Jackson on "Lives in the Balance"(mp3, 2 MB)

Q: Was your dad a horn player or arranger?

A: He played piano. He told me that when he was young, he wrote an operetta and that the local -- we lived in Highland Park when he told me this, in L.A. And he said that the local -- the Pasadena Playhouse -- somebody wanted to put this operetta on and he -- but they didn't have any money to pay for the work. They just had the money for the production. And he wouldn't let them do it. So therefore, nobody ever did this work. He just told me, he said, this is like one of the lessons that he offered me. He just said if anybody wants to do your stuff, just let them do it. Don't worry about getting paid. Just get the stuff launched. But I remember him sitting at the piano writing. You know, he'd have these fits of writing. He'd spend three days like writing songs or one time he was -- I think he might have been trying to write an operetta. And this is probably when he was probably in his late 40s at this time. And I remember him looking down at me and then looking and realizing that he had two cigarettes burning at the same time. And he'd say, "You think I'm smoking too much?"

But he was a horn player. Yeah, he had about half a dozen horns that sort of surrounded the entrance to this alcove where his desk was. And occasionally, he just walked around the room playing a French horn or a sousaphone or something. He was like -- he was a freak. He really loved instruments and he always told me, "Never sell an instrument if you don't have to. I mean, if you have to, okay. But I mean, just basically keep them. They're just opportunities to get into another frame of mind." Which I didn't understand when I wanted to stop playing the trumpet. He encouraged me to play the trumpet. But I mean, I started playing trumpet and I wanted to play piano and he wouldn't let me switch. And it was like, "no, no, no, you're really getting good. No, no, no. You can't switch to the piano. And I'm thinking, you -- you said I could. What a drag. So I basically like just sort of like began to boycott the trumpet. I just sort of did less and less work on it. And I sort of snuck around playing guitar.

But you know, music is that way. I asked for a banjo. So he waited to get me one for my birthday, which was like six months away. By that time, I was playing guitar and I didn't really want to play the banjo. So I was always wishing I'd get a guitar for my birthday and I got a banjo. And I thought, "Right. Okay. He's just a little slow on the uptake."

Q: Have you ever used a horn on a record?

A: Yeah, I have. As a matter of fact, I used horns on a record that I wrote for my dad, a song called Daddy's Tune, which needed to have horns on it. And so I --

Q: That's right. From The Pretender.

A: Yeah.

Q: You grew up in L.A., but you made your first musical mark in New York City. What made you drive across country as a teenager with some friends and you had like, I don't know, 50 bucks in your pocket or something?

A: I had exactly 50 bucks in my pocket.

Q: So what made you do that?

A: And my mother's Signal Oil card. My two best friends invited me, who were older than I was. I hung around with my sister's friends. And they were a couple of years older. And these guys wanted -- I guess they just thought that I would be -- I was kind of quiet. I hung with -- I sort of tagged along with and I was very sort of introverted and pensive. And they probably though I'd be good company, and I might be able to share the gas money. So they said, you know, "We're going to New York. We're going to return a car that belonged to this friend of mine's family. We're going to drive this Rambler American station wagon from -- essentially to New York. I think he had to return it in Niagara Falls. But I went as far as New York with them. And there was another friend of mine that lived in New York. And they were all musicians. And I think they wanted to go to Europe. And they did. They wound up going -- one of them got all the way to India. Their girlfriends caught up with them in Niagara Falls and they wound up going on the trip, too. So suddenly, there're all these guys and girls that I knew from Orange County -- they were a little older than I was. I mean, I hit New York and I was 18. I had just turned 18. And they were about 20, maybe Adam was 21. And their girlfriends had caught up with them in Niagara Falls, which I thought was sort of -- there was some foreshadowing there. They all sort of went to Europe with sleeping bags and I sort of stayed in New York thinking that there are opportunities for me to sing and to play. And some stuff happened, but I mean, it was really years before I was able to make a record. I had time to go to Europe. I didn't realize it. I could have gone.

Q: But even though this is your first, "solo acoustic record," I'd imagine in those days you were playing by yourself in coffee houses; is that correct?

A: That's what I was doing. This is exactly the way I used to play. Although, a song like The Birds of St. Marks, was written that year. It was written in 1967. And I was playing -- I got a job playing guitar for Nico, accompanying her. And it was Tim Buckley that got me the job, because she had been playing on this bill with -- and it was just a bar. We literally sat behind a bar, a part of the bar that -- where people sat with tables. And it wasn't being used as a bar. It was a really long barroom. There was a bar up at the other end of the room. And we were behind the bar. And Tim Buckley -- I went to go see Tim Buckley do this gig. And he was doing this gig with Nico. And the night -- Nico, the night I went, Sterling Morrison of the Velvets was playing behind Nico. And just playing guitar and accompanying her. And another night, it would be LouReed. I think John Cale did a -- but she needed her own accompanist. And they were all trying to get her squared away so she could have her own career, because she wasn't going to stay in the Velvets. So Tim called me a couple of days after I saw the show and said, "Do you think you would want a job as an accompanist? Because Nico is looking for an accompanist and she asked me. And of course, I -- you know, I've got gigs, I'm going to Boston, plus I don't think it's for me. And I was just this -- I had just gotten to New York and everybody knew I was out of money. I mean, we spent my 50 bucks getting there. I mean, I was just living on Mrs. Paul's fish cakes and mooching off my friends. I mean, I was just this kid they knew from home that was absolutely penniless. And there was snow on the ground and I was wearing penny loafers. I'm from Orange County. So I started being her accompanist.

And it was really an interesting thing, for the first time, to try to make up an arrangement in a key and to figure out how, how best to represent a song for somebody else who didn't play an instrument. Later, Nico began to play a -- well, a little pump organ, which she played absolutely uniquely. And you can hear her play this on the Marble Index record that she made next. But this record was basically made and as far as I can -- I would say, probably two sessions. Produced by Tom Wilson, who would produce Bob Dylan. And Lou Reed and I -- the day I went in and played the songs of mine that she sang, Lou Reed also came in and accompanied her on the songs that he had written. And after which, we went to go see this show at the RKO, the Murray the K Show, with Cream, the Blues Project, Jim and Jean and Wilson Pickett. I mean, it was like a rock revue. You know, it was the most amazing thing I ever saw.

Q: You're having all these experiences, yet it's still hard to imagine a teenage kid writing a song -- a song that sounds like it comes from such an old soul, like These Days...

A: That's deceiving. I'll tell you why. Because I think that my own generation was disaffected. It was basically alienated from what was going on. And Dylan was my main, you know, it was the voice that led me through most of my growing up. And there's a guy who, though he had this sort of very young, almost cherubic countenance in his first couple of albums, had this very, very old man's voice. And I think that's kind of a young thing to do.

And in fact, kids are the ones that are always trying to do -- embrace -- they're looking for their adulthood. They're looking to be older than they really are. And in that song, I mean, for instance, the lyrics that are here -- this is the way I played the song for Nico. This finger-picking thing is what I wound up playing for her. But when I wrote this song, I actually flat-picked it. But it didn't sound good flat picking this electric guitar. Andy Warhol insisted that I like get – "he can do it if he plays an electric guitar", or Paul Morrisey, who was the guy that sort of helped produce most of what Andy did, whether it was films or other things, said "Andy said, play an electric guitar," because it will be more modern. The name of the bar was called The Dom, which is a Polish word for -- I don't know what. Dom. It was The Dom on St. Marks. So Andy thought, well, that's mod spelled backwards. And this is Andy Warhol's (laughs), you know, bizarre and wonderful... his pop sense, he said, "oh that's mod backwards. So it was "Andy Warhol's Mod Dom" is what he turned the Polish bar -- which was like the only – and there was one night a week that this was an R&B gig. There was an R&B bar. So if you went there on one night, it would be a bunch of people from uptown, hoping to catch a glimpse of Andy Warhol and his wild entourage of freaks. You know, a bunch of lawyers and society people or wherever, looking to catch a glimpse of Rene Rickard (sp?) and Nico and Gerard Milanga (sp) and Ella Migetta (sp?). These people who are like wearing feather boas and -- I don't -- you know, they were freaks. But another night, if you'd go there, everybody's black. It was all listening to r&b. It had an amazing juke box, which was sort of half R&B and half stuff like the Beatles. I mean I must have heard the single of Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, the A and B side. Remember when that came out. It would be like sort of before Sergeant Pepper and after -- they weren't on an album at that point. They were just a single that was put out.

But it was a beautiful environment in that it was -- and there were these films on the wall. Andy liked -- on the nights that Andy had the bar, there were these films being projected. They were loops. So there was a skydiver that was just sort of falling through the air eternally. I mean, if you looked really carefully, you could see where the loop jumped. There was a picture -- another loop was a loop of Lou Reed sort of glowering at the camera, eating a candy bar. And this was conceptual and it was full of artists and it was a bar scene. Playing these sets was for people who were in there sort of to observe that scene. They were sort of like a voyeurist -- there were like all these people from uptown that would come...

So you weren't really playing for -- I mean, you had the feeling that Andy's entourage was also performing. They were actually supposed to come and show up at this thing for a certain amount of time before they go on wherever they're going to go. But occasionally, it turned into like a real party.

Anyway. I digress. The song These Days I finger-picked it. So this is actually the way I wound up playing it for Nico. And it wound up being the way it was recorded on her record. Although they added strings afterwards and they did -- they made it into something that people think of as somewhat of a classic record. I mean, I've had a lot of younger musicians tell me that they really liked this record. And that's what they know of me, basically, is this record, which was never really hugely popular. But it's sort of like a cult classic.

Q: So when you hear the lyrics to These Days, do you ever think --

A: Well, I changed the lyrics, because they were too -- they were so despondent -- I mean, you were saying this was an old soul. But I think it was a very young thing to say, I'll stop my dreaming. An older person would never say that.

Q: But someone saying "Please don't confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them." At 16 years old, I mean, how many failures are there to be confronted with?

A: Enough. One. Who knows? I really think that people feel those things way earlier than their teens. I really think that adolescents really are very concerned with whether they're accepted or whether they're doing things right or whether or not they have something. Whether they have regrets. I think the question of regret comes in very, very early.

Q: You were so much older then. You're younger than that now.

Jackson, the first couple of songs we've talked to so far, you play on your guitar. Can you sense how your guitar playing has evolved over the years?

A: Yeah, my guitar playing was always just meant to be accompaniment to -- I just never really tried to become a good guitar player. I wanted to be a good accompanist for my songs. And so I've always foregone any kind of virtuosity and just -- but I've gotten better and better. And the tone is the thing, tone and the right kind of guitar. Certain guitars really are alive in certain keys and registers. And other guitars are alive in other registers. So depending on the key and the tuning that you need for the song -- I had to make up tunings to play some of these songs (solo), because they were written with a band. I think I would assume and most people would assume that songs were written on (an) instrument and then you add other instruments to that instrument. I mean, if I wrote a song that had a very simple guitar part and the band -- it needs to be simple because there's a band playing. But you can't sit there and play that one note through the whole song, if that's the only instrument there. It has to be a fuller part. So I had to actually make up new tunings and a way of playing some of these songs, not all of which were written solo acoustic and then brought to a band. Some of them were written with a band as a resource, really. A song like The Birds of St. Marks was written on guitar. And it never seemed finished to me, partly because it would be really hard to get what I got out of it on the piano out of the guitar. It just doesn't have the kind of -- the voicings and the kind of part that really soars when I play on the piano.

I found that out in an interview. I was being interviewed and I was sitting at the piano playing some other song. And it just led to me remembering this song. And because I wasn't at the guitar, I just started playing on the piano. And this arrangement sort of came out, partly me remembering and partly me trying to remember or trying to represent the song, but on a different instrument. So I didn't change the song very much. I think I moved a couple of commas in my mind in the lyrics.

Q: Well, on solo acoustic, someone yells out for the song. They say, "Can you remember The Birds of St. Marks?"

A: This is the funniest thing because, you know, I mean, I didn't know who yelled it. But later I was showing this tape to a friend of mine saying, "You know, like there's this funny little -- there's this great introduction and, I mean, I don't know if I should put this kind of thing on the record. I'll show you what I mean. And I played it for him. He says, "That's me." His name's Rick Solomon. He said, "That's me." And once he said it, I listened to it again and I said, "Oh, my God, that's right. That's you." "You didn't know that was me?" "No, no. I didn't realize that was you."

I've sung that some. But there are people in my audience who have been listening to my songs from -- you know, from a long time back and who remember stuff that I've forgotten. That same guy said, one time when we were sitting around, he said, "Well, what ever happened to that song Just Like Forever?" And I went, "Oh, yeah, that's not finished." And he said, "No, no, no, it's finished. I heard you sing it when I was 20 in the Nassau Coliseum. You sang that song." I went, "Oh, yeah, I remember now. Yeah, we played it for a while." I don't know. I always thought that it wasn't finished.

I sat down and said, like, here's what I've got. This is what I can remember. Halfway through he stopped. He said, "Those aren't the words." "What do you mean?" "Those aren't the words to the song. I've got a bootleg of it." Now he cops to it. "I've got a bootleg of that song. And those aren't the words. Here, let me -- I'll bring it to you." And he brings me the thing. "Oh, you're right." So here I'm thinking I don't know whether what I was singing was an earlier version that I didn't finish or a later version that I forgot having finished the song I kept. But I guess there are two whole versions of that song.

Q: Well, when the guy yells out for "can you remember The Birds of St. Marks," I'm going, "I've never heard of that song." I have all of Jackson's records.

A: Right. Come to think of it, how did he even know about that song?

Q: He's probably got it on a bootleg somewhere.

A: He might. There was a bootleg. It became a bootleg. When I first was signed to a publisher, this publisher did an innovative thing. He said, "You know, you've got so many songs, we're just going to press up...we're not going to make acetates." Acetates were very -- they were one off -- they were like discs. And they were made -- they never lasted very long, because they were made -- they weren't made out of vinyl. They weren't pressed. They were just made and they actually had like a metal core. And there was acetate covering it. You could maybe play the thing about ten times before it started sounding really scratchy and awful. But it was a way of giving people recordings before there were cassette -- hey, folks, before there were cassette recordings we're talking about. I remember when I had my first cassette player. It was the size of a copy of the Yellow Pages. It was not something you carried around in your pocket. You carried it around in the front seat of your car maybe, -- anyway, that's telling you how old I am.

Publishing demos were given to people by virtue of these little acetates. But this guy said, "Instead of making acetates every time, we're going to print up your 30 songs and these 10 songs by your buddies, Greg Copeland and Steve Noonan. And they'll be these two discs that we can just send to people. So there are all these discs around of me singing -- and they're like one take. We went through them in one take -- and I wasn't singing well at all. I had a very bizarre singing style in those days. But there are still a few of these around. I mean, I personally destroyed a number of them. But I mean, I think there are still a few of them around. And that's maybe where he --

Q: Well, you revisit The Birds of St. Marks on Solo Acoustic, thanks to your friend yelling it out. And most of us have never heard it before. You alluded to Nico and you mentioned St.Marks. So does this song go back to that period?

A: Yeah. I wrote this song -- I wrote this song for Nico, yeah. I started it in New York and I finished it in L.A. And there's, among my weary secrets, is that this image in the last verse of the "wooden lady turn and turn" is actually -- there used to be a statuette of a Las Vegas showgirl that, at a distance, just looked like just that. But I mean, it was actually made of wood. And it used to be right outside the Chateau Marimont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where I went to go stay after I left New York and came back home. And only from my window could you see this -- this was carved out of wood and painted. And the paint was peeling. And it was this beautiful sort of very close-up view of show business and of Hollywood -- I mean, there's the sort of peeling paint, wooden statuette. That's really what that last verse refers to for me. I mean, you could say that Nico -- Nico had sort of a wooden countenance. She had a German accent and a very deep voice and was -- but was so distant you could get away with calling her wooden. You know, you could say, "Wooden lady, turn and turn." But really, this is the Sands Hotel.

She was waving a cowboy hat. It was like a showgirl. I mean, recently, I saw some photographs from the Running on Empty tour. There were times when rock and roll was advertised on sort of -- like this sort of plastic marquees that -- outside of venues that were surrounded by woods. I mean, not that long ago. 20 years ago, 30 years ago. It's a different world.

Anyway, this is interesting. It's almost like a little time capsule. It's interesting for me, because this song contains who I was and what I thought at 18. And it's sort of preserved there. I remembered that song in that interview and a lot of people saw this TV special, this "Going Home" special. So that must be where he heard the song.

Q: The Birds of St. Marks is something rare for you Jackson, a previously unreleased song. Because it seems to me over the course of 30 plus years and 12 studio albums, there's not many songs that escaped. You talked about that publishing acetate, and "Somebody's Baby" was on a soundtrack. But there's not a lot of B-sides and stuff floating around. So is it like you will serve no song before its time?

A: (Laughs) That's it! You know you go to make a record and you just use the stuff that measures up. That makes it. But I tried to record Birds of St. Marks for The Naked Ride Home. And I did record it. And I recorded it a couple of times. And I liked it very much. But in the final analysis, it didn't fit with the newer songs. It just seemed like it was from another time and it didn't match up. It didn't have as much of an interaction with the other songs that I thought it should have.

Q: We talked about your stint in New York City. By 1971, you were back in L.A. You were living in a neighborhood around the Hollywood Bowl. Some of your neighbors were people like JD. Souther and Glenn Frey and Don Henley. You guys were hanging out at the Troubadour. Are these the musicians you consider your peers today?

A: Yeah, these guys are not only my peers, but my heroes. We all sort of met playing coffeehouses and clubs in L.A. And Glenn was in a duo with J.D. Later, I think it was David Geffen who said, you know, like JD. could make a solo... I think maybe they each wanted to make solo records. He didn't split them up. But I think that they wanted to each make solo records. And J.D. seemed to be better on his own than Glenn seemed when he sang by himself. I think Geffen said, "Glenn, you should have a band. You should like make a band." And I think he took -- I think he was a little bit like, you know, not despondent. I think he was like, "oh, really?" But nothing could be truer. I mean, and he went away and put together the Eagles.

He came and he said, "I've got this great -- you should hear us. We've got this kind of great combination of players." And I went by to hear the Eagles play in a -- and they weren't called the Eagles. They weren't called anything. But I heard Glenn and Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner, who I knew -- I'd heard him sign with Ricky Nelson and Bernie Leadon, who played with the Burritos. I mean, I knew who these guys were. But this drummer was amazing. I walked in and this guy was singing, like the Ray Charles version of You Don't Know Me and playing the drums. And I went, wow, man, this is something you never -- I mean, I don't think I've ever heard a drummer sing like this. I mean, who are the other singing drummers? I mean, the drummer of Dave Clarke? I mean, "Glad All Over"? Or Ringo, who was not really -- I don't know if you ever actually saw him play the drums and sing, but it was not that kind of singing. I thought, man, this is amazing.

But we all knew each other because there were clubs and people and parties. And people played in each other's -- people always pulled out guitars at people's houses. And you hung around. We wound up eating at two or three of the same restaurants. You see each other several times a week you'd wind up seeing each other and going to somebody's house or going to a club and meeting afterwards.

Q: And Glenn Frey helped finish writing one of your songs. A song called Take It Easy. And that appears now on the greatest-selling album of all time, the Eagles Greatest Hits. So I'm thinking it's probably safe to say that Take it Easy has helped foot the bill for you to play an endless number of benefits over the years.

A: Take it Easy is probably the most famous song I ever had anything to do with. By virtue -- by courtesy of Glenn and the Eagles' hit making power. That illustrates the power of a hit. I mean, I was writing this song and Glenn kept-- he said, "If you're not going to put it on your record, we'll put it on our record." Because they recorded it a few months after I did. I said, "Oh, okay." And I was stoked, because I loved their playing. I loved the band. I thought, "That's great. That's real exciting." But still, I was busy and I couldn't finish it. And he finally -- he offered a couple of times to finish it. I said, oh, finally, "yeah, you finish it." But what he really did was he imbued it with a kind of mythic grandeur. I mean, when we were talking about redemption earlier, you know? There's more redemption in the phrase, "There's a girl, my Lord," than anything – than anything I've written in any other song. I mean, he -- he wrote that. I mean, he added that. I mean, he said, "What have you got?" And basically, I said, "Well, I'm thinking, you know, like "Standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona," something, something, something. And he just tied that up like so appropriately.

And he is that guy. Don and Glenn are like the odd couple. Don is the really fastidious one, who really neatly hammers out all the syllables and the phrases and really goes about remembering everything that they talk about and putting it in an order that -- Glenn's the guy that jumps to the top of the table and says, you know, "How's this?" He'll come up with these phrases. And they lived together. In those days, they lived -- they shared an apartment. Every night, Glenn would like fire this thing up and there would be this party -- wild party. And like the next day, it would be like -- and, you know, Don was in there in the midst of it. But the next day, it would be like Don sweeping up and putting the house back together again. Then every night it would happen again.

I think Glenn really -- also, he had a great arrangement sense. The same sensibility that put together this band, also could imagine these really incredible harmonies. You know, when the Eagles started, you thought, "Wow, this is great. It's like that California -- it's like that Byrds thing. But in fact the Eagles were singing four-part harmony and the Byrds were almost always two part. The Byrds just had a lot of different singers. They had the voices, but the Byrds didn't sing this kind of harmony.