“My first album came out 50 years ago,” Jackson Browne told the sold out Santa Barbara Bowl crowd on September 7. Hearing him play two of the top singles — “Doctor, My Eyes" and "Rock Me on the Water” — from that 1972 album, Saturate Before Using, was a sentimental journey for most of us in the crowd.
I wasn’t quite old enough to go to Jackson Browne’s first Bowl show in 1975, but I clearly remember seeing him in 1983, 1992 (performing with Christopher Cross and Michael MacDonald at an Earth Day benefit show), 1996 (performing with Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley at Gail Marshall for Supervisor benefit), with Tom Petty in 2002, and on and on and on. I’m a longtime fan for sure.
A social justice warrior with the heart and the soul of a poet, I’m convinced that one of the reasons for Browne’s enduring popularity is how easy his songs are to sing along with him. One of my favorite sing-along songs is “That Girl Could Sing,” his 1980 hit that he introduced by saying it was about a beautiful girl he’d see driving around in a Jeep in L.A. “That Dude Can Sing” too, just as beautifully, and with just as much heart as ever.