1
The frail youth with the shoulder-length brown hair, the puppy-wide eyes, and the lips that looked like they could lacquer a lover hung in the shadows despite the glare of the stage lighting. His eyes were downcast as he concentrated on his instrument…but was that the only reason? Or was he masking his shyness as well?.
He didn’t play as though he were uncertain. The chords that he picked out were rarely more than basic, even when they outlined one of his own compositions, but he handled them with a gentle effortlessness that—had anyone in the audience actually cared to pay attention—might have marked him out as a guitar player worth keeping an eye on.
Instead, most members of the crowd were too busy either waiting for their own opportunity to get up and play, or impatiently marking time while a friend prepared to do so. Yeah, the kid onstage could play his guitar. He could even write songs. What he couldn’t do was sing. Or at least sing loud enough to be heard. Not for the first time that evening, a voice rose out of the crowd, louder than the hum of the rest of audience, louder than the sound of the guitar being strummed on the stage, and certainly louder than Jackson Browne’s voice, and it told him what he should do.
“Sing louder!”
And Browne would raise his voice to what he thought was a shout, but which was still little more a meager whisper, and hope that this time, he was singing loud enough.
He never was.
There again, Jackson Browne never saw himself as a singer. Or a guitarist, for that matter. His goal was simply to write songs, and let other people suffer the torment of performing them. Seventeen years old, but already toting a portfolio that could make older songsmiths blanch, Browne had imagined the music industry to be a place whose denizens would flock to the words and music he wrote, and then treat them as sensitively as he himself did. Instead, he’d been reduced to this; to literally singing for his supper in a room full of singers, all of them convinced that they, too, had the lyrical skills to become the next Bob Dylan.
Maybe some of them did. But Browne’s lyrics were better than most of theirs. Even if they still could not be heard.
Sometimes he wondered how he had ended up here, in this place at this time. Because that was a story in itself, and if anybody showed any interest in him, he might tell it.
He wasn’t born in the United States, and he wasn’t born Jackson Browne, either.
But some time after Clyde Browne III squawked his first screams in Heidelberg, Germany, on October 9, 1948, his American serviceman father, Clyde Browne II, and mother, Beatrice, abandoned his birth name and started calling him Jack instead. That was the name that Clyde II had been using for most of his life, after all, but just to make sure there’d be no confusion, they threw a pun into the renaming, too. The boy would be Jackson…Jack’s Son.
Jackson Browne was just three when the family picked up and placed Europe behind them. They returned to the United States, to Abbey San Encino, the stone and adobe mansion that his grandpa, another Clyde, had built in Highland Park, on the northeastern fringe of Los Angeles.
There the boy grew to love art, threatened to become a talented painter; and there he followed his father’s lead and listened to jazz. Back in Germany, Jack Browne had been a pianist for one of the bands that played around the army base where he was stationed, and had even jammed with a visiting Django Reinhardt one night. Now he was a jobbing player for whoever would have him, a printer by day and a musician by night. At home, his was the voice that convinced all three of his children to pick up a musical instrument.
Jackson gravitated toward the cornet, but he never truly took to it, was never able to transition from blowing the notes that he knew should be played to speaking the sounds that he heard in his heart; for it is that, he knew instinctively, that separates a musician from a simple player. Maybe he could ape a Louis Armstrong solo note for note. But that, he knew, was not the point. The point was to create solos of his own.
Instead, he found that receiving formal musical training—an endless succession of scales and hard graft—is essentially akin to learning any other subject at school. He struggled to find the fun in lessons and he never could. His father suggested he transfer his attentions from cornet to trumpet, but that was no better; and, as he grew older, it became a positive handicap. When his friends threw parties, one or two of them would always bring a guitar along and the other guests would sit in rapt attention as they strummed their simple songs. You could not capture a room with a trumpet. You were far more likely to empty it.
But music did become a motivating force regardless, particularly as Browne approached his teenage years and found himself confronted with the same kind of choices that all adolescent boys need to make; whether to devote his time to something constructive, or destructive? It wasn’t quite a straight contest between the chess club and juvie, but a lot of young Browne’s school friends seemed to have made their own decisions, and as he sat in class listening to the tales of the latest spate of vandalism or violence, he sensed his own heart making a similar choice.
In the end, it was his family who answered the question for him, as they abandoned Highland Park as refugees from the creeping urbanization of a neighborhood that had been ferociously suburban when they first chose it for their home. Low-income housing was drifting over the borders, and low-income lifestyles were chipping away at what had once been a world of fifties sitcom perfection. Highland Park remained a picturesque place, but the pictures that the older residents saw became less pleasing every day. Land prices dropped; the Spanish tongue blossomed. It was no longer a place where the senior Brownes felt that they could happily raise a family.
Now they lived in the aptly named Sunny Hills neighborhood of Fullerton, Orange County, where the biggest sign of rebellion seemed to be driving a GTO a few needle-shakes over the speed limit. For young Jackson Browne, however, even that revolution was out of reach. He really wasn’t that deeply into cars.
In fact, he was a bit of an outsider all around. He didn’t have the money to dress sharp like some of the kids, and although he was fair at wrestling, one of his high school’s preferred sports, other physical activities left him lukewarm. There would be no spot on the football team for him, no endless hours at the baseball diamond.
He enjoyed surfing but, as in wrestling, his build let him down. He was so slim and frail that a decent-size wave could make mincemeat of him.
Music, however, fired him up, especially that memorable night when his elder sister Berbie came home with a couple of African-American folk musicians she knew, Joe and Eddie, and the entire family sat around singing and playing together, deep into the darkness. That might not have been the evening when Browne set the compass of his ambition to the true north of music. But it was certainly the one he would remember.
Joe Gilbert and Eddie Brown were southerners; Gilbert was born in Norfolk, Virginia, Brown in New Orleans. Their families moved to California in the fifties, and the boys met at high school when they both enrolled in the a cappella choir. Their first ever appearance as a duo saw them take first prize at the Berkeley High School talent show, and by the end of the decade they were regulars on the San Francisco–based television variety program The Don Sherwood Show.
They were also the young Jackson Browne’s first hands-on exposure to the music that would come to dominate his teens, the folk sound that was gripping the teenage American imagination like nothing since the Hula-Hoop.
Folk music is the voice of the people, so it is ironic that the more people who actually hear it, the further it slips from their grasp. “Most folk songs today are written in Tin Pan Alley,” the young Bob Dylan was prone to scoff as his own star rose in the early 1960s, and though the media was swift to rebrand his particular brand of politically reactionary strumming as protest music, that was what folk had always been, a querulous questioning of the status quo set to the simplest instrumentation and belted out with more conviction than actual singing ability.
Even the notion that “new” folk songs could be written seemed somehow anathema to the movement’s purist heart, which was the other reason Dylan was so remarkable, even before most people had heard him. Adapting and adopting themes, tunes, and imagery that sprang from sources so traditional that they were lost in the mists of time, Dylan was fashioning an entire new folk repertoire, the first American since Woody Guthrie (who, with such ironic perfection, died just as Dylan commenced his ascent) to shake off the shackles of the past while remaining true to the blacksmiths who forged them.
Joe and Eddie did not protest. Their folk was strictly within the largely motiveless “sing along and clap your hands” vein that the likes of Dylan (with “Blowing in the Wind”) and Tim Hardin (“If I Had a Hammer”) would eventually be subverting. But that was all that the young Jackson Browne required, and all he would continue to require for some years to come.
Ironically, considering how deeply embroiled in political and environmental causes he would become later in life, Browne shrugged politics aside for the most part. He saw protest music as facile and vacuous, a vagary that had no significance for anybody beyond the journalists who coined the term and the idiots who perpetuated it. Certainly none of his friends ever spoke of “protest music” as anything they had any interest in; for them, again, the music observed and commented, as it had always done. Protest? It didn’t mean anything.
Browne did throw his energies into the civil rights movement as that spread its tentacles into student life of the early 1960s, but he quickly became disillusioned, and not only by the sense that many of the causes that he heard espoused were doomed to failure because they simply weren’t good causes to begin with. It was the movement’s constant quest for easy solutions that bothered him; he felt they were being settled upon without any consideration of the wheels they might set in motion.
He recalled one such struggle, a local campaign that insisted blacks were being kept out of one particular neighborhood by racist whites. No, Browne argued back, they were out because they didn’t want to move in. It wasn’t neighborhoods people wanted, it was work, and if that particular area had no employment possibilities then why would anyone want to move there, black or white? That was the problem that needed to be addressed, the underlying roadblock that contributed to the cosmetic traffic jam. And until he came across a cause that made that distinction, he preferred to stay out of it.
Browne, then, did not intend to try to change the world with a song. For him, it was sufficient that folk music allowed him to play, to sing, to blend in with his friends. And maybe speak his mind.
Neither was he confining his ears to folk alone, to the likes of the self-styled Mayor of MacDougal Street Dave Van Ronk, or Woody Guthrie’s young acolyte Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. At the same time that the folk movement burst into the mainstream American consciousness, the tail end of the 1950s and into the pre-Beatles 1960s, there was likewise an explosive embracing of the nation’s blues heritage, of veteran black musicians like Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. In later years, history would insist that it required the British Invasion of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals and so many more to remind the United States of its roots in the blues. But where were the young Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and Eric Burdon importing their precious blues records from? The United States.
Browne was one of the myriad American teens who were well-versed in the blues long before the Stones rolled onto those shores; whose musical tastes had rejected the sweet pop and balladry that flooded in through the gates that early rock ’n’ roll had opened and instead dug back into the past, to trace the new breed’s heritage. Blues, folk, jazz, country—it was an open palette, and anybody with ears was digging deep into it.
Chip Taylor, destined to become one of the 1960s’ most visionary writers and producers, but still a music-hungry teen at this time, recalled spending his nights with his ear pressed to the family’s Motorola radio. Nightly, the young James Wesley Voight (as he was then known) would sit at the table in the hallway that divided the family kitchen from the bedroom he shared with two brothers, future vulcanologist Barrie Voight and aspiring actor Jon Voight, tuning into whatever sounds he could find, but hoping most of all to pick up the broadcasts from Wheeling, West Virginia—“the great country songs, the great blues songs. All the music that would come together in the 1990s under the banner of Americana, but at the time, that was our folk music.”
For Chip Taylor, the music would take him to New York with a country band that played around the Irish pubs before. When Taylor was just sixteen, they landed a deal with one of the biggest black labels in the city, King Records, the home of James Brown. For Jackson Browne, it brought him out of himself. At home, he would sit back listening to the records that either he or sister Berbie stacked up around the gramophone, and if he could lay his hands on brother Severin’s guitar, he would strum along until he’d taught himself the tune. Then, evenings and weekends it would be down to the beach, where everybody played, and everybody listened. Indeed, there were so many guitarists sitting on the sands that Browne wasn’t merely able to teach himself to play on a succession of borrowed instruments; it would be a couple more years before he even needed one to call his own. Before that, he would just borrow from whoever wasn’t playing theirs at the time.
Brother Severin was, naturally, the guitar owner Browne turned most frequently toward, and finally his persistence paid off. Severin was buying an electric guitar and rather than sell his now redundant acoustic, he promptly handed it to Jackson instead.
Sister Berbie, meanwhile, was doing her own bit to encourage their youngest brother’s musical inclinations. Active within her high school’s folk milieu, she was one of the team of students who organized hootenannies, the open mike song and strumming shows that had suddenly become the center of American teenage life. There she came into contact with every would-be singing, strumming, songwriting student in the school, and was in fact dating one of the most able of them all, an angular-faced young man named Steve Noonan—whose father was the owner of the Aware, a downtown coffeehouse that was one of the focal points of Berbie’’s high school’s folk explosion.
As she became more aware of her brother’s enthusiasm, Berbie permitted Jackson to accompany her on a few of these sojourns and, long after she and Noonan broke up, Jackson and the songwriter had become solid friends.
It was impressive company for Jackson to be keeping, all the more so once he was introduced to Noonan’s early-sixties songwriting partner, Greg Copeland, an enthusiast who, with Noonan by his side, thought nothing of raiding the school’s music department for whatever instruments they required (the bass fiddle was a favorite) and staging impromptu bluegrass concerts before class.
It was friends such as Copeland and Noonan who nurtured the musical seeds that Joe and Eddie had first planted in the young Browne; they who persuaded Browne to go to see Joan Baez at the open-air Hollywood Bowl on October 12, 1963. It was a concert that would literally change his entire perspective on music.
The twenty-two-year-old Baez was enormous in 1963; indeed, it is a sign of just how all-consumingly huge the protest music scene had become that she was the first singer to sell out the 17,000-seat Hollywood Bowl since Frank Sinatra, at the height of his bobby-socksing singing career, nineteen years previously.
For three years now, Baez had been the face of American folk, a dark beauty with a voice of crystalline purity and an ear that could draw unmitigated diamonds from the rust of the hoariest folk song. A denizen of the Boston coffeehouse circuit, but a complete unknown in the wider world, she exploded out of the annual Newport Song Festival in 1959 and since then had placed three albums on the U.S. Top 20, an unprecedented feat for a performer so young and, in marketing terms, so specialized.
Baez’s repertoire was largely traditional and largely English. She performed folk standards like the murder ballad “Mattie Groves,” the supernatural “The House Carpenter,” the allegorically rousing “The Trees They Do Grow High.” But she would dip into the American canon too, teasing heartbreak afresh from the murder ballad “Banks of the Ohio,” walking the “Lonesome Road” to “East Virginia”; she sang Guthrie and Leadbelly. She listened for new voices too: those of her sister Mimi and her boyfriend Richard Farina, for instance; Carolyn Hester, Eric Von Schmidt…and Bob Dylan. Baez was singing Dylan’s praises before most people even heard him sing, and as she toured the United States through 1963, the nasal little hobo look-alike was an integral part of her entourage, her lover when she was offstage, her special guest when she was on.
He was onstage alongside her in Hollywood too, a scruffy ragamuffin who had long ago perfected the “gee, shucks, great to be here” stance that Baez’s audience expected of even the queen’s most favored courtier. But then he opened his mouth to sing, usually a song of his own creation, and even Baez sometimes looked on with awe-struck amazement.
Old hands in the audience knew what to expect. They’d seen Baez pull Dylan from her hat so many times before. For fifteen-year-old Jackson Browne, however, the tousle-haired Midwesterner who sang through his nose wasn’t simply a surprise. He was a revelation.
“The first music that I heard that I really went crazy for was Bob Dylan’s,” Browne enthused. “Songs like ‘Talking World War Three Blues’ or ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’”
Of course he’d heard Dylan’s antecedents aplenty; Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Joe and Eddie. But those singers had spoken to the world. Dylan spoke to him, first from the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, where the singer introduced a brand-new song, “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” and laughed as Joan Baez stumbled her way through it because even she had not had time to learn it yet; and then at home, where young Jackson sat alone with his record player, listening to the Bob Dylan record he’d bought the next day, the singer’s self-titled debut.
By the time Dylan’s second LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was released the following month, Browne had absorbed its predecessor into his very DNA and was now ready to do the same thing with this new one. “I would get the [new] Bob Dylan album and I would breathe it…until he put out the next one,” Browne laughed. “If, when I die, they open my brain and do a cross section, like the rings of a tree or something, they will find several years in there when there’s nothing but Bob Dylan.”
Browne’s epiphany was not his alone. Across the country, in the wilds of southern New Jersey, the young (two years Browne’s senior) Patti Smith experienced a similar awakening when she caught Dylan onstage with Joan Baez; in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, James Taylor heard the same magic for himself. And in every town and city in between, countless other young teens made their own discovery: that the simplest of all musical equations—a guitarist who wrote, sang, and performed his or her own songs—was capable of taking music to a whole new plateau. One where a successful performer did not need to sing about girls and boys and cars and sex in order to be accepted. He needed to simply sing about himself.
That was what Browne and Smith and Taylor and everybody else who was bitten by the Dylan bug found exciting, and not only because it was within their reach in musical terms. Browne was excited because Dylan’s example connected with another of his ambitions; the drive to literally speak to people one-on-one, to move them and make them either think or react.
He had no interest in “making it,” in making records or playing the Hollywood Bowl; and even when he catalogued his own teenage idols, Dylan and Baez and Richard Farina, he saw no need, felt no urge, to emulate their material successes. All he wanted, he said, was “to speak to people as Richard Farina had spoken to me.”
He just needed to find a voice of his own.
Dylan was the first in a succession of body blows that were to reshape the American music scene in the early 1960s, and do so in astoundingly rapid succession. Discover Dylan in late 1963, and you would still be absorbing the shock waves when, scant weeks later, you would experience another epiphany as the Beatles made their television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Process them into your musical DNA and a few weeks later, you’d have the Rolling Stones. And it’s hard to say, today, who made the biggest difference.
Browne saw the Stones for the first time almost exactly a year after he first caught sight of Dylan, sitting in a seething crowd watching in amazement as row upon row of teenage girls removed their panties, wrapped them around anything that would give them some weight, and then hurled them toward the stage. Musically and lyrically, the Stones were the antithesis of what Dylan had become; scarcely writing their own songs yet, they were still largely reliant on the blues for their repertoire. But they too spoke to audiences; they too connected with something deep inside the people who saw them. They became something else for Browne to think about.
The British Invasion crashed into his psyche. It is no coincidence at all that one of the biggest hits the older Browne would enjoy should be with a cover of a song he first heard performed by the Hollies in 1964, the buoyant “Stay.” Nor was it by accident that he repaid the Kinks for a teenage decade full of favorite songs by guesting on front man Ray Davies’s 2011 album See My Friends, and demanding the Kinks reprise “Waterloo Sunset.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Davies admitted. “He wanted to do ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and I really wasn’t sure how it would work, because he’s a singer from Southern California, and that’s such an evocatively London song. But he came in with his guitar, he sat down and played it, and the point of the collaborations was to let people slide into the way they wanted to do it, and he changed the key, which allowed me to find new expression with my voice. We just cobbled it together on the spot and it was a great experience.”
Born from essentially an Anglified version of the experiences that shaped Browne’s own youth, the dislocation of once leafy suburbs being consumed by the creeping morass of urbanization, the British Invasion’s breed of rude suburban R&B supplanted folk in Browne’s musical mind around the same time as Dylan’s growing desire to shake the shit from his shoes saw him begin distancing himself from the squawking babe he had birthed.
Within six months of Browne’s first Stones show, Dylan was plugging his guitar in at the 1965 Newport festival and topping the chart with “Like a Rolling Stone,” and Browne himself was growing his hair and spending his summers in San Francisco with sister Berbie. Now a shoulder-length-haired brunette who had just discovered LSD and allowed its imagery to populate his lyrics, he was writing more songs. One of his compositions from this time was titled “Lavender Windows.” The title says it all.
In fall 1965, Browne entered his senior year at high school. He would not mourn its passage; as it is for so many people, school was simply something that he endured because he had to, and whose pretensions and problems he saw through every time he asked a question that a teacher could not (or would not) answer. American youth were becoming more and more politicized, but still the highest points on the campus agenda would be the length of a girl’s skirt or a boy’s hair, all those apparently crucial elements that adulthood regard as symbols of teenage rebellion, but which actually matter naught in the face of the subjects that go undiscussed. He lost himself even more in his guitar, to the point where later in life he’d admit that his instrument was his most lasting memory of school. Everything else had simply gone in one ear and out the other.
Still, he stuck it out, a halfway confident kid with an acoustic guitar, a way with the ladies, and now, a newly hatched love for the Byrds, the Los Angeles band that blended the poetry of Dylan with the drive of the Stones into an all-California cocktail of sound. In fact, they were on his mind the night he finally tired of one of his friends, a fourteen-year-old named Janet, telling him that she wanted to be a singer, without ever actually getting around to prove that she could sing. So Browne pushed her into it.
“Sing.”
Every Thursday night at the Paradox, a folk club fifteen miles away in Tustin, would-be performers were invited to show up for open mike nights. Browne was a regular visitor to these events, but he never got up on the stage himself. Standing in front of an audience and singing the songs he was writing simply wasn’t a part of his plan. But he handed Janet the lyrics to “She’s a Flying Thing,” taught her how to sing it and somebody else how to play it, and then sat back in fury as the pair reduced his song to rubble, a country-tinged monstrosity that he barely even recognized.
“So sing it yourself,” someone else told him and, although Browne went through the fires of hell in the hours before he took the stage for the first time, that’s what he did. But he never truly became comfortable with standing up there—and it showed in the barely audible whisper with which he would torment the audience as they stood staring at him. More than once he would cringe as a shout from the crowd demanded that he sing louder, and even his friends admitted that his voice was little more than faint background noise. He could already write songs, everyone agreed. But he needed someone else to sing them. He needed his own Byrds.