I first experienced Jackson Browne at the Fillmore East, opening for Laura Nyro.\u00c2\u00a0 This was long before I even knew who David Geffen was, never mind the fact that the two shared a manager.\u00c2\u00a0 All I knew was this guy opening for my favorite riveted the audience.\u00c2\u00a0 Kept everybody in rapt attention, almost an impossibility for an unknown act without a record in release.\u00c2\u00a0 I waited in excess of a year for that debut to finally hit the store.\u00c2\u00a0 I purchased it at Sam Goody and played it incessantly.\u00c2\u00a0 Loving "Rock Me On The Water" and "Something Fine".\u00c2\u00a0 This was long before "Doctor My Eyes" was plucked from the record as a single.<\/p>\n
And by time the second album came out, twenty months later, Jackson was a known quantity.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only had he had his own hit, he’d co-written the Eagles’ breakthrough debut.\u00c2\u00a0 But "For Everyman" contained no singles.\u00c2\u00a0 And neither did its follow-up, "Late For The Sky".\u00c2\u00a0 Jackson was gone from AM radio.\u00c2\u00a0 He was only for a growing legion of fans.\u00c2\u00a0 Who connected with this album-long opus.<\/p>\n
That’s what we did.\u00c2\u00a0 Travel down to the record store to buy a hit of dope.\u00c2\u00a0 Which we didn’t smoke or inject, but placed on a turntable.\u00c2\u00a0 But, the trip we took was oh-so-real.\u00c2\u00a0 We gained insights that eluded movies and television.\u00c2\u00a0 If you wanted to know which way the wind blew, you played a record.<\/p>\n
And, as a result, this business blew up.\u00c2\u00a0 Millions of copies would be sold of albums with no hit, sometimes not even any tangible airplay.\u00c2\u00a0 Concerts that began in theatres graduated to arenas, then stadiums.\u00c2\u00a0 Your hardest problem was getting a ticket.\u00c2\u00a0 Seemingly everything sold out, almost instantly.\u00c2\u00a0 Going to the show wasn’t just a badge of honor, but an unmissable experience.\u00c2\u00a0 Hanging with your brethren as your favorite played those songs you wore out on the disc.<\/p>\n
A singer-songwriter like Jackson Browne could go on to superstardom.\u00c2\u00a0 Banding together with his peers to stop the proliferation of nuclear power.\u00c2\u00a0 But then came MTV.\u00c2\u00a0 And the boy bands.\u00c2\u00a0 And the CD revolution.\u00c2\u00a0 The amount of money involved was staggering, no one wanted to leave a cent on the table.\u00c2\u00a0 Albums sold double digit millions.\u00c2\u00a0 Concert ticket prices went into the stratosphere.\u00c2\u00a0 And then it all collapsed.<\/p>\n
They say Napster killed the music business, I’m not so sure.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a confluence of factors, radio consolidation, MTV moving away from videos and the sheer plethora of new material.\u00c2\u00a0 But, all this change rendered the classic acts of yore impotent.\u00c2\u00a0 They could record new music, but no one wanted to hear it.\u00c2\u00a0 If you paid a hundred bucks you believed you were entitled to hear the hits.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t a once a month experience, concertgoing was oftentimes a once a year experience.<\/p>\n
As for the young ‘uns, the purveyors told us they were initiating kids into the concertgoing experience.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s not what got us hooked, extravaganzas peppered with evanescent singles.\u00c2\u00a0 The culture was gone.\u00c2\u00a0 You had to have a new star every season.\u00c2\u00a0 To the point where there were no new stars.\u00c2\u00a0 Just old stars playing old material to an aged audience and auto-tuned youngsters playing to either very few or a lot once.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything we boomers were brought up on, everything we believed in, was gone.<\/p>\n
So I didn’t have high expectations for Jackson Browne’s concert last night.\u00c2\u00a0 Wherein he was going to play too much new material to a half full house.<\/p>\n
But that wasn’t the case.\u00c2\u00a0 It was positively staggering.\u00c2\u00a0 Must’ve been a telephone campaign, they must have read about it in the newspaper, because these tech-unsavvy denizens got the word.\u00c2\u00a0 The venue was full and they gave standing o’s to new material!<\/p>\n
And I’m sitting there thinking how Jackson Browne has a body of work.\u00c2\u00a0 The focus was on his post hit material, from the nineties on.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, he played about a track from each of those early albums, but there was more material from "I’m Alive", "Looking East" and "Naked Ride Home".\u00c2\u00a0 And, not the obvious tracks either.\u00c2\u00a0 Who’d expect twelve years later Jackson would fire up "Culver Moon"?<\/p>\n
But he did.\u00c2\u00a0 Prefacing it with a story about Culver City.\u00c2\u00a0 How in the rest of the country they didn’t quite understand what he was saying.<\/p>\n
Yes, it was a hometown crowd.\u00c2\u00a0 And we loved it.\u00c2\u00a0 Jackson telling us one number was composed on the bike path and at that icy snowboarding hill at the edge of the Valley.\u00c2\u00a0 How "Live Nude Cabaret" was inspired by that place on Pico.\u00c2\u00a0 How many times have I driven by that?\u00c2\u00a0 THOUSANDS?<\/p>\n
It was like the seventies.\u00c2\u00a0 Coming to L.A. and finding out there truly was an El Monte Legion Stadium.\u00c2\u00a0 That all those references in Frank Zappa and Firesign Theatre records were real.<\/p>\n
They applauded the playing.\u00c2\u00a0 They exclaimed for the backup singers.\u00c2\u00a0 They hooted for the political numbers.<\/p>\n
The audience was supposed to be dead.\u00c2\u00a0 They were supposed to talk and go for a drink during the eight new songs.\u00c2\u00a0 They weren’t supposed to even know the album tracks, never mind enthusiastically appreciate them.\u00c2\u00a0 It gave me hope.<\/p>\n
Because this is exactly how it started out.\u00c2\u00a0 There won’t be a review in the paper.\u00c2\u00a0 There won’t be footage on "Entertainment Tonight".\u00c2\u00a0 TMZ didn’t send a crew.\u00c2\u00a0 The show was only for the people who were there.\u00c2\u00a0 Swooning when Jackson played "Fountain Of Sorrow", immediately jumping to their feet when he did "The Pretender".\u00c2\u00a0 This show was more alive than the productions of those topping the hit parade.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a soulful quality.\u00c2\u00a0 The audience was engaged.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t about the backdrop, there was no dancing. It was about the music. And it hasn’t been about the music for such a long time.\u00c2\u00a0 But those in attendance, they remember.\u00c2\u00a0 They still believe.\u00c2\u00a0 Jackson Browne may not have a record deal, but he’s got an audience.\u00c2\u00a0 And the latter is much more important.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I first experienced Jackson Browne at the Fillmore East, opening for Laura Nyro.\u00c2\u00a0 This was long before I even knew who David Geffen was, never mind the fact that the two shared a manager.\u00c2\u00a0 All I knew was this guy opening for my favorite riveted the audience.\u00c2\u00a0 Kept everybody in rapt attention, almost an impossibility […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-shows","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-mg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}