Aural Robert

The least surprising story in music today is the inevitable passing of irreplaceable talent. Tenor saxophonist Benny Golson died at age 95 the day I finished this salute to another fallen star, Southern California singer/songwriter John David "JD" Souther.

Souther was a charter member of the so-called Mellow Mafia. It never ceases to amaze me how much rancor and scorn still gets heaped on Southern California acts from the 1970s. The Eagles' "Hotel California" has been played to death for years at audio shows as an example of stellar recorded sound, yet I cannot count the number of times audiophiles have ranted to me about how The Eagles were "too perfect." And how the whole hippie vibe of drummer Russ Kunkel (who is now bald and wears suits) and bassist Leland Sklar (who admittedly does look like Father Time) creeps them out.

Call me a cheeseball, accuse me of having overly sentimental tastes (though I prefer the term "eclectic"), but count me among those who adore the work of Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, David Lindley, Rosemary Butler, The Eagles, and the guy who started it all, Gram Parsons. But one name that's not as obvious as all those is JD Souther.

While many in the SoCal crowd of the '70s wrote their own music, notably the great Warren Zevon, such artists as Linda Ronstadt and even The Eagles still needed to find quality material. Souther, who at one time was Eagle Glenn Frey's partner in the duo Longbranch Pennywhistle (whose only album featured guitarists Ry Cooder and James Burton), went on to become both a songwriting partner and a backing singer on many of the Mellow Mafia's most famous albums. He cowrote "The Best of My Love," "James Dean," "New Kid in Town," and "Heartache Tonight" with The Eagles. On a career trajectory also followed by Zevon, Souther wrote 10 songs that Linda Ronstadt recorded and took to new heights, including "Prisoner in Disguise" and "White Rhythm and Blues." He also had a personal relationship with Ronstadt, coproduced her album Don't Cry Now, and sang a duet with her on "Hearts Against the Wind," which appears on the Urban Cowboy soundtrack.

Most of the elite Southern California musicians, including Tom Waits, eventually signed to one-time artist-manager David Geffen's Asylum label, and Souther is no exception. An argument can be made that Souther's canon, particularly his 1976 album Black Rose, has always been underrated. Yet, in the magical world of creativity, Souther, with one exception, was never able to put his own songs over as well as others did. In many cases, he never even tried to record them. His gorgeous, high-tenor voice, a constant presence on iconic albums by his friends and peers and briefly in the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, never quite worked as well on his own stuff. When he unveiled "New Kid in Town" to the Eagles, as they were making the album Hotel California, they were flabbergasted and liked it so much they accused him of holding out on them. Yet he didn't cut his own version until his look-back retrospective Natural History in 2011.

Listening again to the few records he made under his own name, it's easy to hear what The Eagles heard, in slow numbers like "Run Like a Thief " and "It's the Same" from Souther's self-titled first album. That collection also contains "How Long," with perhaps his strangest lyrical couplet, "Like a blue bird with his heart removed/ Lonely as a train." Produced by Peter Asher, who was so key to Ronstadt's career, Black Rose, Souther's supposed undiscovered masterpiece, is most famous for the inclusion of the song "Faithless Love." Ronstadt famously covered it in 1977, the year after Black Rose, on her album Simple Dreams.

If one human emotion endlessly fascinated Souther, it was sadness, most often provoked by love gone wrong. Equally skilled at words and chords, his heartrending expression of pain, as heard in "Faithless Love," was his superpower: "Where nobody's right/and nobody's wrong/ Faithless love will find you/And the misery entwine you/Faithless love/where did I go wrong."

Even when happiness was possible, Souther still had doubts. In "Simple Man, Simple Dream," from Black Rose (also covered by Ronstadt on the aforementioned album, whose title also came from the song), he hesitates: "What if I fall in love with you/Just like normal people do/Well maybe I'd kill you/Or maybe I'd be true." To its credit, Black Rose contains the slinky, atypical, "Midnight Prowl," which features Lowell George on slide guitar and Donald Byrd on flugelhorn.

As a solo artist, Souther's moment in the sun came with the 1979 release of the album You're Only Lonely. Backed by the all-star cast of Browne, Frey, Wachtel, Kortchmar, David Sanborn, Phil Everly, and others, the title track—a Top 10 hit—is a sweet Roy Orbison–styled serenade with a wicked hook. The song is the definitive answer, the emphatic apotheosis of Souther's constant subject: What's responsible for heartache? It's also the finest example of his singing, as he effortlessly rises to all the high notes. The highest-charting effort of his career, the single reached #1 on the US adult contemporary chart, and the album itself made it to #41 in the US.

You're Only Lonely, along with both his self-titled debut and Black Rose, were recently reissued on vinyl, CD, and digital by Omnivore Recordings. The vinyl was pressed at Copycat Hi-Fi Media in Minneapolis. The CD and digital versions of each album contain unissued bonus tracks. For You're Only Lonely, the extra tracks are "Ever Faithful Woman" and "Bad News Travels Fast."

Senseless kvetching about too-perfect '70s Southern California country rock aside, Souther had a gift for both singing and writing songs. Another vital musical voice lost.