Written looking back at the first time I heard Jackson Browne's music... <br /> <br /> <br />That unremarkably fateful school lunchtime <br />Paddy Nagle put needle to vinyl <br />In the 6th Form Common Room. <br /> <br />For Everyman. Jackson Browne. <br /> <br />Must have been ‘75 <br /> <br />Over, around and through the cacophony <br />Of teenage angst and competing egos <br />Searching for the world and their pecking-order-place in it <br />Came a lone voice <br />To that wilderness where I wandered <br />Uncomfortable, unsure and largely alone <br />Thinking and feeling things, <br />Different things, <br />Things inexpressible and confusing that seemed <br />To set me apart and mark me <br />(tho’ I knew not with what brand or sign) <br />as: ‘Not Us’. <br /> <br />The voice was accompanied by melancholy chords <br />Which found rich resonance – <br />Not within my mind as if to pigeon-hole <br />Singer, song and style in some rank ordering of performers - <br />But within my spirit, <br />Where you sat on my floor, played, sang <br />And were gracious enough not to mock <br />My first attempted harmonies. <br /> <br />I played guitar a bit (or fancied I did) <br />And the guitar, Spanish, was a good one. <br />“We’d better get him a good ‘un, Alice; <br />It’ll be another 9-day-wonder <br />Then we’ll only have to sell it”… <br />Had been my Christmas list’s reception, <br />And that is now 30 years or more and half as many guitars ago. <br />Yet my fingers found your chord shapes, patterns and progressions <br />Almost before first hearing. <br />Somehow you became a reference point - <br />A sole voice, sometimes as lost as me, <br />But crying in that same wilderness.<br /><br />Tony Jolley<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/angst-and-egos/
