The Spirit Cellar, a liquor store on Cahuenga in the San Fernando Valley. Jackson Browne in the back rehearsing himself a new touring band. A large door blowing in the wind. All sorts of junk lying around. A frying pan with old grease and spatula. A vegetable calendar. A Clairol Custom Care Conditioner/Hair Care Diagnostic Center with spigots that squirt and a chart that matches up hair colors and hair chemicals.
For instance, red and whatever its maintenance requires. But there are no redheads in the room. Only a couple of blonds (Ed the steel man and Warren the singer-songwriter), a light brown (Mickey the drummer), two brown (Richard the guitarist, a.k.a. "Balloon Dick" because of his adipose, and Jimmy on piano), and three dark browns (me, Rotelle the bassman, and Jackson Browne).
Many of these masters of the quarter note are -- in Jackson's words -- "shitkickers from Linden, Texas," and they're in Linda Ronstadt's organization. They back her up, Sometimes she gets flustered when her performance is not -- in her opinion -- up to par. Jackson has some good advice for such tearful times. "Stroke Linda, I don't mean sexually but you should really stroke her to let her know she's great no matter how it comes out on any given night.' She has not been told yet that these gentlemen intend to leave her by July. "What are you gonna call yourselves then, the Linden Meteors?" asks Jackson in an off the-cuff manner.
Huh? Aren't they gonna be Jackson's band, isn't that the story, isn't that what they're doing there? What's up? they begin to wonder. But "If we tour with you, will we at least get to be on a few cuts on the album?" is all Mickey can ask.
Well, I'm gonna want you to play on my next session and we'll see how it goes from there . . ." Jackson, for the first time in his musical life, has power to wield. Like Dylan a good deal before him, he is getting his first electric band together. "Thought I'd get electrocuted with all this equipment, all the wiring," he laughs. He's all of 22 and he's already had a long haul behind him. He's earned himself a band, and every unattached musician in L.A. wants in by now, and plenty of attached too. So he's about to kiss the old acoustic setup goodbye except for certain songs.
He's not all that comfortable in the role of boss and he does everything subtle he can to play it down. He's nice about it. "My dad's a pianist and he told me not to play with anybody who wasn't better than myself, that way you get to learn." This is a rather blunt reference to their musical prowess as genuine professionals, intended to alleviate any fears the guys may have about their association with him. "There are aspects of rock and roll I don't go for. Well, actually I do but I know tourings gonna go stale so I'd like to maybe be in a group, really learn how to play my guitar. Since playing with you guys in Chicago I've been all jacked up. I've been having incredible ideas all the time about how to do songs, plus having an old lady helps, all that energy. But one thing having a girlfriend doesn't help is, do you know that girl up at Asylum, Lonnie? She's got incredible hips and she can't help the way she looks
"Maybe you oughta just beat off thinking of her," someone suggests. After years of settling for whatever came his way, Jackson now has his pick of the crop. He's become very selective about using his fluids.
Jackson has learned everything he knows about arranging from the experience of cutting his first album for Asylum. To show his expertise he sometimes launches into fake arguments about whether the gang ought to do their own jams on certain of his already prearranged numbers, of course they know they're allowed to jam, he's just still unsure of himself as a bandleader. Usually the instructions are on the order of "not too many notes, just swells" or "more backbeat after the bass comes in." During the preliminaries to "Under the Falling Sky" Jackson asks Eddie for some steel. They get going and Jackson suddenly realizes he wants slide. "Slide," says Ed, pointing to his guitar, then "Steel," pointing to his steel, a joke has been made, ha ha. Jackson's relative inexperience with this band business is a gas and no one minds including him.
Time for a supper break. Off to Lucy's El Adobe for some Mexican eats. Lucy knows Jackson real well. Even though his Sunset Strip billboard is now down, who doesn't know him in L.A.? "'Doctor My Eves' is 24 with a bullet," he tells her with pride.
Jackson's first East Coast appearance anywhere: State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1965. Also on the bill were Steve Noonan and Tim Buckley. Tom Nolan later dubbed them "The Orange County Three" in Cheetah. Jackson stole the show. Seems like every song Steve did was a Jackson song. "Seems like every song I'm doing is a Jackson song." Steve went on first, setting the stage for Jack. Jack went on next and lie just knocked everybody out. He set the scene for Buckley.
Buckley was the professional who was already performing at Andy Warhol's Dom on St. Mark's Place in the wonderful East Village and he even had an album cut on Elektra. He could have pulled it off by himself. But Jackson had put things on that plane already and so Tim got a chance to soar. I mean, this was really a fuckin' heavy concert for early 1967, everybody east's first taste of California sunshine . . . just about. The Airplane had played Stony Brook a few weeks before, but that was just dope reaffirmation and weird clothes and San Francisco fog, not all that much solar radiation. Jackson lit the place all the fuck up, he really did. There's people who still talk about the show, especially the point where J. Browne asked for a drink and the local Suzy Creamcheese (that was actually her assumed moniker, every school must've had one) brought him a vinyl hat full of water. He turned it down when somebody else got him a soda pop out of a machine nearby but he did get to stick it in Miss Creamcheese somewhere in the course of his travels. Later she told Stony Brook lochinvar David Roter that "he was the best." And he was all of 17, and she, the school slut who oughta know! The stuff of which legends are made.
By late winter Jackson was staying with Noonan -- then a Vista volunteer living on whatever street it was below Houston -- and playing at the Dom himself, opposite Nico. Nobody ever really listened at the Dom, downstairs from the Balloon Farm, later the Electric Circus. But the hamburgers were good they were pretty cheap on a good roll. Light shows on the walls with pieces of movies like Andy's Vinyl in black and white with Gerard Malanga getting hot wax poured down his chest while bound to a chair. One night Andy who was always reading the New York Times in the back -- got Gerard and Pope Ondine to just sit up on stage and talk. They had nothing to say and both of them had double-breasted suits as was the style then. On another occasion Jackson -- swell guy that he was -- got club manager Paul Morrissey to let his new friend David Roter do a late set for the hangers-on. His first song was "Sam, the Girl You're With Is a Man."
But for those who were listening Jackson was where the action was. Here he was the prototype singer-songwriter years before it had a context. He was ahead of his time so they called him a rock singer, an individual rock singer without a band. The only others at the time were people like say, Donovan and Buckley and Tim Hardin -- and Donovan was already recording with a group, in fact they all were. Certainly Jackson wasn't folk, that category had already been erased from the slate.
Jackson was a poet who made people cry, gasp, etc. That sort of storybook shit. When his songs rhymed, as in "Someday Morning." it was understated overkill, they really fuckin' rhymed:
In the morning skies the stars begin to sputter and to fade
As the night surrenders all its claim on shadows it has made
A watchdog's hungry bark
Is the morning's first remark
Upon my waking
And everyone must someday do his own thing
And everyone must someday do his own thing
And I have a brand new song to sing
One night in April '67 at the Dom, Nico started bothering him right on mike about a threatening phone call she had received, claiming him to have been the nasty, horrible caller. Their relationship had been deteriorating of late anyway, having tottered from the level where Jackson had been exultant to boast that he, a 17-year-old, was "the lover of the most beautiful girl in the world." She upset him so much that he just up and walked off in mid-performance, being replaced by a willing Bobby Neuwirth who just happened to be sitting right there out front.
Poor Jackson. He was just so goddam innocent.
Too innocent for the Dom at least. This famous publicist who's still around and still a New York scene-maker and Max's staple was hanging around him all the time, being nice to him and all for no apparent reason. Telling him stuff like he oughta have a TV show of his own on which he could just be groovy, since he was such an oh-so-outasite flower child, Lou Reed -- then of the Velvets -- warned him, tried to explain that this male person was after Jackson's ass -- after all, the pretty, young Jackson was one hell of a prototype sex symbol for the gay rock underground -- but Jackson missed the point until it finally turned out that whatshisname unequivocally wanted to fuck him. Spooked the shit out of him.
Nico plus New York in general sent Jackson scurrying back home to Southern California. But his legend-myth-etc. stayed behind.
In the summer of 1969, Jackson ended up in the same room with David Roter one more time, this time in Berkeley. Jackson had just skinnied out of the draft with the help of an enormous consumption of speed. But there was still plenty of speed to spare and he handed over two entire handfuls of the killer stuff. "I was even losing my memory," he said as he kissed that former life goodbye.
Jackson had by then completed all he was gonna complete of an album for Elektra. Elektra had been the normal, expected rendezvous for every kindred spirit of the whatsit clan. Buckley had been first, by this time he had three albums in his name. Noonan had had one of his own recently released, even though its blandness prevented much mention of its existence. Jackson had even cut a nifty demo for Elektra on his first sojourn to New York, containing a whole bunch of his songs, three sides of him and one of Noonan. (It's been bootlegged and it's a good one, even though Jackson disavows any relationship between it and his present recordable talent.)
Elektra had this ranch at the time, the Whatever-it-was Ranch in the Northwest: country wholesomeness was beginning to come into vogue and it was a place for the fellows to get their heads together, etc. Journeymen luminaries John Koerner and Willie Murphy had already cut a vastly over-hyped piece of wax there and praised the joint to the sky. Jackson was there to do his long-awaited (it had been a long time already) first album and his producer was Barry Friedman, a.k.a. Frazier Mohawk. They didn't really get along, Jackson and Frazier, and no usable tapes resulted from the sessions.
It wasn't until David Geffen -- now the big cheese behind Asylum Records -- found him that Jackson got anywhere. So says Jackson himself and Geffen says it too:
"I was working at CMA at the time and I got a letter in the mail with a demo and an 8 x 10 glossy, and the letter said, 'I'm writing to you out of respect for the artists you represent.' And it went on and on and on and on and on. I figured, my God this guy can't be any good, so I threw it in the garbage pail, without listening to the record. I wonder if I should tell all this. Anyway, so my secretary comes in the next day and she says, 'You know that record and that picture and that letter you threw out?' I said. 'You go through my garbage?' She said. 'Well, he was so cute that I took it home. And he's very good. Listen to the record.' So I put on the record and there's a song called 'Jamaica Say You Will' and I was totally and completely knocked out with this record, this horrendous demo. And I called him up but he was gone. There was no way I could reach him. And I called him for three months at this particular number and tried to track him down all over.
"Finally three months later I got a call from him. I made him come to my office the very instant. He came over with a guitar, sat down and played me six or seven songs and I sat there with my mouth hanging down, you know, I just couldn't believe it. And then he told me this whole story about himself. That was my absolute first knowledge of him. I mean although I had heard the Tom Rush records I had never put two and two together. Anyway I told him that I wanted to look after him. That was before I had any idea that we'd have a record company, et cetera, but at the time I was looking after Joni and Laura and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and some other people, and we've been together ever since. He wanted to make a record immediately and I kind of wanted him to wait, figuring that he was just getting better and better. Finally, a year and a half after we met, he made his first record.
"He's much more prepared as a person now to deal with being successful than he would have been when he first tried to cut a record three years ago or whenever it was. I think he's lucky that he didn't make it before now. Very lucky. He's young now but he was that much younger three years ago, four years ago. I think it would have been tragic had he made a record then."
After enchiladas at Lucy's, Jackson stops off at Crystal Sound, scene of the sessions that led to his first release. Producer/engineer Richard Sanford plays him the tentative results of his work with singer Casey Kelly. Jackson is pleased, then bothered. "I wonder why the production wasn't as good on mine," he wonders aloud but halfway to himself. Same producer, same musicians Kunkel, Skiar, etc. -- so how come it sounds better for Casey? Jackson can be touchy about his past work, and in moments of insecurity he even views his music-making future as a likely sequence of merely progressively better failures. The archetypal perfectionist, he carries his second thoughts about the first album back to work with him.
Back at the Spirit Cellar, Balloon Richard speaks not very highly of his mescaline trip of the night before, his first. "It wasn't that weird." Jackson has the answer: "Well, you should go out on the Magic Mountain and take some of those cactus buds. Strange things happen . . ." Jackson in his element again, the teacher and spiritual guide.
Then it's Jackson the world mover. A new song that's gonna be "the fuckin' motherfuckin' hit of the Seventies." It's a song for David Crosby, who in an interview of two years before was heralding Jackson as "the best fucking songwriter in America today." David wants to buy an island and start a utopia, he's already got some sort of bulldozer to help him in his chores as a builder. Jackson wants very much to believe that David can do it but his doubts are too strong, for once it's somebody else who's the Naive One. "Even if he does it the water pollution's bound to catch up with the place sooner or later." The song expressing these cosmic misgivings is a lulu, long and awesome and cooking and everything. Jackson is happy with the way it sounds. "Like the first time you heard 'Long and Winding Road,' it sounds familiar even though it's a new melody, it strikes a responsive chord." And so it does. Jackson the rock and roll theorist is right.
But he feels he has to ask the guidance of those around him concerning the total makeup of his next album. "Do you think it's alright if everything isn't country?" he asks the band. These may be Texas shitkickers he's asking but they agree it's alright. "Like I'd like to have something in R&B and maybe Latin arrangement with a mariachi thing in it on something else, lots of different things for different audiences. I'd like to get as many types of people to listen as possible, how's that idea sound?" Not very radical for 1972, so the agreement is universal. Fine.
Ultimately Jackson discusses an album concept he's been thinking about, apparently for some time, a tribute to desperadoes. Like the Doolin-Dalton Gang, composed exclusively of losers after a double bank robbery sharply decimated their ranks. Warren gets to do his Jesse James ballad on the 88s. Reflexively, things shift into a copytune vein, Creedence, Stones, Buddy Holly, "Day Tripper," fun, everybody just jamming and getting to sing. The whole day's been a thunderous success.
Aided by available snow they've continued long into the night, falling out one by one except for the indefatigable Jackson. Finally it's down to just him and Ed on steel. "I got nothing to do, it's late, might as well keep playing with you." Just the encouragement Jackson needs to challenge the Sandman a little longer. They try some single-note stuff on a couple of Jackson songs the others have not yet attempted.
After about an hour or two it's down to just Jackson. Given his new enlarged musical framework, just Jackson is no longer enough. For the moment at least. So it's home to his new house on the beach behind a gate in Santa Monica. Goodnight, Jack.
(June 22, 1972)