browne a few times over the course of this blog - this blog which will be twenty-freaking years old in November! It seems like just yesterday it was a mere ten years old.

I knew that Jackson Browne was an important career and personal support for Warren Zevon - I wrote about that back in 2014.

But I only just found out about this Dutch radio recording of Browne and Zevon playing and singing together, available on the Internet Archive for free. It's known as "The Offender Meets The Pretender."

I've recently gotten into Warren Zevon. I've enjoyed his songs over the years, and went to bat against a college radio station in Philadelphia, back in the 1990s because they were bowdlerizing "Lawyers Guns and Money," cutting out the line "the shit has hit the fan" when they played it. Because of the word "shit." 

But I've discovered additional Zevon cuts lately, like Desperados under the Eaves, which has Zevon's musical impression of an air conditioner that is amazingly soulful and affecting.

I've rediscovered "Tenderness on the Block" released in 1978 - it's not on "Offender/Pretender" - but it is on YouTube -  it's hard to believe it was written by the same guy who wrote cynical and gory songs like Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, Werewolves of London and Excitable Boy (discussed in this droll Paste article "Profoundly Horrifying Song Lyrics: “Excitable Boy” by Warren Zevon.") When I hear these lines from Tenderness:

Mama, where's your pretty little girl tonight?
Trying to run before she can walk, that's right
She's growing up, she has a young man waiting...

I almost expect the next line to be - 

And he's gonna dig up her grave and build a cage with her bones

But this girl won't get caught by the Excitable Boy because:

She was wide-eyed, now she's street-wise

To the lies and the jive talk

But she'll find true love

And tenderness on the block

UPDATE: he co-wrote this with Jackson Browne so that makes more sense.

What's truly horrifying to me is that any teenager Zevon might have been singing about in 1978 is in her sixties now. 

Zevon didn't make it to his sixties, dying at age 56 - not from liquor or drugs (although he abused those for much of his life) or a car crash, but from mesothelioma.

Enjoy.

For the Roses

Well I have to confess I find much of For the Roses irritating, although I blame Jackson Browne for that, in part. Because when I paid attention to him he used to go on and on about the awful great burdens of being a famous rock star and life on the road and blah blah blah poor you, rich beautiful man.

One of the things that is clear about Joni Mitchell's life at this time is that not only is she experiencing the hassle of being famous, but the hassle of having boyfriends who are also famous and have groupies throwing themselves at them.

And you can understand how that would be pretty annoying. But it's not exactly relatable. Although I do like that fact that she throws the F bomb in the middle of "Woman of Heart and Mind" - the first time she uses the word in a recording, as far as I can tell.

And two of the songs are absolute masterpieces.

The first is Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire. I had listened to the song several times without paying too much attention to the lyrics and then got a shock when I realized that she's talking about a junkie who is considering suicide:

Looking for Sweet Fire, shadow of Lady Release.
Come with me, I know the way she says,
It's down, down, down the dark ladder.
Do you want to contact somebody first?
Leave someone a letter?
You can come now or
You can come later.

This isn't just some lah dee dah roses and clouds and ladies of the canyon. This gets into Steely Dan territory for its lyrical melody versus grim subject matter contrast.

I tried to get a discussion of this song into my play JULIA & BUDDY but after hearing it in a reading I was forced to conclude it wasn't working. Alas.

 

And as if that isn't enough, there's You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio. One of her most perfect up-beat pop-rock tunes, right up there with Chelsea Morning and Conversation and Big Yellow Taxi. And you just cannot beat the extended radio metaphor, it's pure poetry.

Here's the Miles of Aisles version - no video though, just a pan out of the cover.

And last but not least, for those who enjoy rock star nudity - and who doesn't? - you can see Joni's bare ass on the inside of the album: