I always defend meteorologists. It bugs me when people say "If I screwed up in my job half as often as they do, I wouldn't have a job." I happen to think weatherpeople (and I don't mean Bernadine Dohrn) are right way more than they're wrong, and they're right about stuff I can't even imagine: what time a storm, which hasn't even formed yet, in fact is just a twinkle in colliding high- and low-pressure zones' eyes, will start in a given area. Not only that, but what type or amount of precipitation different parts of a state, even one as small as New Hampshire, will get, and when the storm will "pull away." See, if it pulls away too fast, there'll be no storm; even the weather is about sex.
So here I sit, a true believer, hunkered down in anticipation of mixed-precipitation-becoming-6-inches-of-heavy-wet-snow, in my area. That was supposed to begin 5 hours ago. Nothing has happened yet. I'm writing this during the time I'm supposed to be on the radio. I'll still believe next time.
That's not what I want to write about, though. I recently purchased Jackson Browne's newest cd, called "Standing In The Breach." It'll probly be dismissed by many with a casual "sounds like every other Jackson Browne album," but what's wrong with that, I'd like to know (sounds like a McCartney lyric, dunnit?)? Hemingway's books looked and sounded like they'd been written by Hemingway, Faulkner's by Faulkner, Henry James's (ugh) by Henry James (ugh). Picasso, once he found his style, painted Picassos. Emily Dickinson wrote Emily Dickinson poems. I apparently don't have any cultural touchstones post-1950: we are who we are. Put on Jackson Browne and expect to hear Monet (that fooled you, right?)? It won't happen.
Browne has a reputation, I think, as something of a melancholic, writing songs (mostly) about love lost, love gone wrong, relationships not quite working out. Mopey, literate, Romantic stuff. Of course I eat that kind of thing right up, and revel in his ability to get emotion into words, onto paper, out of guitar and piano strings. But he's also always been socially conscious and aware of the larger world: not just a navel-gazer, but an activist (god, I hate that term. I can't believe I used it. But these missives are one-and-out, so there's no goin' back to change it) and committed Lefty, which of course I also eat up.
I can't get past (or over) the third cut on the new disc, "The Long Way Around." I mean literally. I have previously described in this space my obsessiveness and obsessions--20 consecutive plays of "Melancholia" being perhaps the best example-- and I find myself hitting "repeat" whenever that song comes along. The arrangement, a little shuffle, is pretty cool, and there's this spooky, I'd say backmasked, electric guitar part. But the words, the words: Here's what he says in it:
I don't know what to say about these days.
I'm seeing people changing in the strangest ways.
Even in the richer neighborhoods
People don't know when they've got it good.
They've got the envy, and they've got it bad.
When I was a kid everything I did was trying to be free:
Running up and down Tinsel Town with the fire inside of me,
My planets all in retrograde, the best of all my plans got laid.
I made my breaks, and some mistakes--
Just not the ones people think I made.
Now I'm a long way gone,
Down this wild road I'm on.
It's going to take me where I'm bound
But it's the long way around.
It's a little hard keeping track of what's gone wrong;
The covenant unravels, and the news just rolls along.
I could feel my memory letting go some two or three disasters ago.
It's hard to say which did more ill:
Citizens United or the Gulf oil spill.
And I'm a long way gone,
Down this wild road I'm on.
It's going to take me where I'm bound
But it's the long way around.
It's never been that hard to buy a gun.
Now they'll sell a Glock 19 to just about anyone.
The seeds of tragedy are there
In what we feel we have the right to bear:
To watch our children come to harm
There in the safety of our arms.
With all we disagree about,
The passions burn, the heart goes out.
And we're a long way gone,
Down this wild road we're on.
It's going to take us where we're bound
It's just the long way around.
Man, there's so much brilliance there. You have no idea how much I wish I was smart and talented enough to come up with that. In Verse 1, a self-referential bit at the end of line 1 ("these days," the title of a song no 16-year-old should be capable of writing, but he did). In V. 2, the odd syntax about youthful freedom, but that scrambled-up stuff was what it felt like, tryin' to be free. Then that fabulous phrase "the best of all my plans got laid" in V. 2 (now that's something a 16-year-old oughta be thinking about!), and the reference to "some mistakes...just not the ones people think I made," which I presume refers to the Darryl Hannah episode (and what is it with her and Neil Young, of all people?!?).
After the first chorus, V. 3 expresses exactly how I feel lately, resigned and helpless and hopeless, not even helplessly hoping anymore. I don't think it is hard, though, to know which did more ill: the Gulf oil spill polluted a relatively small area for a small time; Citizens United has polluted our entire political system ("the covenant") for, perhaps, generations, until maybe someone who believes in the Greater Good, not just temporal political expediency, comes along and makes us more whole again and tries--and has the guts-- to right the Ship of State. I despair that I will live to see that.
Then Chorus 2, and the blazing brilliance of Verse 4, full of wordplay (if such serious stuff can rightly be called play): "the seeds of tragedy in what we feel we have the right to bear," which is of course a doubly intended use of that word, meaning "to stand, to put up with" as well as the Second Amendment reference implied, "the right to ... bear arms," while our children "come to harm, there in the safety of our arms:" a "safety" is the mechanism on a gun that prevents it from firing; our children should be safe in our arms, but our arms too often hold arms (weapons). Finally, "the passions burn, the heart goes out:" an echo of Yeats, in The Second Coming; "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity." Our passions for a cause burn, sometimes, and our hearts can go two ways: "out," to those whose lives are adversely affected by life's slings and arrows, or "out," extinguished, like "a brief candle."
And that's not even to mention the choruses, which move from the suddenness of "Now" to the continuance of "And" to the inclusive and encompassing "we're" of the final chorus. Not effin' bad for just another tune from a faded former star, huh?
Are you there? Say a prayer for The Pretender: get up and do it again.
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