Ladies And Gentlemen, With A Lot Of Ado, Born In The U.S.A. Like You've Never Heard It Before

July has slipped away, but this blog's Born In The USA Appreciation Month has not. Think of it as a game at this year's football World Cup, with ridiculous stoppage time additions prolonging the fixed time limits by someties 20%. It's time to wrap the extravaganza up, and there was only one way to do it - with a completely rethought and re-arranged album called Born In The U.S.A. The subtitle A Musical Journey To Vietnam And Back already tells you that this isn't your youth's (or semi-youth's) Born In The USA, To be fair, until not too long, it wasn't mine either. The original One Buck Records Born In The USA was a simple alternate album with more of the 1983 solo material, worked around the original, downbeat version of the title song. 

But hey, you know, I can read the room, at least from time to time. Bruce's release of Tracks II with pretty much all of that material made my lil' alt album superfluous. I had snuck out Don't Back Down last year before that box set could steal my thunder, but that old version of my own Born In The USA simply wouldn't have brought muvh to the table. So back to the drawing board I went, and did I ever. It so happened that this was just after having made a deep dive into Brice's back catalogue again, and thinking about some of the pillars of his discography. Cars and girls, as that glib Prefab Sprout parody I hate has it, but you kno, the other stuff Dead end twons in insudtrial decline. And the big one - Vietnam. Bruce has returned to the topic of that war again ans again throughout his career - until it got replaced by more current wars, even if the sentiments stayed the same. But the Vietnam war had an outsized impact on Bruce Springsteen and his music that some people kind of handwave away, instead of acknowledging it as one of the major themes and settings of his work. 

Survivor's guilt is a real thing, even an indirect one, and ruce Springsteen knows it and feels it - maybe not every day, but a lot of days. His opening rap from the big Live box set he brought out in 1985 about fighting with his dad that ended with him being rejected by the army and the understated 'punch line' of his dad simply saying 'that's good' has always stuck with me. As have the lines that Springsteen says that cut to the heart of Spirngsteen's experience of that war and its veterans: "There was a lot of guys going to Vietnam. And a lot of guys went, and a lot of guys didn't come back. And the ones that came back, weren't the same anymore.". Bruce and his friends didn't go, but ever since Bruce has wondered - in song, in writing, in onstage banter - about what that really means. He didn't go, but someone else went in his stead. What happened to that person? Did he go and not come back? Or come back and not be the same anymore? 

Springsteen has brought up how on a personal level the loss of young men going to Vietnam and not coming back, or coming back in a body bag, by evoking the fate of Bart Haynes, the drummer in his first band, The Catsiles, and that of Walter Cichon, lead singer for Jersey bar band The Motifs and a guy that his peers were sure was going to make it in rock'n'roll. "The Wall" - the latest song on this collection, recorded in the late 1990s after reuniting with the E-Streeters .

The vietnam war, like so many wars before and after -  came and ent, but one of its cruelest aspects is the memory that remains, a memory that continues to haunt Springsteen. The controversial production choices and ensuing common misperception of "Born In The U.S.A." have obscured how personal and important its observations and sentiments were on a personal level for Springsteen. People didn't listen closely at the time, as some will continue today, out of some weird anti-Springsteen Pavlovian dog-like  reflex. Millions bought the "Born In The U.S.A." single, but how many listened closely to its b-side "Shut Out The Light", another song about a Vietnam war vet coming home and not being the same anymore - it should have quelled any ambiguities about Bruce's stance right then and there.

 The a- and b-side of tha single spring from the same source, literally. Bruce demoed a song called "Vietnam" during the Nebraska demo sessions that he would rework until it essentially split into these two songs. Famously cribbing the title from a Paul Schader script to possible write music for - an implicit debt Springsteen repaid years later with the title song for "Light Of Day" - that became the new chorus for one song, with some of the other verses he was experimenting with turning into "Shut Out The Light". Te two existing demmos of "Vietnam" finally became the impetus for this radical variation of Born In The USA, not an album he could've brought out in the mid-80s, but an album that looks at Bruce's treatment of the Vietnam war in its entirety - from contemporaily commenting on it while the war as going on via two Steel Mill tracks from 1970 to the quiet rumination of "The Wall" almost thirty years later. 

You'll find that this is in no way 'authentic', so if that is what you"re looking for in musical offerings, you'll have to look elsewhere this time. I reworked most of the tracks, adding in things that weren't there and in some cases never supposed to be there - other music, sound effects, you name it. This Born In The U.S.A. is really supposed to be eperienced as its own thing, not a simple rummagging through Bruce's archive. Just to give you a quick idea: The "Prologue" consists of that aforementioned concert speech that was - somewhat incongruously attached to "The River", a song that notably neither talks about Bruce's relationship with his dad or the Vietnam War. It has gotten a new backing (bonus points if you identify what it is...). 

The first album side is built as the journey promised in the album's subtitle - with a three-part 'Born In The U.S.A. 'suite' that goes from the U.S. to Vietnam and back, supported by the two Steel Mill numbers from a concert in 1970. It consists of re-edited versions of "Vietnam" - to which I've added the "Born In The USA" chorus that shows up on only one of the versions (Part 3 is a hybrid of parts of both versions), as well as an excised verse from an early try of "Born In The USA" that details the Vietnam portion of the journey. Part 1 details the hometon troubles of our protagonist in Glendale and ends with him touching down in Vietnam, Part 2 has him trying to survive in the Vietnamese jungle, and Part  opens with his plane touching don back home, only for him to be completely alienated by the infifference of evryone aaround him. He's a long-gone daddy in the U.S.A now, even if Bruce hadn't found those words yet...

"We'll All Man The Guns" follows a soldier into the war who's echoing the slogans of his superior, wile hoping to get back to the girl he left at home - a well-worn scenario whose exceution is in the band obviously sneering at the sloganeering ("And we'll all man the guns for America / And we'll all run the enemy home). Speaking of sloganeering: Bruce and his SteelMill cohorts are not above that themselves, when they end "America Uner Fire" with a coda juxtaposing "America The Beautiful" with the theme of "The Micjeu Mouse Club". Subtle this is not, but then again, these were guys 20 year old. "America Under Fire" is the very first song in Springsteen's work that looks at vets coming home and feeling alienated, while society looks down on them, giving way to the later songs in that register. It also has a bit of a soul bent to it that is interesting. 

Side b opens with "Shut Out The Light", albeit not the 1984 b-side version (and I hated to lose Soozie Tyrell's first contribution to a Springsteen recording), but the 1983 demo version which has verses Bruce later excised for the b-side version, notably an ending that implies the vet will commit suicide by letting himself drown. a bummer ending to a bummer song, that Springsteen maybe felt was too much. From there we take another look at Vietnam War vets in "Brothers Under The Brifge", an outtake from The Ghost Of Tom Joad that finally showed up on Tracks (and Soozie Tyrell is finally here!), thus time about a group living as drop outs far from society in the Californian desert. From there we go back to "Born In The U.S.A", the original acoustic country-blues with the trademark Nebraska howls, From there, Bruce's unnamed narrator - but really a version of himself - visits "The Wall", the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington and reminisces about an old friend lost in the war - in true Bruce fashion, it's Billy yet again, but really he's talking about Walter Cichon. This late Nineties recording was finally isuued on High Hopes, the not very satisfying grab-bag of outtakes and redos, and will hopefully be appreciated better here. I have used the little keyboard figure of Bon In The USA" as a sort of leitmotiv throughout the album, so it would have seemed churlish and, worse, cowardly not to have that version of "Born In The U.S.A." on here, so it's next to wrap up the album with a short reprise of "we'll All Man The Guns" and another surprise that I think works well and contextualizes some of his choices, and then a little "Coda" I let you discover for yourself. 

I did a lot of work and spent a lot of time on this, so I hope some of the more doubtful as far as Bruce Springsteen is concerned will give this a shot. It really isn a Springsteen album that oves and sounds lile nothing else - a sort of meta-album on how Springsteen frames and contextualizes the Vietnam War in his songs. I think its interesting to compare the rawness of the first side - obvious for the Steel Mill tracks and for the work-in-progess early work on what would become "Born In The USA" with the more refined, subtle work on the pieces on the second side, especially "Brothers Under The Bridge" and "The all". Anyone who declares that Sprngsteen 'does the same old' and didn't evolve as a songwriter and storytelle should listen closely. 

When I say in the title that there was a lot of ado, that's because I knew this write-up ws going to run long, and it did. Nut, you know, sometimes there's a shit ton to say anout an album, and so few paragraphs to do it. So, now it's time to get into Born In The U.S.A. - the version you've never heard before.

Justice Is Coming To Tombstone, Its Musical Highlights Are Coming To You

When Tombstone made it into theaters in late 1993 it was already a legendarily troubled production, though a lot of the issues- were kept under wraps at the time. Originally scheduled as the directing debut of screenwriter Kevin Jarre, Jarre got canned a couple of weeks into the job after being hopelessly overwhelmed by the job and falling behind schedule. Kurt Russell, if you believe his own account, took over directing incognito, as they hired genre vet George P. Cosmatos as a 'ghost director'. Faced with Kevin Costner's competing production that, due to Costner's clout, blocked most distribution, they had trouble indinging a distributor and finally got the film out at Buena Vista and Tombstone became a surprising box office hit. 

You know what might've helped in that success? Having one of the greatest teaser trailers of all time! In between the quick cutting, the relentless music taken from Peter Gabriel's "The Rhythm Of The Heat", the parade of stars and recognizable faces on display, and the booming voice of trailer voiceover man, this is what puts butts into seats:

Seriously, how do you not want to go and see that movie after watching that teaser? (An amusing sidenote: how the teaser tries to elevate Jason Priestley - then the hottest teen star with Beverly Hills 90210 - to a main character, when he has a grand total of about five minutes screen time and is completely inconsequential to the film's story). 

Every time I do a rewatch of Tombstone and I'm about twenty minutes or so in, I think to myself 'What an underrated classic this is', normally right around the scene where Kurt Russel's Wyatt Earp schools an asshole-ish saloon gambling master, played by a then-unknown Billy Bob Thornton. And then the movie goes on, and the whole romance with an actress thing starts and the movie kind of starts to drag...and then, well, it ends up being the merely pretty good movie we all remember, plus an outstanding performance that some more should remember. 

A merely pretty good Western it might be, but it is one of the most quotable. Seriously, what a number of cool lines Tombstone has:

"We cross?"

"Are you gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?"

"You're an oak, Wyatt!"

"I'm in my prime..."

and of course "I'm your Huckleberry". 

It's fair to say that this is Val Kilmer's best performance, and I'd say Michael Biehn is right when he considers his duel with Kilmer his finest hour. The fear, almost panic in Johnny Ringo's face when he realizes he'll face Doc Holliday, not Earp, the way he tries to talk himself out of the situation, and then how his fearful face turns into a crazy-eyed, murderous grimace, when he realizes he can't: "Alright, lunger, let's do it". Biehn might have never been a master thespian, but here he dances with a great actor, and he holds up his end of the bargain. Just a great movie scne and that is all. 

(Also: Kilmer got fuckin' robbed of an Oscar, hell, he wasn't even nominated! There was a ton of competition, but still. What do you remmeber more? Kilmer in this or Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive?)

You wish Tombstone would have had two or three more of those scenes, but journeyman director George P. Comatos - or Russell, if you believe him - wasn't all of a sudden going to be John Ford or Howard Hawks. There's a classic Hollywood elegance to the film, and some wonderful shots, but at two hours the movie can't quite sustain viewer interest at all times. One of the issues was the overly ambitious script with dozens of parts, that had Kevin Costner attached to Tombstone, before he decided to mount his own Wyatt Earp picture (titled, very imaginatively, Wyatt Earp, natch!) with Lawrence Kasdan. Costner wanted more spotlight on Wyatt's (i.e. his) character, which Jarre refused,but finally Russell had to prune down the script to make the budget and schedule, making his main character what he calls an aura figure, without much interior life or characterisation. The mammoth script and less-than-ideal shooting conditions mean that Tombstone is one of those weird movies, that moves both too fast and not fast enough simultaneously, that does too much and too little at the same time. 

It's also fair to say that the 'pretty good' verdict also applies to the music score by  business veteran Bruce Broughton, probably brought in on the strength of his score for Silverado. When you hear the score, it's like the film: You wish it would be better then 'functional to pretty good'. Now, true to the credo of this blog, this isn't a bad listen, or it wouldn't be on here, but it's interest is limited, as Broughton simply hasn't written that many memorable cues. What's memorable is here, but the strict quality control of the One Buck Guy means that there isn't a ton of the score here. About 25 minutes is all there is, but I figured you'd rather spend a good 25 minutes with this score, then get bored during an hour of it. At least the second half, with its more action-based cues, builds up a nice head of steam, before we get to the "Tombstone Main Theme that runs through the end credits - in which we recap seeing Earp and his group walking to the O.K. Corral, the scene probably most remember from this movie, anyway.  

As for the opening track, it's the only one that isn't strictly speaking a score cue from the movie. "Tombstone Heat" is a (mostly) vocal-less mix of "The Rhythm Of The Heat" that approximates the feel of that film teaser. Oh, by the way: I am known for mercilessly cutting things down, but this version of the Tombstone Motion Picture Soundtrack is not one of those times. I did choose the existing shorter edits of the tracks "Josephine" and "Morgan's Death", but everything else is its original length, the score was and is  originally made up of sometimes really short cues, a couple of which I extracted from longer medleys. 

So, Tombstone, a good movie with a pretty nice score. Go rewatch the movie (this write-up hopefully did its part to inspire you), if you have the opportunity, and then listen to this breezy version of the film's score. 

Next Stop: Dead Man's Town

Various Artist tribute albums are admittedly often a hit-and-miss affair. It's not for nothing that One Buck Records features a whole selection of reworked tribute albums - often thinned doqn editions to curb the spread and throw off the duffers. Various artist ributes to an artist's specific album aren't any different. I recently listened - obviously linked to Bruce and Born In The USA month on these pages - to Badlands, the tribute to Nebraska by a bunch of Americana artists, that got really good reviews back in the days, so I picked it up, but it never became a favorite. Something about it doesn't work. Today's album is obviously not about Nebraska, but Born In The USa, so e're off to Dead Man's Town, a 2014 tribute album by folk/country/Americana label Lightning Rod, that also doesn't quite work. Don't get me wrong, it works well enough, otherwise it wouldn't show up here - theme month or not - but yeah, something about this album makes it less than the sum of its parts. 

And the parts themselves should be really good. Aericana covers of Bruce featuring such house favorites as Jason Isbell and highly rated artists like Justin Townes 'Son Of Steve' Earle, Blitzen Trapper, Trampled By Turtles or Low. This thing should have been a freakin' slam dunk, and I thought it would be, rejoicing when I found it for little money during the famous soldes sales weeks. And it starts impressive enough, ith a slow, moody violin-led version of the title song by Jason Isbell and then-wife Amanda Shires, followed by...a slow, moody cover of "Cover Me" by The Apache Relay. Do you see where this is going? Yes, to get rid of the mainstream sheen and, let's say, populist stink of the original, almost all of the artists here have the same idea: play the song slow and moody. Which is fine, if you do it, and do it ell, but loses in efficacity, when half a dozen or more of your colleagues have the same idea. 

This, then, is Dead Man's Town's problem in a nutshell. In a vacuum, by themselves, these are all very fine versions of Bruce's songs, but the cumulative effect of having so many slow, moody covers makes the album come off a bit sleepy, as if it's permanently stuck in first gear. Thank god that the Quaker City Nighthaks find another gear for "Darlington County" - which admittedly would have sounded weird in slo-mo - and the North Mississippi All-Stars turn the elegiac "My Hometown" in a raucous uptempo coutry & western (or maybe rather cowpunk-adjacent) tune. 

So, Dead Man's Town is full of fine music which is just assembled less than perfectly. This is maybe an album where the shuffle function could come in handy, for a slightly more surprising listen. Sure, it won't suddenly pick up more pace in the abundance of slow numbers, but it's worth a try, maybe. Here Dead Man's Town is presented as is. And as is, sameyness and all, this is still a very nice collection of Springsteen cover tunes, especially if you're into the whole Americana thing. 

So, get ready, next exit: Dead Man's Town! 

PS: If the idea of Americana-flavored Bruce covers talks to you, check out For You, an Italian-artist compilation of exactly that, which features a couple of songs rarely covered elsewhere. 

Do The Bruce, Butch ! Uh, I Mean Stay Gold, Ponyboy! Uh, I Mean...What Was I Just Talking About?

The One Buck Guy is not known to be lazy, though he's increasingly known for talking about himself in the third person. Because if I were, lazy that is, I would just copy and paste a chunk of the write-up for Ozarker and attach it here. You know, that part about cool musicians emembering the music they heard, when they were young, and that music would possibly probably certainly include Born In The USA. Listening to  utch Walker's Stay Gold - and its obvious pointer to nostalgia, and 80s nostalgia specifically, in the title, I had the exact sae thought I had when listening to Ozarker: 'This man loved Born In The USA when he was a kid, and that love will out'. The sonic markers might not be as pronounced as on Ozarker, but they're there. 

Butch Walker had been lingering around on the periphery of my record collection and musical awareness, popping up on the occasional 'various artist'-sampler. One of those appearances finally got put to good use hen I used his cover of a Nirvana song for my Nirvana rock opera redux project, but other than that I hadn't really deepened my knowledge of Mr. Walker. I finally did, thanks to a mistake. Browsing on Allmusic for one reason or another, I saw a link to an interviw with Mr. Walker on the title page, which sounded interesting enough, and was. It talked about the impressions and the making of his new album. Well, except it didn't. That album was Stay Gold, which had come out in 2016, but that  tite page link to what I assumed was a promo for the just released album was in...2024. Surely a programing error, but you know, some philosopher, possibly me, once said 'Life is using a faulty algorhythms to get something useful out of it' (or something). So I finally dove into Mr. Walker's music after that interview piqued my interest, if you pardon my French. Deep-dive would have been too much, since Walker is active ince the 80s, in -various bands ranging from glam-metal to moe straight forward rock. So I mainly focused on checking out some of his solo work. 

Oh, and of course first and foremost, the aforementione Stay Gold. which is a really really swell piece of rock'n'roll business, with just the slightest hints of twang and Americana to it. The set-opening "Stay Gold" is, well, pur gold, Ponyboy. "East Coast Girl" has some weird spoken word interludes that remind you vaguely of, oh I don't kno, ggy Pop maybe, but the chorus threatens halfway through to collapse into that of "No Surrender". Like I said, maybe this isn't intentional, but, you know..."Ludlow Expectations" has a title that Springsteen would never write, the song's chorus, however...

Anyway, I don't wanna hammer these comparisons down everyone's throats too much, so let me say this: Great set of ten rock tunes, whether you're a Springsteen-ite (-ist, -ophile?) or not. Walker is a bit of a traditionalist, for sure, in music and attitude, even sequencing - something the One Buck Guy wholly approves of, of course. He puts the pedal to the metal for most of this album, but when he slows down for ballads "Descending" and "Record Store", it's on traks five and ten, the vinyl side closers. Well done, Butch. As is the whole of Stay Gold. Just a wonderful album, that reminds you of what you liked about Ryan Adams back in the days when he still made good records. 

So, everybody, stay gold with, naturally, Stay Gold...

The Dirty Dozen Of Bluegrass Chartbusters Is Full...

 

It's the ying and yang of the cosmos, or at least of the One Buck Records part of it: One series - beloved All Pearls, No Swine - slows down while another - it took a couple of volumes, but now also beloved Bluegrass Chartbusters - picks up the pace. As said in the last installment of our series, I got to diggin' again...and diggin...and diggin'...And then I got to recompiling...and recompiling...and recompiling...So I did spend a lot of time recently with this series to knock it into shape after a wave of new arrivals made it grow by another 25%! 

The result of some of this work is now right in front of you. The first reworked 'old volume', into which I reseeded some of the new arrivals, the idea being that they don't all arrive in the back half of this series disproportionally. Also: Get some cool new discoveries out early, and for all to hear. I've spent the last week plus or sso grooving to one particular tune, Molly Tuttle's "She's A Rainbow". It's such a propulsive, fun cover of the ol' Rolling Stones experiment - and for me it dusts the original. Now this is bluegrass verging on pop, with drums and electronic effects. But if we consider the latter a nod to the horribly dated psychedelic effects on the original, I'll allow it. Ah, scratch that, I would allow it anyway, it's such a great track. 

But a one highlight reel this is not! We got more where those come from. also making their series debut: The Dirty Grass Players, introducing Jimi Hendrix to the row of covered artists, with their take on "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)". As a one-off, we have brothers Jake And Tebey Vandelaand, covering Aloe Blacc's "Wake Me Up", an immensely popular tune in bluegrass covers, and for good reason. Even in its original pop arragement it sounds half like a lost bluegrass tune already! Tebey Vaadeland is normally more of a rockabilly specialist, but they bring a nice old-school backwoods feel to it.

And there's another series debut for future contributors: The Grateful Bluegrass Boys dropped an album of bluegrass covers in 2017, and nothing since. Paul Simon's "Late In The Evening" has some of the Zydeco feeling (accordeon solo!) that Simon brought - not wthout controversy - to Graceland. The rest is ably handled by the veterans - old and new - of this series. Want to hear "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" in a countrified/deep country fried version? Dale Ann Bradley and Dave Adkins will oblige! Ever thought that Mr. Mister's "Kyrie Eleison" (or "Carry A Laser", for those of us in the know...) would make a nice bluegrass tune? Listen to Love Canon to find out...

Newly covered artists here include Phil Collins (and his coolest solo song), The Allman Brothers, one-hit wonders The Lumineers and Gotye, as well as Jimmy Webb, although his song would only become a hit when a certain country veteran supergroup got their hands on it...and picked up its title as their band name! 

So, you know the deal: Behind its admittedly sobre cover, here's another 20 great bluegrass tunes covering 20 great originals. Need I say more? 

The Other Side(s) Of Being Born In The USA...And Making Music There

It has become almost apocryphal to say that for every album Bruce Springsteen released, there is at least one he didn't, but since the man has opened the gates to his vault over the last decade (and, ahem, the gates to his other vault), it's becoming more and more evident, how true this is, now that people don't have to exclusively piece things together from bootlegs anymore. In the cas eof the run-up to Born In The USA, Bruce had material for about six albums, that he then pruned down and selected and reselected until coming up with the twelve-song track list - including famous late arrival for hit single purposes "Dancing In The Dark". A ton of the other tracks went back in or stayed in the vaults, though Bruce churned out a handful of possible contenders as b-sides. 

Now, not all of this material is top notch - how could it be? - but overall there are a number of very strong songs that didn't get their due in time, and coud have been hits if Springsteen had issued them with an eye on the charts. I'm mainly thinking of "My Love Will Not Let You Down", finally issued on Tracks fourteen years later, which sounds much more like a hit single than half of the tracks of Born In The USA that did become top ten hits. With Born In The USa you can easily argue that momentum in pop and rock music is real, because at any other time, I don't think a so-so song like "I'm Going Down" would have come anywhere near the top of the charts if it hadn't come from the unstoppabe blockbuster that was Born In The USA.

But back to some of those songs. What if Bruce had kept some of the unused, but high quality stuff that didn't make the cut, and quickly thrown out a follow-up album in late 1985 or early 1986? (In real life he didn't need to, because Born In The USA was still throwing off singles in November 1985, more than a year and a half after the album had been released, following the trailblazing of Michael Jackson's Thriller) That album could've been Rockaway The Days, our One Buck Record of the day, slily presented with a cover that would remind people of its prdecessor - as if here was a need at the time to do so. I have already documented some of Bruce's best demo work with Don't Back Down last year, so this focuses on the finished tracks. I was rather brutal in my selection, dropping two numbers at the last second to make Rockaway The Days a vinyl-appropriate nine-track 40-minute affair. All killer, no filler, or pretty much.  

"Frankie", a lengthy track that oes back to Bruce's love of Van Morrison was a concert classic in 1976, the dropped from the line-up of Darkness On The Edge Of Town for Bruce's harder-edged material. He and the E-streeters gave it another try in 1982, but with the pop-rock sheen of Born In The USA and its eye on concise songs, "Frankie" again got the boot. And in some ways, it is clarly a song from a different era that Bruce that he had left behind, but as a nice throwback to romantic mid-70s Bruce it's a really nice piece that deserves its place in the sun. Another temporarily lost classic, "This Hard Land" figured on early track lists of Born In The USA as its last track, before Bruce inexplicably discarded it, only to resurrect it as a a re-recording for his Greatest Hits album. Fittingly, maybe, it's now the closing track of Rockaway The Days. 

Rockaway The Days collects some of Bruce's finest, if unassuming, pop moments from the era like "Man At The Top" with a very vague country influence, the raucous "Lion's Den" originally recorded during a session for Gary U.S. Bonds (and having its horns anachronistically added in 1998 for Tracks, but we'll turn a blind eye on that, exceptionally). and "Janey Don't You Lose Heart", which like "Man At The Top" was brought out as a b-side. "Janey" also has the first recorded vocals of Nils Lofgren on a Springsteen track, who overdubbed his harmonies on the original 1983 version. 

"Protection", used here as a kick-ass opener for what would have been side b, isn't a finished studio track, but the still very shiny demo Bruce recorded and then gave to Donna Summer. He originally wrote another song for her, which arguably fit her style better, but Jon Landau more or less forbid Bruce to give it away. That song was "Cover Me", a song that I personaly never felt was particularly great, but it bacame a huge hit as Born In The USA's second single, so maybe Landau knows a thing or two more about what the record-buying public likes. 

Rockaway The Days - nine top song from mid-80s Bruce, some of which arguably are better than the weake numbers on Born In The USA. Either way, a very fine companion to the big blockbuster that came before it. 

 

Requiem For An Unknown Singer-Songwriter, or: News From The Slop Shop

Farewell, dear Jared, we hardly knew you. Come to think of it, we didn't know you at all, and you wanted it this way. But now that you have seemingly shuffled off your (im)mortal (digital) coil and have gone into the great beyond of other cyberegions, we salute you for...uh...your infatiguable work ethic, your high work standards and your sophisticated artistry of sounding like a couple of different people all at once. Rest In Power, Jared, no matter where that power comes from. New server rooms, maybe. 

Hey, you guys remember Jared Hutcherson, right? To some, he's the country-singer/songwriter that created dozens of albums as if it was nothing. To others he was the name of one of the most shameless A.I. slop generating programmer imaginable, pointing out modern country radio's hollowness by churning out hours and hours of inoffensive, bland country-pop pap that would go unnoticed among real artists on country radio. And now he's gone. I'm not saying my little article calling out 'Mr. Hutcherson' had something to do with that, though I'm not saying it didn't, either. Who knows how Youtube got wise to the systematic shenanigans behind our beloved Jared, or whether the people behind Jared took the money and ran, while they still could. 

Jared getting deep-sixed by his creators

If you remember, 'Jared' was notoriously productive, as A.I. slop machines tend to be, churning out albums, and long albums at that, contrary to real artists, whoe albums get shorter and shorter, due to the Tik Tok-isation of the younger generations of music listeners. And now his thirty albums are seemingly gone from all music streaming services, having also quit Apple, Amazon and the rest of the bunch. Jared you are gone, but not forgotten. 

Music recommendations straight from the slop shop are of course continuing. a couple of weeks ago, together with some albums from the early 70s that go well with my All Pearls, No Swine project, Youtube proposed me a band called The Rash Cooper. I liked two of their songs, though they didn't sound much alike, and wanted to find out more about the band. a Google research yielded absolutely nothing besides that album: no web presence, social media, even a mention on a website somewhere. If an abum with non-descriptive artwork is the absolute only thing a 'musical artist' has out there, there's a pretty much 100% probability it's A.I. So, I kept a tab on these guys, and guess what. Almost exactly a month after the first one, the second album of the 'band' dropped, again with nothing but the album and its obviously A.I.-generated cover to show for it. Goodbye, The Rash Cooper, you sloppy A.I. slop. 

This is what you get when you let A.I. (no emphasis on the I.) write its own epitaph

The stories of A.I.-generated slops and sloppy fakes are becoming legion and getting worse - music streming platforms now have to delete thousands if fake songs every day - and that is, when they're trying, which considering their business model they don't have a real incentive to. But they really should, as the scammers have upped their game, now skimming both sides of the aisle. As seen in the article I linked to, A.I. now steals or 'creates' fake tracks by fake artists, which then get streamed thousands of times by A.I. bots on a loop, allowing the scammer to goose the streaming numbers for a half-way decent payout. It's not much money per se, a low four digit figure, but it's like phishing mails. You repeat this often enough on a small scale involving small local bands to rip off, and you got yourself a salary. The loss, however, is on the scammed artists, not the streamers, so it'll probably take some turns for the worse, before the wave of A.I. slop & scam music really gets monitored and persecuted as it should. 

No such stuff here on One Buck Records, pbviously, though nowadays I have to be careful as hell as well when sourcing the All Pearls, No Swine and Bluegrass Chartbusters series. So far, no A.I. has made it past ol' OGB's quality control, but the enemy is getting stronger and better. Still, all human-made music right here, of which there is more coming up very soon, same as it ever was. 

Like a ghost rider in the sky, Jared will return someday...on a burning horse!