#391 - Jackson Browne - The Pretender (1976)

MUSIC HISTORY WRITTEN BY HEAD WRITER DJ MORTY COYLE:

Released in November of 1976 on Asylum Records and produced by Jon Landau this is the fourth album by the American singer/songwriter.

We covered a lot of Jackson’s bio on our Judd Apatow episode so let’s just catch up to what got him to this record.

Jackson was writing and playing when he was a teenager in Los Angeles and people were soon successfully covering his songs, making him an in-demand songwriter of the new laid-back, mellow, California Rock, scene.

However in comparison to his contemporaries Jackson’s songs were always more poetically mature and searching for meaning in both our lives and life itself while deeply rooted in romanticism.

After the Eagles had a big hit with “Take It Easy”, a song he co-wrote with the Eagles’ Glenn Frye his performing career really started catching up with his writing.

Jackson was also like a male version of Linda Ronstadt who was the desired female darling of the scene and he dated Nico, Laura Nyro, and Joni Mitchell before he was 24.

Now you’ll remember that his second album, “For Everyman” had the song “Ready or Not” about him meeting and getting together with the model and actress Phyllis Major and them expecting their son Ethan that year.

Well, they got married at the end of 1975 and Phyllis and Ethan accompanied Jackson on that year’s “Late for the Sky" tour.

Then he started working on the follow up record.

Several of the songs including the title track concerned themselves with the loss of the dreams of ‘60s idealism in a trade for the material excesses and comfort during the ’70s. In that way he predicted the rise of the Yuppies in the ‘80s.

As he explained it, “The idea is that we’re pretending to go along with something that isn’t quite where we belong, a default version or reality, with a job and a house.”

The musicians assembled for the record were mostly stars and studio pros of the California Rock scene including Don Henley, David Crosby, Graham Nash, J.D. Souther, Bonnie Raitt, Waddy Wachtel, Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro, Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne and guitarists Lowell George and Fred Tackett, as well as Roy Bittan from the E Street Band on piano, and Jackson’s longtime multi-instrumentalist David Lindley.

Tragically during recording and only four months after their marriage Phyllis overdosed on pills and died in an apparent suicide at their home in Hollywood.

It instantly left him as a widowed single father of a two-year-old and he took a break for several months to deal with everything.

Jackson was never one to shy away from frank and heavy subject matter so during that time off he channeled his insurmountable loss into some of the songs and overall tone and returned to continue recording.

Although some critics found it was less focused and too similar to his previous records and style it was overall well received.

It went to #5 on the Billboard Album charts and by the next year it went platinum for the first of three times.

Jackson went on to make ten more albums, selling over eighteen million records, and became almost as famous for his outspoken Liberal Democratic point of view through activism and charity work for such causes as curbing the expansion of nuclear power and supporting at-risk youth.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Bruce Springsteen in 2004.

Earlier this year in March he released "A Little Soon to Say”, the first single from his as-yet-untitled fifteenth album which got pushed back due to the pandemic. In March he also announced that he had caught COVID-19. He has since recovered and is looking forward to a co-headlining tour next year with James Taylor hopefully.