Song 286: For this week’s playlist track, you can listen to Doctor My Eyes by Jackson Browne, who also wrote the song. I had noticed Jackson Browne’s name on the credits of a handful of excellent cuts in the 2 years before this single appeared. Tom Rush had a pair of very good JB songs on an LP he released in the spring of 1970, which was a record I had spinning on my own turntable a lot back then. The Byrds also had a JB track on one of their albums, as did Brewer and Shipley, so I already had a lot of respect for Jackson’s songwriting long before word came that he would soon have his own LP available. During the spring of 1972, I happened to do a lot of hitching, shuffling between Chicago, Atlanta, and New York a few times, and somewhere along the way, I heard this cut for the first time while in a grocery store or drug store. I knew Jackson had a single out, and when this track started playing, I felt certain that it had to be the one. From that very first hearing, I really liked the catchy piano riff that kicks off the song, as well as the track’s uptempo feel, which suitably supports the thoughtful and reflective words. So often in that era, in the early years of crafting my own lyrical stories, I would hear a new record and imagine some sort of accompanying deeply-poetic lyric, only to be disappointed, when I learned the actual lines, by mundane cliches and cheap rhymes. In stark contrast, Jackson’s single, and indeed, his entire first album, totally lived up to my expectations, both in words and music. Doctor My Eyes always sounded very good to my ears, and quite illuminating to my imagination as well.
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