Jackson's Day in Court

By JAY COCKS

In which Mr. Browne, the rocker, testifies about lawyers in love

Hot torts? Flying briefs? What can the other trappings be? Well, "Ooh-sha-la-la." And "Ah-a-ah-a-a-ha." And, inextremis, after all other ancient echoes of Top 40 radio have been exhausted, there is always that lonely, sibilant warbling that sounds like a dance-band leader whistling inside a diving bell.

Take it straight from Jackson Browne, 34, sardonic explorer of all byways of the heart: these sounds are the mating calls of lawyers in love. The song title may sound like a goof, but Lawyers in Love is, in fact, a particularly neat juggling act from rock's foremost romantic prestidigitator. Part departure and part consolidation, it is the sturdy cornerstone of one of the year's strongest albums.

Browne is among the premier singer-songwriters of his generation. But that was the '70s, and the world is a few months shy of the most dreaded year of the '80s. Browne is ready for it. Lawyers in Love is full of dark Orwellian visions, leavened by some bright comic asides and lightened by some of Browne's most danceable music. The author concedes that the title track is "pretty sarcastic and maybe a little haughty," but its weirdly resonant images ("I hear the U.S.S.R. will be open soon/ As vacationland for lawyers in love") give it a power that lasts longer than any punch line. The song is full of laughs, but it is not a joke, just as the album, full of ominous broodings about personal loss and international nightmare, dances clear of being oppressive with its melodic lightness and buoyancy.

The deftness of the album, and its title tune, comes clear only after repeated listenings. (Fortunately, these are not hard to come by. The single is getting heavy air play and is No. 13 on the charts; the album is nestling comfortably at No. 8.) Lawyers in love may simply be liars who passed the bar exam, but Browne has no current musical peer at describing how mendacity of the heart can lead both to corrosion of the soul and corruption of the body politic.

His ruthless romanticism--the kind that can curdle into narcissism if the sun shines too long on it--gives his records some of the trappings of a visionary quest. Indeed, Rock Critic Paul Nelson has described Browne as a sort of rock-'n'-roll Sir Gawain. Browne never wears much armor--vulnerability is a great part of his appeal, both as a writer and performer--but in the past he would sometimes get knocked right off his high white horse by the density of his subject matter.

On Lawyers in Love, the lyrics are much more relaxed, the titles of the songs (Tender Is the Night, Knock on Any Door) either evoke bleary late shows on all-night movie channels or, as in Downtown, deliberately call up echoes of old songs for purposes of dramatic contrast.

The album's two most intense tracks, Cut It Away and Say It Isn 't True, are almost as simple as plain chant. Cut It Away ("Somebody cut away this desperate heart/ Cut it away before it tears my whole life apart") is a racked-up love song about the dissolution of Browne's marriage to onetime Model Lynne Sweeney. Say It Isn't True is a stone-simple antiwar song, throbbing with a synthesizer line that pulses away insistently like the red warning light flashing on a war-room console. Browne makes no apologies for the directness. "Say It Isn't True is sincere to the point of being embarrassing," he says. "But not really. It's absolutely a prayer. It's me not caring if anybody thinks I'm corny."

Like most romantics, Browne has had to deal with charges of corniness and self-indulgence before. So have the best of his peers (Warren Zevon, Don Henley, Jack Tempchin). And like them too, Browne has been able to confound categorization by constantly challenging it. He grew up in Los Angeles and then a little farther south in Orange County, second child of teachers. His father was also something of a jokester (the name Jackson was partly inspired by a gag in a Crosby-Hope-Lamour Road excursion) and a reasonably hot Dixieland jazz player. Orange County, most renowned as the seat of Disneyland and a stronghold of the John Birch Society, got Browne going--away. He was playing local hoote-nannies by his late teens. Before he was 20, he was off to New York accompanying Nico, Andy Warhol's rock wraith. By his mid-20s he had one hit single, three solid albums and a reputation as the kingpin of the Los Angeles folk-rock scene.

Brown also had a fair portion of sorrow at the center of all this success. In 1976 his first wife, Phyllis, committed suicide, 21 1/2 years after the birth of their son Ethan. He drew from this experience a formidable album, The Pretender, in which he fused personal tragedy with a more general portrait of a society shut off against itself: "Oh God this is some shape I'm in/ When the only thing that makes me cry/ Is the kindness in my baby's eye."

Browne, indeed, writes wonderfully about fatherhood, even if the toll has been heavy. Ethan, now 9, lives with his father, while Ryan, 1 1/2, is with his mother. "I have hope of finally getting it right, of finally learning how to integrate life as a parent and my life as an artist," says Browne, before admitting, "So far I've never really got them to go together."

What he has got together is his band. Playing without his wizardly accompanist and musical inspiration, David Lindley, who split off on his own 2 1/2 years ago, Browne has cooked up a rock-solid band, so cohesive that it has become part of his creative process. "I started to take unfinished songs to the band and respond as a writer to their suggestions, Browne says. "Your instrument is actually the medium with which you're going to perform the songs. The band is now my instrument."

The five musicians have helped him cut away a lot. Browne's music pulse: with a feeling of renewal and new possibilities. That desperate heart he sings about is his own lookout, however. It wil likely remain intact, but in tatters, as long as he is writing some of the best songs west of the Rockies. --By Jay Cocks Reported by Denise Worrell/Atlanta

With reporting by Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.