While in high school Joe DiFazio began taking classical music lessons. Graduating high school he applied to and was accepted to Ohio's Baldwin-Wallace College's music program. College opened up the door to the world of rock and roll and just two semesters short of graduating, DiFazio quit school in order to play keyboards for a Canadian Beatles cover band.
Interested in finding a way to meld rock with his earlier affection for classical music, in 1974 DiFazio decided to strike out on his own. Recruiting percussionist Royce Gibson, the pair began writing and recording material. Unable to interest a major label in their efforts, the pair eventually released the DiFazio and Perry Johnson produced "The Atlantis Philharmonic" on their own Dharma label.
Taken as a package, it makes for a fairly impressive debut. Even more so when you consider it was recorded independently and with minimal financial resources. Following the album's release DiFazio and Gibson toured the Midwest extensively, though plans to record a pair of follow-on albums never saw fruition.
By the early-'80s DiFazio had largely dropped out of music. Increasingly interested in computer technology and musical applications he went back to college, obtaining bachelor and masters degrees in computer technology from Indiana State University, though he also found time to complete his music degree. DiFazio is currently a professor of new media and computer technology at Indiana State University.
Late for the Sky, Jackson Browne's third Asylum album, is his most mature, conceptually unified work to date. Its overriding theme: the exploration of romantic possibility in the shadow of the apocalypse. No contemporary male singer/songwriter has dealt so honestly and deeply with the vulnerability of romantic idealism and the pain of adjustment from youthful narcissism to adult survival. Late for the Sky is the autobiography of his young manhood.
The album's eight loosely constructed narratives rely for much of their impact upon stunning sections of aphoristic verse, whose central images, the antinomies of water and sand, reality and dreams, sky and road, inextricably connect them. Browne's melodic style, though limited, serves his ideas brilliantly. He generally avoids the plaintive harmonies of southern California rock ballads for a starker, more eloquent musical diction derived from Protestant hymns. Likewise his open-ended poetry achieves power from the nearly religious intensity that accumulates around the central motifs; its fervor is underscored by the sparest and hardest production to be found on any Browne album yet (Late for the Sky was produced by Browne with Al Schmitt), as well as by his impassioned, oracular singing style.
On side one, Browne tells bluntly about his personal conflict between fantasy and reality in erotic relationships, struggling with his quest for idyllic bliss. The title cut explores an affair at its nadir ("Looking hard into your eyes/There was nobody I'd ever known"), concluding with an image of the sky, the album's symbol for escape, salvation and death. "Fountain Of Sorrow" develops parallel themes of sex and nothingness, fantasy and realism, as Browne, looking at the photograph of a former lover, recalls: "When you see through love's illusion, their lies the danger/And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool/So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger." In the chorus, highly romanticized sexuality becomes a "fountain of sorrow, fountain of light." Later in the album the water images are developed into a larger metaphor for death and rebirth.
"Farther On" and "The Late Show" complete the first part of the song cycle. Locating the sources of Browne's exacerbated romaticism "in books and films and song," "a world of illulsion and fantasy," "Farther On" defines Browne's quest as a "citadel" in "a vision of paradise." Its desolate conclusion finds Browne alone and older, "with my maps and my faith in the distance, moving farther on." By "The Late Show," Browne is so absorbed in despair that if he "stumbled on someone real" he'd "never know." Midway in the song, however, he meets a lover and in an impulsive gesture they drive away from the past in the "early model Chevrolet" pictured on the album cover.
The second side of the album describes the precariousness of the journey, as Browne's sense of personal tragedy metamorphoses into a larger social apprehension. "The Road and the Sky," a jaunty rock song, reintroduces the water motif. "For A Dancer," which follows, is one of the album's two masterpieces, a meditation on death that harks back to "Song For Adam" on Browne's first album. But "For A Dancer" is not a lament; it calls for joyful procreation to combat metaphysical terror. Browne's graceful lyric, as fine as any he's written, finds its counterpart in music, an ethereal tango in which David Lindley's fiddle dances against Browne's vocal. A crisp little rock song, "Walking Slow," celebrates Browne's newfound domestic stability. "Before The Deluge," the album's summary cut, brings together in a comprehensive social context the themes of the rest of the album. The verses are linked by a moving secular prayer for music, shelter and spiritual sustenance: "Let creation reveal its secrets by and by/When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky." This chorus's final statement follows a verse so imagistically potent as to suggest literal prophecy
by Stephen Holden, Rolling Stone, 11-7-74
Tracks
1. Late For The Sky - 5:42
2. Fountain Of Sorrow - 6:52
3. Farther On - 5:21
4. The Late Show - 5:14
5. The Road And The Sky - 3:08
6. For A Dancer - 4:46
7. Walking Slow - 3:55
8. Before The Deluge - 6:27
Lyrics and Music by Jackson Browne
