In 1976, Jackson Browne was working with producer Jon Landau on what would turn out to be his breakthrough album: The Pretender.
Jackson lived all of a few blocks from the recording studio, so it took a long while to drain his car’s gas tank. And when the fuel gauge started to verge on “empty” he figured, why bother stopping to fill it up? It’s only a few blocks.
If his car ever ran out of gas, Jackson never shared that part of the story, but he spent a good bit of time running on empty.
Such was the inspiration for one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
On August 27, 1977, Jackson performed and recorded live his new and unreleased song at his show in Columbia, Maryland, and when he released it as the title track of his live album later that year, “Running on Empty” went to #11 and spent seventeen weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. It carried the album to multi-platinum status and cemented it as Browne’s best-selling album ever.
Bruce and Jackson are almost the same age–only eleven months and change separate them. They played the same venues as young working musicians, and they both released their first albums at the age of 23.
But they grew up on opposite coasts and had very different life experiences. Bruce famously avoided serious romantic entanglements while on the ascent; Jackson, by contrast, was already a parent by 1973, married by 1975, and touring with his family in tow when Bruce was at the peak of his Born to Run hype.
By the time Jackson wrote and recorded “Running on Empty,” his wife had committed suicide, leaving Jackson a single parent. The open road must have been a lot less romantic to him at the time than to Bruce (it’s interesting to consider that Jackson wrote his “running” road song while Bruce’s was still getting popular radio play), so if the inspiration for the song was pedestrian, its meaning was surely symbolic.
“Running on Empty” operates on multiple levels: it’s about life on tour, but it’s also a song about grieving and moving forward. It has a depth belied by his band’s crowd-pleasing performance, and it was almost inevitable that eventually he and Bruce would play it together someday.
Bruce first teamed up with Jackson on “Running on Empty” at the Survival Sunday benefit show in New York’s Central Park on June 12, 1982, with Bruce mostly in a supporting role.
They played it together twice more in the eighties, but both performances are muddy recordings and similar arrangements to their Survival Sunday debut–hardly must-listens.
But in 2004, Jackson opened for Bruce and the E Street Band at a single show on the Vote for Change Tour, and Jackson brought Bruce on stage to join him on “Running on Empty,” their first performance of the song in fifteen years.
Unlike their previous performances, they traded lead vocals this time, and for the first time we get to hear Bruce truly connect with “Running on Empty” as an older, wiser, veteran of the road.
Bruce and Jackson have performed “Running on Empty” since (the last time was exactly 25 years to the day from their very first), and they’ll likely perform it again. Like “Born to Run,” it captures the lure of the road, but “Running on Empty” also captures its toll–something with which Bruce would only later become familiar.
Running on Empty
First performed: June 12, 1982 (New York City, NY)
Last performed: June 12, 2007 (Red Bank, NJ)
LOVE to see Bruce in these collaborations. Both videos are fun and what a great song! Bruce is into Jackson and his band. (Good to see Jackson delegate a guitar solo to Bruce in the second and both end with the classic Springsteen leap!)
“Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive,
Tryin’ not to confuse it with what you do to survive,
(In) ’69 I was 21, I called the road my own,
I don’t know when that road turned into the one
I’m RUNNIN’ on.” (Wow.)
Gotta believe these lyrics really meant something to Bruce then (and now). And later, among others, in ’04, “Running into the sun, but I’m running behind”. Just beautiful.
Thanks for the MATR.
Jackson Browne has always been a favorite of mine. Living on the West Coast in Portland, he is the artist I’ve seen the most in person, starting in the 70s when he played with Warren Zevon. (Although, my San Diego cousins saw him earlier in California – as usual…) I’ve seen him in large venues, small venues and everything in between, including at a fund raiser for my daughter’s high school in the 90s. I always love his collaborations with Bruce, this song being no exception. They always seem like kindred spirits. Thanks for sharing this – it made me smile.