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Jackson Browne - For Everyman

Jackson Browne
For Everyman

The title track of Jackson Browne's second album, "For Everyman," was a response to the escapist vision of Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Wooden Ships." As violence, fear and paranoia overtook Sixties utopianism, "Wooden Ships" (written by Crosby and Stills, along with Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane) imagined a kind of hipster exodus by sea from a straight world teetering on the edge of apocalypse. "We are leaving/You don't need us," the song declared.

Browne wasn't giving up so easily. As David Lindley's guitar eases the introspective "Sing My Songs to Me" seamlessly into "For Everyman," Browne sings in his characteristic long, fluid lines: "Everybody I talk to is ready to leave with
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the light of the morning/They've seen the end coming down long enough to believe that they've heard their last warning . . . /But all my fine dreams, well-thought-out schemes to gain the motherland/Have all eventually come down to waiting for Everyman." Deliverance must come for everyone, Browne insisted, not just hippie troubadours.

To his credit, Crosby sings harmony with Browne on "For Everyman." In fact, the L.A. all-stars turned out in full force to support the young man who was the songwriter of the moment on a Seventies scene that was just emerging as a cultural force. The scene blended high ideals, literary aspiration and California-style pleasure seeking, while the sound merged folk rock and country. Glenn Frey co-wrote "Take It Easy," this album's opening number, with Browne -- it had already been a hit for the Eagles -- and he sings harmony on the loose-limbed, honky-tonk rave-up "Red Neck Friend." Joni Mitchell plays piano on "Sing My Songs to Me." Don Henley adds a vocal to "Colors of the Sun," as does Bonnie Raitt on the delicate folk ballad "The Times You've Come." Browne also delivers his own world-weary version of "These Days" -- a song of his that Nico had recorded on Chelsea Girl and that Gregg Allman had performed, definitively, on his debut solo album, Laid Back.

Browne is still searching for his true voice on For Everyman. Is he the genial rogue of "Red Neck Friend" or the mystical dreamer of "Our Lady of the Well"? He will find that voice the following year on his masterpiece, Late for the Sky. But on For Everyman, he was testing his various talents with obvious joy, because, like his audience, he was just discovering them. (RS 818)

ANTHONY DECURTIS

Did you know that Jackson Browne wrote the Eagles' hit "Take It Easy" (featured here), or that he was a full-blown country rocker who was part of L.A.'s canyon rock scene of the early '70s? "These Days" (which Nico covered on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack) is also here in its twangy, B-Bending glory.

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Jackson Browne - For Everyman