Vinyl Release

Lana knows what I'm on about. In the song 'Brooklyn Baby' from her brilliant 2014 LP Ultraviolence, Ms Del Rey complains, 'They think I don't understand the freedom land of the '70s'. She was born, you see, in 1985 and Lana - known to her mum and dad as Elizabeth Grant - is deemed by those who should know better to be too young to appreciate the '70s aesthetic.

Go West

you only need to listen to any of Lana's records to suss she gets it. This one lyric makes abundantly clear she's an old soul in a young body.

'The freedom land' is spot on. It was a 'land' when I was growing up, a mythical land where youth reigned supreme over tradition and elder resistance, where dreams came true and the sun shone all day and the moon was always full. A terrain of rich possibilities and everything and everyone basked in a golden glow. This was the West Coast idea, the California sold to us by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Mamas & Papas, Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles. The California state of mind.

It's dead and gone now but, boy, was it appealing and nowhere did this promised land sound more promising than in 'Take It Easy', a song written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey and made a massive hit by The Eagles. It's also the opening track on Browne's 'For Everyman' and the scenario's perfect. The singer's running down the road trying to loosen his load with not one, not two, not three, but seven - count 'em - women on his mind. In 1963 Jan & Dean boasted there were two girls for every boy in the beach valhalla of 'Surf City'. A decade later, that's tripled and more!

This Is A Man'S World

Browne's song continues to recall a girl in a flatbed Ford, 'slowin' down to take a look at me'. Here, then, the traditional popular song has been turned on its head. Now, instead of the babes, it's the blokes who are the sex objects, a fantasy Browne perpetuated in a lot of his songs. The Cali dream was entirely male-focused. To his shame, Neil Young sang, 'A man needs a maid…. just someone to keep my house clean, fix my meals and go away'.

Another track off the album, 'I Thought I Was A Child', finds our protagonist trapped in a relationship by a girlfriend who gets pregnant: 'I told her I had always lived alone/ And I probably always would/ And all I wanted was my freedom/ And she told me that she understood/ But I let her do some of my laundry/ And she slipped a few meals in between/ And the next thing I remember, she was all moved in/ And I was buying her a washing machine...'.

Although it may seem kind of pathetic that the heroes of Browne's songs are always self-obsessed victims, wounded in love and penning boo-hoo sob story confessionals, this was really how the scene was set up. The guys all called their partners 'old ladies' or 'mamas' and that's what they wanted, mummies to look after them, not equals to share a life with.

So, to recap. One: the men are handsome gods. Two: the men are big babies. And three, almost all the songsters extolling the attractions of the California dream were fakers who were making it up, outsiders to a man, determined to create and perpetuate their ideological paradise. Neil Young was Canadian, Don Henley came from Texas, as did Stephen Stills. Graham Nash was an import from Manchester, Glenn Frey hitched in from Michigan and Jackson Browne was born in Germany.

The thing is, though, they were all so good at establishing this fabrication that to an impressionable lad in his early teens growing up in going-nowhere Wiltshire, these guys were everything and had everything any bloke could ever want.

Browne's debut LP, self-titled but also called Saturate Before Using, was full of marvellously helpless broken-hearted selfpity and tender bromance, and the followup, For Everyman, expanded on these themes considerably, with the moneyed communal network coming together to support and lend a hand.

Rockaday Johnnie?

We used to scour album sleeves in 1973 to marvel at who was helping out who and For Everyman did indeed boast a veritable who's who of studio talent; fellows who

could supply the required smooth laid-back groove without breaking sweat. Those laying it down at the Sunset Sound and Wally Heider's studios included various Eagles; Bill Payne from Little Feat; Russ Kunkel and Leland Sklar, the rhythm duo favoured by singer-songwriter royalty James Taylor and Carole King; Spooner Oldham, one of the famed Muscle Shoals Swampers; Bonnie Raitt; Joni Mitchell; David Crosby; and even Elton John under the pseudonym Rockaday Johnnie. You get the picture. The crème de la crème.

It's a cracking album too. If Crosby's 1971 set If Only I Could Remember My Name was the pinnacle of collaborative eccentric Californian indulgence, For Everyman was more tasteful, more sophisticated. The sort of almost soporific disc championed week in and week out by Whispering Bob Harris on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Anyone remember Andy Pratt?

Thanks For The Memories

As for the other songs on the album, the title track was allegedly a response to CS&N's 'Wooden Ships', which is a sci-fi tale about a handful of cosmic sailors, possibly survivors of a nuclear war, heading off to pastures new. Browne's song asks, 'What about the rest of us?', wrapped in vaguely religious imagery. 'These Days' was written when he was just 16 and having a dangerous fling with Nico of Velvet Underground fame. It's another contemplative composition, recorded by Nico with grand autumnal melancholy for her 1967 LP Chelsea Girl and again by Gregg Allman on his 1973 solo LP, Laid Back. 'Redneck Friend', meanwhile, is allegedly a song about his, erm, member.

Anyway, like I said, we now live in different times and our musical mopers tend to be more bedroom-based, like Rex Orange County, or pseudo psychotic like Billie Eilish. There ain't no freedom land to escape to in 2024, real or imagined. But we can still remember what it felt like.

Re-Release Verdict

First released in 1973 by Asylum Records, For Everyman has been reissued on a 180g '50th anniversary' vinyl LP on Inside Recordings, the Los Angeles-based independent label set up by Jackson Browne in 1999.

The songwriter has overseen the remastering of its ten tracks from the original analogue tapes, and the LP has been 'packaged to resemble the original vinyl release', including the lyric sheet insert. A remastered CD version is also available. HFN

Sound Quality: 90% 0