Jackson Browne’s off-grid ranch

Browne: saintly

In his new eco-TV series Ed Begley has just outed singer songwriter Jackson Browne as a long-time off-gridder. Browne, who used to go out with Daryl Hannah, is living on an off-grid ranch in deep Southern California.

“He’s got this big wind turbine, and his ranch is completely off the [power] grid,” Begley said. “He’s done all of it himself.” We’re impressed. But Browne is so cool and unassuming that no further details seem to exist

Browne founded Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) along with Bonnie Raitt back in the 1970s. They put on the very first Live Aid in 1979, though they did not call it that. The all-star series of concerts organized by Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, John Hall and Jackson in 1979 to benefit MUSE. In addition to serving on the MUSE Foundation Board, Jackson helped edit and compile the 1980 3-LP live album from those shows. No Nukes/The MUSE Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future featured a line-up including Bruce Springsteen, The Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Ry Cooder, Chaka Khan, Peter Tosh, and Tom Petty, among many others. The album, which includes Jackson’s “Before The Deluge,” climbed to #23 on Billboard’s pop chart, a considerable feat for a triple-disc collection.

The conventional wisdom is that Browne derailed his career by introducing more political commentary into his songs in the 1980s, but in an interview at his Santa Monica studio, Browne, 55, had a different explanation for his commercial drop-off.

And as a lifelong activist, he has no regrets: “I think those songs that I wrote about specific political things have not only found a place in people’s lives, but they’re also an important part of my life. So I don’t try to second-guess them.”

Jackson grew up in that fertile folk music revival of the ’60s, learning songs by Mississippi John Hurt and Dave Van Ronk and Doc Watson and Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. There was that interplay between learning something and making something up that was a natural environment to begin writing songs. “So I started writing songs when I was about 15. Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison were big influences too. I also read a lot … Steinbeck, Kerouac. Irving Stone. What invariably happened was I would sit down and read, like, two pages of a James Baldwin novel and then go off and write a song, because it was such a potent catalyst. ”

“I grew up in a time when everybody felt like they were going through something together. I don’t know if kids now feel that way or not. I felt a connection with people. Maybe because I hitchhiked everywhere and I was a hippie. I met people hitchhiking that I would spend two days with — go home with and stay in their houses.

“I didn’t quite know how to write songs on social themes until later, but I grew up singing civil rights songs, songs they would sing at demonstrations and people’s houses. It was what I was reading about; it was what I was thinking about all the time. I think I read three books about the Vietnam War back-to-back one summer when I was touring, and then I read “Salvador” by Joan Didion, and I went, “Oh, my God, it’s 20 years later and the same kind of thing is happening. Policy is being made in secret.” Thought, “This can’t be happening again.” So when I began writing “Soldier of Plenty” and “Lives in the Balance,” I didn’t intend to write political songs. When you write and when you dream and when you imagine, the things are coming through you, they’re coming from what you’re dealing with, and they manifest themselves through playing.

“It’s an odd thing, but life is long, and this music is something you have with you your whole life. It’s a magical thing, because it winds and curves and twists and turns and metamorphoses in so many ways.”