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I Wasn’t Ready for Her
A Jackson Browne college story
“The postscript to this sad story was that within three weeks she had moved in with Jackson Browne, who lived down the street, and three months later she was pregnant. They had a boy named Ethan and got married in late 1975. In March of 1976, Phyllis committed suicide with a massive overdose of sleeping pills while Jackson was on tour” (Jonathan Taplin, The Magic Years, Heyday Press, 2021, 192).
Lives connect in the strangest of ways. In the above account, writer and former manager of The Band, Jonathan Taplin, exposes his past about as starkly as one could. The story he tells about this particular moment comes after a tumultuous relationship with the beautiful woman he mentions, Phyllis, whose mother tried suicide and failed. Phyllis gets into a relationship with Taplin and after just a few months begins urging that they have a child because her fertile days are growing short.
Pressure in relationships, especially to have children, can build to a point where anyone can make a bad mistake and do the wrong thing. When he introduced Phyllis to his own mother, Taplin heard words that most sons and daughters might rebel against:
“You don’t love that woman. You’re just showing her off, hoping you won’t have to get on with your real life,” (191).
