Runnin’ On Empty and My Only Regret

I’ve certainly screwed many tons of things up in my life, and there are also many cool things that I might or could have done but didn’t, but I don’t regret any of these things except one: I never trusted myself as a musician and so never had the opportunity to go on the Road.  In later years, I have at times, perhaps quite delusionally, gone all Marlon Brando on myself: “I coulda’ been somebody.  I coulda’ been a contender.”  Maybe yes, maybe no—in all likelihood, I would have amounted to just another guy in just another band who wanted to make it and didn’t.  But I’ll never know, and I’ll never have had the experience of taking it on the Road to find out.  This is my one and only regret. 

To live a life in which the whole point of your day is to get to the stage and play for an hour or even 2, to arrive at a point as a part of a band where the act of performing becomes routine enough that you are so focused and comfortable in the act of creation that you aren’t really aware of the audience but only what you and the band are playing…that’s  the one thing I wish I had done in this life.  The feeling a band gets when they truly enter a groove—it’s better than any fuckin’ drug, sex, love, french fries, or any other damn thing in the world, and the only way you get to that point, that groove, is by performing together every night.  The Road Life--  much romanticised and also much maligned—that constitutes the pursuit of this place is the subject of Jackson Browne’s “Runnin’ On Empty.”

And so: I took a walk today with Jackson Browne and the Section (a group of LA musicians who backed dozens of classic albums in the 70s and 80s) as they hit the road with Runnin’ On Empty, and, as it always does, the album left me pretty shook up by the time the band walked offstage after “The Load Out / Stay.”  The album documents the Road experience as clearly, completely, complexly (just made that word up right now, heck yeah!), viscerally, and beautifully as anything ever recorded.  The band sound is enormous—David Lindley’s lap steel and fiddle work takes a lot of the foreground, but Leland Sklar’s bass, Russ Kunkel’s backbeats, Danny Kortchmar’s rhythm guitar, and Browne’s smooth and precise vocals all are equal elements in the palette.  The tracks—recorded onstage, in rehearsal rooms, motel rooms, on the bus— vivdly document, implicitly and explicitly, the band’s love for their musical work, but also the loneliness and boredom of the Road life, and also pay homage to the hard work and cruel ironies of the life and roles of roadies, bus drivers, audience members and other non-performers involved with the Show every night.

The album opens with the title track overviewing the magic of Road Life—driving and playing and living out The Dream-- driven by a straightforward but unshakable guitar riff, mid-tempo backbeat, and soaring lap steel lead work by Lindley.  “The Road,” documenting the ironic loneliness of a performer’s full-yet-empty romantic life, is next.  The tune’s first verse is actually recorded, appropriately enough, in a motel room, and then cuts to the stage for the last 2 verses.  The nearly silent moment when the listener sails from motel room to stage in between verses, cued only by the faint hoot of an audience member, is like running off the end of a cliff and starting to fall, and eerily evokes what must be the performers sensation as he leaves partners in one town and moves to play another show in the next before repeating the same cycle over and over.  “Rosie” is a heartbreaking testimony to the jealousies of roadies, and Danny Kortchmar’s “Shakey Town” studies the peculiar and complex relationship between the guys in the band and the tour bus and truck drivers in the Road Culture.  The cover of Reverend Gary Davis’s “Cocaine”—well, that’s pretty straightforward, but it’s a hell of a rendering of the tune and that part of the Life.  By “Nothin’ But Time,” actually recorded on the tour bus and describing the phenomenon of leaving one show to go to the next, the listener knows the band loves to play and is glad for the chance to do so but also knows that the Road Life is not simply a bed of roses.

The record closes with “The Load Out / Stay,” which the band had never performed and had only run through once very quickly the afternoon of the gig on the recording.  They had to listen very closely to each other to make the damn thing hold together onstage, and the intimacy of the band’s musical moment on this number, ironically delivered in front of a packed auditorium, is a helluva thing to hear.  “The Load Out” celebrates the hard work of the road crew, the love and devotion of listeners who attend shows, and Browne’s deep appreciation for them both as well as for the opportunity to live the Road Life.  The simple piano and haunting melody which frame the song are genuine and moving and never fail to remind me of my only regret. “Stay” is a warm bit of wishful thinking that any one show could go on forever.

I don’t regret not being a rockstar, but I do regret never having the chance to live the Musician’s Life on the Road, in pursuit of that dream.  Runnin’ On Empty’s real gift to me is that it takes me there and lets me live that life in all it’s glory and loneliness, if only briefly.  Thanks, Jackson.