Arts & Culture

Jackson Browne (who knew his first name is Clyde???) as our music writer Christie Marcy pointed out, wrote the sound track for the seventies, a decade which everyone who lived in wishes was the sixties. So, he was part of the sound track of my youth. A tricky subject.

I’m a food and wine writer, not a music writer. But sometimes time trumps expertise so I was SLmag’s designated hitter at Red Butte last night where Browne and his incredibly competent band played an unusual two-act show—no opener, just a 15-minute intermission.

This was a silver-back crowd; chardonnay was out in full force. But we squeezed our blanket into a space next to a 17-year-old redhead. She was there with her parents, Australians who were in SLC for the USANA-fest and she had been raised listening to Jackson Browne. They were sitting back on the VIP terrace but she wanted to sit up close.

At 7:36, Brown said hello, slid onto a piano bench and commenced playing “Rock me on the Water.”

At 7:40, the crowd put down their wineglasses and started batting around a beachball.

From there, the band went on to play stuff from the new album, Standing in the Breach, interspersed with singalong oldies like “Fountain of Sorrow,” a lovely lyric covered by Joan Baez on Diamonds and Rust, one of the most poignantly nostalgic albums ever.

And that’s the heart of Jackson Browne: So many of his songs have a yearning melody at their core, highly hummable, easy to song along with (to the 8-track in your car) with plenty of the creeping country twang that finally came out of rock ‘n roll’s closet in the 70s, spreading from the folk clubs in Browne’s SoCal home and the boot-scooting bars in Austin to everywhere else. 

In the 70s, his perfect lyrics ached with a nostalgia for a past that hadn’t yet happened, the gestalt emotion at that time. It turns out, it was nostalgia for a past that never happened. Say a prayer for the pretenders, captured in Clyde’s song of the same name.

We were all so much older then; we’re younger than that now.

Browne himself is still the lean Southern California folksinger guy—gaunt but more groomed than a hippie, occupying his slightly uncomfortable place on the spectrum between Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and verging into Huey Lewis when he slips into the commercialism he’s capable of but lyrically eschews. He’s an old-school pro, moving easily from piano to several guitars and back again and giving affectionate credit to his bandmates.

Still, an occasional chord makes you think, if things had gone a little bit wrong, Jackson Browne could be playing piano in a motel lounge. If things had gone a little bit right, his audience would be living off the grid instead of driving BMW SUVs.

Browne’s youthful plaintiveness has matured into political statement. That’s happened to a lot of us. Instead of singing about hitchhiking out of Winslow, Arizona, Browne is bemoaning the environmental devastation caused by by fossil fuels. Oddly, his lyrics sound more optimistic now. Standing in the Breach says in the title track, “You don’t know why, but you still try/For the world you wish to see.”

Last night at Red Butte, the well-heeled audience (Red Butte tickets are not inexpensive; this is not a hoi-polloi venue) danced along to “The Pretender,” the anthem of the aging middle class before they were aging or middle class. That album came out in 1976, the year I left Austin. How did he know we would all become pretenders, “caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender?” Why don’t we care that we did? The—can I use the word poignant again?—contrast between the listeners’ memories conjured by the songs and the present reality was painful.

But the response to Browne’s music seemed to rekindle the idealism of youth—surprising the singer, who seemed almost bemused by the enthusiasm of the audience as they sang along and raised their hands in time with lyrics from the new album, “You know the change the world needs now/Is there, in everyone.” And the band responded to the audience’s energy with more passionate playing. 

We were his audience all along. He’s always been singing “For Everyman.”

Ann Wilson admits that Heart, the band she leads and co-founded with her sister Nancy, didn’t think much of the news that the powerhouse Seattle rockers were being inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 2013. In hindsight, though, she’s come to realize the honor did change some things—particularly how other people treated the long-running group.

“We were kind of cynical, like ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re a working band. Go ahead and put some letters behind our name. We’re a working band. We’ll juust go back to work the next day,’ Wilson said in an interview with Salt Lake magazine. “But after the induction, it’s like having a masters or PhD. All of the sudden, people treat you differently. Whether it’s true or not, people suddenly start taking you more seriously. It’s an interesting thing.”

It’s also probably a frustrating thing for the Wilson sisters, who have been making waves in the rock ‘n’ roll boys club since they broke through 40 years ago with the hit album Dreamboat Annie, and then dominated MTV and radio through the 80s and early 90s with a series of hits. Who cares what a museum says about you when you have that kind of track record? But Wilson is far from bitter. Rather, she comes across in conversation as a person thankful to still be able to get on stage and rock with her band to thousands of adoring fans.

This summer, Heart is headlining a tour that includes fellow Rock Hall of Famers Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Cheap Trick, and Wilson notes that her band has toured plenty with both. She says to expect plenty of the classic hits from all the bands, like Heart’s “Barracuda,” Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” or Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” And she also notes that all three acts are still writing and recording new music, even if people don’t buy albums like they used to.

Heart’s new album is Beautiful Broken, a searing set of new original tunes and some re-recorded old songs that the Wilsons felt never were recorded properly. The result is classic Heart, rocking heavy one moment and soaring with gorgeous ballads the next. The title track and “Two” both make it into the band’s set on the summer tour, but Wilson knows the audience wants to revel in the oldies for the most part.

“There’s just enough new stuff and just enough hits,” Wilson says. “People who come to the show … they like hearing the really exciting new stuff, but if you just went off and did 10 new songs, they’d all be out there buying t-shirts.”

Wilson sees the different eras of Heart’s history as “whole different lives” in her mind. The 70s were great because Heart made their way out of their Seattle hometown onto the radio and the road. The 80s was a commercially successful time, but the industry was “a lot more clamped-down in terms of what radio would play and not play. They didn’t want experimentation. I’ve never seen a time when naturalness, whether it be female or male, was placed at a lower premium. It got so into the hair and shoulder pads and corsets and stiletto heels. Like you were playing in a costume drama, kind of.”

The 90s might have been the most musically satisfying era, she says, when Heart went on hiatus and the Wilson’s created the Lovemongers, a side project with a penchant for Led Zeppelin covers. “That was awesome,” Wilson says. “No expectations. Just fun.”

No matter the era, the Wilson sisters were typically some of the only women finding success in a male-dominated genre. Wilson thinks it’s easier today for young women to break through, but it’s still a challenge.

“It IS still male-dominated,” Wilson says. “But it’s getting closer [to equality] than when we came up. It’s closer than I’ve ever seen it. It’s just a matter of women being out there and getting good. I don’t think men want to keep women down or anything like that. I just think there aren’t as many women who are good. Yet. But they’re getting there. They ARE getting there.”

No doubt a few more will be inspired seeing Heart on Monday in Utah.

Heart, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Cheap Trick play West Valley City’s Usana Amphitheatre on Monday, Aug. 29, at 6:30 p.m. Tickets range from $30.50 to $90.50 and are available through Smith’s Tix outlets.

If there is a soundtrack to the ’70s, there is no doubt that Jackson Browne is prominently featured on it.

The iconic singer-songwriter mastered sweet melodies and introspective lyrics, becoming a key player in what is now known as Southern California sound as a songwriter long before becoming a star in his own right. The Byrds, Nico, Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt all recorded songs written by Browne early in the decade—but, you know him best for co-writing The Eagles’ “Take it Easy” and his own hits “Running on Empty,” “Doctor My Eyes,” and “Somebody’s Baby.”

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Browne has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and he plays a sold-out show at Red Butte Garden on Wednesday night. Doors are at 6:30 and the music starts at 7.