In honor of the late David Lindley, today’s classic song of the day is “The Load-Out/Stay” from Jackson Browne’s live album, Running on Empty. Released at the very end of 1977, Running on Empty went on to peak at #3 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart the following year and be classified as 7X Platinum, based on sales of more than 7 million units. “Stay” was released as the A-side of a single, with “The Load-Out” on the B-side, and reached #20 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Running On Empty was an interesting album, recorded completely on the road. Most live albums are concert albums full of lots of an artists’ greatest hits, but Running On Empty contained all new (or new cover) songs, some recorded in concert but others recorded backstage, on the band’s tour bus, and in hotel rooms. The album is a loose concept album about the weariness of a musician’s life on the road, and “The Load-Out” captures this explicitly. It’s all about waiting around for the show to start and then despairing because it ends much too soon.
It’s a common saying among musicians that you don’t pay us to play, we’d do that for free; you pay us to set up and tear down, to wait around, to do everything that’s required to get to play. As Mr. Browne sings, “The only time that seems too short is the time that we get to play.”
Some nights the music makes it all worthwhile. Other nights are less special, more like work. Carrying those amps and drums from here to there, packing and unpacking, tuning and testing the sound system, it all seems like endless drudgery, but at least it’s constant. It’s the music itself that varies. Some nights the band clicks, everything feels right, and magic happens. Other nights it doesn’t all come together and you leave the stage tired and frustrated. That’s a musician’s life. You live for those good nights and put up with all the other hassles. A good band and a good audience make all the difference.
The band on Jackson Browne’s 1977 tour was a great one. The rhythm section was The Section—Danny Kortchmar on guitar, Leland Sklar on bass, and the mighty Russ Kunkel on drums. The legendary Rosemary Butler sang backup. And David Lindley was there, playing his lap steel guitar and singing the falsetto part on Browne’s cover of the classic Maurice Williams and the Zodiac’s song, “Stay.”
David Lindley played with so many great musicians in the California rock scene it’s almost impossible to keep count. He contributed to albums by everybody from Warren Zevon and Linda Ronstadt to Ry Cooder and Bonnie Raitt, as well as playing with his own band, El Rayo-X. He was a wizard on just about any instrument with strings; he played violin, acoustic and electric guitar, upright and electric bass, banjo, mandolin, dobro, violin, bouzouki, zither, and, of course, the lap steel guitar. David Lindley added something special to every song he played on and every artist he played with; it’s no surprise that Jackson Browne tapped him for this tour and this album.
David Lindley had a long and productive career, one that most musicians could only envy. He passed away on March 3, 2023, of complications from kidney damage resulting from contracting Long COVID in 2020. He was 78 years old.
As an added bonus, here’s a video of Jackson Browne and a slightly different band (not The Section, but rather Rob Glaub on bass and Jim Gordon on drums) playing a very faithful rendition of “The Load-Out/Stay” live at Shepherd’s Bush Theatre in London, captured by the BBC in 1978. You get to see David Lindley doing his thing live, and it is, as it always was, something special.
