Running on Empty

Phew. Running this as politics and events, rather than a feature/bio, mainly because of a brief minute or so meeting one of the characters in a park.

The 70s saw quite a few artists releasing songs, naturally, and one was Jackson Browne. The albums spanning the time period I’m looking at were Late for the Sky and Running on Empty but my meeting with him did not come until the 80s, during the Daryl Hannah period.

There are a few things which immediately struck me in the light of current events … leftists love bare feet and sandals, they’re beta and yet can be uncontrolled and even vicious if pressed. You might say the same about me and others of our side of politics but it takes a lot for me to finally attack and then it’s not lashing out like an association footballer but more like a rugby fwd … focussed violence for result.

Leftist women from those days had many men through them, they were often emotional messes, e.g. Marianne Faithful and if they were in Laurel Canyon, then drugs kicked in. In the article, it mentions JB’s and Joni Mitchell’s switch to cocaine from weed. Unless it was spiked, weed tended to calm a person down, e.g. Queen Victoria and the Indian hemp … coke though could do the opposite, making the person like, as JM said, “Like tissue paper, cellophane.”

Needless to say, the Holy Spirit had no place in them and thus the things which happened … happened.

Looking at the women JB partnered with … JM was an edgy fair hair, more thin than rounded … so was Phyllis Major, plus Daryl Hannah. All had mental problems … did he choose the type or was he susceptible to them, as I’ve been to a different type, though just as edgy, which I’m thinking reflects on me?

All those women accuse him of violence, which he flatly denies, plus one writer in the entourage of rock press etc. said that Joni’s thang was to push her man to distraction, push him away, then claim desertion. JB, being immature until much later, always on the road, was the diametric opposite of what those women needed … they needed a solid rock to anchor to, impervious to her crashing breakers … though eventually it would wear him down. The rewards though, at the good moments, are indescribable, even to a songwriter.

He was however “call me the breeze”, as so many of the era were. Sadly, I was too … my “anchored years” way too young for me … I wasn’t ready, I tried. By the time I tried again, I was too mature in that sense. The way it goes.

I met him because of a girl called Alex, a student of mine, whose father was a film director of note, somehow knowing JB.

While Daryl Hannah sat in a lounge some distance away, JB was introduced to me by said director, I was stupid enough to ask him what happened to his wife? Looking at it then, and a thousand times worse now … what a stoopid, stoopid question. She’d suicided. This was a few years before she, DH, went off the rails.

Just for interest’s sake:

• Joni Mitchell 1943
• Phyllis Major 1946
• Jackson Browne 1948
• Daryl Hannah 1960
• Late for the Sky 1974
• JB and Phyllis marry, son arrives 1975
• Phyllis suicides 1976
• Running on Empty 1977
• Alex born 1978
• JB and Daryl around 1983 to 92

The song Running on Empty was a staple for our road trips, along with many other tracks of course.