Doctor My Eyes

                                               

 

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand

I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can

Now that I am able to withdraw funds from my IRA without penalty, I find that I am circling back to some of the music of my youth. Not surprising, really.  There is a well-chronicled connection between music and memory. As the road ahead grows shorter and the miles pile up behind me, music is a great bridge to those traveled miles. The songs that resonate with me now perhaps weren’t favorites of mine at the time of their release, but they were there, playing along in the background. 

 

I’m currently fixated on Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes.”  Included on his self-titled 1972 debut album, the song reached number 8 on the Billboard charts and established the songwriter as an emerging talent.  He wrote the song in 1969. However, he didn't often play the finished piece because “the clubs I played in never had a piano, and I just put the song aside.” When he decided to include it on his first album, his friend David Crosby agreed to sing background harmony. Eventually Graham Nash signed on as well. “That was the album’s great break—having Crosby and Nash singing with me at a time when I was a totally unknown songwriter. It was quite the calling card at radio stations,” recalled Browne. 

I was nine years old in the summer of 1972.  Neither the song, the album, or the artist made any impression on me.  It isn't linked to any memorable event in my life. I don’t know what I may have been listening to that summer, but it certainly wasn’t the “California sound” that Browne—and later the Eagles—would perfect.  Jackson Five maybe, but not Jackson Browne. In fact, for decades I made clear my distaste for the Eagles and opined that “Hotel California” was the worst song ever. 

But things change, right? Recently, Spotify snuck “Doctor My Eyes” into my daily playlist.  I had paid no attention to this song for fifty years.  But on this day, something about it—the beat, the melody, his voice, my growing fondness for the music of this era—got me. I love discovering a deep track by an artist that I admire, but this was different.  This was me coming around on a song I knew and didn't particularly like by an artist that I knew and didn't particularly like. Has this ever happened to you? I know a guy who hated the Beatles (huh?) forever, and then one day had an epiphany. This was my epiphanic moment, I guess. 

 

I know the song has been a hit for a half century, but I just never was a Jackson Browne guy. My view started to change a bit after watching Echo in the Canyon, the excellent 2018 documentary that examined "the popular music that came out of L.A.'s Laurel Canyon neighborhood in the mid-1960s as folk went electric and the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas and the Papas cemented the California Sound."  Maybe I just needed the proper amount of life experience to appreciate the song's philosophical musings.  I now find myself identifying with the song’s protagonist, a man wearied and disillusioned by all that he has seen and experienced. This is a song whose message I couldn’t appreciate at ten but certainly can at sixty.

I have wandered through this world
And as each moment has unfurled
I've been waiting to awaken from these dreams

People go just where they will
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
That it's later than it seems

 

Life is what happens when you are on your way to do something else. Its lessons are not meted out evenly. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad people? Why does life seemingly reach out at random to spin people off course and into the abyss? And why do so some people in need of reproachment never get it? These are the ruminations of Browne’s character as he wonders if his lifelong stoicism has hollowed him out. 

 

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” the Bible tells us.  (I had to look that quote up.  I am no Bible scholar, believe me.)  It is faith that allows us to reconcile life’s inexplicable tragedies with the idea of a merciful creator. For eons, faith—the belief that there is an overarching purpose for everything—has been the catch-all for that which we cannot otherwise accept. Life seems to require a lot of faith these days, and as I hear of the sicknesses, unexpected passings, business reversals, family tragedies and everything else that just knocks the wind out of a person, that faith is challenged daily. 

 

In a happy accident of timing, Browne, original bassist Leland Sklar, drummer Russ Kunkel (who actually played bongos on the recording rather than drums) reunited recently and, with contributions from musicians from around the world, re-recorded the song for Playing For Change, an organization whose mission is to “inspire and connect the world through music.”  It was posted to YouTube four days ago and has three-quarters of a million views already. Read the video's comments. Great music really is a gift to the world. 

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if it's too late for me

Doctor, my eyes
They cannot see the sky
Is this the prize
For having learned how not to cry?

Browne’s character wonders at the end if it is too late for him.  The question gives some hope to an otherwise bleak existential question. Can he retain his humanity despite all that he has seen and experienced? That’s a question of faith, isn’t it? 

 

P.S. I changed my mind on the Eagles a few years ago.