In March 1976, Jackson Browne’s wife Phyllis Major passed away from a barbiturates overdose. The couple already had a son together, Ethan, who was three by then, just two years after appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone with his father. After a stint with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and a year-long relationship with Nico in New York City, which included writing and playing guitar on her debut album Chelsea Girl (that’s him playing the finger-picked electric intro on “These Days,” which he penned), he moved back to his native California, settled down in Los Angeles, and befriended Glenn Frey. Browne and his, as Rolling Stone wrote, “mind-boggling melodies” had achieved moderate success by 1972, scoring a Top 10 hit with his debut single “Doctor, My Eyes.” His eponymous first record did well enough, though its follow ups—For Everyman and Late for the Sky—failed to leave any significant mark on the Hot 100. It seemed that, by the time Browne arrived at Sunset Sound to record his fourth album with songs scored by unfathomable loss as he was writing them, the easiest way forward was through—but not without good company.
Produced by Jon Landau, who’d just made Born to Run with Bruce Springsteen, The Pretender is a great record—a disarmingly tranquil one, to be honest. Grief lingers over its eight tracks, yet Browne rummages in optimism even at his most scornful. “Oh, God, this is some shape I’m in,” he mourns during “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate.” The album sold 3 million copies in the US alone, going platinum less than a year after first hitting the shelves. Laurel Canyon had rarely homed such an emotional tempest, nor a personnel list packed with more recognizable names than I’ve got fingers. Members of the E Street Band, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Little Feat, Derek and the Dominoes, Orleans, and Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. A future congressman plays the “Here Come Those Tears Again” guitar solo! Stevie Nicks’ longtime guitarist Waddy Wachtel is on the right side of “Daddy’s Tune”! Bonnie Raitt sings harmonies at the end of side one, and Don Henley and JD Souther pick up the vocals at the top of side two.
The Pretender lacks that punchy single, sure. There’s no “Doctor, My Eyes” or “Running on Empty” or “Boulevard” here, but soft rock has rarely sounded better than when it aches out of Browne’s mellow doldrums on “Your Bright Baby Blues.” The music is endlessly balmy and faints in a pitch of contrasts. Soul-stirring domesticity lets Browne fly like a bird “so far above my sorrow.” “Baby, you can free me,” he assures, with gusts of Bill Payne’s Hammond organ falling into the pauses of Lowell George’s slide guitar, “all in the power of your sweet tenderness.” Daydreams of sleeping around then settle in the vacancy. Just as Terry Allen had on Juarez a year prior, Browne decamps south of the American border to sing about his “Mexican dove,” filling his wounded imagination with pictures of “restless wings” and “the sun’s bright corona” while the morning casts a spell on two sleeping, estranged bodies. “Love will fill your eyes with the sight of a world you can’t hope to keep,” Browne serenades, to the tune of Roberto Gutierrez’s guitarrón and Arthur Gert’s twinkling harp. “Dreaming on after that moment’s gone, the light in your lover’s eyes disappears with the light of the dawn.”
Though the exact origins of “The Fuse” are unknown, its piano-and-guitar tempered arrangement is especially sanguine in the context of Major’s death. Browne surveys the absence around him, a “long distance loneliness rolling out over the desert floor,” and reckons with the weight of eternity and what years he lost to the mystery of time’s unyielding forward motion. He questions what suffering exists beyond his own but dares to outlast the falling walls of Babylon. “I will tune my spirit to the gentle sound,” he sings. “I want to hear the sound of the waters lapping on a higher ground, of the children laughing.” Browne speaks of Ethan in the dizzying piano ballad “The Only Child,” urging his only son to “let the laughter fill your glass.” The song is plainly beautiful, an exchange of wisdom from parent to child set to David Lindley’s fussy, weeping violin. The advice is rooted in love, in life’s fortunes being as challenging as they are funny. Questions will go unanswered, Browne wagers, before offering one final lived-in truth: “When you’ve found another soul who sees into your own, take good care of each other.”
“Here Come Those Tears Again,” a track that peaked at #23 exactly one year after Major’s death. Her mother, Nancy Farnsworth, is credited as a co-writer with Browne, who completed one of Nancy’s old song drafts during a trip to Paris in early 1975. It’s a textbook love-lost, crying-man ballad, sung from the perspective of a soured narrator whose lover left because she “needed to free” but eventually returns. His bitterness is a symptom of his own guardedness; “When I can look at you without crying, you might look like a friend of mine,” Browne sings. “But I don’t know if I can open up enough to let you in.” In a hesitation to forgive, “Here Come Those Tears Again” opens itself wide, the piano melancholy evaporating into a sprawling guitar cascade scored by Rosemary Butler and Bonnie Raitt’s vocal support.
The burdens lessen on “Daddy’s Tune,” as Browne pleads to a faraway father and yearns for his closeness. It’s a coastal take on Cat Stevens’ “Father & Son,” a page-turning pastoral of wasted days and once-misunderstood lessons. “The older I become, living your life day after day,” Browne sings, as a horn medley craters into Waddy Wachtel and Fred Tackett’s dueling guitar. “Soon all your plans and changes either fall or fade away, leaving so much still left to say.” The conclusion of “Daddy’s Tune” carries The Pretender’s greatest revelation: “Make room for my forty-fives along beside your seventy-eights. Nothing survives but the way we live our lives.”
While my favorite song of all time is “Doctor, My Eyes,” I will always contend that “The Pretender” is Jackson Browne’s greatest work, rivaling “Fountain of Sorrow” and “The Road” but ultimately surpassing them both. It’s an ineffable, romantic ode to surrender in both the veil of a freeway’s shade and the cresting nightfall of Los Angeles. “I’m going to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means, and we’ll fill in the missing colors in each other’s paint-by-number dreams” is a sentence-long poem. The music winks like a hallelujah before sweeping into an orchestral awakening. The piano lines give way to vibrating strings, as David Crosby and Graham Nash’s harmonies soothe and Browne cherishes the “laughter of lovers as they run through the night.” In the catchy, unmistakable pre-chorus, he sings about the tug of war between finding love and being broke, segueing right into his best lyrical sequence: “When the sirens sing and the church bells ring—and the junk man pounds his fender, where the veterans dream of the fight fast asleep at the traffic light, and the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor—out into the cool of the evening strolls the Pretender. He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there.”
In the early ‘70s, Jackson Browne’s tours with Linda Ronstadt and Joni Mitchell turned into a co-writer credit on the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” and a “Late for the Sky” needle-drop in Taxi Driver. He later produced Warren Zevon’s first two records for their label mothership Asylum, and spent long months on the road with Major and Ethan in a converted Greyhound bus. But it was the commercial breakthrough of The Pretender that opened the door for the tour-recorded Running on Empty, the #1 record Hold Out, and Browne’s highest-charting hit, “Somebody’s Baby,” which found popularity thanks to its appearance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was his first real glimpse at being the contemporary rock songwriter he’s now regarded as, and these songs became a perfect bridge between the two chapters of his inaugural decade as a solo artist. Full of grief, cynicism, and love both found and lost, The Pretender is certainly a product of its era, released into a skeptical, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America. But the surrounding world’s identity crisis never undercuts Browne’s poems about suburban monotony, border-crossing rendezvous, and raising a son with the presence his own father lacked. The music remains sincerely in-style—wonderfully made by a happy idiot for the happy idiot.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
