These Days

I'll be honest with you. My very favorite thing to do in the summer is get the hell out of my own pasture and explore somebody else's way way greener one. But most of the time, there's nothing for it but to just hang around town and try to appreciate the charms of your own little piece of the planet, however bland and horrid that may be. And it turns out there’s a great many of interesting things in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, including an abacus, an IBM 1401 Data Processing system, a self-driving car and a giant globe that you can play fun games with Google Earth on. For me, however, by far the most poignant is a diorama honoring the invention of the MP3. It consists of a giant photograph depicting a record store in 1979, under which there is a small selection of those old world platters known as vinyl in racks meant to simulate the experience of record store shopping.

computer history museum display

The racks are real, and so is the fun of flipping through them, but talk about history being written by the winners! That display can make you feel a little bit nauseous, much like the ones you see in museums honoring the Old West with a statue of a Native American warrior in full tribal dress, i.e. proud, dead, and completely conquered, their perfect image frozen in a time before the battle was so decisively won. The MP3 exhibit had that exact same edge to it, triumphant while at the same time grudgingly nostalgic about a past it can't stop itself from admiring. 

It is also, alas, pretty accurate about the era which saw the demise of the form, all the way up through the records (vinyls) they’d chosen for display in a ‘typical’ rack beneath the photograph. There were titles by the Eagles, Devo, the Stones, Duran Duran, Huey Lewis, Rod Stewart, Gerry Rafferty, Peter Gabriel, Steve Miller. I flipped and flipped, hoping for a record by a black person or a woman, but no. The entirety of jazz was represented by a single artist, David Sanborn, thus capturing much that is wrong with this kind of archiving. On the one hand, the selection was spot on. On the other – well, yuck.

That play list doesn’t represent what was actually available for sale in those years, but it is surely an exact facsimile of what the people who were inventing computers in California were listening to on the radio at that time (and I know this for sure because part of my dissertation research – and my upcoming book -- was on Steve Wozniak and his relationship to music). 

The rack looked so grim that I decided to re-curate it. After a little thought, I chose the five records I thought were worthy of display: Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True, the first Marshall Crenshaw record, the Waitresses, Chipmunk Punk (because they at least do a cover of the Ramones), and Jackson Browne’s Hold Out. JB only made it in there by the skin of his teeth, in part because it felt like honoring the ghost of Nico, and in part because I had a ticket in my pocket to see him perform in San Jose at the City National Civic that night.

my choices

Do you know that word ‘mood’ that kids say today when they feel something too deeply? Jackson Browne is a mood, and when I was very young, he was also bigger than you can possibly imagine. Wikipedia says he sold 18 million records, and at his height I didn’t know a single person who didn’t have at least one. Old punks, sorority girls, parents…he crossed all boundaries of fandom. Even some of the hip and groovy Paisley Undergrounders I knew in the late 80s grudgingly admired him because of his connection to the Velvet Underground. You can mock him if you want to, but I don't know why: his biggest single, “Somebody’s Baby,” underpins the scene in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, where Jennifer Jason Leigh loses her virginity to a callous older guy, and so evocative was its use therein that it’s hard for me to separate the scene from the song now. It’s like the opposite of when a product uses a song to sell itself: instead of fusing the song to the movie, “Somebody’s Baby” has replaced the screenplay in entirety, becoming shorthand for a particular type of high school experience in the early Reagan era. That the experience wasn’t a good one is exactly what makes the song so resonant – that is, what makes it ‘such a mood.’ Truthfully, his whole metier is one long paean to regret and regrets? I got a few. 

Jackson Browne cast a long shadow in the late 70s but by the time the 1980s came around with its rap and its punk and its new wave and its cynicism, he was easy to make fun of, both for his extreme earnestness and personal commitment to lost political causes, and also the way that his sound – which his pals the Eagles monetized into a mushy stew of crappy lyrics and turgid tempos — seemed like the antithesis of everything one liked about rock. Also, there is something vexing about him that I can only describe as his weirdly stubborn inability to be truly intersectional in spite of almost monumental efforts to be so. For example, although he clearly loves and admires world music, you never heard anyone say the word “corazon” with a more gringo accent (although that’s probably pretty much how I say the word too).  And the whole paradigm of the handsome solo artist surrounded by virtuoso musicians, and the female backup singers (inevitably women of color) standing 20 feet from stardom, is hard to defend, especially if, like me, what you really prefer is a really ugly band like the Afghan Whigs putting four really loud guitars up front and singing songs about fucking.

And yet...?

And yet, going to see him perform this summer was required of me, in the same way that not being in Portugal anymore was required of me. You can't deny your place in the world. So I returned to Jackson Browne on this night with no expectations, and the second he began, at 8 pm on the dot, with a new song called “Some Bridges”, I was thrown into the past, like the proverbial boat born back against the current. “Some Bridges” reintroduced Jackson Browne’s sound to me — it, like his visage and haircut, has not changed (at least if you’re not wearing your glasses, which I wasn’t), but it was only on the second song, “That Girl Could Sing,” that the ubiquity of his role in my mental playlist sank in. My cousin Jennifer took out her phone and started Shazaming and I put my hand across hers. No need, actually, because when it comes to this shit I am the human Shazam. I can name that song in 3 notes – except in the case of “Doctor My Eyes,” which I named in ONE.

Pretty much what he looks like without my glasses on anyway

In truth, the music of JB is a little TINY bit older than my peak era, such that I actually remember that when this song came out, I thought it was called “Dark To My Eyes,” and I still secretly sing it to myself that way.  Indeed, listening to him retrospectively, I see how Jackson Browne really keyed me to a particular way to think about and even hear music and lyrics; to focus in on them alone, and to vaporize the thrumming lap steel and other accompaniments such that they seem natural and unimportant by comparison. They aren’t, but that’s what the best singer-songwriters can do. Many of Browne’s best tunes and lyrical images in his work seem simple and true and beautiful, the musical equivalent of Raymond Chandler prose or Ed Ruscha paintings, steeped in a vision of California that I lived very deeply, in another world, a long time ago. Hearing anything from Late From The Sky, Running On Empty or The Pretender reminds me of the California of my youth: of driving all over the state in the back of a station wagon to diving meets in places like Woodlands and Visalia and Escondido and Petaluma, of a thick carpet of golden rippling down hillsides and poking in and out of forests, of the ocean and the sand and the smell of water and chlorine and something else that I would now recognize as the smog-free scent of an endless summer.

In addition, Jackson Browne’s best work raised the kind of questions and stakes that the majority of popular music out there today won’t go near. After all, “The Pretender” is a song about the shortcomings of what Walter Benjamin called the dream state of capitalism, or as he put it, the hell space the sits between “the longing for love/and the struggle for the legal tender,” while “For A Dancer” and “For Everyman” are as haunted by grim death as the most shell shocked of murder ballads. And of course there is his masterpiece “These Days,” one of the best beloved and most covered songs for literally generations of musicians. Written when he was 17, it is the song Holden Caulfield would have written if he’d wandered Manhattan two decades later, crystallizing that specific angst he felt into 3 minutes of musical perfection.

To be honest, I felt like I outgrew both Holden Caulfield and Jackson Browne a long time ago but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t much that was worth listening to in both of them, a non-toxic emotional resonance which is in too short supply today. Ten years ago I might have spent half this column mocking Jackson Browne for that, and maybe railing on the song “Red Neck Friend,” but today, I say fuck that. Honestly, the last time I was in the City National Civic was to cover Ted Nugent for the San Jose Mercury News, and if you’d told me then that idiot’s world view and politics would be the ones prevailing over America over and above the ideals of Jackson Browne, I would not even have believed you. These days -- these days – I can only think of one response to the terribleness of the current zeitgeist, and that is to become a kinder and more thoughtful person to everyone around me: that is, to become the kind of earnest person who listens non-judgmentally to the music of Jackson Browne.