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Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
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Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
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Various Artists
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Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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Jackson Browne
At the time of its release in 1977, “Running On Empty” was a fairly unique product. It was a ‘live’ album that contained all-new material. Many of the songs were not recorded before a live audience, but during soundcheck, or on the tour bus or in a hotel room. It was a theme album about life on the road, with the material serving as a sort of living documentary of the topic at hand. Writing about ‘the road’ is an incredibly mundane topic, but the presentation here was fairly original, and the material seemed to transcend the hoary ‘life-on-the-road’ platitudes that are all too common in the rock and roll genre. Considering the heavy existential nature of Browne’s previous albums, these songs were comparably light and breezy, which caused Browne’s fan base to expand exponentially. The album captures Browne at his creative and commercial peak and for years, “Running on Empty” was a staple of album rock radio. The onset of punk music, though, soon rendered the album obsolete, and it appeared as though it would linger solely as an anachronistic example of what standard-issue rock and roll sounded like before its energetic post-punk rebirth.
Despite its apparent obsolescence, the album’s popularity lingered, particularly with baby boomers who were alienated by the onset of punk rock. For them, “Running On Empty” represented the end of a classic era, which might explain why the album is currently being re-issued as a 2-disk package, with a pair of extra tracks and a few photo montages documenting the tour when these recordings took place. Nearly thirty years on, “Running on Empty” sounds a bit lackluster, but retains its unique charm. The keyboard sounds are cheesy, and the energy level never rises beyond the lukewarm rock of the album’s title cut, but a sense of camaraderie and kinship pervades every track on this disk. The 'bonus’ tracks on this re-issue offer very little in the way of anything new – one is a second take of Rev. Gary Davis’ “Cocaine” that is even more mellow than the issued take, and the other is an offhand instrumental – and the main appeal of the bonus material resides in the excellent photo montages featuring the work of Joel Bernstein. “Rosie” still makes me smile, though, and “Shaky Town” now makes me curious about the whereabouts of songwriter Danny Kortchmar. On the other hand, after hearing “The Load Out/Stay” three billion times on classic radio, I’ve had enough.
“Running on Empty” dates from an era when the Doobie Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd represented the mainstream. I’m not too sure I want to back there, but I must admit that playing this album again did trigger a bit of nostalgia, and I’m happy to report that “Running on Empty” holds up better than I suspected it would.
Grade: 
 
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