Speaker 1: Pushkin. In the nineteen seventies, Jackson Brown was known as
Speaker 1: one of the originators of the care free California classic
Speaker 1: rock sound, with hits like Doctor My Eyes and Running
Speaker 1: on Empty Looking. As his career progressed, Jackson Brown's knack
Speaker 1: for writing soul searching lyrics turned more political. He began
Speaker 1: to write protest songs that addressed weighty issues like environmental
Speaker 1: degradation in US foreign policy. Brown continues to use his
Speaker 1: music as a vehicle for change today. His latest album,
Speaker 1: Downhill from Everywhere, was inspired by a documentary about the
Speaker 1: Pacific garbage back and our impact on the planning. On
Speaker 1: today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Jackson Brown about how
Speaker 1: he is able to turn catastrophic headlines into palatable songs.
Speaker 1: Brown also talks about moving to New York City when
Speaker 1: he was eighteen and writing songs for the Velvet Undergrounds Nico.
Speaker 1: Brown also remembers the time his former label boss, David
Speaker 1: Geffen shut down his attempt to quote the Black Panthers
Speaker 1: Bobby Seal and a song. This is broken record liner
Speaker 1: notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce
Speaker 1: Headlam and Jackson Brown. I want to talk about your
Speaker 1: new album. Of course, First of all, where did the
Speaker 1: title come from? It comes from an oceanographer named Captain
Speaker 1: Charles Moore, the guy that discovered the North Pacific gyre
Speaker 1: and all the plastic squirreling and the jar has become
Speaker 1: known as the Pacific garbage patch. He's the guy that
Speaker 1: sort of discovered it and sort of brought out to
Speaker 1: attention of the rest of the world. And in talking
Speaker 1: about the ocean and our impact on the ourc change
Speaker 1: says that's the ocean is downhill from everywhere, and that's
Speaker 1: where the title comes from. And it's really at the
Speaker 1: heart of what the song is talking about us humans
Speaker 1: impact on the planet. You know, this album it has
Speaker 1: political songs like that one the Dreamer. It's got other
Speaker 1: songs that deal with current issues. And this surprised me.
Speaker 1: It seemed like a very optimistic album to me. The
Speaker 1: personal song seemed very optimistic, which is not always something
Speaker 1: I associate with your music. It wasn't wistful or valedictory.
Speaker 1: Were you in a good mood when you when you
Speaker 1: wrote this album? Were you in a good place? This
Speaker 1: album got written over a period of years, so I
Speaker 1: think that that maybe I have a desire to be
Speaker 1: optimistic or to be be hopeful. Not optimistic, but to
Speaker 1: be hopeful. The act of writings song, I think I
Speaker 1: reflectively want to leave things in there'll be some light,
Speaker 1: some possibility for a positive outcome, you know. In still
Speaker 1: looking for something, Looking for Love, you're you know, minutes
Speaker 1: from downtown. There are the songs of somebody who's kind
Speaker 1: of in the game and enjoying it. The whole album
Speaker 1: has a sense of dealing with things that are interminable.
Speaker 1: They things that are going on and on and on,
Speaker 1: problems where they're before and are there now. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: about moving forward, and it's about trying to find find
Speaker 1: your way, you know forward. As far as being in
Speaker 1: the game, you know, you got to think that you are,
Speaker 1: even if you're not, come on, you must be in
Speaker 1: the game. Please give us hope here to want to
Speaker 1: make music, you know, you have to have that's the thing,
Speaker 1: just that that you want to. You know, they still
Speaker 1: want to. I mean, it'd be easy to get tired
Speaker 1: of it. But I think I think that probably the
Speaker 1: reason I don't is I I don't do it all
Speaker 1: the time. I'm not I'm not releasing album after album,
Speaker 1: and you know, releasing an album every year or two.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just I mean, the song the Dreamer.
Speaker 1: I've been trying to write that many years ago, and
Speaker 1: it just sort of took a turn. I met this guy,
Speaker 1: Eugene Rodriguez, and showed him this old song idea I had,
Speaker 1: which began with the you know, like the Minutemen being
Speaker 1: down on the border enforcing you know, trying to you know, vigilantism,
Speaker 1: and it just turned into a song about about a
Speaker 1: young person come into this country and giving her future
Speaker 1: to this country, and that is so optimistic. There's so
Speaker 1: much hope in that in the in the midst of
Speaker 1: the debacle that is our immigration policy and the years
Speaker 1: of trying to deny you know, access to people who
Speaker 1: are fundamentally here before we were, and you know, to
Speaker 1: a great extent. You know, people have been coming from
Speaker 1: Mexico to California or Arizona, you know, since before they
Speaker 1: were in the Union. It's just like they're the best
Speaker 1: among US immigrants. My grandmother came here when she was sixteen,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of there's a lot about this
Speaker 1: country that are the optimism that people have when they
Speaker 1: come here. Folded together with the difficulties they endure. But
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's a mixture of both, you know, hardship, optimism,
Speaker 1: you know, struggle in each all of these songs. I
Speaker 1: think you mentioned the Dreamer, and I'm wondering when you
Speaker 1: when you do write a song that way, you know,
Speaker 1: because your personal songs, people relate to them because the
Speaker 1: sort of commonality of emotions that people have and the
Speaker 1: dilemmas they face in life. When you're approaching a more
Speaker 1: political song, do you say, I want to write something
Speaker 1: about immigration because it's wrong? I mean, how do you
Speaker 1: get from there? How do you get from this sort
Speaker 1: of high level New York Times headline to the emotional
Speaker 1: heart of a song like that. Yeah, that's a good
Speaker 1: question because the thing that I've tried, I've tried to
Speaker 1: do in the past sometimes to try to broach a
Speaker 1: subject strategically and try to draw people into the subject
Speaker 1: and taught what matters to each of us. And there's
Speaker 1: the problem with anything political is if you're too oblique,
Speaker 1: they won't know what you're talking about. And if you're
Speaker 1: too direct, they run the risk of making people feel
Speaker 1: that they're being sort of scolded or lectured. Also, I
Speaker 1: told myself, look, I want this to sound like the
Speaker 1: way it would sound like if you and I were
Speaker 1: drinking in a bar and we're just talking about what's
Speaker 1: going on in the world, not that as if you're
Speaker 1: some sort of elevated place and lecturing people about something
Speaker 1: that should know about but dount or that they should care.
Speaker 1: But you know, you have to make people. You have
Speaker 1: to get to people where where they do care and
Speaker 1: where what they do know about. In the case of
Speaker 1: Downhill from Everywhere, it's not exactly it's not exactly political
Speaker 1: because there's no polemic. There is just like a bunch
Speaker 1: of compounding and sort of contrasting images, you know, the prison,
Speaker 1: the mall, factory, farming, the hospital. And the fun of
Speaker 1: it was to make it flow out of it so
Speaker 1: that these seem like extreme consciousness, and sometimes it was.
Speaker 1: But you have to make those words sound good with
Speaker 1: rock and roll. And if what I really wanted was
Speaker 1: a song that you don't have to listen to the
Speaker 1: words to at all, you would just listen. You might
Speaker 1: hear some of them going by while you're listening to
Speaker 1: the guitar part, or the or the drum based and
Speaker 1: the drums, and I just wanted to feel good. I
Speaker 1: decided not to talk. I mean, I had like a
Speaker 1: verse that was gonna you know, it wasn't like going
Speaker 1: to name Trump. I just didn't want a song with
Speaker 1: his name in it. I wasn't going to refer to him,
Speaker 1: but I was gonna be talking about like, you know,
Speaker 1: downhill from the White House, downhill from the dump, downhill
Speaker 1: from that's something, or the downhill from the biopsy and
Speaker 1: that suspicious lump and yeah, right, but that's I don't
Speaker 1: think that's the editor in me that said, Okay, you
Speaker 1: can put that aside. Keep looking. Do you think as
Speaker 1: a result of this last year, when you go back
Speaker 1: out in the road, are there songs of yours from
Speaker 1: your catalog? You say? You know, suddenly this makes sense
Speaker 1: now if I if I take this out in a
Speaker 1: way it might not have two years ago. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure the process of deciding what you're gonna play is
Speaker 1: a really involved saying. I'd say I'm more involved in
Speaker 1: with which of my old songs the audience wants to
Speaker 1: hear after having been shut down for this amount of time,
Speaker 1: In which of my new songs I can you know,
Speaker 1: I can I can expect to get a real, real
Speaker 1: strong listening to. You know, there were times when I
Speaker 1: went out and tried to play every every new song
Speaker 1: on an album in a set, and you wind up playing,
Speaker 1: you know, more than half the songs would be these
Speaker 1: new songs. And I got sort of chided by some
Speaker 1: of my friends, like, and people really come to hear
Speaker 1: you what they already know, and you might want to
Speaker 1: just like cut that down to two or three songs.
Speaker 1: And at the same time, I think that this is
Speaker 1: a really important time where people do want to know
Speaker 1: what's what's transpired. And these a lot of these songs
Speaker 1: were you know, written before and the pandemic, and they're
Speaker 1: about the last several years or their or their culminations.
Speaker 1: Some of the songs go back a lot longer than that.
Speaker 1: And Man of Fact, Downhill from Everywhere was the song
Speaker 1: I was writing for a long time. And what I think,
Speaker 1: it's probably not going to be apparent to anybody, you know,
Speaker 1: but how would anybody know? But I mean, I've got
Speaker 1: on my laptop screener, I've got like all these sound
Speaker 1: checks from trying to play that song. I play these
Speaker 1: things back and there are moments when, like I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's the way the drums have to play this song. Well,
Speaker 1: that's or the time that Greg Lea's played this incredible
Speaker 1: like dang dann't get that deck out, this really great
Speaker 1: guitar leg. He figured it out all these sound checks
Speaker 1: where something happened and I go, oh yeah. And then
Speaker 1: there was the time where I cut the song and
Speaker 1: and I say, look, I'm I'm screwing us up. Let
Speaker 1: me just try to play my guitar black Jeff, you
Speaker 1: sing it and he's singing my keyboarders. The guy was
Speaker 1: singing this line down here from the water. Well, he's
Speaker 1: swinging in a certain way. He just hears things that way.
Speaker 1: He goes like don godd dump. So he's swinging the
Speaker 1: track that way with his la la laws whatever. He's
Speaker 1: singing to lead the band, whereas the melody really goes
Speaker 1: all got data and it's against the beat, which provides
Speaker 1: a kind of tension and you can get away with it,
Speaker 1: but it's not as in the I tried to convert
Speaker 1: all the phrasing to his phrasing, and that really didn't work,
Speaker 1: throwing off the words again and then coming back to Minka.
Speaker 1: I gotta go back to my Then I just realized,
Speaker 1: I said, just I can have him answer it. I
Speaker 1: can have him reaffirmed that rhythm with his vote Downhill
Speaker 1: from the fat from the band in the room, Downhill
Speaker 1: from the you know, so I gave. I wrote a
Speaker 1: bunch of lines for him to sing too, and Downhill.
Speaker 1: I thought, as cool as like getting my getting my
Speaker 1: singers to sing Downhill from the Anthropascene. I was gonna
Speaker 1: have one of us say, look it up downhill. You
Speaker 1: know it's fun because I'm writing for a band like
Speaker 1: I called in writing that song, I really called the
Speaker 1: guitar part from Greg and a vocal phrasing from Jeff.
Speaker 1: I mean a moment where Fritz was kind of channeling
Speaker 1: the Stones and trying to play this thing. Just make
Speaker 1: the song about music first, you know, And so do
Speaker 1: most songs. For you to start with lyrical ideas, it's
Speaker 1: usually some piece of lyric and music at the same time,
Speaker 1: I feel, or a little little bit of music at
Speaker 1: the same time. But it's usually a phrase. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you're still you're a slow writer, aren't you. You've noticed, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the fastest you've ever written a song? One of
Speaker 1: the fast songs was on this album A little soon
Speaker 1: to say, came up pretty quickly. What's a little quickly
Speaker 1: for you? That I had this idea and a month
Speaker 1: later I really started to write it. And then in
Speaker 1: a matter of about a week or so, I had
Speaker 1: kind of you know, wow, yeah, stuff happens. I got
Speaker 1: a phone call in the middle of writing this verst
Speaker 1: and I got a phone from a friend of mine
Speaker 1: who's who I worked with, like my production guy, like
Speaker 1: I ever told him to do, but had that conversation
Speaker 1: with him. I just led me into this whole reassessment
Speaker 1: of my whole you know, like I didn't find much
Speaker 1: wisdom when I was when time was on my side.
Speaker 1: That verse came from like a feeling I had from
Speaker 1: a conversation on the while writing the song. It's not
Speaker 1: like I set out to say something. It's just you.
Speaker 1: It's a process of uncovering things that in you. You know,
Speaker 1: within you. We'll be right back with more from Jackson
Speaker 1: Brown after this break. We're back with more from Bruce
Speaker 1: Headlam and Jackson Brown. You are associated with Los Angeles
Speaker 1: in a way that few people are associated with places.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe Kurt Cobain and Seattle, or Willie Nelson
Speaker 1: in Austin, but you are this Los Angeles character. So
Speaker 1: I'm interested in that early part of your career when
Speaker 1: you left, when you went to New York to work.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me a bit about that, because it
Speaker 1: was Dylan who inspired you to a certain extent. And
Speaker 1: what was it like for you're very young a kid
Speaker 1: to leave LA and go to New York. Well, I
Speaker 1: grew up in LA until I was about thirteen. But
Speaker 1: then at the time that I went to New York,
Speaker 1: I've been living in Orange County. My family had moved
Speaker 1: out to Fullerton. You know. I kicked myself that I
Speaker 1: didn't go somehow get a job at Defender Factory and
Speaker 1: like have like a stash of sixties you know, stratocasters
Speaker 1: to show for it. But I was really, yeah, I
Speaker 1: was really immersed in folk music and Dylan, and continue
Speaker 1: to be immersed in roots music and folk music after Dylan.
Speaker 1: Sort of. See, there's a thing about folk music is
Speaker 1: that you learn a song and you make it your own.
Speaker 1: You either combine maybe you've combined Dave Van Rogg's version
Speaker 1: of stagger Lee with Mississippi John Hurt's version of Staggerly.
Speaker 1: You take the best of those versions and you put
Speaker 1: them together and to put it in your own. In fact,
Speaker 1: I wrote a verse a version of stagger Lye that
Speaker 1: in which I'm combine those versions and I'm quoting Bobby Seal,
Speaker 1: you know, the Black Panthers, you know, like Bobby Seals says,
Speaker 1: stagger Lee was the brother off the block whose actions
Speaker 1: had to had to speak for him because he couldn't
Speaker 1: relate to talk. Listen, all you millionaires is something you
Speaker 1: should know. He's his ship together. So I'm you gonna
Speaker 1: have to go? Is that a political song? The fact
Speaker 1: is that David Geffen heard that an he went, huh, women,
Speaker 1: what's wrong with millionaires? What's wrong? We wanted to be
Speaker 1: a millionaire And it didn't make my album to make
Speaker 1: the first album. But just so you know, like what
Speaker 1: I was referring to is that the fact that you
Speaker 1: made these folk songs speak for you and it wasn't
Speaker 1: just like summoning up an arcane song and rendering it
Speaker 1: faithfully from you know, we made have started with that.
Speaker 1: I always Joan Baena's incredible songs that she curated on
Speaker 1: her albums, you know, but she did something to them.
Speaker 1: She cast a spell on them that was brand new
Speaker 1: and traditional and ancient at the same time. So that's
Speaker 1: what we started happening. And Dylan, Dylan did it, you know,
Speaker 1: and they did it so well that you sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, led the whole procession off into like a
Speaker 1: brand new direction. And I always living in Orange County
Speaker 1: by the time that start happening, and when I got
Speaker 1: involved in folk music. Before that, I listened to my
Speaker 1: father's music in Dixie Land, so some of the great
Speaker 1: singers Eelaphus Gerald and man. In fact, we saw Dylan
Speaker 1: on the television one time. It was before first I
Speaker 1: ever saw him, and I was it was like a
Speaker 1: very short show and it was Dylan sitting on the
Speaker 1: edge of a stage somewhere. It's maybe one of the
Speaker 1: first appearances of him in in TV. And he was
Speaker 1: I said, wow, what is this? You know? My dad says,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't into folk music, but he said, this
Speaker 1: is the real thing. This is the real thing. He said.
Speaker 1: I knew guys in the army that sounded like this.
Speaker 1: This is he was stationed in Mississippi for a WI said,
Speaker 1: this sound reminds me of that guy sitting on the
Speaker 1: edge of his bed playing the guitar. In the barracks.
Speaker 1: You know this is like this is, And so he
Speaker 1: sort of validated Bob Dylan very early on for me
Speaker 1: at a time when and what happened to meeting, of course,
Speaker 1: is that all these songs that he had written were
Speaker 1: learned by everybody. And the thing is that the job
Speaker 1: still was to make it your own. So I started
Speaker 1: writing songs at that right around that same time. And
Speaker 1: what you write about what you know? You know? Your
Speaker 1: dad he what instrument to be playing. He played piano,
Speaker 1: but he loved horns, He loved the trumpet, and he
Speaker 1: loved the trombone. He played a lot of Jack Teagarden,
Speaker 1: and he would walk around the house playing the trombone, saying, listen,
Speaker 1: there's only three positions. Can you check out how many
Speaker 1: notes he's playing. But he's only never forget having like
Speaker 1: combinations of thin of keys and fingering you only they
Speaker 1: have that, that and that and then it's your lip.
Speaker 1: And so he's walked. He's fascinated with how the trombone
Speaker 1: is played. He's not he's not good at it. But
Speaker 1: he actually did one one time get to play with
Speaker 1: Jack Teagarden and he went up with Teagarden's tie and
Speaker 1: Tea Garden. Evidently Tea Garden like typed his tie. They
Speaker 1: left the jack had at six in the morning or something,
Speaker 1: and like te Garden had a stein. So he wanted
Speaker 1: him and it was it was like a tallest amount.
Speaker 1: It was like a for eyes possession of his Also
Speaker 1: a picture of him playing with Django Reinhard. He was
Speaker 1: a really good musician and he wasn't in rains band.
Speaker 1: He actually booked Ryan Hard for these parties and he
Speaker 1: would get to sit in Wow. So we I grew
Speaker 1: up with that sort of lore. But when folk music happened,
Speaker 1: it was taking on all this information about the world,
Speaker 1: about our history, and about who really is here, you know.
Speaker 1: So even though I lived in this like really sterile
Speaker 1: little tract home in Orange County with my family, I mean,
Speaker 1: the conduit and the lifeline to the to the world
Speaker 1: outside was music. A lot of musicians I've talked to
Speaker 1: their their fathers were jazz musicians, and often they didn't
Speaker 1: like their kids musical choices. My father. I remember my
Speaker 1: father coming to see my one of my gigs. I
Speaker 1: vaguely understood that that there wasn't a lot about my
Speaker 1: singing or my even my my my songs were not sophisticated.
Speaker 1: You know. It wasn't like he was. He was not
Speaker 1: going to get to cross the Jordan, you know, and
Speaker 1: come go off into the future with us. You know.
Speaker 1: He was like even in jazz, you know, he told him,
Speaker 1: you like, he said like, yeah, Miles Davis, Wow, you
Speaker 1: know what I thought? Really? Oh no, I thought, okay, well,
Speaker 1: you're definitely telling me where you're at. But we we
Speaker 1: diverged on so many things. He said, you and your
Speaker 1: friends think you're nonconformist. We didn't really, And then they
Speaker 1: were to use that where there wasn't the issue. He said,
Speaker 1: but you're gonna have to cut your hair, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to You're gonna want to raise a family,
Speaker 1: and then you're gonna have to get a job and
Speaker 1: cut your hair. And I thought, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: You know, so there are all ways in which that
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily have to follow your parents the dictates
Speaker 1: of their their their view. But at the same time
Speaker 1: he gave me, he gave me such an incredible love
Speaker 1: and appreciation for music, jazz, for for and an understanding
Speaker 1: of who's here terms of you know, racially, you know,
Speaker 1: the deities in our house were like I say, Ella Fitzgerald,
Speaker 1: and I vaguely understood that he didn't have that find
Speaker 1: an appreciation for what I was doing. He'd come to
Speaker 1: my gig and at the end of the gig he said,
Speaker 1: I don't lose that drummer. You know about all he
Speaker 1: could say. And he's right. I mean, like you'd think,
Speaker 1: you know, he really dug Russconsle's drumming. And but I
Speaker 1: had him come over and I wanted to send him
Speaker 1: down and play him the pretender. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: song for him in the second half. He was asleep
Speaker 1: before we got to the second half, you know, and
Speaker 1: I just went, well, that's just about perfect. You know,
Speaker 1: he didn't hear he didn't hear Daddy's tune. No, he
Speaker 1: didn't wow when he talked about like cutting your hair
Speaker 1: and were those his resentments that he had to he
Speaker 1: wasn't resentful about it. He just thought that we were,
Speaker 1: you know, young and so on our wild oats, but
Speaker 1: that there was he was describing what he had done,
Speaker 1: which was he said he never thought he was a
Speaker 1: professional musician. He always thought of himself as an amateur,
Speaker 1: and that he had never really followed through, or that
Speaker 1: he'd gotten the job the jobs that he needed to
Speaker 1: do to have a family. But he also told me
Speaker 1: really wild stuff, like he enjoyed being in the army
Speaker 1: because he didn't have to think and to be to
Speaker 1: be fourteen and to hear that, it was like all
Speaker 1: I needed to know. That's okay, that kind of disqualifies
Speaker 1: you as a as an advisor, you know. But he
Speaker 1: also he'd say the coolest stuff, like one time he
Speaker 1: said he was over in my house, he was leaving.
Speaker 1: He said, well, play good. But you didn't have to
Speaker 1: say he is. He was an English teacher and a
Speaker 1: metic who correct us every night at the dinner table.
Speaker 1: We didn't have to learn grammar or any of the
Speaker 1: rules of because we were just forced to speak correctly
Speaker 1: all the time, not forced, but just admonished if we didn't.
Speaker 1: And I said to him, play good. What do you mean, dude,
Speaker 1: don't you mean play well? He said, yeah, but I've
Speaker 1: never heard of musicians say play well, play good? So
Speaker 1: how old were you then when you went to New York?
Speaker 1: I was eighteen, and you'd been playing around la and
Speaker 1: then what took you to New York? I've been playing
Speaker 1: out in Orange County, you know, coffee houses and stuff,
Speaker 1: and I was living in Orange County. My friends would
Speaker 1: drive into New York and there was like a they
Speaker 1: needed a third person to share with the gas and
Speaker 1: share in the driving. We made that trip in three
Speaker 1: and a quarter days. You know, it was like just
Speaker 1: straight through driving around the clock. We were delivering a
Speaker 1: car to my friend's family up in I think it
Speaker 1: was up in Niagara Falls that he had to deliver
Speaker 1: this rambler American station wagon, and so we drove it
Speaker 1: straight to New York and went to the another friend's
Speaker 1: house who was living on the on the Lower East Side.
Speaker 1: So I had a well, yeah, I was from I
Speaker 1: was from a set of players and that hung around
Speaker 1: a club called the Paradox in tust And the reason
Speaker 1: they called it the Paradox was it was traditional music
Speaker 1: for contemporary minds. Is what the guy's business cards sent.
Speaker 1: And in a way it was in that guy. The
Speaker 1: guy that owned the club sang a lot of Hank
Speaker 1: william and that he and his partner their dream was
Speaker 1: to have a club where people came and made music.
Speaker 1: And in that club I heard Sonny Cherry Brown, McGee,
Speaker 1: Jack Elliott, all these musicians that would come and play
Speaker 1: the Ash Grove in LA would always be looking for
Speaker 1: another gig, and there was a gig out in Orange
Speaker 1: County that they could go play a weekend, you know,
Speaker 1: the ad and have to fray the costs of coming
Speaker 1: west in the first place. So there was a really
Speaker 1: strong folk scene and there were a bunch of songwriters,
Speaker 1: and these guys hired my friend Steve Noon and two
Speaker 1: he got a gig there. It was really a big
Speaker 1: deal that one of us, one of us sort of
Speaker 1: rug rats, were like, I had a gig, he had,
Speaker 1: Like we could go hear each other's and Steve sang
Speaker 1: some songs in mine and sang songs that he had
Speaker 1: written with Great Copeland. And these are my mentors, you know,
Speaker 1: guys that were two years older than me, but let
Speaker 1: me hang with them. But when we went to New York,
Speaker 1: one of the things that happened in that first week
Speaker 1: or two that was there is that Tim Buckley had
Speaker 1: a gig at the at the Dam, and Niko was
Speaker 1: on the billing and she was being accompanied by Sterling
Speaker 1: Morrison and apparently sometimes it would be Sterling, sometimes it
Speaker 1: would be lou Reid, sometimes it would be John Cale
Speaker 1: but she was leaving the Velvet underground and to be
Speaker 1: a solo artist. And I think that it was the vibe.
Speaker 1: I don't really know this for sure, but the vibe
Speaker 1: was that it was all something that they were all
Speaker 1: agreed about. I say, she stayed in the Velvets might
Speaker 1: have been a more mainstream band, you know. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, I don't think they care that much about that.
Speaker 1: Webb's mainstream. They were actually like real outliers. But I
Speaker 1: think that they were helping her along with her transition
Speaker 1: to a solo artist. So she offered Tim Bucket the
Speaker 1: job of a company or because I don't think that
Speaker 1: I don't maybe didn't go well with her that one
Speaker 1: night it was one guy, one night it was another guy.
Speaker 1: So she wanted her own accompanies, and he came in
Speaker 1: and said that there was this shot. He said, I
Speaker 1: don't think she understands that I have like a career
Speaker 1: that I'm like, he doesn't know about me and know
Speaker 1: I've got a gig in Boston next week. I'm not
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not going to become her accompany. And
Speaker 1: he knew I was destitute. I came to New York
Speaker 1: with fifty bucks in my pocket and a Signal Oil
Speaker 1: credit card that I could use if it was an emergency,
Speaker 1: my mom's credit card, you know, and without without clothes
Speaker 1: for winter. It was the snow on the ground, and
Speaker 1: I was wearing these loafers, you know, and like, I
Speaker 1: don't know what people thought about us with California, like
Speaker 1: wearing T shirts and loafers and stuff in the snow,
Speaker 1: and like what, you know, what are you doing? I
Speaker 1: had that job for just a little while. It didn't
Speaker 1: didn't last very long. I wanted wanting to go back home,
Speaker 1: and but you gave you gave her some songs like
Speaker 1: these Days, which she made it. Yeah, during that time,
Speaker 1: that song that that herd Chelsea Girl record was recorded
Speaker 1: and I was on a session. I mean we recorded
Speaker 1: what we did. I mean, she had learned three of
Speaker 1: my songs and they're they're on that record. And I
Speaker 1: also accompanied her on a Tim Harden song that where
Speaker 1: Tim Harden wrote a song about Lenny Bruce, a Dylan
Speaker 1: song called keep It with Mind, which no one had
Speaker 1: ever heard before. It was like she she was curating
Speaker 1: songs the way really. I mean, I compare her to
Speaker 1: Judy Collins, because Judy Collins was the one who would
Speaker 1: make an album was something before we were coming to
Speaker 1: New York. I mean a song of her record of
Speaker 1: her lot was her album in which she had Circle
Speaker 1: Game and an Obscure Donovan song, a Leonard Collins song,
Speaker 1: a Jacques Brell song. Judy Collins was really like curating
Speaker 1: songs and presenting them, you know, and as a singer
Speaker 1: and as a stylist, and really nobody thinks of her
Speaker 1: this way, of course, but that's what Niko was doing.
Speaker 1: She had collected a bunch of songs. She had lou
Speaker 1: Reed songs, you know, police Kick and Stomp, Young Love
Speaker 1: plus runs through matted here. I remember these songs. Loui
Speaker 1: Reid was as that he was on the he was
Speaker 1: on the session I was on and that when I
Speaker 1: say on the session, it was just it was just
Speaker 1: me and him and she recorded the songs that in
Speaker 1: that day and it was Tom Wilson, the great great
Speaker 1: Columbia staff producer would produce Bob Dylan. I don't know
Speaker 1: if he knew what to make of you know, what
Speaker 1: to do as a producer. But but what one thing
Speaker 1: they did was they took all these songs that were
Speaker 1: basically sung that she sang with one person playing guitar,
Speaker 1: and the day I was there, it was like the
Speaker 1: song that I accompanied her on, the song that she
Speaker 1: did with lou Reid. Then later they put strings on everything,
Speaker 1: which Leco hated. She thought that was like I think
Speaker 1: she thought it was kind of like an easy solution
Speaker 1: to like what to do with these songs. It was
Speaker 1: like a kind of one size fits all. It was
Speaker 1: a thing that has mastered everything. But I think it
Speaker 1: resulted some of these songs like These Days and Fairest
Speaker 1: of the Seasons really benefited by having the strength of string.
Speaker 1: Arrangements were great. Chelsea Girls has had a kind of
Speaker 1: longevity and a kind of there was a there's a
Speaker 1: moment there that was sort of captured. So why didn't
Speaker 1: you want to stay? I guess that was just all
Speaker 1: I'm sick, you know. And when I think about it,
Speaker 1: what would have happened that I stayed isn't intriguing question
Speaker 1: for me, because I probably would have gotten in a
Speaker 1: band all the way earlier than sooner than I did.
Speaker 1: I would have been an East Coast musician. I would
Speaker 1: have been exposed to more kinds of music. But when
Speaker 1: I did, though, I mean when I came back, I
Speaker 1: tried out for this band called the General Soul, and
Speaker 1: there in that same audition I met Jesse Ed Davis.
Speaker 1: And also in that same that same sort of audition
Speaker 1: session was this guy Leroy Marinell who later wrote co
Speaker 1: wrote Whereols of London with Warren Zevon and a couple
Speaker 1: other songs. So, I mean, I was I was growing,
Speaker 1: you know, I just go here, go there. On the
Speaker 1: way home from the airport, there was a leaked version
Speaker 1: of Sergeant Pepper playing on the radio. Then it wasn't
Speaker 1: supposed to be played, but somebody had this I think
Speaker 1: b Mitchell reads. I mean, he had this copy of
Speaker 1: that he'd been given by one of the Beatles. Then
Speaker 1: he just couldn't help himself. He played it on his
Speaker 1: shofl people going to the Beatles run caft D and
Speaker 1: a week later the album came out. But I mean,
Speaker 1: all these momentous things from me to be hearing a
Speaker 1: day on the life and she's leaving home on the
Speaker 1: way home from an airport. But it was it was
Speaker 1: exciting time for me. I was just you know, writing songs,
Speaker 1: trying to write songs. I like I had started the
Speaker 1: song a child in these hills when I was in
Speaker 1: New York because it was out of homesickness. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's about being from a more pastoral place.
Speaker 1: You know. We'll be right back with more from Jackson Brown.
Speaker 1: We're back with the rest of Bruce Headlam's interview with
Speaker 1: Jackson Brown. It's interesting to think about what kind of
Speaker 1: songwriter you would have been had you stayed there, right,
Speaker 1: different influences, different well, you know what I mean. Out
Speaker 1: in Orange County where my friends and I were, you know,
Speaker 1: like we're practically a little like squatters. I mean, somebody
Speaker 1: to rent a house and then there'd be like twenty people,
Speaker 1: you know. But they were really into the Velvet Underground
Speaker 1: much more than I was. When I was in New York.
Speaker 1: They got into the Velvet Underground and played that stuff
Speaker 1: all the time. So I never really like got the
Speaker 1: whole LA New York. The differences. The differences are more
Speaker 1: apparent to me now, but at the time I didn't
Speaker 1: think that you were you know, and everybody I met
Speaker 1: in New York wanted to come to California. I you know,
Speaker 1: they find out that I was from LA and they say, oh, yay,
Speaker 1: I want to go to la, let's go. I got
Speaker 1: a car, you want to go. I'll be looking at
Speaker 1: this girl with a Mustang and thinking, yeah, I want
Speaker 1: to go. But it was an exciting time. Hey, I
Speaker 1: was eighteen and there was a lot of world unfolding
Speaker 1: wherever I went. I'm interested if you could go back
Speaker 1: and talk to her eighteen year old self about writing.
Speaker 1: I'd say what Dwayne Aldman eventually did say to me,
Speaker 1: like this folk music thing, that's okay, and you do
Speaker 1: it really well. It's okay, but you need to be
Speaker 1: in a band, brother, Yeah, you need to play these
Speaker 1: songs with a drummer. Come on, man, you're in the
Speaker 1: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But you have the
Speaker 1: single best induction speech I do, even if it did
Speaker 1: really eclipse me, it right, And I think about me
Speaker 1: was a clip by that speech? No, no, no, not
Speaker 1: at all, not at all. Now, everybody remembers the first
Speaker 1: part of that speech, and it's Bruce Springsteen describing how
Speaker 1: when he would play with you, you would get all
Speaker 1: the great looking girls looking at you on stage, and
Speaker 1: the street band would only get men and, as he said,
Speaker 1: not very good looking man. But that's the part people remember.
Speaker 1: But I think the heart of the speech. Do you
Speaker 1: mind if I just play you a little clip at
Speaker 1: the heart of the speech? Is that? Okay? Jackson Brown
Speaker 1: gave us paradise lost. I always imagine what if Brian Wilson,
Speaker 1: long after he'd taken a bite of that orange that
Speaker 1: the serpent offered to him. What if you married that
Speaker 1: nice girl and Caroline no I was figured that she
Speaker 1: was pregnant anyway. And what if he moved into the
Speaker 1: valley and had two sons. One of them would have
Speaker 1: looked and sounded just like Jackson Brown. Kane, of course,
Speaker 1: would have been Jackson's brother in arms, Warren's Evan. I
Speaker 1: love your Warren, But Jackson to me, Jackson to me
Speaker 1: was always the tempered voice of Abel, toiling in the vineyards,
Speaker 1: here to bear the earthly burdens, confronting the impossibility of love,
Speaker 1: here to do his father's work. Jackson's work was really
Speaker 1: California pop gospel. Listen to the chord changes that rock
Speaker 1: me on the water before the del You just gospel
Speaker 1: through and through, Okay. Other than he tried to upstage
Speaker 1: you on your night. I mean, I do think it's
Speaker 1: one of the great speeches I've ever heard about anything.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in your reaction to that. I was blown away,
Speaker 1: it was. It was also so funny, but I was,
Speaker 1: you know, my reaction, you know, it didn't escape him.
Speaker 1: My notice that there was a camera on me watching
Speaker 1: him say this stuff, you know, but it was it
Speaker 1: was really, it was, it was. It was huge. You know. See,
Speaker 1: for the longest time, I didn't know how to describe
Speaker 1: what I did. I don't know. I didn't know that
Speaker 1: anybody how many people really got what I did, or
Speaker 1: how to how to describe it or what to say.
Speaker 1: The idea that someone else was going to stand there
Speaker 1: and sum it up or say in so many words
Speaker 1: what it is that I do was really interesting to me.
Speaker 1: You know, the word genius doesn't mean like that you're
Speaker 1: smarter than everybody. Means that there's one particular thing that
Speaker 1: is your genius. You know. One time I told a
Speaker 1: girlfriend of mine this, you should, oh, don't worry, you're
Speaker 1: not one. But the thing is that whatever it is
Speaker 1: that you're particularly good at, I have somebody describe that
Speaker 1: it's as incredible gift. And that's somebody that I think
Speaker 1: so much of that and it's meant so much to
Speaker 1: me that it was just a really overwhelming thing to
Speaker 1: have happened. At the same time, it was done with
Speaker 1: such love and such an such an embrace. It was incredible.
Speaker 1: I find that a little scary. That speech almost not scary,
Speaker 1: but it puts a huge burden on you to me,
Speaker 1: like you're the responsible one. You're the guy who was
Speaker 1: like who you know, witnessing the failure of love, you know,
Speaker 1: the impossibility of love and trying to put together the
Speaker 1: fragments of our life. And I thought, oh, man, poor
Speaker 1: Jackson Brown, Like but you almost I had read recently
Speaker 1: that you said you were writing songs when you're a kid,
Speaker 1: but you probably would have had more fun had you
Speaker 1: just gone out in a garage band and played Gloria
Speaker 1: for three hours the way every other kid was doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I still want to do that. I've I've had to
Speaker 1: have some offers after I wherever that was Predator or
Speaker 1: so Setllite, people say like, hey, we want to play
Speaker 1: Gloria with you. That's there's something about that. Look, that's
Speaker 1: just a component that I that got left out being
Speaker 1: unbanded in high school. But I didn't. I didn't. I
Speaker 1: liked Gloria, but I didn't really admire that the fact
Speaker 1: it was really hard place for songs to grow and
Speaker 1: for lyrics, lyrics to be heard, very hard. So I
Speaker 1: saw I gravitated to the listening rooms where people really
Speaker 1: really listen and thought about what they're listening to. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, the thing is that there's joy. Rock and
Speaker 1: roll is so full of joy, and it's so full
Speaker 1: of the need, the desire for freedom and the and
Speaker 1: the willingness to risk everything for it. You know, there
Speaker 1: is meaning in the sound of a ride symbol. There's
Speaker 1: a way in which somebody does a particular rhythmical thing,
Speaker 1: or like a guitar chord or way in which played
Speaker 1: that is really more power and there's more there's more
Speaker 1: meaning in it than in the meaning of the words. Well,
Speaker 1: there's as much. So which you I want both of those?
Speaker 1: I want this, I want that's that's also like what
Speaker 1: I was trying to do in Downhill from Everywhere. I
Speaker 1: want you to listen to the way these guys are
Speaker 1: playing this. And we really worked on which just that's
Speaker 1: my garage band there, you know the thing that I've
Speaker 1: I fish just to have the words engage you in
Speaker 1: a place where you care. That's what I want to do.
Speaker 1: And to do that you have to hear them. I
Speaker 1: just I'll just ask you one more question about that,
Speaker 1: because we've determined that you've got a new album that's
Speaker 1: hard rocking and you're back into game, all all the
Speaker 1: nice things I want to say about your record. When
Speaker 1: you write, you do write political songs? Do you start
Speaker 1: out an anger? Sometimes? Yeah? I met this guy wanted
Speaker 1: He it's a punk rocker. I can't remember his name now,
Speaker 1: and he was telling me, you know, I like your music. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, I think, but you know, I think it
Speaker 1: should be a little angrier. You know, I think you
Speaker 1: should be angrier. I just doug that he was willing
Speaker 1: to talk to me because it was that's the saying
Speaker 1: with which all this enables. Days of shoegazing, like introspective
Speaker 1: songwriters were sort of swept aside by punk music. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that, after all, there's plenty of stuff that
Speaker 1: I'm angry about. I think that I have something similar.
Speaker 1: But it's not about getting the anger out, but hope
Speaker 1: in I want to engage about what's what's going on
Speaker 1: in this life and and also try to at least
Speaker 1: chart a course or in some way, you know, direct
Speaker 1: myself and whoever else is listening to a possibility that
Speaker 1: things might be could be improved upon, you know, and
Speaker 1: really that always comes down to improving yourself. And first,
Speaker 1: you know, are you more hopeful now than you've been
Speaker 1: in the past? Well, the whole like that. The Haitians say,
Speaker 1: you know, lespark Feviv, hope makes life. That that's such
Speaker 1: a simple anguage Haitian creole. But I mean what they
Speaker 1: mean is like, hope makes life possible. So you know,
Speaker 1: I'm hopeful as a motherfucker. You know, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: I'm trying to find it wherever I look. You know,
Speaker 1: I think we've got your next album title right, hopeful
Speaker 1: as a MOTIFU listen. Thank you so much for this.
Speaker 1: It's been just fantastic than the left for the conversation.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed it. Thanks to Jackson Brown for talking
Speaker 1: about his career and the inspiration behind his new album,
Speaker 1: Downhill from Everywhere. You can check out that album plus
Speaker 1: all of our favorite Jackson Brown songs at Broken Record
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube
Speaker 1: channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where
Speaker 1: you can find all of our new episodes. You can
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is
Speaker 1: produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafen.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is mio Leabell. Broken Record is a
Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and
Speaker 1: others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus
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Speaker 1: That a theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond,
Speaker 1: h