Jackson Browne playing in Germany in 1976 and Wayne Perkins playing in Birmingham around the same time in 1977 or ’78: NAJ

Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –

ARGO, Ala. – Well, I’ve been out walking some, since I don’t do that much talking or partying anymore, these days.

Out back there’s an old native trail through the woods they say was the original road from Trussville to Springville. I don’t know about that, but these days it’s covered with leaves and sticks and no one remembers it’s there, like the people who made the trail so long ago, long gone these days.

Inside my old friend Wayne Perkins nods off to sleep thinking of those days. Sometimes as a light twinkles from the eyes as memory serves as catharsis. Other times as melancholia drips from the eye like tears on a rain drop.

Back inside the log cabin house we turn to YouTube to listen to different versions of Jackson Brown’s “These Days” song, which is going through another evolution as new artists find it and use it on TikTok videos, at least according to one writer for the New York Times, who wrote about the Jackson Browne song last year.

Of course we all remember the Greg Allman version from the “Laid Back” album released in 1973.

A few years ago Browne and Allman got to play the song together on stage, before Greg died in 2017.

It is now on my list of theme songs.

“Please don’t confront me with my failures,” they sing. “I am aware of them.”

So one useful purpose for this music is to open up memory for stories to flow about those days.

As Wayne and I are thinking about this together working on a timeline and book proposal, he thinks back to the early 1970s when he first traveled to Europe with the Smith Perkins Smith band, which had a record deal with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, and Jackson Browne was opening some of their shows as a solo artist. He had played with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, but signed with David Geffen’s Asylum Records in 1971 and had a hit with “Doctor My Eyes.”

So as Browne and Perkins become friends on the road, apparently Browne had a bit of stage fright or shyness or anxiety going out in front of the crowd alone with no band backing him at the beginning of his solo career. So Jackson asked Wayne to join him on stage, Perkins recalls. Apparently that gave Browne the confidence he needed and he went on to greatness and fame from there.

The Smith Perkins Smith band never released their second album, in part because Wayne ended up in the studio with Bob Marley and then the Rolling Stones.

The rest, they say, is history, from those days to these days.

CHECK OUT this photo montage of Joel Bernstein photographs set to an overture from the album “Running On Empty,” created by Andrew Thomas for the 2004 “Running On Empty” DVD-A release.

Jackson Browne really is one of the best “good guys” in American rock and folk music up there with James Taylor.

We are working on getting quotes from him for the story of Wayne Perkins.

Wish us luck.

Original Lyrics

Well, I’ve been out walking
I don’t do that much talking these days
These days

These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do for you
And all the times I had the chance to

And I had a lover
But it’s so hard to risk another, these days
These days

Now, if I seem to be afraid
To live the life that I have made in song
Well, it’s just that I’ve been losin’ for so long

Well, I’ll keep on movin’, movin’ on
Things are bound to be improving these days
One of these days

These days I’ll sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend
Don’t confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them

***

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