I asked the guitarist and music producer who rented me one of his houses for the summer what he thought about Jackson Browne; He answered with the question: “Do you mean the most genius songwriter in America?”, an answer that left me relieved and pleasant. I saw no need for insistent clarification, before or after Bob Dylan. For 50 years, Brown has been knitting some of the greatest Americana assets of our generation, although he suffers from a certain remoteness outside the North American continent, but not totally. The guitarist is a decade younger than me, but I know the family in whose company he was exposed to music as a teenager, and in my eyes there was no question about Dylan.
Like other singers and bands shaking off covid-19 cobwebs, Brown is plowing the summer on the road. The sheet will be shortened from mentioning them all. I suggested to the owner that I would buy tickets to the last of Brown’s four consecutive nights at the Beacon in Manhattan at the end of July. Before I knew about the rising waves of the epidemic, a month before Covid, I saw Dylan during his term at “Beacon”. From their regular ten days every March, every year, until their end, this was the home of the Allman brothers. There were springs when they raised the ceiling there.
As usual, the nagging creative tension from Dylan’s voice. Until he opened his mouth, there was heavy apprehension in the hall. After all, this is someone who has been pouring gravel for decades. But it immediately became clear that all he forgot to do, in my humble opinion, was to clear his throat; This is the only explanation for the clear and wide-ranging voice that came out of the Hibbing nightingale’s mouth. The audience did in their pants.
Two weeks ago I complained bitterly here about the almost total lack of good restaurants in New England. When I read the text again when it was published (later proofread), I did not understand the pleasant tone in which it was written. America is not what it used to be and discrimination in it is multidisciplinary. When you hang around too much in the radioactive zone of bad food, you turn down the volume with a kind of apprehension; Or is it the fate of old people who develop an existential reluctance to be close to evil. In any case, I was not wrong.
At a time he must have had nothing to do with, the New York Times, which holds itself geographically responsible for New England, stepped up and fondly described a culinary revival in Mystic, Connecticut, the mythical port city. The words were gentle, but I was a boy and now I’m not. What’s more, in the summer, Mystic in terms of population density per capita, is like the Azrieli junction at five in the afternoon or at any hour.
The more painful sting was that The Times prided itself on its music coverage; Beyoncé and Amanda Shires in the same week. But not a word about Jackson Browne’s Four Evenings. It’s a story that travels far, East Coast Latina to the West Coast South, led by the Eagles (sometimes honestly, sometimes less) that Brown brought to producer David Geffen with the cadre of Linda Rundstadt, Warren Zivon, the late Genius and many others. What does the “Times” care that Brown’s wingspan also embraces Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, KSN and others, who recognize his skills and his long-standing political commitment, to the right side of course. The “Times” is a crumbling monolith, leaving behind fragments of black plastic .
From my temporary place of residence we pour into New York on empty summer roads in the afternoon in less than two hours. It’s the same road, or one of its parallels, that I’ve been driving on for almost 20 years. Except for holidays, traffic is easy. I take into account the influx of New Yorkers from out of town on summer weekends, and the fact that the Upper West Side is not the heart of the dining scene but the location of “The Beacon”, Broadway and 74th Street, but I will not be convinced that New York has recovered from Covid and is shaking off the dust from its clothes . The city still shows teeth marks, although not uniformly.
The early conclusion was that we would eat at a good Chinese restaurant, the name of which was not specifically stated. As we walk from legal parking next to the sidewalk on 65th Street, without blocking an entrance or fire hydrant, roughly in front of Lincoln Center, my gastronomic memory awakened to life and sent tingles. Two of my favorite Chinese restaurants in Manhattan were “Shun Lee Palace”, East branch, with a luxurious look, red skin and unnecessary ceremony mannerisms that detracted from the taste; And “Shun Lee” (sans Palace) in the west, established in 1969, and if you believe the 8 X 10 master photos on the wall left by beauties like Brooke Shields, Jane Fonda and others, they had a great time. “Shun Lee” (Western-struck proletarian simplicity, small tables and an upgraded ghetto atmosphere; all good signs. It wasn’t a suitable night for a tequila foray, but two TsingTao beers for one laid a nice humming foundation and a brownie Jackson).
With the tickets on the iPhone, we were not stressed but alert. Sometimes familiarity with a menu is efficiency. The dumplings were a treat after a long hunger followed by an excellent serving of Japanese eggplant slices steamed with garlic, ginger and spices; chicken in sesame which was more exciting than its name; And a dish of shredded meat that was roasted as toothpicks and a bug in the tooth. I liked the fact that we didn’t fall into the “beat the expert” rock history. It’s a fascinating kind of maturity to talk about other things on the way to a rock show.
The fact that all the tickets were sold in a hall of about 3,000 seats on the night of the last performance of the one whose first album, “Saturate Before Using”, was released in 1972, is a testimony to the life expectancy of a great creator who did not always lick honey in his private life. This is also hard evidence of the statistical quantification of an audience of my age – there is no point in insisting that some of them were older – who do not adversely affect the fluctuations of the industry but remain one of its loyal pillars. The line to enter was slow and orderly; No spers were seen; Everyone occasionally glanced at the “Ticketmaster” app to check that the digital ticket was flashing. I passed the merchandising booth without stomach rumbling. I don’t wear t-shirts with captions, and I framed the vinyl versions of “Late For the Sky” and “Running On Empty” long ago with the record inside. I am one of those who need to live in the company of souvenirs from their cultural world.
At 20:04, Brown and his band were deep in “Barricades of Heaven”, a song that recalls how one singer alone warned throughout his adult life of the need to protect democracy, preserve the ecology and not take his eyes off the climate crisis. He was one of the founders of No Nukes after the nuclear reactor disaster in the late 1970s, a member of “Amnesty International” and other organizations. He always sat at the front of the plane on his way to a confrontation with the authorities.
Brown is one of the rockers who jump the traffic; On a good evening, Dylan moves more than he does, because what does the 81-year-old Dylan care how he looks. A man of small stature, but of good proportions, who passed through the life of a covid mipi with a degree of long, luxuriant hair that hid his deep eyes in a silvery fringe that clicked and was pulled back and a white beard. He has four steady steps around himself with a guitar and he escapes behind the piano where he composes his songs. His more sweeping brokers, and it is my pleasant duty to note that he has, his animation highlight is to raise the same leg three times to knee height and wave the same hand three times. Not Springsteen, but the boss is also preparing for the day when the skating on his knees will be more than he can handle.
Brown is not a musical virtuoso; The simplicity of his presentation and singing of some of the most touching and deep songs in English and his warm voice that betrays the beginning of a struggle in the upper registers, are still among the most touching moments. The absence of his previous band heroes, David Lindley, Danny Couch, Leland Sklar and background singer Rosemary Butler, who added so much to “Stay” that it plays next to “Load-out”, is evident and present. Although they have names and the replacements stand their ground, they are products of an efficient musical generation with good control, but this is no longer flight of melodic Valkyries at their best.
Most of the songs are calculated, deep in words, slow and thoughtful, but you can’t take away from Brown who wrote the first half of “Take it Easy” at the age of 50, raised his hands and let his friend Glen Fry finish it for the Eagles. His first album had two surprising rockers, “Doctor, My Eyes”, whose guitar solo was played by Jesse Ed Davis, a guitarist of Native American descent who died of heroin, and “Rock Me On The Water”, which made it clear that Brown was more than a kid from a good family and the son of a musical father . The great “My Redneck Friend” about his friend Greg Ullman, he was also there, and the necessary pairing that destroys me anew every time “Late For The Sky” followed by “Fountain of sorrow” are undoubtedly two of the greatest romantic breakup songs in history, mainly due to their lyrical simplicity .
I don’t want to start an argument that has no bottom line, but Dylan’s genius is his ability to observe, partly external, partly his own, and in the cynical and ironic defiance that seethed from his stronger songs. He always leaves you aware of the fact that he is both in and out of the song; Who can bear this density on his back? Jackson Browne sings with his heart’s blood and with a commitment that leaves no room for doubt; It happened to him, that’s why he writes. Of course the intensity shrinks over time and in the end the intellect wins over the emotion. But those who listened to him in the 1970s recognized the source of the pain. Like his young wife who killed herself and left him with a baby son that Brown doubted how to raise.
Brown is the type to chat with the crowd. Pulls out the playback headset in his ear to listen with his sad smile to the requests. He likes to place his poems in time and place because 50 years is a big piece of life for everyone. He loves “The Beacon” and holds no grudges for being infected with Covid here in his last appearance and for the isolation, which was probably more than being sick. He emerged from him different in appearance and more introverted. It was possible to insist on some songs that seemed necessary that he didn’t play, but the show went on for three hours without a break and two encores. I didn’t see an opening for complaints.
What surprised me no less was the fact that for three whole hours there was a sparse crowd going to the bathroom. A crowd around the age of 70 who, at the height of his spontaneous enthusiasm, rose to his feet, clapped his hands above his head, rattled his prosthetics, did a few dance steps to the island and then sat down, did not storm the doors en masse. To me, this is a fascinating phenomenon; Either those present controlled the restraint taps and waited to pee at home, or wore Depend, anonymous diapers. Everything is legitimate in my eyes. It was not easy to break free from Brown’s embrace.
I will not pretend to translate Brown’s words, but one can try to mediate their content. In “Before The Deluge” (“Before the Deluge”, 1974) he writes about the disaster of 2022: “Some of them knew happiness, some knew pain, and for others only the moment mattered. On young wings of courage and madness they flew in the rain and their feathers, once so Soft, torn and dropped… Some of them were angry at the abuse of the earth and the people who turned beauty into strength. They struggled to protect it but were surprised by the intensity of its fury in the last hour when the sand ran out. Only a few survived the effort to understand something so simple and great, in the tormented years that came before the flood.” The last words elicited a cry of sympathy that entered the fused “beacon” from the world melting into itself.
From the popular “Take it Easy” with the girl in the pickup truck who pulled up for him in Winslow, Arizona, one of the encores, Brown danced easily to “Our Lady of The Well”: “It’s a dance done in silence under the morning sky, You’re in your life and I’m in mine. Here we stand and speechless Drawing water from the well, looking across the plains where the mountains stand motionless. I have come a long way in the sands to find peace in the company of people in the sun, where the families work the land as they have always done, so far in the other direction has my country turned.” Everyone has their own personal reasons, but “so far in the other direction my country has turned” wounds me every time.
Brown’s lyrics were never included on his albums. It was rare restraint. “Late For The Sky” is his best album in my eyes in 1974 (four songs from it in concert) in “Rolling Stone” Steve Holden explained that it was worth transcribing them for four hours for anyone who wants to discover a genius songwriter. “Don’t jump at me with Dylan,” Holden wrote, “I know Dylan and he writes completely different songs. There is such a natural grace and flow in Brown’s private personality and an original statement that is so morally mesmerizing without being coercive. Brown is looking for romantic options in the shadow of the apocalypse. He was always looking for compassion and tenderness and despite the decades that are written on his face in deep wrinkles, he is unable to count on the decade when the flood will come down and five have already passed him by in the recording studio. No contemporary songwriter has dealt with the vulnerability and fragility of romantic idealism and pain.”
There are performances that fall out of you on the way to the door. There are performances that wrap around you for weeks. As those who went from burning matches to cigarette lighters and cellphones trying to commemorate what is happening in a blinding light – let the cellphones go. They are intrusive, brutal, capturing a distant metallic sound and a bouncy, unsharp image. The next day, YouTube is filled with bad clips of their kind, defaming the performance retroactively. Not every intimate personal experience needs to be shared on a social network. There are moments that are meant for us to keep to ourselves. or put them into words. Not sure either.