Written looking back at the first time I heard Jackson Browne's music...


That unremarkably fateful school lunchtime
Paddy Nagle put needle to vinyl
In the 6th Form Common Room.

For Everyman. Jackson Browne.

Must have been ‘75

Over, around and through the cacophony
Of teenage angst and competing egos
Searching for the world and their pecking-order-place in it
Came a lone voice
To that wilderness where I wandered
Uncomfortable, unsure and largely alone
Thinking and feeling things,
Different things,
Things inexpressible and confusing that seemed
To set me apart and mark me
(tho’ I knew not with what brand or sign)
as: ‘Not Us’.

The voice was accompanied by melancholy chords
Which found rich resonance –
Not within my mind as if to pigeon-hole
Singer, song and style in some rank ordering of performers -
But within my spirit,
Where you sat on my floor, played, sang
And were gracious enough not to mock
My first attempted harmonies.

I played guitar a bit (or fancied I did)
And the guitar, Spanish, was a good one.
“We’d better get him a good ‘un, Alice;
It’ll be another 9-day-wonder
Then we’ll only have to sell it”…
Had been my Christmas list’s reception,
And that is now 30 years or more and half as many guitars ago.
Yet my fingers found your chord shapes, patterns and progressions
Almost before first hearing.
Somehow you became a reference point -
A sole voice, sometimes as lost as me,
But crying in that same wilderness.

Tony Jolley

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/angst-and-egos/