How Jackson Browne and a Dozen Groovy Rockstars Ruined the Country

We were somewhere around Midtown Manhattan, at the Garden, when the self-righteousness, a known side effect of living in Laurel Canyon, began to take hold. 1979. A foul year for the soul. Our Leader—The King was dead, rotting in the soil of Graceland, and in his wake, the long-hair vultures and expensive whores moved in wearing tie-dye and carrying acoustic guitars.

They called themselves MUSE—Musicians United for Safe Energy—but if you looked closely through the haze of pharmaceuticals and egos, you could see the gears of a massive, multimillion-dollar guilt machine grinding away. Jackson Browne and his troop of “Groovy” brigands had descended upon Madison Square Garden to save the world from an atom they didn’t understand, and in doing so, they kicked the future of American prosperity into a ditch.

The Great Panic of ‘79

It was a classic case of Nuclear Neurosis. A minor hiccup at Three Mile Island—a few thousand fish belly-up and some confused birds—was enough to send these pearl-clutching millionaires into a flat-out frenzy. They weren’t economists. They weren’t scientists. They were, as the high priestess Grace Slick so elegantly put it, people who didn’t know anything except spending money and who they could screw.

But suddenly, they were the arbiters of national energy policy.

They wailed. They strummed. They preached. And the “booty” rolled in like a tidal wave. We’re talking $6 million in 1979 cash—that’s a staggering $26 million in today’s debased currency. A mountain of loot generated by selling a “cause” that was nothing more than high-priced hot air.

The Cost of the Song

While the rockers were patting themselves on the back and counting the gate receipts, the rest of us got the bill. The math is brutal, cold, and inescapable:

Oil Prices: Shot from a manageable $15 a barrel in ’79 to a skull-crushing $128 by 2008.

The French Connection: While we were hyperventilating, the French—the French, for God’s sake—built 57 reactors and went about their business in peace.

The Navy Standard: The U.S. Navy has clocked 15,400 reactor-years of accident-free sailing. No meltdowns. No three-headed sailors. Just cold, hard efficiency.

But the “No Nukers” didn’t want efficiency. They wanted nobility — a documentary. They wanted a triple-live album. They wanted to feel important while they paved the road to our current energy purgatory.

The King vs. The Clowns

Look back at Elvis. In ’61, the man raised sixty grand for the U.S.S. Arizona memorial. He didn’t film a self-congratulatory “rockumentary.” He didn’t release a “King Saves the Navy” box set. He did his job as an American icon giving back and then vanished into the Vegas night.

Contrast that with today’s mess: a permanent circle-jerk of burning oil to charge electric cars while Sheryl Crow frets over her Tesla. We’re drowning in “carbon trade-off costs” and “Green New Scams” that have added trillions to the tally—all because a dozen rock stars decided forty years ago that the atom was “scary.”

Now, in 2025, the song remains the same. The stage has changed, but the actors are just as shrill. They’ve moved on from reactors to banning gas stoves and policing cow farts, while the ghost of low-cost, pollution-free energy wanders the halls of history like a man who lost his keys in a blackout.

The bridge to sanity was never built. It was traded for a backstage pass and a gold record.