JACKSON BROWNE
The Laurel Canyon laureate talks protest, golden toilets and cocaine.
With new LP Downhill From Everywhere, the veteran singer-songwriter gets in Confidential mood and reflects on feuds, excess and politics, admitting, “I basically know nothing.”
“Do people no longer take drugs?” JACKSON BROWNE
FOR SOMEONE whose music is regularly imbued with a sense of melancholia, MOJO finds Jackson Browne to be remarkably chirpy, recalling a London promotional visit in another century when publicist Derek Taylor dragged him in to watch a sweary Sex Pistols rampaging at Bill Grundy on live TV. “Pretty funny,” he says, “a harbinger of things to come.” Originally emerging as the archetypal voice of California in tandem with the Eagles, these days he’s also an ecological campaigner and political activist who sued the Republican Party (and won) when John McCain used his song Running On Empty in his 2008 presidential bid.
The title track of your new album, Downhill From Everywhere, offers a depressed view of the world.
How could you not have a depressed view of the world? The title resonates with the world generally, but it’s also about the health of the ocean, which is downhill from everywhere and is the repository of all humanity’s activities.
When did you start taking a stand on politics? Your earlier work was more personal than political.
I was always drawn to political activism. I grew up in the civil rights era. I demonstrated and was active as a teenager and was involved before I was able to write anything political. But, as my friend
Steven Van Zandt says, what’s more personal than your political?
You lived through some crazy times of course – all the excesses of ’70s LA…
Do people no longer take drugs or get caught up in excess? There is nothing more excessive than celebrity life in the USA. It did seem to me that was to be avoided and I tried to give fame a wide berth. The degree materialism has prevailed seems to have vanquished higher ideals. There’s no place you can escape what’s happening in the ecological and political realms, symbolised by the golden toilet at Trump Towers. Not that much has changed since the ’60s and ’70s, but all through history people have tried to create social change. It’s just that now, time is running out.
Do you look back on your work with satisfaction?
I reflect more on the low points! I made a lot of mistakes, but life is for learning. There was a period of about 10 years when I was exhausted. I thought I was full of energy… I was certainly full of cocaine.
You’ve always worn your heart on your sleeve in song. What was the impact on you when your wife [model Phyllis Major] died in 1976?
It happened in the middle of making stopped for a while. I finished Sleep’s Dark And Silent Gate after she died, and it gave shading to the rest of the record. Songs take on resonances of things that have happened since they’ve been written. The Pretender is not about my wife’s suicide, but songs I’d written before mysteriously became more about that. I wrote For A Dancer for someone else who died and that was on the album before The Pretender [1974’s Late For
The Sky]. I wrote it living in a house with her [Phyllis Major] and our child and gradually the song became about her. That’s how songs work. They migrate into other parts of your life and other experiences. Someone said they played [1993’s] Sky Blue And Black at their wedding, they said “that’s our song”. I said “Really?” It’s a break-up song. People hear what they want to.
You had quite a feud with Joni Mitchell after your wife died – did you ever bury the hatchet?
No!
What have you learned?
That life is longer than you think it is and is full of surprises. I basically know nothing. I knew nothing before and I know nothing now. I started to write a song with Waddy Wachtel called Don’t Know Nothing No More, Didn’t Know Nothing Before… but we didn’t finish it.
Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before…
There’s a lot of things I wish I had not told an interviewer before! I keep buying basses, but I don’t play bass. I don’t know what that’s about. I’ve got some really beautiful basses, lots of them, but I don’t play them. I don’t know what I’m doing with them.
Downhill From Everywhere is out on July 23 on Inside Recordings.