Writer: Jackson Browne
Producer: Richard Sanford Orshoff
Recorded: Late 1971 at Crystal Sound in Los Angeles
Released: Spring 1972
| Players: | Jackson Browne — vocals, piano Jesse Ed Davis — guitar Leland Sklar — bass Russell Kunkel — drums David Crosby — backing vocals Graham Nash — backing vocals |
| Album: | Jackson Browne (Asylum, 1972) |
“Doctor My Eyes,” Jackson Browne's first single, reached Number Eight on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Browne had spent the years before he signed his own deal earning a reputation as a songwriter. He did a brief tenure with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who recorded his “Melissa” and “Holding.” Tom Rush and Steve Noonan also recorded his songs.
Browne drew many admirers from his fellow singer-songwriters, including David Crosby and Graham Nash, who contribute harmony vocals on “Doctor My Eyes.”
But Browne's most important, if anonymous, admirer was the secretary to David Geffen at his fledgling Asylum label, who was impressed by Browne's demo tape and by his picture and urged Geffen to consider signing Browne.
Browne says he wrote “Doctor My Eyes” on his father's old piano at the Echo Park, California, apartment he shared with J.D. Souther and futureEagle Glenn Frey. “The piano had a broken key, so that if you hit this one note, the F note, it would go up and strike, it was an upright piano, you'd see the hammer hit the key and it would flip back, bounce back and hit it again. Every time you hit it once, bonk, it would bounce back, bonk-onk. And if you did it at the right tempo to go g-dong g-dong g-dong, it was kind of trippy. Anyway, I was playing around with that. I wrote it based on that one little sound thing.”
Browne says the song was inspired by an eye malady he suffered that year. “I had a really weird thing happen with my eyes where they became really, really–I guess they became infected with something, and really red. I couldn't tell what was wrong with them and was really freaked out for like a week or so. I also couldn't see, and I didn't have any money and I finally went to a doctor and he gave me some stuff to put in them. But there was this period of time in which I didn't know what could possibly have gone wrong with them. It became a metaphor.”
A year after Browne released the song, the Jackson 5 had a U.K. hit with a cover of “Doctor My Eyes.”
The Jackson Browne album–sometimes referred to as Saturate Before Using because of a legend on the cover–hit Number Three on the BillboardTop.