5
By early 1966, Jackson Browne was ready to abandon his attempts to make his voice heard, or even audible, and find a more reliable conduit for his songs. It was not an admission of defeat; rather, he knew that the experience would allow him to grow stronger, to refine his art without standing in the spotlight, and, best of all, he would not even have to take responsibility for the group’s somewhat wacky name.
Who, after all, calls their band the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band?
Destined, within a decade, to become one of the biggest names on the West Coast rock scene, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band grew out of the New Coast Two, a Long Beach jug band formed by, and comprising, singer-guitarist Jeff Hanna and singer-songwriter guitarist Bruce Kunkel.
Informal jam sessions at the legendary McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Long Beach, a hangout for young players as diverse as Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, developed into more regimented rehearsals, and slowly a lineup began to crystallize around a gang of like-minded players: Ralph Barr, Les Thompson, Jimmie Fadden, and, because the whole thing both looked and sounded like fun, Jackson Browne.
With a set that slipped from original compositions to such standards as “Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” and “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were a purist jug band catching a ride on the same revivalist coattails that had already ignited the Lovin’ Spoonful. Observers laugh at the memory of the double-breasted pin-striped suits, whiteface, and cowboy boots that adorned the six musicians’ frames; and the jugs and washboards that filled their van.
But an utterly unexpected victory in a battle of the bands competition at the Paradox landed them a gig at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, opening for Texas garage growlers the Sir Douglas Quintet as they rode the one-two punch of the hits “She’s About a Mover” and “The Rains Came.” And a few nights later, the Nitty Gritties were sharing a bill with the Lovin’ Spoonful, as they ventured west for the first time.
The jug band’s fame began to spread, and so did their musical horizons. But Browne never truly felt he belonged. He wrote one song that his bandmates adored, a ragtime novelty called “Melissa.” But they passed over “These Days,” which he wrote around the same time, and they looked askance at other numbers he brought along. If it couldn’t be jugged, then it was of no use to them.
By summer 1966, shortly after the group played an utterly mismatched gig at the Glendale Ice House, opening for Captain Beefheart, Browne had quit the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (another Paradox regular, their manager’s brother John McEuen, replaced him); and by August, all of Browne’s performing nerves were firmly placed behind him when Bob Sheffer and Hank Fisher, proprietors of the Paradox, persuaded him to play his first ever solo gig. And this time, not only could he be heard, he seemed to be enjoying himself, too. So much so that, when his girlfriend at the time, singer Pamela Polland, invited him to join her band, Gentle Soul, he made it clear that it was only a temporary measure. He wanted to get on with his own career.
An aptly named vocal duo, Gentle Soul originally comprised Polland and fellow vocalist Rick Stanley. But Stanley quit while the band still had some outstanding dates to play, so Browne stepped into the gulf. It was a short-lived venture; Stanley returned after no more than two weeks away, and Browne was free to return to his solo career.
But if Gentle Soul was just another passing fancy, Polland remained one of Browne’s greatest local cheerleaders, singing his praises to all who listened, including Billy James, a publicist at Columbia Records. James and Jackson met at the Golden Bear one evening that fall, and days later, Browne was recording his first demo tape for Columbia. Before the label could act on it, however—possibly before they even heard it—James was jumping ship, taking on the plum assignment of opening Elektra Records’ new Los Angeles office. And he wanted Jackson Browne to jump with him.
It was not an offer Browne could decline. The success of the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album the previous year had seen Elektra begin moving closer to the pop mainstream they had hitherto kept at a deliberate arm’s length. The label came close to resigning John Sebastian once he moved onto the Lovin’ Spoonful, actually exchanging contracts before it was discovered that the group’s publishing deal already bound them to the Kama Sutra label.
Elektra was more fortunate with Los Angeles band Love, which scored its first hit single in the spring of 1966 with “My Little Red Book.” Love’s debut album followed and, despite the general unpredictability of the band’s music (sometimes brilliant, sometimes…not so brilliant), they remain one of the best-loved acts of the age, with their only serious competition coming from Elektra’s next and, at the time of Browne’s arrival, most recent venture into rock, the Doors.
This was the company that seventeen-year-old Jackson Browne was being invited to keep; this was the legacy that he would be expected to preserve; and in terms of painting his own private legend around his arrival in those halcyon corridors, his Elektra career got off to a flying start. On October 9, 1966, Browne signed up as a staff writer at Nina Music, the label’s publishing wing. His entire $500 advance was spent buying his way out of a summertime pot bust.
Writer Joe Smith recorded Browne’s recollections of his day in court. “There were two hundred black and Chicano kids in court that day and it was an inescapable fact that they were all going to the slammer, while the other three or four clean-cut kids like me, whose parents had paid a lawyer to stand up and say how ‘upright’ we were—well, you just knew we weren’t going to jail. Whoever had the bread was gonna be all right.”
And it looked like bread was not going to be a problem. Not now. Less than two weeks later after Browne signed with the publishing company, Nina repaid his loyalty by getting his lyrics in Time magazine.
***
The New Troubadours.
It was a resonant term for what was, even if you acknowledged its innate tunefulness, a particularly unresonant turn of events.
Throughout its first decade of life, which we will say kicked off with “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1955, rock ’n’ roll had been about tutti-fruttis and long tall Sallys, yeah yeah yeahs and a-lop-bam-booms. It was about Rolling Stones pissing on filling station walls, and rockers with locks that trailed so far down their backs that even their admirers confessed that a few looked like girls.
It was about kicking out the jams and getting down and with it; “Summertime Blues” and “My Generation.” Articulating anger and fire-eating frustration. “Paint It Black” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Howling like Ginsberg and fucking like beasts.
It was not about sitting down and writing a poem to your heart.
It was not about speaking to your innermost child.
It was not a place to go if you wanted to talk about your feelings, and hands up everyone who felt a little bit betrayed when they learned that John Lennon wrote “Help!” for precisely those reasons? The last truly significant pop record that the Beatles ever made, transformed into a three-minute sob on the psychiatrist’s couch; and, because the Beatles were never allowed to do anything without it immediately igniting a whole new trend—couldn’t even break wind without a myriad imitators buying baked beans in their wake—suddenly thoughtfulness and analysis were the way to go. And, by the time the Beatles got around to “Eleanor Rigby,” even Time magazine was paying attention.
The magazine’s October 2, 1966, edition tells the tale, and christens the new movement, too. “The New Troubadours,” screamed the article’s headline, and that was foreboding enough. But it got worse.
The opening lines to the story set the stage. “‘Zeeks!’ gasped one teenybopper. ‘You can’t even dance to it!’ She was referring to the Beatles’ latest release, ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ in which the shaggy four sing to the accompaniment of a double string quartet.”
Time applauded the Beatles’ daring, for raising the barricades with which rebellious youth had hitherto ring-fenced its musical heroes, and it found echoes in the words of countless other commentators elsewhere in the media. Mature and stately, adult and accessible, “Eleanor Rigby” was the sound of “the familiar big beat of rock ’n’ roll…receding.”
But was it receding because it needed to recede? Or were there other forces at work here, forces that had less to do with rock ’n’ roll needing to pause and take a quick breather than with the fact that the people who listened to the music had suddenly grown so goddamn old?
Fifteen in 1955, when Elvis ushered in the age of cool, and Eddie, Chuck, Gene, and Buddy were all banging on the door, you would be staring thirty in the face at the end of the sixties. Thirty! An hitherto unimaginable age that you would have spent the past two decades declaring tantamount to a death sentence.
And though you still felt much the same as you did half that age; still liked the same records, dug the same films, read the same books…well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? They were the same records. In 1976, a twenty-eight-year-old Jackson Browne remarked, “most people [never stop] living the first twelve, or maybe fifteen, years of their life. When they’re forty and talking about something, it could just as easily be about something that happened to them when they were ten.” And he was right. Because youth is when you have time for those things, and a record or a movie or a television show is going to mean far more to you when you’re in teens, and the most important thing in the world is that record (or movie or television show), than it will when life itself has taken over. Time to grow up, time to settle down, time to put away the air guitar and “could you turn that down a little? The kids are trying to sleep.”
So first you turn it down and then you notice that the records you’re playing have been turned down as well. That the Beatles are no longer screaming to be heard above a stadium full of keening schoolgirls, and are sitting around the campfire instead, singing songs about lonely people. That the Stones have stopped seeking satisfaction and Dylan now is sailing sad-eyed ladies across the lowlands.
It was nothing you could put your finger on. But there was a creeping literacy moving into the mid-1960s music scene. Songwriters were suddenly comfortable searching for words that rhymed with more meaningful terms than “baby,” “yeah,” and “like long hair.” It was a dark sobriety, a sense of seriousness and, most chilling of all, a morbidity that may or may not have stepped from those hysterical early Beatles reviews that compared “I Want to Hold Your Hand” with the combined output of Shakespeare and Beethoven, and had been leaching into art’s enfants terribles for a couple of years now. It’s true, too. Have your work compared to that of a grand master long enough, and sooner or later you will start believing the hype. And, even more dangerously, you will start living up to it. Human nature does not permit otherwise.
Nobody was to blame, either. There is no single reason why rock was suddenly going soft on us, and no truly culpable party. Yes, the Beatles did their bit, of course, and so did Bob Dylan and the Band—expunge Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Blonde on Blonde and Music from the Big Pink from the historical record of 1966–68, and an awful lot of grimness would have been averted too; a lot of hubris and po-faced panegyrics, and an entire school of “informed” rock writing that made a virtue of the fact that the writers themselves had been to college and actually paid attention in class!
That was a new development. Hitherto, rock reviewing had been the purview either of tired and bitter old newspaper staff men who’d seen youth fashions come and go, and traced a direct line of musical decay back to whatever had floated their boat when they were fifteen; or it was in the hands of the so-called teenybop press, who didn’t care who the hell they wrote about so long as they were young, male, cute, and malleable.
But Crawdaddy crawled out in January 1966, a magazine that treated rock as though its words were engraved in stone; Rolling Stone rolled up on November 9, 1967; and almost smack-bang perched in between those two dates, Time magazine laid out the editorial brief for both, the first concerted nationwide attempt to transform rock music into something that could physically help shape the news, and not simply make it every time a passing pop star was caught looking happy while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.
It is no coincidence, either, that the music that Time singled out as so special was essentially that to which Crawdaddy had handed its early accolades: Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Lovin’ Spoonful were all profiled in the first four issues of Paul Williams’s Brooklyn basement-based fanzine, and were all lionized anew in Time.
Twelve months later, in the first few Rolling Stones, there they all were again, the grimly serious faces of rock music as more than a cure for the summertime blues, or the rest of the words that Roger Daltrey merely stuttered through: “Why don’t you all just f-f-f-form an orderly line in the corridor and the doctor will see you shortly.” This ain’t rock ’n’ roll, as David Bowie would later be paraphrased; this is mama’s best chicken soup.
Lots of currents, lots of courses, lots of little pick-up sticks, and all of them pushing pop into directions it should never have looked in. A rock band with an orchestra, writing new concertos for guitar and cello; an album with an art libretto, emblazoned with the death threat “rock opera.” And a singer with a conscience, with a soul-singing sadness, pouring out his heart with an inner-worldly wordiness and laying bare that same essentially teenage sense of personal angst that past generations had left locked in their journals, but which could now be set to a wistful melody and raised up as something somehow salable.
Misery loves company, after all, but even more than that it loves postadolescent self-absorption, and “wow, if you think that last song was meaningful, wait until you hear the next one.”
“In recent months,” that Time feature continued, “the pop market has been penetrated by a new and impressive clutch of poet troubadours. They are mostly ex-folksingers who turn out their own numbers, are older than their forerunners and more musically sophisticated. They write songs with titles like ‘A Single Desultory Philippic’ [Simon and Garfunkel] and ‘Sunshine Superman’ [Donovan]. The recurring themes are loneliness, alienation, and lovers who walk ‘on frosted fields of juniper and lamplight’ [Paul Simon’s ‘For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her’].”
To further illustrate the point, however, and perhaps to hammer it home with irrefutable finality, the magazine asked readers to consider another song, titled “Shadow Dream Song”: “It’s a crystal ringing way she has about her in the day, but she’s a laughing, dappled shadow in my night.…”
The brief verse’s author was not named or credited. But Jackson Browne’s friends, family, and music publishers all knew his name. Which means that, with so much happening, or threatening to happen, in Los Angeles, it was pure teenage adrenaline that prompted Browne to place it all on hold and go to New York City instead. That and the fact that his sister Bernie’s old boyfriend Steve Noonan had recently moved across the country, and Greg Copeland intended driving from coast to coast to visit him. In fact, Copeland and some other friends intended venturing even further afield, using New York simply as the starting point for a trip to Europe. Browne couldn’t afford that, but New York was certainly doable.
They left early in the New Year of 1967, on a dead-of-winter journey that, with everyone taking turns to drive, took them just four days without stopping for anything more than gas and necessities. Of course Browne’s memory of the trip wasn’t all it could have been; he told writer Joe Smith that they left Los Angeles in January 1967 and listened to the Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston prize fight on the radio as they crossed the Texas Panhandle. But that fight took place in 1965, and their journey was certainly too early in the year for the newly renamed Muhammad Ali’s next fight, demolishing Ernie Terrell (the elder brother of the Supremes’ Jean Terrell) on February 6, 1967—a match that was all the more memorable for the sheer brutality of the bout, but which would swiftly be absorbed into the background noise that surrounded Ali’s loss of his championship title just two months later.
It doesn’t matter. Whenever Browne arrived in New York, and whatever he listened to on the radio as they drove, he was immediately installed on the sofa in Steve Noonan’s apartment, a few tiny rooms on the Lower East Side, at a time when that address alone conferred a certain bohemian gravity upon its occupant.
Certainly it was a world far removed from any Browne had seen before. Even Highland Park, which his family had evacuated when the neighborhood went downhill, could offer nothing to compare with the ragged slums of the loisada, the immigrant-packed and poverty-stricken warren of streets and tenements through which Browne and Noonan had to trudge every night, simply to get home.
Yet there was a status symbol of sorts in that address, not to mention easy access to most of the places where two teenage or thereabouts musicians might want to be; beginning with Greenwich Village and straggling out from there.
The East Village began almost literally at the bottom of their road, and David Peel, the epitome of New York street performers as the age of the hippie began to dawn, was quick to name his own band after the area he called home; David Peel and the Lower East Side Band would soon be joining Browne on the Elektra books, while another Elektra artist, singer Tim Buckley, was already a friend of Noonan’s.
In fact, the two of them, Noonan and Buckley, had recently been booked to play a Sunday afternoon show at one of the State University of New York’s smaller campuses, in Stony Brook, on January 13. Browne tagged along and, in the laissez-faire spirit of the day, was added to the bill. And, according to journalist Richard Meltzer, who met Browne for the first time at that show, Browne “just knocked everybody out,” both in his own right and by association. “Seems like every song I’m doing is a Jackson song,” Steve Noonan admitted during his opening set, and he was right.
Stony Brook was simply a one-off for Buckley; his main engagement in New York at that time was a residency at Andy Warhol’s Dom, and that was an education for Browne as well, even before he entered the building. The term hippie was not yet in wide use in New York, but the first glimpses of its imminent preeminence were already making themselves noticed around the Village and St. Mark’s Place.
Gone were the ragged jackets, checkered shirts, drab flat caps, and harmonica cases that had once stuffed the windows of the trendiest neighborhood boutiques, replaced by velvets and furs, fringes and tassels.
A military surplus store called Limbo opened up and did a roaring trade in army greens and camouflage, to kids who would never dream of donning such costumes in earnest; the military draft was creeping ever closer to a lot of them as the United States stepped up its suicidal intervention into Vietnamese politics, and cops were beginning to stop kids on the streets to check their identification papers.
Browne wasn’t worried about the draft right now, because he knew officials wouldn’t track him down to the couch in Steve Noonan’s living room. Besides, you didn’t go to the Dom to worry about things, much the same way as you didn’t go to the Dom to listen to the music. You went because it was the Dom; and besides, a lot of the music was god-awful anyway, sound blasting from cheap amplifiers ricocheting from the walls of a building that had barely functioned as a Polish social club in the years before Andy Warhol took it over, and whose acoustics had only gotten worse once he moved his own apparatus in there. The scrawny albino with the hesitant handshake was an artist, after all, not a sound engineer, and not an acoustic technician either.
So when bands walked around complaining that the sound did strange things when they played at the Dom, Warhol took that as a compliment to his own genius. You could create art from anything.
Even from a discotheque on St. Mark’s Place whose name, unbeknownst to everyone who read shorthand S&M terminology into it, translated from Polish as something far more domestic than that. The venue’s full name was Polski Dom Narodowy, “Polish National Home,” but “Dom” was “Mod” in reverse as well, and occasionally Warhol would tell somebody that was why he called the club that.
But no, the Dom was the Dom long before Warhol and his right-hand man Paul Morrissey cast eyes upon it; and long before they launched their own nitery in April 1966 with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia presentation that merged light, film, sound, and personality together into one seething, bubbling, beatific whole.
Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground was the unrelenting soundtrack to the experience. The lights and slides of Daniel Williams and Jackie Cassen provided the visuals; the dancing of Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov were the focal point, all whips and chains and writhing flesh, bloodied by gelatin slides and given fresh manic momentum by the merciless strobes. And though things had calmed down considerably in the ten months since the Warhol Dom’s opening, the club retained at least a fission of the frenzy for which it once had been renowned.
Five movie projectors worked full-time, bathing the walls in Warhol’s own cinematic vision. Five carousel projectors shot fresh images onto the stage every ten seconds. Colored gels and spotlights did crazy things to your eyeballs, and a huge revolving mirror ball, one of the first seen in a New York club since the golden age of the speakeasies, sent shards of light flashing across every darkened surface.
And all night long, the spotlight would seek out and then settle upon Nico, German model, Fellini actress, Andrew Oldham protégée and now Warhol superstar, ethereal beauty, and dazzling blonde, the New York underground’s pick for the most stunning woman in the world.
Nobody could resist Nico. Warhol worshipped her, Lou Reed adored her, John Cale became her friend for life. Bob Dylan wrote a song for her, Iggy Pop carried a torch for her, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones were in love with her. Leonard Cohen started writing songs for her the same night he met her. Jackson Browne, then, was just the latest in the long line of men who had fallen beneath the former Christa Päffgen’s intoxicating spell. “I had a gigantic crush on Nico. She was so fucking beautiful. I had seen these twenty-foot-high posters of her for the three weeks I’d been in New York and then I went down and saw her—it was even my first time in a bar, I think, because I’d just turned eighteen.”
Nico was at the Dom with the Velvets when they opened the place; she was still at the Dom now that they had moved on, a solo artist who relied on whoever else was in the room with a guitar to back her up as she sang. Tim Buckley filled in a few times; so did her old Velvets bandmates Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison.
But she was in a weird position. Verve, the MGM subsidiary that picked up the Velvets on the strength of Warhol’s reputation, clung onto Nico’s contract after she and the band parted company, and now they were demanding an LP. The suits at the head office had never quite understood what she was doing with Lou Reed and his noisemakers anyway; saw Nico through the same starry eyes that any beautiful female pop singer ignited in the mid- to late 1960s, and Nico went along with their scheme because she accepted most offers that came her way. “It is better than saying no to them,” she shrugged. “Because who knows what possibilities might then emerge?”
She was still establishing her repertoire. She sang three songs on the Velvets’ first LP, and vocalized through a few more live. All the songs floated in and out of her own show, and Lou Reed had promised some to write her some more. But other songs came and went as the mood hit her.
Songwriter Tim Hardin, the junkie folk author of “If I Had a Hammer,” had turned over a few of his songs to her. So would Leonard Cohen; so had Bob Dylan. But Nico was always looking for fresh material, so when her friend Danny Fields called her up one day to tell her about the young songwriting guitarist who he’d met at her show the previous evening, Nico wanted to know more. And when she realized that she had already spotted the young man herself, so preternaturally pretty and looking so hopelessly lost amid the Amazonian knights who normally haunted the Dom, she wanted to know more than that.
Fields reeled off all he had been able to glean. A teenage German-born army brat who was living on the Lower East Side, a friend of Tim Buckley, and a songwriter too.
Nico was intrigued. She placed a great deal of stock in the laws of coincidence, and playing alongside a fellow German, so far from her own birthplace, intrigued her. Besides, if there wasn’t a synchronicity there, then there was another one in his family tree, a brother whose middle name was Severin, the central character in the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.”
Plus, laughed Fields, “He is so innocent!” He passed on what he had already determined was his favorite Jackson Browne aneċe; how, driving out from Los Angeles, he and Copeland stopped the car at a filling station in Missouri and Browne had asked for the key to the restroom. The old guy behind the desk handed it over, and it was only when Browne was inside the room that he realized he’d been handed the wrong key. He was in the ladies’ room. And the old guy had not been making a political statement.
Fields introduced himself properly. He was an A&R man at Elektra Records. Browne flashed recognition; “I’m a contract songwriter for Nina Music.” Fields called Nico’s manager, Paul Morrissey, over; Morrissey asked Browne if he played electric guitar. Browne nodded. Then Morrissey asked if he’d play electric guitar behind Nico, and Browne melted.
Despite Nico’s membership of the Velvet Underground, the New York media shared Verve Records’ insistence that she was a folksinger, partly a consequence of a sweet little single she’d cut in London the previous year, a lightweight Gordon Lightfoot lullaby called “I’m Not Saying,” but also because what else could a solo female singer do, if she wasn’t performing out-and-out pop?
She wanted to step out of that image and all agreed that an electric guitar would be the easiest route they could take. Browne didn’t have one of his own; he’d have to borrow one from a friend out on Long Island, he explained. But he had no hesitation, either. “I got a call, would I like to be her guitar player? I went over and got my brains fucked loose.”
He could have had them fucked even looser. Installing Browne as her latest paramour, and a semipermanent houseguest at the West Village apartment where she raised her infant son, Ari, Nico was a demanding lover, as her most of her exes have testified at some point.
But she was also simply at the front of a long line of people who were apparently eyeing the young Jackson Browne with undisguised longing, and a cautionary voice for him to be careful who he sampled.
“Jackson was so pretty,” Nico reminisced in 1981. “Jackson could have had anybody he chose, man or woman, boy or girl, but he was so young he did not realize. He used to tell me I was the only woman he wanted, and Lou would laugh at him for that, because he was the only boy that a lot of the men wanted.”
Lou Reed, hanging at the Dom as one of Nico’s occasional guest guitar players, befriended Browne quickly, setting himself up not precisely as a barricade against which Browne’s admirers would crash, but at least as a purveyor of wry caution.
Richard Meltzer recalled there was “this famous publicist…and New York scene maker [who] was hanging around [Jackson] all the time, being nice to him and all for no apparent reason. Telling him stuff like he oughta have a TV show on which he could just be groovy, since he was such an oh-outa-site flower child.”
Lou Reed tried to warn Browne to give his new friend a wide berth; Meltzer did too, and others as well. But Browne remained oblivious. “I really didn’t know what was going on,” he told Cameron Crowe. “I mean, I realized it later, just remembering scenes of what people said to me. But it was like candy or something. I knew what a fag was.… I knew that when this outrageous transvestite came up and said he was Nico’s little sister, I knew what it was. It scared me. I kept my distance.”
But his publicist friend took a little more figuring out. Lou Reed, Meltzer recalled, “tried to explain that this male person was after Jackson’s ass, but Jackson missed the point until it finally turned out that what’s-his-name unequivocally wanted to fuck him. Spooked the shit out of him.”
There again, considering Jac Holzman once recalled that the first time Browne heard the word hippie, he thought it was an affectionate term for a small, hip person, that is no surprise. A lot of things spooked Browne at that time, including Nico.
When she wanted his favors, she was the best girlfriend in the world. She grabbed at Browne’s songs as quickly as she grabbed at his soul, listening as he played through the best of the thirty or so that Nina Music had published and was now planning to press onto a demonstration disc, and inclining her head when she heard one she wanted to spend more time with. “Shadow Dream Song,” the lyric that Time magazine had utilized to illustrate the literacy of the modern troubadour, fell into her live set; so did “It’s Been Raining Here in Long Beach.”
Steve Noonan recalled her performance. “I went to see Nico with Leonard Cohen, and we just sat there and watched Jackson play the electric guitar as an accompanist. This songwriter who would later eclipse everybody on that stage in terms of popularity, and yet he’s playing backup guitar. It’s kind of like hearing Jimi Hendrix as lead guitar for James Brown or something. [But] everybody starts somewhere, so Jackson’s sitting there playing his electric guitar with Nico.”
“These Days,” already being cited as the most significant song Browne would ever write, was earmarked for the album that Nico was preparing to record; “The Fairest of the Seasons” and “Somewhere There’s a Feather” followed it into the studio once the sessions began. She nodded, too, at “Holding,” only to change her mind when he told her (so proudly, she recalled) that his old friends in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had already recorded it alongside “Melissa” for their self-titled debut album.
Nico shrugged. “Jackson had so many wonderful songs, and I could have my pick of them.”
“This guy was a kid and he was writing these great songs,” Browne’s friend singer Warren Zevon mused. “I suppose I knew him before he wrote his masterpiece, but…he’s always been great. When Jackson sets out to write a funny song, fuck it’s funny. When he sets out to write a sensitive song, fuck it’s sensitive.”
Paul Williams’s Crawdaddy threw its weight into the arena, its May 1967 issue presenting “an uncertified list of fine songwriters you may not know about (but should).” Browne’s name was first on a registry that also included Pamela Polland and Rick Stanley, Greg Copeland and Steve Noonan, Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Ray Davies, and Neil Young. “These people have already written more beautiful songs than you could produce or sing in a lifetime, and they’re all getting better. Go to them.”
Nico agreed. Her debut album, Chelsea Girl, was titled for the Andy Warhol movie of almost the same name, and Browne’s three songs were in sterling company: Tim Hardin, John Cale, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan. And in the studio, where producer Tom Wilson ensured that the entire LP was slammed down in just three days in April, his guitar playing chimed as distinctively as that of any of the more seasoned musicians who worked alongside them.
But the sessions were fast, and Browne’s own parts were recorded in under a day, before Reed hustled him off to the RKO Theater to catch disc jockey Murray the K’s Music in the Fifth Dimension supershow, a night in the thunderous company of Mitch Ryder, the Blues Project, the Who, and Cream. “What a day,” Browne sighed, but he barely had time to process any of it before he headed out to California the following day, to try and mend a broken heart.
One night, as she and Browne played their show, Nico began telling the audience about a threatening phone call she had received a day or two before. Browne sat quietly, cradling his guitar as he always did, waiting until Nico had finished her rap. He was used to diversions like this, and so were the regulars in the audience. Suddenly, Nico whirled around to accuse Browne of being the caller.
He denied it, but Nico was hearing none of that. She had made up her mind, and that was something else about Nico. If she decided something was true, it didn’t matter how much evidence was presented to the contrary. She would not budge.
So Browne budged instead, walking offstage with his guitar in hand. “I was stunned,” he told Nico biographer Richard Witts. “I said, ‘How could you think it was me, Nico? Fuck this, I’m going.’”
“Poor Jackson,” mourned Richard Meltzer. “He was just so goddamn innocent.”