In my dream Jackson Browne approaches me, drenched in turquoise and denim, a pretender bearing precious gifts I do not want. Jackson says unto me, “I am the conscious of my generation. The anatomist of the Me Generation, of their lost dreams and pretenses and soul-killing emptiness. I sing about Yuppies—have you heard about them?—for yuppies, and my music is sweet and sad and let’s face it a tad bit boring. Here’s a song called “Disco Apocalypse.” Take it. The end is nigh.”
Jackson Browne wasn’t the best of the seventies El Lay folk and country rock crop. He certainly wasn’t its sharpest social observer—I would grant that honor to Don Henley (yeah, that’s right) or Joni Mitchell. He’s always been far too cerebral, too inward looking. He’s a serious man, and a philosopher of sorts, and a pessimistic one at that. His “The Pretender,” with its hollow men leading affluent lives of quiet desperation, is proof.
But then again the LA musical community was awash in pessimists. They knew they had it good and they took full advantage of the fact—hedonism was the order of the day—but they also knew they were living in a dystopia called the Hotel California. And Lord knows he’s never been the City of Angels’ most charismatic artist—Mr. Excitement he ain’t. No, he is (and I’m not undermining his gifts) a craftsman of solid but hardly supercharged songs played with consummate skill by a superb cast of supporting musicians. The man has always known how to put together a great band.
Browne was on a streak when he released 1980’s Hold Out. He’d released the excellent The Pretender in 1976 and followed it up with the iconic live album Running on Empty the following year, and both cemented his early promise as a songwriter to be contended with. He was no thriller, and he was a humorless git, but he had his finger on the pulse of the Zeitgeist—of the Me Generation putting away childish things like countercultural community and settling down to the job of getting rich.
But on 1980’s Hold Out he faltered. His gifts failed him, and what you’re left with is an album that disappoints in all but one respect—musicianship. Hold Out is no communique on the spiritual malaise afflicting his upwardly mobile contemporaries—it’s a life-support system for a few good melodies and some really solid playing.
The chief offender, and the album’s inadvertent centerpiece, is the absolutely ridiculous and very telling “Disco Apocalypse.” The song itself is a mediocre example of bland competency, and the lyrics are a collection of trite generalities of the sort that let you know that Browne turned off his frontal lobe before putting words to paper. Imagine what Don Henley might have done with a title like that—he’d have littered it with gimlet-eyed details and savage scorn.
From the incomprehensibly bad diction of the opening lines (“Down the side streets and the avenue/There be sisters walkin’ two by two”) to the vague vapidity of the closing lines (“With the dreams of flesh and love dancing in my mind/Dancing through the fire on the edge of time”) Browne makes it apparent that he knows nothing about disco or disco culture or disco people and cares not a whit about the era’s most important social and musical phenomenon. All you get is naysaying from a man who knows nothing about his subject. His takeaway is that the disco lifestyle is an empty and soul-killing one—the stuff of empty dawns and blasted hopes blah blah blah.
But where’s the apocalypse? I’ll tell you. For the slick singer-songwriters of Los Angeles disco must have been apocalyptic indeed—it was new, it was incomparably strange, and it was threatening, just as glam rock and punk had been before it. Only disco was infinitely worse and even more incomprehensible because it was popular. People like Browne found their entire world—including their livelihoods—in jeopardy to this horrible (to them) new music, and fear must have coursed through the veins of El Lay’s rich rockers from David Geffen’s hot tub to Dan Tana’s on Sunset Boulevard.
Was this the end? Would the never-ending supply of cocaine dry up, the groupies disappear into the arms of John Travolta, the Bee Gees and the Trammps, and their Lear jets be seized for nonpayment? Would their narcissism be seized? Would Laurel Canyon burn in a disco inferno? In England bands like the Rolling Stones were trying to keep up with times and cash in. Jackson Browne would not. He and his contemporaries had what they proudly called “song power.” No, they’d sooner retreat to the jungles of Cambodia like Colonel Kurtz. Apocalypse Now indeed.
Browne has just as little to say about the runaway kids on “Boulevard,” although the song itself has an admirably tough sound—Browne has never been a rocker, but this one has muscle and it works. But lyrically you get nothing, or very little—life’s tough, the kid’s are jaded and guarded, but you get the idea that Browne knows nothing about them. Other than a mention of the male hustlers’ hang-out the Gold Cup restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, you get nada in the way of detail.
And the same problem lays waste to his dirge for the late Lowell George, which he wrote for George’s infant daughter. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice dismissed it as “rank,” but I would charge it with the lesser crimes of being unconscionably maudlin and lyrically weak. Some of its lines are stunningly dumb (“And you can sing this song/On July the Fourth/In the sunny south and the frozen north”). Others are simply trite and sentimental. What you don’t get is a single concrete detail to let you know that Browne actually knew and admired the man. The opening lines are a banal panegyric, and they’re worth repeating in whole:
“Your father was a rounder
He played that rock and roll
A leaper and a bounder
Down to his gypsy soul
The music was his angel
And sorrow was his star
And those of us who follow
Might hope to reach as far.”
I can only imagine George in his grave, sniggering at this parade of cliches. Seriously, you could say as much about virtually every dead musician for the simple reason that you’re saying absolutely nothing. The words are simply placeholders for the telling and moving particulars Browne was too lazy or not perceptive enough to come up with.
“Hold Out” is no disgrace, but it doesn’t exactly set the cornfield on fire—it’s a workmanlike piece of songcraft that benefits, as do all of Browne’s songs, from the more than workmanlike skills of musicians like mainstay David Lindley and Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne. Browne is telling the woman he loves but has hurt that he’s “traded love for glory” and it’s left him (big revelation) unsatisfied, and it’s the same old, same old only directed at Browne himself. He’s not calling himself a hold-out; he’s telling her to hold out for something or someone better.
But I can’t escape the suspicion that that title, which is also the title of album, has a deeper meaning than anything he conveys in the song. There’s a part of me, and I’m probably wrong about this but so be it, that can’t help but think the title relates back to “Disco Apocalypse.” To wit, Browne is a hold out against a musical world that he finds completely foreign and that threatens to leave him irrelevant. In short, it’s a cry of defiance–KC and the Sunshine Band won’t take Jackson Browne alive.
Its piano-driven companion piece, closer “Hold On, Hold Out,” is just a tad bit spritelier (a welcome development), but it too suffers from its lack of detail. He maintains an iota of hope (“Hold a place for the human race/Keep it open wide”) in the face of life’s difficulties, but it’s all so… vague. I like the conversational and tentative feel of the spoken word stanza at the end, just as I do the high notes he hits during a snatch or two of actual singing during the stanza, and I’m authentically moved when he closes the song with the words, and yeah they’re sentimental to a fault but I don’t care:
“Anyway…
I guess you wouldn’t know unless I told you
I. I love you
And just look at yourself–
I mean what else would I do?
Hold on–”
“Call It a Loan” is a very pretty ditty about the cost of love or something, and how it’s a bet when you think you’re getting it for free or something, and perhaps I’m dense but I find Browne’s message rather confusing actually, what with their being two men inside Browne one of whom is a thief, but thieves don’t borrow they steal, and never pay anybody back. The kicker lines go “Oh – if I’d only known/What your heart cost/On – can we call it a loan?/And a debt that I owe/On a bet that I lost” and they’re clear enough, but mostly the song is an undeniably pleasant muddle that you’ll enjoy if you just cut Browne some slack instead of wishing he’d kept it simple and stated the obvious. You never own someone else’s heart—it’s a loaner, and the one you love may just want it back.
“That Girl Could Sing” may just be the best song on the album—it opens with a shuffling beat and some big piano chords, and let’s forget for a moment that it bears a more than passing resemblance to “Running on Empty” and focus instead on Browne’s stellar vocal performance and the catchy melody and the lyrics, which don’t exactly qualify as immortal poesy but for once are worth a close listen. The subject of the song is a quicksilver type, easy to love but impossible to hold on to, and I like this quick little synopsis of Browne’s unenviable situation:
“She coulda turned out to be almost anyone
Almost anyone
With the possible exception
Of who I wanted her to be.”
That “almost anyone” is a nice inclusion and point of clarification, and there’s nothing mystifying about the following either:
“Talk about celestial bodies
And your angels on the wing
She wasn’t much good at stickin’ around, but
That girl could sing
She could sing.”
Browne has the tendency to free associate, to get lost in his own vague conceits and contorted metaphors, and God knows he’s not the one for concrete imagery. No, it’s all generalities and abstractions for our boy, but on “That Girl Could Sing” he manages to express with clarity a universal and succeeds in getting out of his own way long enough to do it. It sounds cruel but he’s the least of the great LA singer-songwriters because he mostly lacks the eye for the telling particular, except when it comes to dissecting the desperate lives of the pretenders of his generation, the lawyers in love and whatnot.
And that—along with the small handful of standards he wrote before he began to think of himself as the F. Scott Fitzgerald of his generation, are what he’ll be best remembered for. He won’t be remembered for “Hold Out” because while it sounds good, and is nicely layered and impeccably performed, it tells us nothing about the bitter travails of his life or the lives of his pampered cohort at the upper reaches of the tax bracket, except that they suffer from a nearly paralyzing fear that their world is aflame. Burn, baby, burn.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
