By Jesse Kornbluth
Founder, HeadButler.com
Listening to "Solo Acoustic, Vol. 1" -- Jackson Browne's new "live" CD -- I time-travel back to 1966. I was 20 and, in my prodigious way, writing a piece about a young singer for a national magazine. We spent the afternoon together, we had dinner, and then Billy James, the singer's manager, said he had a little surprise.
Billy James was a man to be taken extremely seriously. He had been at Columbia Records when Dylan came along, and he had recorded the first known interview with him. He knew everyone in Los Angeles. He had a magnificent wife and a radiant son. He wasn't the Pied Piper, but he surely had the Piper's private number.
We repaired to Billy's hotel room. An herbal remedy was produced. Candles were lit. Billy switched on a tiny reel-to-reel tape recorder. And a man and woman sang:
Awake to understand you are not dreaming
It is not seeming just to be this way
Dying men draw numbers in the air
Dream to conquer little bits of time
Scuffle with the crowd to get their share
And fall behind their little bits of time
Oh, leave me where I am I am not losing
If I am choosing not to plan my life
Disillusioned saviors search the sky
Wanting to just to show someone the way
Asking all the people passing by
Doesn't anybody want the way
I say goodbye to Joseph and Maria
They think I see another sky
And from my fallen window I still see them
I'll never free them from the sky
The song was "Colors of the Sun." The singers were Jackson Browne, then unknown, and Nico, the Andy Warhol protégé who sang with The Velvet Underground. The effect was magic.
I don't mean "magic" the way reviewers use it. Like when they say, "It was a magical night in the theater -- best damn musical I've seen in years." I mean real magic. Time stopped. The world fell away. All that was left were two voices -- his, young and thin and too sensitive to live, hers, age-old and husky but not broken -- and their deep insights into love and longing.
There were a few more songs on the tape. When it ended, Billy told me about Jackson, the singer-songwriter who grew up in the Republican stronghold of Orange County -- no kidding; its airport is named after John Wayne -- and who surely had some kind of future.
Well, yes: He turned out to be the West Coast Bruce Springsteen. More melodic than The Boss. More lyrical. More personal (I can't imagine Springsteen writing a song like "Here Come Those Tears Again"). More political. And, on the flip side, less of a showman. Less of a generational statesman.
"Solo Acoustic, Vol. 1" is a lovely CD because it strips the songs to their bones. It's just Jackson and a guitar so delicate it could be flamenco, just Jackson and a piano that rolls like the sea. The 30 seconds of applause at the beginning? Not so lovely. And some of the stories between songs won't be so funny or compelling if you listen to this CD often.
So maybe this one is for the hard-core. Maybe you'll want to start with the earlier masterpieces, from his first golden era, when the world was bright and politics hadn't yet beclouded his (and our) sky. There's a list below of his best work. The Greatest Hits CD? Never touch the stuff. To me, they're all the greatest.
Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based journalist and founder of Head Butler.com, a cultural concierge site and free daily e-mail featuring information on new and classic books, movies and music.
