Goodbye, Dolly - From A Faraway Distance, And A Recent Admirer

I honestly can't say I have much of a relationship with Dolly Parton's music, of which I have only heard a song here or there. I of course knew the ridiculous image of Dolly - big hair, big boobs, big voice nd attitude. But I didn't listen much to her music and I didn't know much about her. That chnaged a couple of months ago, when - while zapping aimlessly with the wife in tow, yes, some people still watch TV! - we fell on a music documentary whose subject I don't recall, might have been Bowie. Right after, however, we segued straight into a documentary on Dolly Parton, and I increased my knowledge, not to mention my appreciation of here, manyfold. 

Talk about a self-made millionaire or going from rags to riches. These are often used as metaphors, but rarely have they applied to somebody as well as Dolly Parton. Born in a wooden shack to dirt-poor parents and part of a family counting a dozen children, Dolly's upbringing was clearly the stuff normally reserved for screenplays. The way she managed to hold herself in  male-dominated business in the 60's, the way she looked for more freedom away from Porter Wagoner, all this stuff - just impressive as hell. And that is before you take into account her charity work, and the sense that she just had kind words for everyone, even those that didn't have any for her. That list of 'big somethings' I did in the paragraph above? It's fair to say that 'big heart' needs to be added and underlined a couple of times. In bright, trashy pink, if Dolly had her way. 

The wife and I stayed glued to that documentary, and then - somehow transfixed by the country mood watched half of a concert by the Highwaymen that followed the Parton doc, until at about 1.15 A.M. I told my wife that it would probably wise to pack it in. I had put 'check out more Dolly Parton' on the imaginaryt to do-list, as I was mostly familiar with her as part of the Trio albums with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. And then I never really got around to do that, with so much other music and other things taking precedence. So Dolly's death two days ago, at age 80, doesn't strike me really on a personal level, and i won't pretend that it does. But it's fair to say that our world just got a good bit poorer without Dolly in it. 

The One Buck Album of the day, Coat Of Many Colors, is a classic by Dolly Parton, including the title song that Dolly herself considered her favorite, from among the hundreds and hundreds of songs she wrote. It also came out at an impressively active time for Parton, being her third album of 1971 after The Golden Streets Of Glory and Joshua. This is the 2007 remaster with four bonus tracks. The cover still looks kind of weird (and makes Dolly somewhat look like anboy), but hey, that can't do any harm to the fab content. Just a fine little album to remember this giant of country music by. 

R.I.P. Dolly Rebecca Parton, 1946-2026

That Long Road Out Of Eden Just Got A Whole Lot Shorter, Folks...

What'd they say about Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road? 'Too fat to float'? That's pretty much true of most double albums. If I had to name a double that probably works better as a double, I'd point to London Calling, because the sprawl and diversity is the point and I would have trouble cutting that one down in a sensible way. But other than that? Woof, there's a lot of other double albums, even classics of the genre, that are indeed 'too fat to float' and so it's up to ol' OBG to try to get them to slim down. We started recently by turning Nick Cave's The Lyre Of Orpheus/Abbatoir Blues double whopper into a (hopefully) more delightful single album, My Beautiful World, and now it's time to take the knife to our first real double album.

The Eagles' Long Road Out Of Eden is a prime candidate for this nes weries, because, man, this thing is flabby as fuck, and there's a lot of grease to cut away here. Which in itself was surprising when the album came out in 2007. After all, in the preceding thirteen years after their 1994 reunion, the band had managed a grand total of five new songs, four in 1994 for Hell Freezes Over and a pretty good one-off ("Hole In The World") in 2003, which technically hails already from the first Long Road Out Of Eden sessions. So the fact that not only they'd finally came out with a new studio album, the first after 1979's The Long Run, but on top of that that it was a double album, was somewhat surprising. (Incidentally, and infamously, The Long Run was initially announced as a double album, mainly to give guys like Don Felder a chance at a lead vocal, but they didn't even have enough material for a single good album, hell, I'd argue not even enough for half a single good album. But, as usual, I digress.) Maybe less surprising: they worked, on and off,  over six years on that sucker. Another Long Run. Anyway, with one album they almost quadrupled their output of the last fifteen years of their existence. Impressive!

Except, well, you know. There's quite a bit of stuff on Long Road Out Of Eden that is, you know, not all that good. Not to mention that, much like Henley's and Frey's solo work, songs have a tendency to run long, too long. The result: A rather unreasonable ninety minutes for twenty tracks, and several tracks that drag. So, OBG to the rescue! There is a pretty good classic Eagles album in there, you just have to extract it from amidst all the chaff. Because, let's be honest: One part of Long Road Out Of Eden - arguably the better, more succesful part - was a conscious choice to recreate not only the Eagles sound, but to create songs that reminded you of the band's heydays: "Busy Being Fabulous" is such a song, as is the choice to finally issue J.D. Souther"s "How Long". 

The band had covered that tune in concert throughout 1973 - with Frey, Henley and Randy Meisner all trading lead vocals on verses - but didn't issue a studio version to not steal their buddy's thunder. Having Frey's kids stumble onto their dad playing that song on Dutch TV on Youtube pushed the band to issue it as the first single, making it, like "Busy Being Fabulous", a top thirty hit, which was no small feat for a veteran classic rock band in 2007. But the slow crawl - sometimes literally - through Long Road Out Of Eden also reveals, that the band's two dictators leaders Frey and Henley used the album as a sneaky stealth way to issue what sounds like solo recordings, more or less smuggling in solo EPs into the double album, knowing full well that an album with the Eagles name on it would largely outsell any of their solo records. 

So, there' was a lot of throwing out to do. A ton of tracks that sounded like solo adventures got the boot, mostly Frey's, since he indulged a lot in yawn-inducing ballads. All the songs that sounded like Eagles songs made the line-up, with the exception of "Fast Company", a sort-of redo of "Life In The Fast Lane". The problem with that one: The band did another number that vaguely recalls the funk-rock of "Life", "Fail Grasp At The Big Picture", one of Henley's patented political rants, and of the two I liked the latter better. So long, "Fast Company"! Speaking of Henley's political content: This is of course the biggest change from the classic years: Whatever ecologic or political criticism the band could muster in its prime was couched in metaphor so as to be almost unrecognizable - you have to really stretch to read the 'white settlers edstroying paradise'-scenario of "The Last Resort" as a critique of the way Aspen, Colorado got turned into a snowy Disneyland for rich guys like, ironically, Henley and Frey.

Henley got a lot more direct during his solo years, and it shows on Long Road Out Of Eden. His nature activism shows up on the a capella poem adaptation "No More Walks In The Woods"and he comments on the reliance on media manipulation and American Imperialism in "Fail Grasp" and the title song. The sentiments of both have sadly become way more relevant in the last decade thanks to a certain orange dictatorial authoritarian dictatorial you-know-who. Henley's bitter political rants aren't obvious classic Eagles material, but they're better than the overkill of soppy ballads. 

A classic Eagles album would make room for one solo spot for the two 'good hands' members of the band, which limited the choices for Wals and Schmit, who had two tracks each on the double album - quitely respecting the logic of 'one track per album'. I picked "Do Something" for Schmit, which while also a ballad is much more urgent than the ultra-sappy "What Do I Do With My Heart". For Walsh, a dilemma: He has an original song on the album, but it's an ultra-slow crawl of a song about doing nothing that, well, does nothing, but takes a mind-numbingly long seven minutes to do so. Attempts to edit it down proved unsuccessful, so I picked his cover of "Guilty Of A Crime", which itself is a remake. He recorded it in the mid-90s for a TV series soundtrack, but it's sprightly and (somewhat) rocking, which any version of Long Road Out Of Eden is in short supply of, so it might have gotten the vote for inclusion either way. 

Well, folks, this write-up threatens to get as long and difficult to get through as the original album *shudder*, so I'll try to be quick: Conceived as a classic vinyl-era album, ten tracks sequenced as two distinct sides with their own dynamics; The two singles and most-Eagles sounding tracks frontload side a, while side b opens with the album's epic, the ten-minute title song and its accompanying piece, Frey's short (and Grammy-winning) instrumental "I Dreamed There Was No War". The Walsh track then livens up the solemn proceedings, before we close gently with "Waiting In The Weeds" - sounding totally like a Henley solo track, but again, real quality cuts were limited - and the aforementioned "No More Walks In The Woods", which is lovely, but works much better as a closer than an album opener.   

Given Henley's and Frey's predilections for long, drawn out codas that don't really bring much to the table besides running time - carried over from their solo work - a number of them have been edited down a bit. Also: no soft rock slop! That sleazy saxophone solo at the end of "No More Cloudy Days"? Sayonara, sucker!

So there it is, ol' OBG really slimmed that flabby album down to a core that is infinitely more listenable. The Long Road Out Of Eden might still be long, but it's a lot shorter and more agreeable to listen to.. agree? Disagree? Step on that road to find out...

One Album Wonders: Meet Funky White Boy John Henry Kurtz, Y'All!

I hadn't really been looking much into John Henry Kurtz - and as you can see from the series title, there isn't that much to look at, anyway - but listening to his fantastic cover of "Drift Away" when I prepped All Pearls, No Swine 37, got me thinking 'hey, you should check out what else the man has done'. Turns out he did exactly one album, Reunion on ABC Records inn 1972. If you look  at the album cover, you'd probably say 'oh, big deal, OBG unearthed another country rock album from the early Seventies', but that isn't quite what this is. The old-timey cover with Kurtz in army uniform is essentially a fulfillment of a dream, as he was an ardent collector of Civil War memorabilia since his teenage years, and in his latter years had one of the largest collection of such artefacts in the U.S. But the music isn't just the sort of Americana or country rock that the cover implies. 

There is a clear soul, gospel and r'n'b influence to Kurtz's album; with a brass section arranged by Michael Omartian and r'n' backup choir everywhere. This album - and that you definitely wouldn't tell from the cover - is funky as hell. Play that funky music, white boy! Just listen to the gospelish "Everything Has Got To Be Free" or the brass-driven "Get On The Right Road"; This means that this album kicks more ass then some of the Americana treasures I regularly feature on this blog and in this series specifically. John Henry Kurtz reminds me of another funky white country boy, Mr. Travis Wammack who absolutely should and will feature on this blog in the future. 

Country-soul has existed long before a certain Cecil Ingram Parsons pretentiously dubbed it 'Cosmic American Music'. The real cosmic American music was made elsewhere, by other people, and I love them and their records, but Kurtz's album is somewhat akin to Parsons' idea: A hint of country, but here almost surpassed by the brass-driven soul and gosel elements. It's also a find of curios. Sure, everyone covered Kenny Loggins' "Danny's Song" back then, but the same ca't be said for Shiloh's "Simple Little Downhome Rock'n'Roll Love Song For Rosie". It's not only a mouthful of a title (a little shortened here), it's also one of the first song written and sung by - Mr. Donald Henley. 

After Reunion and two more singles for ABC Records (the one I could find is attached as a bonus track), John Henry Kurtz, uh, drifted away from the music business, though not from showbiz. He became an announcer and voice over artist for television, lending his voice to, among others, NBC Nightly News and Court TV, did some shows on Broadway and some television appearances as an actor. 

Look, this is just a wonderful little album from the Seventies. Almost forgotten today, it doesn't do anything particularly genius and I don't want to or have to sell it like that. Ten quality tracks, finely produced, arranged and played, and well-sung by Mr. Kurtz. Funky, rural music without any pretensions. Sometimes you don't need more than this.     

Here Come More Chartbusters, But Not The Ones You Expected...

 

The Chartbusters are back, but not the ones you're used to. Well, it is summer after all, so what sounds like summer, and also kind of sounds like something the One Buck Records would throw onto an unsuspecting public: Why, it's the Reggae Chartbusters, of course! Instead of some sweet Bluegrass, we're going to listen to some sweet Reggae, covering the last sixty years or so of popular music. 

Most of this series is based on the Vintage Reggae Café series from cheapo Argentine 'specialist' label Music Brokers that specialises in 'hits but played as reggae/jazz/easy listening/etc.' type compilations, with that Vintage Reggae Café series nonetheless reaching an impressive sixteen volumes. Now, what exactly is vintage about it is another question, one better not to ask. The other, also not great to ask: Who are all these people? Other than Pinky Dread I have never heard of any of the Vintage Reggae Café roster. They are essentially like the first years of CMH's Pickin On... bluegrass series, pure studio projects with a clear purpose, rather than real, organic bands finding purpose in their assigned cover albums, as was increasingly the case in that series, once Iron Horse got the ball rolling in that direction. The purpose is obviously 100% mercenary, but hey, who's to say you can't have fun with this.

Speaking of mercenary motives...

Fun in limited doses that is. There are a ton of their covers that don't work particularly well, so this series will not be like its sibling, the Bluegrass Chartbusters, which mushroomed into an XXL endeavor. This will be four volumes and not one more. One reason for that is also, that in these songs with their relatively samey rhythms, it's hard to find much particular artistry. I would argue that the Bluegrass Chartbusters often found real interesting things to do with the covers they did, whereas the Reggae Chartbusters are admittedly closer to pure novelty, albeit entertainingly so. These hand-picked covers are a ton of fun, whether it's United Rhythms Of Brazil and Shirley Adamson's covering "Walk Of Life", Reggister's covering "Girl's Just Wanna Have Fun" or Luca Giacco covering "Hotel California". 

To not make this an entirely Vintage Reggae Café affair, and for sentimental reasons, I added some other stuff. It would be cooler to say I first heard reggae by, say, Bob Marley or Peter Tosh or The Clash, but being a kid growing up with 80s mainstream radio the first reggae I heard was most likely including UB 40. (Other reggae hits I remember from when I was young are Musical Youth's "Pass The Koutchie Dutchie"  and Sophia George's "Girlie Girlie"). So UB 40 will grace these, helped out by Chrissie Hynde for their first appearannce here with "I Got You Babe". And I also included NYC's finest in terms of reggae covers, the Easy Star All-Stars, checking in with covers of Radiohead's "No Surprises" and the Beatles' "With A Little Help From My Friends". 

You know the M.O. already from the Bluegrass Chartbusters: 20 tracks, a cool flow, tons of fun to be had. So, get these and have fun...

 

Follow That Nice Long-Haired Fella Into The Country Warehouse, He's Got Some Goodies For You...

One of my favorite bootlegs of all time, recorded in the Country Warehouse in Rochester, New York November 25 1988, with the title fittingly also having a sort of double meaning, as the shows on this tour with the Patrician Homeboys - multi-string instrumentalist Dan Dugmore and Timothy Schmit on bass and backing vocals - were easily the most 'country' of Zevon's career, with Dugmore adding banjo, steel guitar and dobro to a bunch of songs. Wanna know why this is one of my favorite bootlegs? That's why! Some of the songs here have never sounded like this and would never again, like a banjo-led almost-bluegrass version of "Boom Boom Mancini", a slide-guitar "The Factory", and pedal steel-supported versions of "Carmelita", "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded" and "Hasten Down The Wind". A track list heavy on Warren's debut album was of course always going to find favor with me. Zevon used the acoustic country-esque atmosphere to dust off some of the blues covers he did with R.E.M. (minus Michael Stipe) as Hindu Love Gods. I don't think Zevon is a particularly good Blues interpreter, but these are fun enough, and add to the unusual track list.

Fellow friendly neighborhood music blogger Babs shared Flac files that were a definitive upgrade over what I had, though these are still de-Flac-ed, for a couple of reasons. The first: I ran almost everything through Audacity, not for sound, but for presentation. There's two types of thinking with live bootlegs, either leave everything exactly as is - warts and all - or...not. Warts and all meaning long silences, noodling and tuning, etc. etc. If you know me and you know this blog a little bit, you probably have guessed that that's not my way of doing, and the Gene Clark boot from a couple of weeks ago already should have tipped you off: The first order of the day: listenability. The second order of the day:re-listenabibility. Some banter might be fine once, but do you want to hear it two, three, four, five times? 

Now with this bootleg, things are a little different, because Warren is an all-time great banterer, and even if some of his comedy routines - like introducing the band and joking about Dan Dugmore's instruments - are well-rehearsed, they're still worth hearing and rehearing. So except for a bit between Warren and Dugmore that went nowhere I kept all the pertinent banter, which brings me to the second issue I often have with boots, especially ones that were 'commercialised'. The indexed tracks begin with the songs proper, meaning any introductions or related banter will be attached to the preceding track, which isn't a problem when you listen to the whole thing, but not if you hit the shuffle or random function on your music listening device, or if you want to use a track on a compilation somewhere, 'cause then you would have the track proper and then some talk introducing a track that never comes. 

So I attached all the intros from the preceding tracks to their rightful place in front of the song concerned, so you can listen to this at random, extract highlights or do whatever the hell you want with it, without the need to work around restrictions or firing up Audacity. Without those pesky minutes of dead space, it's also a breezy listen at a little over 70 minutes. 

So, off into the Country Warehouse with y'all, for a rather unique Warren Zevon experience...

Them Bluegrass Bands and Folks Would Like Your Attention Once More, Please...

Aaaand welcome everybody to Chartbusters week over here at One Buck Records which of course must kick off When last we checked in with with our beloved Bluegrass Chartbusters series - or probably the time before that - I talked about the massive expansion that took place in the meantime, when I was alerted to certain bands that might fit the format. After I had just weaved those bands (The Fly Birds and Della Mae) into existing volumes, I went on a crazy Bluegrass cover song search bender, searching high and low and ending up with something like eighty plus tracks as a haul. Now that's a lot of tracks, and certainly way too many to just try and weave into existing volumes by throwing out or pushing doiwn the line a couple of others. No, a more radiczl solution was needed. 

Seeing the massive number of tracks, I thought, that I'd better start from scratch and create a couple of entirely new comps that I would then weave in between existing ones, whcih is what I did. This is the first of three entirely newly compiled volumes that will show up in the following weeks and months, as I also want all regular contributors to have been introduced by the series halfway point. To keep continuity with the other volumes, I took a couple of tracks of series stalwarts like Love Canon or from the Pickin On...-crew of other volumes, but one side effect is still a rather huge influx of new faces and names into Bluegrass Chartbusters Vol. 13. 

Having already established most of the bluegrass bands trading in pop and rock covers, most of the new arrivals make their own original music, with the very occasional cover song thrown in for good measure. Such is the case of country/Americana veteran Darrell Scott, who doesn't necessarily do a lot of bluegrass, but got his String Band together for a fantastic take on "Southern Cross", which hereby becomes the first triplicate Bluegrass Chartbuster. Well, what can I say, I love the song, and I have yet to run into a Bluegrass cover I don't appreciate. The Darrell Scott String Band version is interesting as it's the only one with harmony singing, but instead of the close harmonies of the original, they are loose, shouty harmonies, really upping the back porch get together feel of the cover.  All this is to say: it's awesome. 

Also not strictly a bluegrass group, but occasionally dabbling in it: The Whiskey Brothers, opening things here with a simply wonderful cover of Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl". Also new to the series is the Grass Mountain Unit, a young quartet from Alabama, tht even has double representation on this whole volume. The group, with lead vocalist and mandolin player Drury Hammond tackle Johnny Cash's "Big River", while second-in-command Lucas Black with other bck up plays a superb cover of The Grateful Dead's "Deal". The Mountain Grass Unit will have their debut album out later this month, and are definitely on the rise, so check them out here first!

And the debuts just keep on coming: Just when I thought I had caught all 'play unexpected bluegrass covers for a living' type bands, here come the Grasslers, et ils vient de près de chez moi, plus ou moins. The Grasslers are coming from - careful, pun incoming - the Var Ouest as they like to say (so the south of France), with their covers landing just on the right side of reverence. Their debut in this series is a cover of "Dancing In The Dark". 

Fireside Collective usually play what they call GrooveGrass - with electric guitars and drums - and we'll have some of that on later volumes,  but here they debut with an acoustic take on Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". Also debuting but here to stay: The Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra, here helped out by Darling West, for "Gold Dust Woman". And finally, in the one-and-done category: The Stray Birds were an acoustic trio out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania - now also sadly defunct - leaving a beautiful version of Nancy Griffith's "I Wish It Would Rain" for our delectation. 

As if all these new folks were not enough, the old(-ish) crew also has some highlights lines up. AJ Lee, once again backed up by Blue Summit, has never sounded as soulful or sultry as on Southern soul classic "He Called Me Baby". Truly wonderful stuff. Plus more quality work from Iron Horse, Cornbread Red, Love Canon and others. I also really like what Kenny Blackwell and violinist Gabe Witcher do with their instrumental take on Neal Diamond's "Red Red Wine", turning the normally upbeat song into a surprisingly elegiac tune. That's one of the things I like about this series, still being able to wring something unexpected from the well-known and even the hoary. 

And that should do it for today, folks. Now load up those twenty tracks and have yourself a grand ol' time. Spoiler: Total keeper, this one...

OBG's Slimmed Down Program Makes A Beautiful World Out Of Nick Cave's Imagination

I don't know exactly when I startd to fall out of love with the music of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds a little bit, but it was around the time of the release of his double album/ two single albums as a double album Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus. Until then I had collected all of his recent releases, mostly in the first week of release. But yeah, this double whopper didn't really pull me in, and then I drifted away from the Cavester anyway. Now, individual moments absolutely pulled me in: I think "Nature Boy" is one of Cave's best compositions from his beatific period, and a bunch of other track like "There She Goes My Beautiful World" or "Babe, You Turn Me On". But yeah, I blame it on 'the wrong albup at the wrong time' syndrome. While the twin vortexes of extreme drama and extreme romanticism that curses through Cave's middle period - which I'd say covers about The Boatman's Call to this album, but any characterisation si free-flowing - were great for a young man growing out of a teenage mindset, they inevitably lost some glow as I was getting older. 

It might've also been that I was simply a bit 'Cave'd out' - this is great mood music if you're in the mood, but you have to be in the mood to appreciate it, you know. Plus, it's not the most varied type of music. Anyway, while te two albums didn't get played much, I thought that their highlights would probably make for a pretty good listen. Thus the idea, of turning the strictly subjectively speaking best tracks into a vinyl-era single album. Ten tracks, 45 minutes of good stuff. This is something that is in the back of my mind for a good long while now, so it's up to Mr. Cave to start a new series around here: The Slimmed Down series will aim to make killer single albums out of slighly or very bloaty doubles. I have extended single albums to double albums before - most notably Poco's Crazy Eyes and the Beach Boys' Holland - and now we'll go in the other direction. Out with the flab, in with the class, so to speak. 

In the case of Cave and his Bad Seeds that means some rigorous cutting - of the 17 Abbatoir/Lyre tracks, only nine remain. The tenth track making up our vinyl appropriate album is actually a b-side, but at least to my mind the sprightly "Under This Moon" is better than almost half of what ended up on the album(s). Speaking of sprightly: Cave really is at or near the top of his skills as, yes, a pop musician on songs like "Nature Boy" and "Breathless", so of course he added some out of tune flutes to the opening and ending of the latter, just so no one would accuse him of going too 'Top Of The Pops', or something. Let's say it adds to the charme.

And charming it is, this collection of ten tunes that make up My Beautiful World. So let Nick Cave's beautiful world make your world a little more beautiful as well...

Some Recent-Ish All Pearls, No Swine, For Your Delectation

All Pearls, No Swine might be slowing down, but this series is far from over, checking in with the third volumededicated to relatively recent music, meaning the last fifteen years and change. 

To get listeners' attention I put the hardest rocin' trak up front, with Dead Sara's bad-ass ass-kicker "Weatherman". If the lead singer's voice sounds vaguely familiar, that's because Emily Armstrong got a more high-profile gig recently, relacing deceased lead singer Chester Bennington in the reforùed Linkin Park. Dead Sara, the power trio with female guitar gunslinger Siouxsie Medley isn't dead, per se, but in a holding pattern since then. Funnily, there's a second track called "Weather Man" by German slow-pop outfit Someday Jacob, that reminds you a bit of The Czars. 

All Pearls, No Swine 42 consists for the most parts of tracks that I picked up here and there because I liked them, ranging fom r'n'b from Candian artist P. "Don't Call Me Philip" Bailey to brass-driven soul-rock from Cole Gallagher with "Sugarland" - yes, the Bruce Springsteen rarity that finally got its official release last year on Tracks II. There's slightly-artier-than-you-remember Counting Crows with comeback single "The Tal Grass" and crunchy power pop verging on punk rock from The Cry! with "Toys In The Attic" (not the Aeromsith song). There's reliable vets Wilso and the also ever-reliable Jason Isbell with the demo version of one of his greatest songs, "Elephant", and Kacey Musgraves with a cover of "Can't Help Galling In Love", done for that weird Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie a ouple of years ago. 

You will realize that there are a number of very short songs - Lucero's rootsy "Take Me Away", Jason Faklner's rock instrumental "The Perfect Crime" and the also instruenta little jazz excursion "Swan Dreams" by the Colin Steele Quartet. There are here for a purpose, since I knew that the closing track would run long. Really long. It's the "Terrapin Station (Suite)" track that Daniel Rossen and The National (among others) did for the massive Grateful Dead tribute Day Of The Dead compilation, and that didn't feature on my two-disc distillation. A perfect run-out groove that necessitated the inclusion of some short songs to fit under the - yes, still existing - 80 minute time limit. 

As you can see fro this write-up, there's aain a good number of different styles and genres on this compilation, as it should be. Something for everyone, hopefully. Also as usual: enjoy!

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 Bruce 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.