Jackson Browne - Running On Empty

Genre rock Publisher Asylum/Elektra/Rhino External Links Official Website Rhino Records

Even the most casual of music fans know that the road is often both savior and tormentor for musicians. After all, being a touring musician means you're not working a shift at some crummy lifer job, and rules, if there are any that exist, are broken so often that there may as well not be any. Jackson Browne's document of life on the road during a specific time and place in pop culture history (the 70s) is a testimony to the allure and repulsion of the road. Running On Empty, here remastered on a beautiful two-disc (one's a DVD, with a 5.1 stereo mix and two bonus cuts as well as extras such as a photo gallery of tour photographer Joel Bernstein's work) set updated by Rhino, is not exactly a live album as I remembered incorrectly from my youth, but an audio account of life on the road.

Browne recorded some tracks live (at the time all brand new material and covers) but others were rehearsal takes as well as ones recorded in different Holiday Inns (the album even says what town and what room, so if these places are still around it would be neat to check them out, I suppose). There's a version of the Rev. Gary Davis' "Cocaine" done in an Edwardsville, IL Holiday Inn, that is the epitome of "loose" playing. While the title track rings as clear and true today as it did back then. Browne and his backing vocalists infuse the song with heart and pathos, never once slipping into banal sentimentality, the song retaining its bite even after twenty-eight years.

David Lindley's fiddle playing on "The Road," mournful and lamenting, backs Browne's clear vocals perfectly; while "Rosie," a song about self-love, features delicate harmonies around a piano backing. The simple power of "You Love the Thunder" still rings as delightfully in the ears of this 34 year-old writer as it did at age 6 or 7 as I listened to it on my parents' stereo. While "The Load-Out/Stay" doesn't pack the emotional wallop it once did (something about its sentimentality seems both arch and arcane after three decades have passed), Danny Kortchmar's "Shaky Town," featuring a rousing Browne vocal of "That's a big ten-four!, from your back door!/Just put that hammer down/This young man feels, those eighteen wheels," and Kortchmar's country flecked guitar work, soars above the album's downtrodden, road weary feel.

Jackson Browne's Running On Empty may not be quite the experience of listeners' memories, but it holds up against a great many of the work done by his conspirators of the time. The album is frozen in a time and place, but that does not mean that it is dated at all. In fact, the feeling here is one of timelessness. Far from perfect, it is the account of record for what it was like to be in a rock and roll outfit in 1977. Warts and roses, the good and the bad, Running On Empty never shies from its inherent truth.