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The Pretender
Jackson Browne

Asylum 7E-1079
Released: November 1976
Chart Peak: #5
Weeks Charted: 35
Certified Platinum: 4/12/77

Jackson BrowneLike most performers who transcend their genre, Jackson Browne often seems more a symbol than an artist. Singer/songwriter fans find in him the fulfillment of the style's promise: Browne's songs really do merge poetic vision and rock. But there are also those (like my friend who suggested that this albums's proper title is The Pretentious) who find the genre symptomatic of all of rock's current weaknesses. Browne is the epitome of everything they find disagreeable, both lyrically and musically.

It is odd that Browne is surrounded by such certainty of opinion, for ambivalence is the hallmark of his style. He has managed to make confusion an advantage, partly because he never hedges: he knows he doesn't know. The Pretender, the most complete development of his music, is bounded by contradiction. In "The Fuse," the record's first song, Browne professes: "There's a part of me.../Alive in eternity/That nothing can kill." In "The Pretender," the final number, he dismisses such spiritual hope: "I'm going to be a happy idiot/And struggle for the legal tender." Both of these statements are naive; for Browne they are equally true and false. So he admonishes his son, in "The Only Child": "Let your illusions last until they shatter."

Jackson Browne - The Pretender
Original album advertising art.
Click image for larger view.
If Browne has been heralded as a songwriter, this is due mostly to his lyric gift. The music itself has usually been ignored (at least by his admirers) and for a good reason. His three earlier albums are sluggish and cluttered, a hodgepodge of California studio effects, without a solid center.

The Pretender uses identical rudiments, but focuses them. The results are often moving and compelling. The album's spareness is accentuated by passages of almost dreamy lushness (the strings on "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate") and echoing vocals, which are a recurrent mannerism. Part of the improvement can be attributed to producer (and Rolling Stone collaborating editor) Jon Landau, although it is also indicative of the artist's increased maturity. Browne's voice is notoriously weak, for instance, but the strength of the rhythm section forces the signing past its limits. On "Sleep's Dark," "The Pretender" and "The Only Child," the vocals have a new passion, equal to the themes.

Still, much of this album is the mellow California rock of which the Eagles are the alternate prototype. If Browne's music has more backbone than the rest, the genre itself is not very challenging. There is a tendency to blandness, even in a song as strong as "Your Bright Baby Blues." So "The Pretender," which uses the same musical conventions to achieve the dramatic force of Rod Stewart's "The Killing of Georgie" or Bob Seger's "Night Moves," is all the more remarkable.

If Browne were a different sort of performer, one might think he's outgrowing his environment. But all his music, perhaps even the singing, is functional. The focus is always lyrical. The arrangements and performances are successful precisely to the degree that they bring our full attention to the emotions and ideas he articulates.

And it is Browne the lyricist who is often taken as a symbol, and most often misunderstood. He has been condemned as a rampant sexist, and with good reason: cowriting the Eagles' chauvinistic anthem, "Take It Easy," was inexcusable. But his romantic perspective is considerably more complicated. His affairs are never casual, not even when he's dismissive, as in "Linda Paloma." And in "Here Come Those Tears Again," he uses his confusion to greatest advantage. The role of the singer isn't clear: is he anticipating the return of a lover who has jilted him, or is he imagining the reaction of a lover he's just jilted? Perhaps both. For this song, at least, his vision of love turns on something rare: friendship.

Browne may also be the apocalyptic visionary, the questing hero in search of the Big Bang of final romance that his hardcore cult sees him as. But as someone who's always had reservations about admiring him, I find that Jackson Browne touches me most deeply when he's most specific, least cosmic. Writing about mortality and parental roles, he is as mature as any writer in rock, and more cogent than most. The metaphysics are there, all right, but it is the characters and experiences on which they are based that make them compelling.

The most striking songs on The Pretender are concerned with death and parenthood, subjects not necessarily unrelated (see the earlier "For a Dancer"). Often, his apocalyptic imagery is merely a way of getting at his feelings of mortality -- the crumbling towers of Babylon in "The Fuse" are as much about the inevitable erosion of time as anything else. And parenthood is seen as a symbol of the middle-class life he has experienced: it's both a joy and a trap. In "Daddy's Tune," he reaches out to his father, long ago alienated in order to share with him the turmoil of advising his son in "The Only Child." In a way, this is his ultimate dilemma -- to be a father, or to be a son. And his ultimate triumph is to realize and reconcile the parent and the child in each of us.

Such song-to-song concordances are not unusual. Lines and images overlap: the drum in "The FUse" and "Daddy's Tune," and the opening lines of "Your Bright Baby Blues," and "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate," which is about both the horror of a marriage gone bad and man at his most mortal: "The only thing that makes my cry/Is the kindness in my baby's eye." And all of these cross-references come rushing to a climax in "The Pretender."

"The Pretender" is a breakthrough. Browne has always had traces of cynicism in his writing, but about romance he has remained firm. Love can make a difference, all of his songs say. But "The Pretender" is a song about why even that won't work, in the long run. In its most shattering moment, the hero imagines what he and his dreamlover will do, if ever they manage to meet:

And then we'll put our dark glasses on
And we'll make love until our strength is gone

Daniel Blank, the irrational murderer of Lawrence Sanders' novel, The First Deadly Sin, also made love wearing sunglasses. This is what he found: "For me, it was a revelation, a door opening... I can never forget it. It was the most sexually exciting thing I'd ever done in my life. There was something primitive and exciting about it. But it shook me. I wanted to do it again." The next week, he begins strolling the streets, murdering strangers with an ice ax.

"The Pretender" cruises a similar street, but with a different aim. As a romantic he wants only love, but as a modern, middle-class southern Californian, he's unsure what to do with it. Clawing at the world, trying to make sense of something, one choice seems almost as good as another. The happy idiot who struggles for the legal tender is finally as free as the romantic fool who waits for love to change everything -- and both are equally trapped. Each has only one certainty: "Get up and do it again. Amen."

This is the prayer we are asked to say for the Pretender, "who started out so young and strong/Only to surrender." It is a prayer for Everyman, as much as any other prayer. What makes the song work, though, are its specifics, the way that even the junkman, pounding his fender, becomes a part of this cosmic cycle. The images are tied to a time and a place, as the best of any writer's work is -- and the horror is in just such detail: the house beside the freeway, the packed lunch, the work, the endless evenings. Getting up and doing it again, seen this way, is not so very mystical, but simply the way each of us -- even the artist -- lives his life.

Repeating this inhumane cycle, which defines humanity, we are left with very little. Perhaps only that particle: "Alive in eternity/That nothing can kill." Jackson Browne's contradictions, his ambivalence, are not resolved, but they are reconciled. One might say that this is the end of the hero's quest. But there is no end to searches such as this. They repeat themselves from generation to generation, year to year, day to day. Just as all of our illusions last, until they shatter.

- Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone, 1/27/77.

Bonus Reviews!

Jackson Browne had been in the studio for three weeks to give birth to his fourth album, The Pretender, when his wife Phyllis killed herself with sleeping pills. He is quoted in Rolling Stone as saying, well, yes, The Pretender is the story of Phyllis and himself, but adding, "I'm not sure how worthwhile my describing such a personal tale is... I think it might be more worthwhile if it weren't taken that way."

In fact, the album refuses to be taken just that way, and not simply because it isn't specific about what she said and he said. It also is the story of yourself, of myself; it is about the self and the conflicts and contradictions it continually has to house. The word "story," though, with its implication of completeness, is a little off the mark. Browne's albums aren't Separate Projects to be compared to one another but installments in his odyssey through his inner life, wherein perhaps reside truths about your inner life and mine as well. It is a trip he has undertaken according to old and valid wisdom: know yourself and you will know humanity.

The Pretender is about frustration and optimism. If you analyze the songs and put them in one column or the other, you'll see that the undertone of optimism is not rational, that Browne's observations turn up too much evidence that the game is fixed; the album is about the human spirit refusing to do the reasonable (rational) thing, which would be to lie down and quit. The title song, quite an extraordinary piece of work, projects an "outer" life into what would seem a logical adjustment to this world: "I'm going to be a happy idiot... And struggle for the legal tender." But the protagonist there is the pretender; his soul is up to something else. "The Fuse," which starts the record, is also supposed to go just after "The Pretender," something like the way the lead-off man bats after the pitcher and gives you hope that things will pick up again. In this song the spirit assesses its own toughness.

Browne's words in this installment are just a shade more earthy than in previous ones. His structuring of verses and his curving of melodies -- while these continue, characteristically, to refer back to turns he's taken before -- are just a little more conventionally "songish," a little more basic. It is at once simpler and more complicated music than that of Late for the Sky. The Pretender is just as strong musically, but in a different way. Jon Landau's straightforward production and good ideas -- such as having a harp plucked in ways that suggest mariachi phrasings in "Linda Paloma," a song that acknowledges Mexican musical influences but can't afford to have that overwhelm what the listener perceives in it -- get at the essence of Browne's thematics. I think "Here Come Those Tears Again" is structurally and melodically too complicated for the sense of its own words, as if Browne felt he had to write it before his subconscious had coughed up a full set of instructions. Most of the others sound as if they came to him after he had done all the difficult and painful work involved in preparing the way. Well, the truth is already there, all of it, some of it in the outside world and a lot of it in Jackson Browne and in you and me maybe even in in the other fellow who looks to us like a happy idiot. Say a prayer for all of us pretenders.

- Noel Coppage, Stereo Review, 3/77.

The only Seventies hero who can match Springsteen, Browne is our finest, most consistent and most thoughtful singer/songwriter. If I weren't pretending toward at least a modicum of historical inclusiveness, I'd include all four albums on this ten best list.

- Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone, 12/15/77.

This is an impressive record, but a lot of the time I hate it; my grade is an average, not a judgement. Clearly Jon Landau has gotten more out of Browne's voice than anyone knew was there, and the production jolts Ol' Brown Eyes out of his languor again and again. But languor is Browne's best mask, and what's underneath isn't always so impressive. The shallowness of his kitschy doomsaying and sentimental sexism is well-known, but I'm disappointed as well in his depth of craft. How can apparently literate people mistake a received metaphor like "sleep's dark and silent gate" for interesting poetry or gush over a versifier capable of such rhyming-dictionary pairings as "pretender" and "ice cream vendor" (the colloquial term, JB, is "ice cream man")? Similar shortcomings flaw the production itself -- the low-register horns on "Daddy's Tune" complement its somber undertone perfectly, but when the high blare kicks in at the end the song degenerates into a Honda commercial. Indeed, at times I've wondered whether some of this isn't intended as parody, but a sense of humor has never been one of Browne's virtues. B

- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.

Jackson Browne's unique blend of from-the-heart lyrics and laid-back rock has struck a chord with a good many listeners though his albums have never quite achieved the sales of a Springsteen. All his albums are now available on CD.

Browne is poet and politician. His own life has been filled with sorrow and loss. "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate," for example is a sad remembrance of his dead wife. "The Pretender" marks a transition in the artist's work from romantic, almost Gothic, folk poems to a more cynical, more mature and more accepting stance. Musically, this is one of his strongest albums with major contributions from session drummer Jeff Procaro, the late Lowell George and Albert Lee on electric guitars, David Lindley on slide and the voices of Bonnie Raitt, David Crosby and Graham Nash -- their contributions are much easier to hear on CD though there is still some treble graininess and a gentle muddle in some of these ten-year old analogue recordings. Sadly, the lyrics included as the album liner are no longer provided with the CD though with its improved clarity they are not missed.

- David Prakel, Rock 'n' Roll on Compact Disc, 1987.

The perfect culmination of the first phase of Browne's career (1972-1976). Produced by Jon Landau, The Pretender is the artist's final statement of the role of everyman in contemporary society. In this instance, Browne's always outstanding lyrics are set to melodies and production values which provide a perfect accompaniment. Perhaps because of Landau's positive influence, this is more pure rock & roll than the pop/ballad form which had previously defined Browne's work. The LP had first-rate sound when it was released, and the CD sound is enhanced with a greater spatial quality that fits the material to a tee. A

- Bill Shapiro, Rock & Roll Review: A Guide to Good Rock on CD, 1991.

On The Pretender, Jackson Browne took a step back from the precipice so well defined on his first three albums, but doing so didn't seem to make him feel any better. Employing a real producer, Jon Landau (who worked with and managed Bruce Springsteen), for the first time, Browne made a record that sounded like a real contemporary rock record for the first time -- the drums boomed, the vocals had attractive, echoed presence, the songs were tightly arranged, the instrumental licks were L.A.-tasty -- but this made his songs less effective. Where the uptempo drive of "Doctor My Eyes" on the first album had emphasized the disillusioned lyric tone, here the ersatz Mexican arrangement of "Linda Paloma" and the bouncy second half of "Daddy's Tune," with its horn charts and guitar solo, undercut the lyrics. But the main problem was that the man who had delved so deeply into life's abyss on his earlier albums was in search of escape this time around, whether by crying ("Here Come Those Tears Again"), sleeping ("Sleep's Dark And Silent Gate"), or making peace with estranged love ones ("The Only Child," "Daddy's Tune"). None of it worked, however, and when Browne came to the final track -- traditionally the place on his albums where he summed up his current philosophical stance -- he delivered "The Pretender," a cynical, sarcastic treatise on moneygrubbing and the shallow life of the suburbs. The song was primarily inner directed; the pretender was the singer, and it would be hard to find a lyric as self-hating (or as self-pitying). In a sense, the song's defeatist tone demands rejection, but it is also a quintessential statement of its time, the post-Watergate '70s. Once again, Browne had accurately described the world around him by defining his own place in it, dire as that might be, and you had to admire that kind of honesty, even as it made you wince. * * *

- William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.

The Pretender gets a little ponderous on songs such as "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate" and the title track, Browne's first rant of middle America, but it also was emotionally powerful, with songs of regret ("Your Bright Baby Blues," "Here Comes Those Tears Again") and hope for the future ("The Only Child," "Daddy's Tune") following his first wife's 1976 suicide. It also solidified his commercial cachet and was his first platinum LP. * * * *

- Gil Asakawa, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.

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