Brave new world.
Everything seems that way when it starts. Till the dream rots.
It's easy to live the highs. Easy to ride the crest of the wave, even though it may not be ours. But when it comes to calling the lows, naming the hollowness, facing the wormwood, writing about the canker, where did the brave new songwriters go?
Rock music always seemed sad to me. It was real, because you could have fun, but you'd have to face your ghosts and demons. The sadness was real, sometimes more real than the happiness. We had thought that after Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and a host of culture heroes, the new music would break new ground and provide answers - in the seventies.
It didn't.
Most of rock was repertory, the pale-white cover version, after 1970. It was not new - the life-blood was gone. In fact, even the things that provided the knife-edge during those groundbreaking days were gone. Gone was the wonder, the heady elixir of discovery.
I want to know what became of the changes we waited for love to bring
Were they only the fitful dreams of some greater awakening?
Somewhere from within, in our self-worship and ritual mirrors, the canker began to eat away. Rock music had had a memorable and fondly-remember'd voice, but was now being sold to the highest bidder, ideals and all. The accountants owned rock music in the seventies; rock music was not itself, did not own itself. The flights of fancy were now landed, to perform at order, for somebody's gain.
Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender
Where the sirens sing and the church bells ring
And the junk man pounds his fender
Where the veterans dream of the fight
Fast asleep at the traffic light
And the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor
It was the day of a unique type of person, who was to be the prototype for later decades - one who had seen love, freedom and creativity, but had sold his soul. Or, of a person who had seen dreams die and never recovered. Cut loose from his tender anchor, he was adrift without a beacon in a world that knew nothing of and cared even less about hopes or his dreams.
Out into the cool of the evening strolls the Pretender
He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there
Are you there?
Say a prayer for the Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender
The Pretender WAS the seventies; either he had no higher dreams than his own, or had no dreams anyway because they had been crushed. Either way, he had cold blood flowing in his veins; his emotional nerve had been severed and the wound cauterised. His unseeing eyes were fish-grey and dead.
I don't think it was just rock music, it was everything that we call life. Everywhere, the Pretender set up shop - caretaker, and undertaker. He provided security, when there was nothing to guard; the seeming exhilaration of freedom when there was no creativity or song; wistfulness and nostalgia, though the anchor to their day had been cut away; fanfare, pomp and circumstance, for paper kings on paper thrones; the very substance of a mirthless smile. The Pretender knew nothing of causes, of the river of life or where it flowed, the raw nerve or where the sensation was; but he acted the part all the same.
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This has been really difficult to write. The song has been such a life-changing force over the years and I always despair of capturing its life-blood and putting it on display.
I heard of Jackson Browne in 1990. I had heard his name in connection with the Eagles earlier, and that he had written their earliest hit, "Take It Easy". 1990 and 1991 were the years of the singer-songwriter genre for me. Donald Clarke wrote, "the singer-songwriters were the true art-rockers, but they would never have accepted the label". I searched hungrily for songwriters who wrote their own songs and sang in the folk-blues-rock'n'roll idiom, and found a host of them; Jackson Browne was one shining star in a constellation.
Jackson Browne captures my attention as much now as he did twenty years ago, because he seems to take thoughts, feelings and deep impressions out of my heart and put words to them; like something I've always suspected to be true, he puts them into words. He certainly is the blue-eyed singer, with the full sunset behind him, on a beach, writing songs by picking them out of my heart.
Songwriters of that noble genre and tribe are many and they're all equally skilled. To be fair, however, none of them captured the seventies so completely, tellingly or hauntingly as Jackson Browne did in "The Pretender". It was and always will remain a song that captured the essence of an entire decade - the sadness, the hollowness, the "it's all over"ness, the facadeness, the "shards-of-a-dream"ness. No brave new world here, just ghosts.
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We still can recognise The Pretender in this age. The links with Jackson Browne's 1976 portrait have been SEEMINGLY severed, but what has happened is a mutation, something like what happened to Jack Napier when he fell into that vat of foul fluid and emerged as The Joker. In the seventies, the Pretender was merely immature; today, he is past recall.
Words like "sinister", "eerie" and "evil" come to mind, words that seemed aeons away in 1976. It's just the age, it's just the stage......
