An unusual glimpse into the dawn of Jackson's career (18 years old).
Some small clicks and pops in the background as it was taken from vinyl.
CD1 - 42:51 1. Holding 2. Somewhere There's A Feather 3. These Days 4. Funny You Should Ask 5. Love Me, Lovely 6. You've Forgotten 7. Someday Morning 8. Cast Off All My Fears 9. In My Time 10. Melissa 11. It's Been Raining Here In Long Beach 12. You'll Get It In The Mail Today 13. Shadow Dream Song 14. The Light From Your Smile 15. Gotta See A Man About A Daydream CD2 - 39:23 16. Time Travel Fantasy 17. Fairest Of The Seasons 18. Sing My Songs To Me 19. Lavender Windows 20. The Painter 21. Fourth And Main 22. Bound For Colorado 23. We Can Be 24. And I See 25. Ah, But Somtimes 26. Marianne 27. Tumble Down 28. You Didn't Need A Cloud 29. Lavender Bassman 30. She's A Flying Thing Tracks 1-17 were recorded at Jaycina Studios in New York City, New York on January 7, 1967. Tracks 18-30 were recorded at Columbia Records Studio in Los Angeles, California in October 1966.
The story about the Nina Demos.
Jackson had more to show for his time in New York than a small stash of cash. One afternoon in February 1967 he stepped into Jaycina Studio with Elektra staff producer Peter Siegel and, in the span of hours, did a two-track recording, guitar and vocal, of more than twenty of his tunes. The session wasn't that unusual; publishing companies often have their staff writers catalog their material on tape. But instead of doing the next usual thing-making single-song acetates of the songs and plugging them to the appropriate artists and/or producers- Nina Music pressed the songs from the Jaycina session and a two-hour Columbia session from the previous year...thirty Jackson Browne tunes in all...onto two long-playing records. (Ten Steve Noonan songs, a couple of them co-written by Jackson, were also included in a nod to Noonan, also signed with Nina at the time).
One hundred copies of the unorthodox showcase LP's, packed in plain white jackets, were distributed in the music community. The records, which came to be known collectively as the Nina Demos, are a treasure. Comprising virtually every demoable song in Jackson Browne's repertoire at the time, they tell an enlightening tale of an eighteen-year-old doing his conscientious best to pin down his life as well as his art.
To Browne's credit his Nina Demo songs don't stray far from his own experience. A favorite, and convincing, theme is that of the earnest, motivated and optimistic young man on the threshold of discovery and growth. In "Holding" Browne writes of holding his door open to the wind. In "Love Me Lovely" he advises his girl in tried-and-true folk-song style to make the most of today with him because tomorrow he's out that door. In "And I See" he compares the drawing of the day with the drawing of his personal growth.
Enhancing Jackson's youthfully mythic themes is his imagery. If one were to go on images alone, life circa the Nina Demo would be a forest and Browne its wholesome nature boy. In "Ah But Sometimes", a one-tune tour of the outdoors, Jackson is variously the lonely tree, the broken tumbleweed, and the growing blade of grass. He utilizes the leaf as a symbol of vitality and growth, meanwhile asking his friends in "Bound for Colorado" to send him a leaf instead of postcards, and in "And I See" identifying himself with the leaf that's just been in a downpour. Water, specifically running water, is a favorite image for more aggressive striving. In "We Can Be" Jackson declares himself to be as reckless as a mountain stream. And in "And I See" he juxtaposes his perception of the open door with the river running relentlessly to the ocean-the image he had used in his junior-high-era poem. Elsewhere more casual references to nature and the elements abound.
The eighteen-year-old Browne was not shy about making his points. The best is yet to come, he informs his going-through-the-motions friend in "You've Forgotten". Meantime a youthful yet natural-in-its-context preachiness pervades "Someday Morning", and "Somewhere There's a Feather" reads like a teen Sermon on the Mount with its exhortation to live, learn, and love. The sermon turns confessional in "Cast Off All My Fears" when Jackson, spying all the love around him, pledges to do what the title says. In "Bound For Colorado" he extends this friend-as-sanctuary theme, offering that one can turn to friends when in need of comfort or enlightenment.
By contrast the rare times that Jackson explores territory seemingly beyond his thematic purview-specifically his forays into to world of heavyweight doubt and defeat-he's unconvincing. In "The Light From Your Smile", for example, he's the sorrowful traveler dragging along his battered -and unexplained- hopes and dreams. He's game to tarry with the lass he meets along the way, but only for a night-he's committed to pushing his would-be heroic self until the sun cures him of his "blindness". At least he has the girl's smile to carry him; in "In My Time" there is no consolation. The dirgelike lyric begins with an image of gold and silver statues turning to tin, after which Jackson sings of his own emotional deterioration in the face of life's apparent, but still unexplained, rigors. Ironically those tunes make the triumph of "These Days", another Nina Demo offering, seem all the more impressive. That Jackson seemingly stretched his art, and especially his own experience, to compose that song at seventeen may have been on his mind at the time. In "You Didn't Need A Cloud" Jackson writes about singing a song to a friend about his walking (an apparent reference to "These Days", or "I've Been Out Walking", as it was titled on the demo) despite his feeling that he had no right to sing it. It takes his friend, in fact, to convince him that, no matter what he sings, he has the right to sing however long he wants.
In sharp contrast to "In My Time" on the demo are "Melissa" and "It's Been Raining Here in Long Beach", the fruit of Jackson's brief stint as a ragtime writer. The ditties reveal how funny Jackson could be. "Melissa", in fact, features a Jackson Browne first, and last: The sound of young Mr. Browne whistling. "It's Been Raining", meanwhile, sounds like the original Jackson Browne self-parody. The slowly sung opening lines culminate with Jackson mustering the courage to withstand the heaviest of Long Beach blights: the smell of fish.... then it's off to the ragtime races.
Jackson also affords a lighthearted touch on his mythic tributes to friends and lovers. "The Painter" and "Marianne" can be found on the demo, as well as "Lavender Bassman", written in honor of Jimmy Fielder, another Paradox regular who went on to play with Blood Sweat and Tears. Yet those songs and his ragtime excursions seem like fish out of the water in the Nina Demo ocean of Jackson Browne's first-person, tenaciously purposeful art.
The young writer's bottom-line seriousness about his art and life is evidenced by the care he took in crafting his songs. Grandfather Clyde Browne once wrote that, for all the faults of his own first tentative attempt at poetry, the lines at least, "scan[ned], and that is more than can be said for the soul-emptyings of many adults". On that score alone he would have been proud of his grandson's efforts. Jackson had obviously studied his share of lyric sheets and marked up untold lines in his campaign to wrote metrically solid lyrics. Even more impressive is his painstaking commitment to, and obvious love for, rhyming. He utilized a variety of standard patterns, and some not so standard, and he seemed to take particular delight in rapid-fire rhymes, helped along by an inner rhyme or two. The effect is electric: many of his verses sing without being sung, heightening the young, vibrant, striving tone of most of his lyrics.
The state of Jackson's art circa the Nina Demo was of obvious compelling interest to him. "Fairest of the Seasons", a song he co-wrote with Greg Copeland, even contained what can be construed as a career reference...the protagonist wondering in one line if he actually has a sound he is able to "write on". If it was Jackson concern at the time it wasn't an idle one.
The problem with the Nina Demo isn't his folk/pop-flavored melodies, which are alternately bright and-with his fondness for diminished chords-moody, catchy, and with enough surprises to keep a listener's interest. Rather, the problem is how Jackson himself sounds...like a singer in search of a voice. Not that there isn't evidence of the singer as purposeful striver, too. For example, he's mechanically proficient-he knows how to hold his notes. Also he seems to have done a noble job of ridding his voice of obvious cops from other singers (although a faint British accent peppers his performance on a couple of tunes, which, along with his nature-boy stance, evokes Donovan, whom Jackson had seemed to harbor an interest in). But his singing reveals that he hadn't learned a far more important lesson yet...how to feel with his voice. His vocals, dragging and wooden, tend to turn his more plaintive songs into dirges, and to sabotage his upbeat tunes. In short they illustrate why Jackson, for all the Nina Demo evidence of his young genius, was signed to a songwriter contract instead of recording contract with Elektra Records in 1967.
Jackson was hardly happy with the demo. He didn't see a purpose in bunching so many of his songs on long-playing records when artists and producers were typically plugged with only one or two tunes at a time for a given recording project. And he felt humiliated by his vocal performance. He was so upset, in fact, that he personally hunted out and destroyed nearly half of the copies.
Source: The Story of a Hold Out by Rich Wiseman; Dolphin Books ISBN:
0-385-17830-1 (the book is out of print for many years).
THE NINA DEMO NOTES
From: Mark Brown (Denver)[SMTP:markbrow@microsoft.com]
Send: Wednesday August 6 1997 1:30
To: 'The Jackson Browne bootleg pages'
Subject: nina demo notes
These are from an interview I did with Jackson in Feb. 1996. There's not as much here as I thought, but we talked about his days in Orange County, then he got into going to New York and recording:
"I started going to New York and hanging around ... living on people's floors and stuff. ''Some of the demos were done in Peter's living room, some in a studio, with them smoking dope and playing. "Peter would invite me over for dinner. He'd feed me, we'd get high and we'd make recordings of my songs. Basically it was one take, and then the next. I'd put down everything I'd ever written, most of which was truly, truly awful.''
Browne had just recently heard the tapes again after having lost track of them for years. The guitar teacher in New York City who'd taught Jackson to play had come across a copy of the demos.
"A friend of mine told me he thought it was remarkably good stuff. He sent me a copy of it. To me it's just really, really bad. I don't think it's very listenable. The song 'These Days' was very influenced by Tim Buckley. He had this incredible power but also had this really wild pronounciation.''
None of the tape was of any use to him, he said, and if there ever IS a box set, don't expect to hear much from the tape besides "These Days'' and maybe "Shadow Dream Song.'' (is that really a song on the tape? Anyway, that's all I've got.)
Mark Brown