Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, sometime resident of Santa Barbara County, will play a concert at 7 p.m. this Saturday, Aug. 27, at the Santa Barbara Bowl.
As such material often does, the background info about Browne provided by the Bowl concentrates on the artist’s awards and honors, both as a musician and songwriter as well as a humanitarian.
While it is satisfying and reassuring to see one’s own taste echoed by institutional recognition — and while it is quite encouraging to see a wealthy artist with nothing to prove working tirelessly for worthy causes that can profit him nothing — to me it is neither his official standing nor his civic virtue that will fill the Bowl this Saturday evening.
Rather, it is the hope of hearing him sing “Late for the Sky” or “These Days” or “Tender Is the Night” or “Rock Me on the Water” or “Lawyers in Love” or…
Long ago, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote and recorded a song called “The Singer not the Song,” and it was released on their December’s Children album.
As the title implies, the message of the song it that the artist is more important than the art — a metaphor, I suppose, for the broader truism that it is what a person is rather than what the person does that is the true measure of the person’s value.
Like any received wisdom, this sentimental piety wreaks havoc with critical judgment. In fact, it is the song that is of primary importance, everything else is secondary or contingent — although, of course, the singer plays an enormous role in the early days of a song’s career.
Browne’s songs are of a quality and number that elevates them to a lofty and thinly populated suite in the Tower of Song.
His peers are the likes of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and [your candidate].
As with the songs of Dylan, Cohen and Mitchell, I first heard one of Browne’s songs in a voice other than his, on Tom Rush’s 1968 album, The Circle Game. Rush sang “Shadow-Dream Song.”
But unlike my experience of Peter, Paul & Mary singing “Don’t Think Twice” or Noel Harrison (Rex’s son) singing “Suzanne” or Dave Van Ronk singing “Both Sides Now,” I was not instantly alert to a new poet, a new sensibility.
It was not until I heard Browne’s own first album — self-titled, but sometimes known as Saturate Before Using — that I understood I was in touch with someone living his life in the same context and timescape as me.
If there is one test that determines for me the greatness of a song, it is the question that the Quaker George Fox suggested we ask of any message: “Doth it speake to thy condition?”
Browne’s songs have always spoken directly to my condition (and while, as always, I make no claims to be spokesman for anybody but myself, I daresay I am not alone).
Though Adam was a friend of mine
I did not know him well
He was alone into his distance
I could guess what he was laughing at
But I could not really tell
Now the story’s told that Adam jumped
But I’m thinking that he fell…
Here is rare insight, and even rarer sympathy, set in simple music of haunting beauty.
Specificity is the key: “I still remember laughing, with our backs against the wall.” Adam was a real person, not a composite. He was just one companion who fell by the wayside in those years, not all of them.
Yet, hearing about him, in the Proustian intensity of Browne’s remembrance, I am instantly transported to my own gallery of sad dropouts, and grieving for Adam allows me to grieve for Courtland or Laurie or Clarke
. (I often get a similar effect reading Anthony Powell’s eminently Proustian A Dance to the Music of Time, as when the narrator returns to Oxford to do research after World War II: “As the forlorn purlieus of the railway station end of the town gave place to colleges, reverie, banal if you like, … turned towards the relatively high proportion of persons known pretty well at an earlier stage of life, both here and elsewhere, now dead, gone off their rocker, withdrawn into states of existence they — or I — had no wish to share.”).
Browne is clearly alone in this song, yet he is just as clearly speaking to someone in particular, and if you question the validity of my application of the word “Proustian” to this work, consider the line “But you say ‘Morocco’ and you made me smile…”
Browne’s discography abounds in songs as great as this, or greater. In his world, as in mine, other people are unique, unknowable mysteries.
I’m not talking about alienation — not Sartre’s “Hell is other people” — but its opposite, if there is such a thing.
Browne would surely agree with Powell’s dictum that, “Seen up close, all people are equally extraordinary.” Ultimately, you can never know the singer, only the song.
Browne is as adept at dealing with international or global catastrophes as he is with the local, merely personal ones.
The urgency and emotional power of his topical — not to say apocalyptic — songs does not flow from a fixed ideology, but from an internally generated moral imperative. He is neither a lawgiver nor an enforcer, only a witness.
I’m not saying that I’ve seen the plan
Make it on your own if you think you can.
Tickets to Jackson Browne range from $45-$81, and they can be purchased at the Santa Barbara Bowl box office (1122 N. Milpas Street), by phone at 805.962.7411 or online.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.