Er, how does that song go again?

By PETER CALDER

That's the problem with being a legend of the 1970s: you can end up forgetting the words that were once legendary. Fortunately for Jackson Browne, they're usually on the lips of everybody in the audience.

The California singer-songwriter, who plays a concert in Auckland on February 10, etched a mark so deep a quarter-century ago that it sometimes seems like yesterday.

Between 1973 and 1977, albums such as For Everyman, Late For The Sky and The Pretender were touchstones for a generation of baby-boomers coming to terms with adulthood, and many of them can remember every word.

The 55-year-old Browne would presumably have no trouble remembering the lyrics to classics like Take It Easy, which he co-wrote with Eagle Glenn Frey. For one thing, it was much on his mind last year as he pursued (and won) a lawsuit against music publisher Warner Chappell Music over royalty payments from sales of an Eagles compilation.

But he admits he can be a bit rusty when it comes to some of the more obscure items from the back catalogue requested by audiences.

"I've done a lot of acoustic shows in the last few years," he says, on the phone from his manager's Los Angeles home where he's stopped for Thanksgiving weekend at the end of the US leg of a world tour.

"And those shows become almost exclusively that - people calling out what they want. Sometimes it's a contest to see who can call out for the most obscure song. And sometimes I just can't remember the words."

"I say: 'Well, I don't think I could get through that', and they say: 'Come on! We'll help!' I had this one guy get up because I got stuck and he came to the piano and sang for me. But he wouldn't leave.

"He sang a verse and then I said: 'I know the rest of it from here', and he wouldn't leave. He was enormous, too, like a gigantic line-backer and there wasn't much I could do."

The song was Looking Into You, a wistful reminiscence in the sentimental, heart-on-his-sleeve style which won Browne his first and most loyal generation of fans. It's fair to say that things haven't been the same since.

In those early days, Browne, Joni Mitchell (the two were, famously, a pair for a while), James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt were the stars in a soft-rock firmament which seemed to stretch right across the skies of southern California.

But a poll of several thousand on a Jackson Browne fan site shows that his popularity has tracked downhill since 1976's Late For The Sky, which almost 45 per cent of respondents name as their favourite.

His tour, which takes in Britain and Europe as well as Australasia, is in support of his 13th album, The Naked Ride Home - the first new material since Looking East in 1996.

Like any of yesterday's big names, Browne has to accept that a good proportion of the audiences will be calling out for the old stuff, but he says he's gratified to see plenty of younger faces, too.

"There are people of every age in the audience. I meet a lot of people whose parents turned them on to the music, who came to it only a few years ago and want to go back to the beginning and listen to all the old music.

"That's sort of your dream come true, really, to find someone who likes what you do enough that they go back and listen to everything that you've done."

Like many of his generation, Browne went through a period in which his songwriting pursued a political agenda. The mid-80s albums Lives In The Balance and Lawyers In Love hotly denounced American foreign and domestic policy, particularly the Reagan administration's support of anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua.

That edge has gone in the new album, which - with the exception of the broad, anti-consumerist Casino Nation - returns to the more personal concerns of mid-life.

But the change in style does not mark a change of heart. He continues to promote political awareness and his conscientiousness was recognised with last year's Steinbeck Award from San Jose State University for artists' contributions to humanity. Previous recipients include Arthur Miller and film-maker John Sayles.

He doesn't see it as a responsibility of celebrity. "I don't even think of myself in those terms. It's an opportunity and it's my duty as a citizen of a democracy to inform myself. "It's very difficult to sing about [political ideas]," he says. "It's very hard to get that sort of detail in a song. As a songwriter it's very hard to get information into a song that will contain a very complex message."

That's why he expresses such admiration for John Walker's Blues, the controversial song by Steve Earle. The loud, proud heir to the protest-folk tradition of Woody Guthrie took plenty of flak with the song about John Walker Lindh, the American national captured while fighting for the Taleban.

The song (sample line: "Now they're draggin' me back with my head in a sack / To the land of the infidel") provoked the American Right to rage, but Browne says the song is brilliant.

"I have to remind people that Afghanistan didn't attack the United States. The song isn't trying to make a hero out of John Walker but just trying to illuminate the world we're living in.

"But there was a period of a year after 9/11 when people didn't want to hear any contrary view. They equated criticism of the Government with being unpatriotic. But this Administration is the worst kind of political opportunists.

"I'd say at least half the people of this country feel that the Government is not entitled to govern because the election was literally stolen. It was manipulated, and there is even a question in some people's minds as to what extent the 9/11 attacks were allowed to happen to galvanise the country to go forward into a war for oil, or at least using the crisis to advance its own political agenda."

Browne is promising that his set, with six-piece band, will be pretty evenly spread across his career.

"We do about half a dozen from the new record but about three-quarters of the set is from the old albums. I try to do a couple of really obscure things each day, things that people might not have heard go by the first time."

Most people, maybe. If they're so obscure that he forgets the words, he can rest assured someone out beyond the footlights will remember.

* Jackson Browne, Civic, Monday, February 10.