Having found favour with the critics and made not insignificant commercial headway with his 1972 self-titled debut album, Jackson Browne found himself with much to emulate when time came to record a follow-up the following year.
An early signing to Asylum Records, a Los Angeles based label formed in 1971 by music scene dynamo David Geffen – that would soon be home also to Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles – Browne, an L.A. native of 25, had populated his first LP with a selection of impressive songs where breath-taking lyrical imagery was set to folk and country rock melodies.
Containing a number of compositions to have already entered the public domain on being recorded by artists such as Ronstadt, The Byrds and the Jackson Five, the record proved Browne was the best interpreter of his own work. Two tracks, ‘Rock me on The Water‘ (48) and more notably ‘Doctor my Eyes‘ (7) enjoyed varying degrees of success when issued as singles, while the parent album stopped just short of the Billboard Top 50.
When his second offering appeared it contained at least two songs already familiar to those with more than a passing interest in contemporary music. His reputation as a resonant, compelling wordsmith enhanced further by ‘FOR EVERYMAN‘ (October 1973) – an assured collection that rarely fails to engage in building toward the momentous title-track that closes the set.
In crafting another notable release Browne receives stellar support from a cast of players whose number includes top notch session hands, members of the Eagles, a former Flying Burrito Brother, Little Feat keyboard maestro Billy Payne, along with contributions from fellow songsmiths Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell and David Crosby.
But his most significant collaborator on this record is guitarist/fiddle player David Lindley who features on every track – duly beginning a musical connection with Browne that, on and off, would continue through many years thereafter, both in concert and the studio.
On the album cover Browne sits alone in quiet contemplation, pictured as it was later revealed, at the backdoor of his childhood home in San Encino, an outlying neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The songs reflect upon the journey through life and once more he seeks to find truth and meaning from personal experience. His observations, however, also extend out to concerns for society as a whole, the artist yearning but optimistic in hoping mutual support will overcome personal regard.
Which is not saying Browne spends all his time wrapped in self-doubt or being worried for the state of mankind in these post-Woodstock, pre-Watergate times. True, there are moments when he is introspective, yet more than once a wry, ironic perspective comes to the fore providing a move from shade to light.
The album begins with the upbeat country refrains of ‘Take It Easy‘, Browne offering his rendition of a song, co-written with Glenn Frey, that had given the Eagles a big-selling U.S. single the previous year. Taken at a more relaxed pace than the version cut by Frey and his Eagle-cohorts, the pronounced steel guitar work of ex-Burrito brother ‘Sneaky’ Pete Kleinlow accentuates the country inflections. The soaring harmonies that distinguished the arrangement offered up by his label mates (which had opened their 1972 debut album), are nowhere to be heard as Browne delivers a more restrained vocal on behalf of a protagonist espousing the virtues of an easy life:
‘Take it easy, take it easy/Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy/Lighten up while you still can/Don’t even try to understand/Just find a place to make your stand and take it easy.’
After the narrator has gone through the now well-acquainted episodes of a mind burdened by seven women, a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and flat-bed Fords, the opening track segues into ‘Our Lady of the Well‘. The tone switches from carefree to concerned as Browne, to the accompaniment of Spanish-flavoured guitar work by himself and Lindley, can be heard rueing the disappearing simplicity of rural life:
‘But it’s a long way that I have come/Across the sand to find this peace among your people in the sun/Where the families work the land as they have always done/Oh it’s so far the other way my country’s gone.’
The mournful steel guitar of Kleinlow permeates through a song that for all its world weary overtones is not without faith in the human spirit as a force for good, (‘Across my home has grown the shadow/Of a cruel and senseless hand/Though in some strong hearts/The love and truth remain‘). Browne keeps the title up his sleeve until the very last line, something he would repeat on the masterful title track of his next album ‘Late for the Sky‘ that appeared the following year.
‘Colors of the Sun‘ is an altogether more melancholy affair, Browne setting the mood with brooding piano work that frames an abstract lyric conjuring imagery that while poetic, is hard to pin down:
‘Colors of the sun/Flashing on the water top/Echo on the land/Digging for a coin/Many other tiny worlds/
Slipping past my hand.’
No matter how vague some of the couplets, the best guess at the gist of mysterious piece being comment on how people are short-changed by their leaders (‘Disillusioned saviors search the sky/Wanting just to show someone the way/Asking all the people passing by/Doesn’t anybody want the way?), he receives excellent vocal support from Eagles drummer Don Henley. The melody is not dissimilar to an offering by The Band, acclaimed sessioneer Spooner Oldham inviting the comparison with pristine organ playing in the manner of Garth Hudson.
The piano honours on ‘I Thought I Was a Child‘ are left in the expert hands of Payne, the track also notable for a turn from drummer to the stars (Dylan, former Beatles all-bar Paul), Jim Keltner. On top of a sprightly, but sparse country rock platform Browne reveals love has entered his life (‘I thought I was a child/Until you turned and smiled/I thought I knew where I was going/Until I heard your laughter flowing‘), the writer welcoming of the emotion, but apprehensive at the same time:
‘I’ve spent my whole life running ’round/Chasing songs from town to town/Thinking I’d be free so long/As I never let love slow me down/So lonely and so wild/Until you turned and smiled/By now I should have long been gone/But here I am still looking on/As if I didn’t know which way to run.’
If the composer sounds grateful his solitary existence is at an end, (‘I thought that I was free but I’m/Just one more prisoner of time/Alone within the boundaries of my mind‘), then solitude and regret combine as the themes of ‘These Days.’ In ordinary circumstances it would stand as phenomenal proof of his current song-writing prowess – the song made even more astonishing by the fact Browne wrote it eight years before at the age of just sixteen.
First heard on ‘Chelsea Girl‘, the 1967 debut solo album of Nico, lead vocalist of the Velvet Underground, (Browne having gravitated to New York played guitar on the track whose pop baroque stylings make it an intriguing period piece), ‘These Days‘ had also been covered by Allman Brother Gregg, whose arrangement was acknowledged by the writer on cutting his own version.
With Keltner again involved Browne delivers the piece from acoustic guitar, his self-critical ruminations made all the more potent by the aching slide guitar of Lindley:
‘Well I’ve been out walking/I don’t do that much talking these days/These days/These days I seem to think a lot/About the things that I forgot to do/For you/And all the times I had the chance to.‘
For most writers a work of such resonance would be the towering achievement of their career, Browne displaying remarkable maturity to insert a couplet such as ‘Don’t confront me with my failures/I had not forgotten them‘, into this emotional folk ballad at such a tender age – ‘These Days‘ the most eloquent rock song ever written by a teenager.
The pace accerlerates noticeably at the start of side two, Elton John (in the guise of ‘Rockaday Johnnie’) contributing some pounding piano to energetic rocker ‘Redneck Friend,’ a track that contains no shortage of sexual overtones amid the amusing lyrical word play.
The following year Browne would have a hand in writing ‘James Dean‘ that appeared on the Eagles ‘On the Border‘ LP, the two songs similar in structure and both featuring vocal input from Frey.
Here the testimony is to physical gratification, (‘Well honey you shake and I’ll rattle/And we’ll roll on down the line‘), rather than tribute to a late film star, the innuendos coming hard and fast, so to speak, (‘I’m going to try to swing you up into my saddle/And then we’ll run but you’ll think we’re flyin‘), as the song builds to a rousing climax.
Browne is more specific in regard to personal experience during the witty, autobiographical tale running through ‘Ready or Not.’
This piano-based mid-tempo track, decorated with the electric fiddle of Lindley, is delightfully episodic in recounting how Browne met his partner, soon to be wife, Phyllis Major – and turn of events that led a freedom-loving individual to the brink of fatherhood:
‘Someone’s going to have to explain it to me/I’m not sure what it means/My baby’s feeling funny in the morning/She’s having trouble getting into her jeans/Her waist-line seems to be expanding/Although she never feels like eating a thing/I guess we’ll reach some understanding/When we see what the future will bring.‘
The lyrics boast a nice line (several actually) in self-deprecating humour while explaining how Browne won her affections – despite competing overtures from an unemployed actor – in a crowded Hollywood barroom. Major initially accepts his self-centred approach to living, only for a change of perspective to affect them both:
‘I told her I had always lived alone/And I probably always would/And all I wanted was my freedom/And she told me that she understood/But I let her do some of my laundry/And she slipped a few meals in between/And the next thing I remember, she was all moved in/And I was buying her a washing machine.’
It is, presumably, their relationship that comes under more studious scrutiny in ‘The Times You’ve Come.’
Structured around the intertwining acoustic guitars of Browne and Lindley, this country lament depicts the vagaries of a love affair, (‘And as our lives have grown/We have found that it only brings us pain/To hang on to the things that we have done‘). There are references to a separation (‘When you went away/Taking all that I built my false road on/I dropped my life and couldn’t find the pieces‘), but the couple have clearly reunited by the time Browne, aided by the distinctive harmonies of Raitt, casts a cautiously optimistic glance toward the days ahead:
‘Now we’re lying here/So safe in the ruins of our pleasure/Laughter marks the place where we have fallen/
And our lives are near/So it wouldn’t occur to us to wonder/Is this the past or the future that is calling?’
Penultimate cut ‘Sing My Songs to Me‘ is a composition the writer has had stashed away since 1966, the soul searching ‘Because it seems to me that there may never be/A better chance to see who I am/Come timelessly dancing/Through my dreams to me,’ sounding more innocent than introverted.
Indeed, the more elaborate, flowery if you prefer, passages of the lyric (‘Let the minutes and hours/Show my mind strange new flowers/But I’d like to know where they go/When the morning comes‘), have distinct mid-60s connotations. Browne (piano) leads a three-strong keyboard presence including Mitchell (electric piano) and Michael Utley (organ) through a poignant, meandering track whose focus becomes a slow-burning build-up to the portentous closer.
Recognised as a response to ‘Wooden Ships‘ the Crosby, Stills & Nash address to their counter-culture following (the song included on their era-defining debut set of 1969), ‘For Everyman‘ looks beyond the fantasy of leaving society behind by sailing away from the travails of modern life – concentrating instead on those without the income or inclination to simply head for the sea.
Intially Browne understands the attraction in leaving behind such distressing matters such as pollution, injustice and the threat from nuclear extinction. Over the mid-paced country rock progressions of the melody he accepts why the prospect of being free of those worries is so enticing:
‘Everybody I talk to is ready to leave/With the light of the morning/They’ve seen the end coming down/Long enough to believe/That they’ve heard their last warning/Standing alone/Each has his own ticket in his hand/And as the evening descends/I sit thinking ’bout Everyman.’
Yet as this superbly perceptive song unfolds, his attention switches from those without either the means or motivation to strike out for somewhere else (one of whom, yacht-owning superstar Crosby, was clearly not offended by the riposte and can be heard on backing vocals), to the ones who have no choice but to stay – Browne urging collective strength over single-minded survival:
‘Make it on your own if you think you can/Somewhere later on you’ll have to take a stand/Then you’re going to need a hand.’
In the end he sounds aware of clutching at forlorn idealism, but that does not prevent him from dreaming big, hopeful the benevolent streak in the human spirit will prevail. Ultimately Browne constructs the ultimate distillation of social consciousness that despite their many attempts, none of his contemporaries, not Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Carole King, James Taylor, nor Joni Mitchell for that matter, have been able to capture with such eloquence:
‘I’m not trying to tell you/That I’ve seen the plan/Turn and walk away if you think I am/But don’t think too badly/Of one who’s left holding sand/He’s just another dreamer/Dreaming ’bout Everyman.‘
In conjuring songs with the depth and resonance of ‘For Everyman‘ Browne was well on his way to the point where before the decade was out, Rolling Stone magazine would label him ‘the most accomplished lyricist of the 1970s’.
But that was for the future. On release the album was greeted warmly by the critics, Rolling Stone in their primary review made the assertion, ‘For Everyman is rivalled only by his first (the second wins) and Browne himself is rivalled by nobody,’ while the New Musical Express found it ‘brilliantly conceived and incomparably immediate.’ In terms of chart performance ‘For Everyman‘ bettered its predecessor by ten places in climbing to number 43 on the Billboard listings, although when issued as a 45 ‘Redneck Friend‘ failed to match the success of his previous singles and stalled at 85.
Nevertheless, the album was ongoing evidence a songwriter blessed with the utmost level of articulation and expressionism had entered the fray, irrespective of whether his concerns were intimate or universal.
Just two albums into his journey Browne was established as a songsmith supreme, yet even then he had scope to climb higher still.
If the 1972 debut and ‘For Everyman‘ were means to finding direction, Jackson Browne would rise to a dizzying level of accomplishment in the years that followed, delving deeply into the emotional contours of the human condition, seeking answers for himself – and in respect of every man.
JACKSON BROWNE – FOR EVERYMAN (Released October 8 1973):
Take It Easy/Our Lady of the Well/Colors of the Sun/I Thought I Was a Child/These Days/Redneck Friend/The Times You’ve Come/Ready or Not/Sing My Songs to Me/For Everyman;
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