Jackson Browne is on a short, six-week solo acoustic tour and will be performing Sunday at the Bill Heard Theatre at the RiverCenter for the Performing Arts.
The tour, which started Nov. 1, “is about six weeks if you don’t count going home for Thanksgiving,” Browne said from Baltimore Monday afternoon.
“It’s relatively short ... I mean, it’s about right, actually, for me in my career because everybody has a family. It’s a little hard to stay out longer than that.”
Browne was born in Germany, but moved back to California with his family when he was a toddler.
“My father was in the military before he began his family,” Browne said. “We never lived on a base or anything. My father worked for the Stars and Stripes newspaper after he was in the Army. He worked for the Stars and Stripes in Japan and in Europe.”
While his siblings went to Japan, Browne didn’t because “I was concerned I would miss something in popular culture.”
Growing up, he remembers music in the house. Both parents played piano, and so did his brother and sister. He played trumpet as a kid, switching to guitar when he was about 13.
“My whole family was musical,” Browne said. “My dad was a real music lover. He came home every day and listened to music. He had friends over and played in jam sessions. We grew up around music. But his music was jazz, especially Dixieland jazz. He liked roots music, too. When I started listening to folk music and playing guitar and stuff, he would always talk about guys he knew in the Army. ‘I knew a guy who played just like that. Mississippi would sit on the edge of the bed,’ he’d say. That’s why I played folk.”
Browne said he wanted his father to appreciate what he was playing.
“But honestly, I don’t think what I was doing was sophisticated enough for his taste,” Browne said. “That’s all right ... I grew up with a sense that... generations were hermetically sealed from each other.”
Besides playing live music, his family had a lot of records, including jazz guitar wizard Django Reinhardt, singers Nancy Wilson and Harry Belafonte and plenty of blues artists.
“My dad took me to see Lightning Hopkins when I was about 12 or 13,” Browne said. “It was really an eye-opener for me. And I bought my first record on that trip. It was a Lead Belly record.”
Even though he kept thinking his music wasn’t sophisticated enough for his father, he later changed his mind.
“Actually, I think he did,” Browne said. “He would always comment on my drummer. He loved my drummer. That’s kind of a later observation of mine. He gave me music lessons that were very far-reaching and gave value to me.”
Browne was about 14 when he started writing songs. And like most young songwriters, he wrote about what he knew — songs about girls.
A little later, he wrote a song called “Fourth and Main.”
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