#51/1218
February 18 1986
Jackson Browne
Lives in the Balance
Genre: Rock
4.5 out of 5 (I know. Crazy, right?)
Highlights:
For America
In the Shape of a Heart
Lawless Avenue
Lives in the Balance
In the summer of 1986 I was living in an apartment on 10th and Hudson along with my college roommate and his girlfriend (also a college peer).
Well, it was an apartment but I didn’t get to use most of it. There were 2 rooms, a living space, buffered by diffused french doors and a kitchen/dining space with a bathtub/shower in it. In other words, if you wanted to shower, you had to do it in the kitchen. The toilet was in a little closet with a sink.
On the other side of the apartment, to the left of the front door was a closet. About 6 feet deep and 3 get wide.
I put a mattress on the floor in there, along with a small tv I found on the street on the lower west side that could only be turned on by sticking a pen in and pulling out the mechanism that operated the set.
It was a long summer.
We lived above a temporary Statue of Liberty store as it was the 100th anniversary of the statue and it was being refurbished. If you went to the roof of the building (we lived on the 5th floor and it was a walk up) you could see the Statue in the distance.
We spent more time up the street at the White Horse Tavern, though.
I am reminded of this time, when a rat peeked its head out of the hole in the sole of my Beetle Boot as it rested next to my pillow, because the cover of this Jackson Browne record is Liberty’s head obfuscated by, what looks like, scaffolding. Which is ominous because it also doubles for a ramshackle cage built around freedom, which is how so many of us felt in 86.
I’ll say this for aging rock stars in 1986, they were unafraid of voicing their anger and enmity to the wrongs they perceived being done to the country by Reagan.
Browne gets overtly political and I’m sort of here for it. “Lives in the Balance” is as relevant to today’s issues in Syria with Turkey as it was when it was written.
“In the Shape of a Heart” is devastating. And I wonder if Ani Difranco had heard it before she wrote “Out of Range”. Specifically this lyric: “There was a hole left in the wall
From some ancient fight
About the size of a fist
Or something thrown that had missed”
Brutal.
I like this record as much as a middling Rick Springfield joint. Maybe a little more, in fact.
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