As our finest practicing romantic, Jackson Browne has been stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again for so long that the road probably looks like a realistic way of life to him. Whether or not he knows it, he's been writing about highways and their alternate routes since his beginnings, so the subject matter and thematic concerns of Running on Empty aren't all that different from those of his first four LPs. But the approach is. This time, Browne has consciously created a documentary, as brightly prosaic as it is darkly poetic, with a keen eye for the mundane as well as the magical. Running on Empty is a live album of new material about life on the road as conceived
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and recorded by a band of touring musicians in the places they spend most of their time (onstage, backstage, in hotel rooms, even on the bus). Since there are two separate concepts here, the audience gets an unprecedented double feature: ten songs they've never heard Browne sing, and a behind-the-scenes look at "the show they didn't see." Ostensibly, the Gawain of rock & roll has scaled down his heroic obsessions, re-covered the Round Table with Formica and invited us in for a cup of truck-stop coffee, thus proving a point we knew all along: that small gestures can be just as meaningful and revealing as large ones.
Ironically, when Browne tries for specifics, he achieves both facts and universals. But his inclination to ease up makes sense here because he's really running two different, very dangerous races: one positively mythopoeic (the Road and its metaphorical implications), the other presumably maudlin (musicians on the road). The first can barely be done justice to within the confines of a pop record, while the second has rarely risen above its inherent cliches.
If a full-fledged mythology of the road didn't exist, we'd undoubtedly have to invent one, but the job has already been done by the same people who gave us the sky and the sea: i.e., practically every artist and thinker who ever lived. Because of this, we've probably got more concrete imagery than we do concrete, more journeying Jungians who would rather check out the Holy Grail than check in at the Holiday Inn. First the fire, then the wheel—it's almost as simple as that. Since the primary theme of nearly every major American novel, play, poem, movie or song is Innocence versus Experience, the road is our perfect primal symbol; we can use it to advance or escape, as beginning or end. When Jackson Browne, on his first album, sang, "There's a train every day/Leaving either way/There's a world, you know," he was giving us both the problem and the solution, and there's not much difference between the two. For Browne, as for most of us, the question has always been whether to stay or to leave, the answer either or neither. We want commitment, but we're committed only to the quandary.
Of course, one apparent way around all this is to stay out on the road, simultaneously
