LATE FOR THE SKY

LATE FOR THE SKY

Sometimes an album comes along at exactly the right time in your life. It speaks to where you are at that time and it changes you. Jackson Browne’s “Late For The Sky” was that album for me. The album was released in late 1974 (50 years ago) but I didn’t discover it until the following summer. Here’s the story of how this album changed my life.

My neighborhood friend Joe and I went out to visit our friend Kevin in Wading River, NY in July of 1975. This is way out on the north shore of Long Island past Port Jefferson. A good two-hour ride. Kevin lived out there with his father. Until the last year he had lived in our neighborhood with his mother (his folks were divorced). When she passed away in 1974 Kevin moved out to live with his Dad. They lived in a rustic A-frame house in a wooded area very near the Long Island Sound. This was our second trip out to see Kevin. We had gone out the prior summer.[1]

One night that week we were at a mall and Joe asked me if I had Jackson Browne’s new album Late For The Sky. When I said I did not, he steered me into the record store and I bought the album. On the way back to Kevin’s house Joe went on about this song I had to hear on the album called “The Road and the Sky”. It had a really cool slide guitar part played by Browne. So when we got back we put the record on the stereo. “The Road and the Sky” was the first song on side two. I remember we listened to it that night but didn’t really get back to it for the rest of the visit. I had only heard the second side of the album.

When I got back home the next week I got out the album and started from the beginning with the first side. It is hard to explain the effect it had on me. As the record began I re-examined the album cover, one of the best ever in the history of modern music (IMHO). The streetscape at dusk, the house with the one lit window, the “early model Chevrolet” out front, the daytime sky over the house (a tip of the hat to the painter Magritte).  The photo of Jackson on the back, with that Mona Lisa smile.

Side one’s is the killer side for me. The first two songs deal with romantic love lost and found. The title song is up first.  From the first notes of the piano riff and David Lindley’s guitar this was a sound I had not heard before. The mix was dense almost murky. Jackson’s voice appears for the first time:  “Though the words had all been spoken…”  As the song unfolded I was transfixed by this tale of doomed love.  Still a bit stunned as the song ended, I was hit by the opening lines from “Fountain of Sorrow”:  “Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer…”  The music and the lyrics carried me to another place. In moments like that when you are totally present there is actually the sense of disappearing. Being totally unaware of self.

The theme then shifts to the quest for love and meaning. The third song “Farther On” far ranging philosophical piece about finding who you are and how to live your life. Heady stuff for a sixteen year old: “Though the distance leads me farther on, the reasons I once had are gone…” The side finishes with the “Late Show”.  I’ve never been able to really understand the meaning of the title. Was it someone who finally was found i.e., showed up at late? Is the story a reference to those late night movies? No matter, it is a moving song about finding love. Near the end Jackson throws another dagger to the heart: “I thought of all the empty miles and the years I spent looking for your eyes…” That line alone says everything about the quest for love. Browne ties in the album cover with the closing lines: “It’s like you’re standing in the window of a house nobody lives in and I’m sitting in a car across the way. It’s an early model Chevrolet. It’s a warm and windy day. You go and pack your sorrow, trashman comes tomorrow. Leave it at the curb and we’ll just roll away.” The car doors slam and side one comes to a close. I just sat there as the tone arm spun on the turntable. I would never be the same.

Side two, where I started just a week earlier, turns to personal themes of human and societal loss. The risks that exist in society and potential for catastrophic loss peak out in the opening song “The Road and the Sky” with the line: “Can you see those dark clouds gathering up ahead? They’re going to wash this planet clean like the bible says.” And again in the closer “Before The Deluge” which addresses head-on the doom brought on by the excesses of man: “…in the naked dawn only a few survived.”  In between we get two songs dealing with mortality. “For A Dancer” is a song about the death of a close friend Browne had lost touch with: “You were always dancing in and out of view… in the end there is one dance you’ll do alone.” Next is “Walking Slow” a mid-tempo song about domestic life but the chorus includes the line: “If I die a little farther along…”. 

In the end the album is a masterpiece and it started me down the road of all things Jackson Browne for the next few years of my life. I picked up the first two albums (the self-titled debut and “For Everyman”).[2] Over the next few years I saw Jackson in concert many times. In the fall of 1976, my freshman year in college, I saw him for the first time in Philadelphia at the Spectrum on the tour for his fourth album, “The Pretender”. The set was heavy with songs from “Late For The Sky” including the first three songs from side one. [footnote?]In the summer of 1978 I saw Browne three times in less than two weeks on the tour promoting “Running On Empty”. The reason I saw him three times was a bit of an accident. He was playing at the Nassau Coliseum out on Long Island that summer and you had to mail in for tickets – no guarantee you’d get them. So I bought tickets for the Garden State Arts Center show in New Jersey in case I didn’t the Nassau tickets. Then my roommate from college called to tell me he got tickets to see Jackson at the Robin Hood Dell, a summer “shed” just outside of Philadelphia. Then I found out I got the Nassau tickets and voila, I have tickets to three shows.[3] I returned the favor and invited my roommate up for the Nassau show. These sets also included “The Late Show”.

The journey continued into the late 70’s but it all started in that summer of 1975 with the first side of “Late For The Sky”. The album was on my turntable for the rest of that summer. I listened to it twice a day, singing along in my room. I don’t listen to Late For The Sky that often these days. I’m not the person I was in 1975, but that album is still part of who I am today.

[1] My last trip out to Wading River would be in the summer of 1978 with my other neighborhood friend Tim. This was the occasion of the infamous Long Island Iced Tea Incident mentioned in an earlier essay about the band Yes.

[2] In the fall of 1975, I was in my room listening to WNEW on the radio. WNEW was one of the last free-format radio stations, meaning the DJs played pretty much whatever they wanted. That late afternoon, it must have been November because I was sitting in the semi-darkness of my bedroom, the green lights of my Harmon-Kardon receiver glowing, as a recognizable voice came on. The song was “Sing My Songs To Me” which cross-fades into the closer “For Everyman” (the song is incredible, almost apocalyptic in its lyrical scope).  Together they probably run about ten minutes. I was transfixed by these songs I had never heard. I think the argument can be made that “For Everyman”  sounded better after “Late for the Sky” was released. “For Everyman” was the beginning of the sound that was honed to perfection on the next record. 

[3] August 10th at the Garden State Arts Center; August 12th at the Nassau Coliseum and August 21st at The Robin Hood Dell.