#phyllis major

[irina-irina-irina]

Phyllis Major

Il était une fois un flic (1972)

[beer--mom]

Browne wrote this about Phyllis Major, a model and actress for whom he had ended a relationship with Joni Mitchell. Major was also pregnant with Browne's child at the time. When Major heard it for the first time, she was furious as she thought it unfairly cast her as somebody who had designs on domestic life. "She hated that song, Browne recalled to Mojo. "She said, 'I wasn't having a baby to get you. And the bulls--t about the washing machine is just insulting. So f--k you.'"

"And she was right," he added. "I should have said in that song, Oh s--t, I'm about to become a parent and I have no idea how to do this.' But I was not emotionally mature enough."

Browne and Major later married, but she took her own life in 1976. After her suicide, the singer-songwriter stopped singing this number out of respect for his late wife because she hated the song. Many years later he started singing it again but he still leaves out the part that she didn't like.

Ready or Not by Jackson Browne

[39adamstrand]

On 25 March 1976, with her 2 1/2 year-old-son, Ethan, and nanny in the next room, Phyllis Major Browne (wife of Jackson Browne) killed herself with a drug overdose.

She had attempted suicide a number of times before, once after a break-up with Keith Richards, and another time around her marriage to Browne (in December 1975), only a few months before her final attempt. 

Jackson Browne's former girlfriend, Joni Mitchell, attended Phyllis' funeral (which angered Browne).  According to Sheila Weller's book Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - And the Journey of a Generation, Mitchell had attempted suicide after her own breakup with Jackson Browne, swallowing pills and cutting herself, but vomited the pills and survived.

Mitchell's song "Not to Blame" from her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo is said to be about Major's suicide ("the frailty you despise/And the looks you love to drive to suicide"), which prompted a response from Jackson Browne, "She's not a happy person, and what she says in that song is absolutely, 100 percent wrong. And it's really very nasty, very, very ill, you know, very bad-spirited of her to make this kind of conjecture."

[joni-mitchelll]