Remember, Remember, The Eleventh Of September

Two days ago, the whole 9/11 memorial thing started here in earnest with a telefilm called World Trade Center I had never heard of, and a documentary on that fateful day that I had already watched, but still stuck glued to with my wife. Somehow, the crazy unrealness of the pictures, reminding you of the feeling of crazy unrealness when all of this went down, catches us sort of unaware every time, despite now having seen the towers go down and that insane dust cloud - which looks like some kind of sci-fi monster, as it winds its way around the highrises of downtown Manhattan - a number of times. Even twnety-five years, it still seems not quite real. 

The wife and I were both too close and too far away from events. we were both studying at the University of Kansas in lovely Lawrence, Kansas. I remember the beginning of the morning ell. I stumbled out of my bedroom because there was a lot of noise in the appartment. My flatmate had put his radio on high volume, and was on the way of leaving, just telling me that something had happened in New York, some sort of attack. And off he went. My flatmate was from Pakistan, and I believe going to join his friends and fellowcountrymen to lay low together somewhere. A thing to know about Lawrence, Kansas: It is easily the most cosmopolitan, international and idiosyncratic plce in all of the state of Kansas. Or as our buddy George - weed-smoking, tax-evading, barstool-philosophizing George - would say, "an island of sanity in an ocean of madness". his is probably the only place in Kansas were a 6"1 Asian drag ueen (probably 6"2 in hgh heels) could walk in full makeup, wig, dress and, yes, high heels through town without being bothered. I alwys thought. 'that lady/gentleman' goes ten miles out of city limits in any direction and we'll find him/her beaten to a bloody pulp in some street corner'. But not in Lawrence. 

And yet, and yet, for two or three days in Spetember 2001, dozens if not more international students - especially those from middle-eastern countries - laid low and stayed out of sight, for fear of some entirely unwarrated redneck retribution. Anyway, so there I was, left n the appartment, with only my flatmate's crappy radio-alarm clock as a source of information (I had a Tv, but only with a DVD player attached to it). So I sat all morning on my flatmate's bed, in front of that horrible-sounding pievce of crap radio, trying to make sense of somehthing that didn't make sense. I'm probably not the only one who had that thought, but I was thinking of Orson Welles' famous/infamous The War Of The Worlds radio play that have people believe that a Mrtian invasion was imminent. Could this stuff be real? It didn't help, that the radio reporting was as chaotic as almost everything else that day. They didn't know how many planes had been kidnapped, and how many planes were still in the air. I don't remember hearing te news of the towers fall, but that's because the rest of the morning is kind of a blur. I remember how I felt, but not what I heard or how much of it computed. 

It was probably around lunch time that I finally took my bike to drive on campus. They had put up televisions in the majority of university buildings, but by that time they had decided to stop sowing newscasts on them, as they felt it would only upset people and make a volatile situation even more volatile. That is also why neither me nor the wife had seen the towers go down, or any of the other events. I only for the first time saw the images a year later, when the first anniversary came up, and documentaries and memorial specials would fill up the screens the second week of September. I don't know why, maybe because it felt too ghoulish, but I had never looked up the moving pictures of the day's events. I read a ton of internet nd newspaper coverage on it, but other thn still pictures, I hadn't seen much of 9/11. So wwhen I saw the pictures for the first time a year later, I was floored. If things had seemed unreal in front of that crappy alarm-clock radio, they didn't look more real in moving pictures. Quite the opposite, the moving picturs somehow looked even less real than the confused radio reports I heard on the day itself. Even now, 25 years later, these pictures look like they got beamed in from an alternative dimension, if not for the recognizable early-2000s clothing and what not. 

I didn't think I'd write something about 9/11, but this stuff wants out, onto a page, so there it is. And so it makes sense to propose to you today the re-issue of my reworked version of Springsteen's The Rising. Until earier this year I had never really listened to the lyrics of that title song in detail, but then I heard a bootlegged version of a concert evrsion with a gospel choir, which was quite impressive, and for the first time in twenty years or so I took the booklet to The Rising and really looked at the lyrics. Somehow, I had fallen in the same Bruce trap that all those people misunderstanding "Born In The U.S.A." had fallen into. I had never really put the dots on the i's on that one, so when I reread it and realized that the titular rising is the dying protagonist's soul rising to heaven, I was like, 'dammit Bruce, you and your catchy choruses, you got me on that one'. 

I also realized that at least to my mind, a trilogy of The Rising's songs talk about the same unknown firefighter. "Into The Fire", "You're Missing" and "The Rising" seem to me about the same man, perishing in the fire. His wido comforts herself with his courage and cnviction in "Into The Fire", then lists all the things hat have changed or stay the same in his absence in his absence, then we go back to the oment he perishes in "The Rising". Whether you share or agree with that interpretation is bside the point, I think, the songwriting and observations on the best parts of The Rising - which are all left on my edited version of the album - are impressive, and anyone who still poo-poos Springsteen as a songwriter or storyteller, I really don' know what to tell you. 'Fuck off', probably. 

So, have a drink for the ones we lost, 25 years ago, in the time beteween, just now. And come on up for the Rising, come on up for the Rising tonight...

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.

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. 

 

Bruce's Inadvertently Controversial Blockbuster - Listen Again Without Prejudice

Welcome to the month of July, the first (and last) ever Born In The USA Appreciation Month here at One Buck Records. Why?, you ask. Because why the hell not, I say. So, what is Born In The USA Appreciation Month? Well, during the next weeks I will post a bunch of stuff more or less related to that album. Some will be Bruce, some will not. There's at least two albums by younger artists that I want to post that show a clear sonic influence of Bruce' landmark album. There's a tribute album, and at least one alternate album that tries to  recontextualize the tite tune and Bruce's other Vietnam tales. But of course if we start the festivities, and that means starting with the riginal album. I don't know when - if ever - you have listened to Born In The USA, but listen again - without prejudice...

Born In The USA was famously or infamously was boorn out of the same sessions that birthed Nebraska, and it would take only a little bit of tinkering to make it a lot more...Nebraska-esque. In the same way that his electric Nebraska demos - finally revealed to the public last year - showed how Nebraska could become more like Born In The USA if the Boss had chosen so, the demos and bootleg cuts show that Born In The USA could have been as big a downer as Nebraska, had Springsteen chosen to do so. Instead he went for the biggest, shiniest sound of his career, and things got...muddld...and complicated. But you can hear the pessimism and downbeat atmosphere of Nebraska through the haze of Max Weinberg's thunderous drus and Roy Bittan's keyboard fanfares. There's hints everywhere. Of a deep and dark uneasiness. Of tragedy disguised as comedy. Of depression disguised as upbeat dance tunes.

One of the infamous memories of Bruce's Born In The USA era is him jiving akwardly with a teenage Courtney Cox to "Dancing In The Dark". When Jon Landay told Bruce that what was missing from the album was a hit, and Springsteen went home and wrote a piece that delivered on that front, you culd accuse Springsteen of seling out, or what not. But when was the last time you really listened to the lyrics of "Dancing In The Dark"? "I take a look in the mirror, I want to change my hair, my clothes, my face / I ain't nothin' but tired / and I'm just tired and bored with myself." Like the lyrics from the title tune, there is an obvious disconnect between the upbeat, joyful music and the downbeat sentiments. It's possibe to look at "Dancing In The Dark" as one of the first expressions of what we now know were bouts of depression that Springsteen was battling with. 

Now, about those production choices. Springsteen approved them, and owned them, and in some ways he continued the 'one for the large audience, and one for me (and the critics)' principle he had established with Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River, then Nebraska and this album, and arguably continued with the subdued Tunnel Of Love and the glossy Human Touch. And it's just so easy to get caught up in the soun dof things. The album came with a lyric sheet, so people could have (and should have) easily sussed out the bitter Vietnam veteran tale in the title song, but Max Weinberg's huge drums - sounding, according to Bruce like handgrnades, which is correct and like the sound of panic, which isn't - and Bittan's triumphant keyboard melody covered the lyrical concerns up real good and real quick. 

The hints of a darker, less mainstreamy album remain, if only in hints, on the album. "Glory Days" started as a one-verse-and-chorus fragment during the Nebraska home recordings, decidedly differently, in that the chorus stated that the protagonist never had any glory days. But even if the final singalong version inverses sentiment and feel of that original idea, if you think about it, "Glory Days" just isn't as glorious as it pertains to be - and again it's easy to get suckered in by the boisterous chorus. But no amount of sha-la-la's can cover up that the heart of the song, with the baseball player's and waitress's lives peaking in high school and then - like John Mellencamp's Jack and Diane,getting on a long downhill slope, is sad, whether acknowledged or not. Like a ton of other protagonists, these folks are on a downbound train. 

Soringsteen did his best to dress up these tunes. "Working On The Highwy" gained a singalong chorus and lost the rather sordid backstory of its original incarnation titles "Child Bride". And "No Surrender" and "Bobby Jean", both songs that adress hois colleagues - the E-Streeters in the former, and the departing Steve Van Zandt in the latter - stay beautifully anthems to friendship and persistance. But yeah, you listen closely to this album and through the extremely Eighties production, and the album suddenly seems to be a lot more complicated than its popular reception and misappropriation of the Reagan administration among others, suggest.

When Bruce had finished the album, his friend, rock critic Dave Marsh, told him that the sound and sensivity of the album's title track and iconography would cause him trouble, but Bruce just laughed the idea off. He would learn the hard way how right Marsh was. But that doesn't stop Born In The USA from being a highly fascinating album, on a number of levels. So, listen again - without prejudice...

Just When You're Ready To Count The Man Out...

...and I no doubt have in the last years, bemoaning his sudden need to price out the common man, that he pretends to stand up for, out of concert tickets and his music (seriously, Bruce, listing your 8 CD outtake box set for 250 bucks?!? Da fuck?!?). But when you need the man, he stands and delivers.

I heard this on the radio this afternoon, and even if I knew about the song, it hits pretty hard when stuck between the usual radio fare. Sure, the lyrics are, uhm, workmanlike, and so is the musical backing which he seems to have borrowed from the Wrecking Ball era. But, you know, who really freakin' cares? The dude's got things to say that need sayin', even if the song isn't some sort of protest song masterpiece. Then again, are any of them? Fittingly, Bruce's voice is now reduced to a croak that approaches Dylan, but again, who cares? 

You might get bored of me leaving links to Brian Phillips articles, but here's another one well worth reading, and it also says things worth saying and thinking about.

I don't really have anything specific to add, having just talked about how you can't trust your eyes and ears in my A.I.-related thoughts (fittingly, led by Mr. Phillips), but you owe it to you and everyone else to try and keep those as open and discerning as possible...

Oh, also, fuck state-sanctioned murder squads 'upholding the law'...

Bruce And The Promise Of The Forgotten Albums

It's not easy being a music fan invested in the Bruce Springsteen's music. Not because there are weird detours like his sould excursion Only The Strong Survive but because he is now entering a phase of his career where curating his work becomes more pressing for him, which means that there is more and more of all the famously discarded material now officially available, as made evident by The Promise chronciling all the songs recorded in the run-up to Darkness On The Edge Of Town or The Ties That Bind - The River Collection. Added to that there are the demos and other scraps that stay unoffcially unreleased and there is just so much music to go through. Famously prolific, it is said that for every album Springsteen does bring out, there is at least another (or an entirely different version of it) that stays in the vaults, and that is true. Sometimes, there is more than one. Sometimes there is more than two. Springsteen's vault of unreleased material literally has hundreds of unreleased songs in various states of composition and mastering.

Like every Springsteen fan, I'm dabbling in arranging and re-arranging this material, and the release of lat week's Tracks II boxset, including seven albums of material, is a good an excuse as any to get back into the alt Bruce business. Actually, the last dib into OBG versions of Bruce stuff, Don't Back Down, was due to the box set coming out, as I wanted to get my version out before the official one did last week. With that out of the way, we can now go back and settle into a more chronological approach, which means back to the mid-70s we go... 

The Promise, the album that is the One Buck Record of the day, largely but not exclusively draws from the compilation of the same name that covers songs Bruce recorded beteen 1976 and 1978 to create a companion piece to Darkness On The Edge Of Town. The idea was to make it a brighter, more optimistic companion, while not necessarily abandoning entirely Bruce's preoccupations and themes on Darkness. This isn't an all-out party or 'let's celebrate we're young' record, which are albums you possibly could have made out of the The Promise box set. No, this is an album that looks for balance, for some light in between the moments of doubt and darkness that you can still see and feel in the distance. I didn't want to go overbaord and create an anti-Darkness, but rather an album that feels like it could stand alongside that work while also being able to stand on its own as an album. 

So you get the optimistic opening punch of "Rendezvous" that clearly recalls Born To Run musically and lyrically ("we'll be riders,through all of the night") and was first issued by Greg Kihn in the late 70s, but also mood pieces like "The Preacher's Daughter", a Darkness outtake that is the only officially unreleased song on here and one of my faves of Bruce's stash of still unreleased songs. And there's the title cut, which lyrically would have fit like a glove on Darkness. Still, I realized that even though I didn't want to do another Darkness, I was inevitably drawn to the moodier, more serious songs rathar than Bruce's tribute-pastiches to Buddy Holly, The Animals or 60s girl groups, so The Promise did end up being a bunch of slower, moodier tunes anway, so I drafted in his version of "Because The Night" to make it a little more lively. 

I probably did it unconsciously, but the album seems itself to do the bridge between Born To Run and Darkness, having the numbers that sound most like Born To Run ("Rendezvous", "Iceman","City Of Night") on the first side, while side two gets moodier and more downbeat, even as Bruce's protagonists try to hold on to notions of romance and optimism in "Hearts Of Stone" or "The Way". But even the song's protagonists urging "Come On (Let's Go Tonight)" - the early version of Darkness' "Factory" -  has something desperate to it. They want to shed their troubles downton, but Elvis is dead, and there is nothing to do about 'em anyway. Fittingly for an album that starts with the promise of a "Rendezvous" and the ringing sounds of Born To Run, the album ends in a darkness on the edge of town, just down Thunder Road. During the long coda of "The Promise", Bruce's protagonists find themselves on Thunder Road once more, but the road, and its promises have irrevocably changed. Where in the original song, Thunder Road was the promise of an unknown, but surely better future, this Thunder Road is a road to nowhere, a dead end street. 

The idea of my version of The Promise as to spotlight a number of absolute top notch Springsteen songs, that - scattered as they are on Tracks, The Promise and the vaults, don't necessarily get their due. Here, they make sense together, they give sense to each other, and they are appreciable as another, slightly sunnier path through the dark roads the boss was cruising and choosing in 1978. If the promise of The Promise is, to have a real album made of these things that the Boss couldn't or wouldn't quite fit together, then I not quite humbly say, promise fulfilled. What say you? 

Don't Back Down: Bruce Springsteen's OTHER DIY record!

Well, I'll be damned if the Boss himself beats me to this. I just read this week about the release of the Tracks II: The Lost Albums box set that is set for the end of June. Judging from the track list there is definitely some unheard material on there that was never bootlegged and will be new to Springsteen fans. The one thing that definitely isn't new to devote followers of the Boss is the first disc, dubbed somewhat prosaically L.A. Garage Sessions '83. Considering that this was one of the most heavily bootlegged era of the Boss, almost everything on there looks like it was already out on boots before. I'm not sure about the track called "Black Mountain Ballad", but everything else definitely has shown up before. And, like any good Springsteenophile (sic?!), I have of course tried to put some of this material into album form. And before the Boss himself drops the motherlode, it's time I get these out before, as a sort of unoffical preview for the official release in a month and a half. 

Don't Back Down is one of the possible albums from the period that I came up with. These tracks are Springsteen toiling away in his home studio Thrill Hill West, somewhat still in the thrall of the downtrodden acoustic tales of Nebraska, while also discovering the joys of a drum machine and a synthesizer. The latter's introduction is especially noteworthy. 

The newly minted title song "Don't Back Down" is amazing, it sounds like Springsteen fronting Depeche Mode! That no doubt sounds like a total nightmare to old school Boss fans, but damn, if it isn't intriguing. The huge, insistant keyboard hook is fantastic, even if Boss fans of old would've probably had a huge amount of trouble accepting him as a synth rocker. Personally, I love it, and I say, bring on the synths, Bruce! (It also isn't clear whether this track will show up on Tracks II, because the Boss wrote an entirely different song - different melody, different lyrics - that is somehow also called "Don't Back Down", so we'll see which "Don't Back Down" won't back down!) "The Klansman", which - as you can imagine from the title -  has some interestig lyrics uses an almost identical synth melody. The other synth rock track is "One Love", again with a chunky keyboard rhythm and drum machine giving the Boss a synth rock makeover.  

The other thing still very much on Bruce's mind is rockabilly. Almost half of Don't Back Down is a rockabilly album, albeit a heavily synthesized one (and, maybe not coincidentally, at a time where ZZ Top were playing their heavily synthesized version of , erm, the Blues). Four tracks, "Betty Jean", "Little Girl Like You", "Sugarland" and "Seven Tears" are clearly influenced by rockabilly, synth-fitted for the 80s. This shows in the running times, with only "Betty Jean" and "Sugarland" (barely) cracking the two minute mark. The Boss was experiencing with rockabilly around the time of The River and had clearly not gotten it out of his system. Speaking of things not quite out of the system: "Richfield Whistle", Don't Back Down's first side album closer sounds like a track that could have fit on Nebraska, thus its placement. In my typical mirror fashion, the second album also ends acoustically and low key, first with the ballad version of "Fugitive's Dream" and then an acoustic reprise of "Don't Back Down". 

You can argue about which Springsteen material (and production choices) will stand the test of time, but I go out on a limb here and say that this DIY stuff - clunky keyboards, drum machine a-go-go et al - comes off better than some of the stuff Springsteen labored over endlessly in the studio. There is a freshness to it that simply can get 'played away' after one too many times in the recording studio. And what sounded rudimentary and garish in 1983 sounds almost charming when sets against the ultraprocessed sound that has crept into theBoss' albums in the last deaced and a half. 

Again, almost all of these tracks will be available officially and no doubt in better sounding versions than what I have here, but Don't Back Down might still have its tiny place at the table. L.A. Garage Sessions '83 with its 17 tracks doesn't sound like a real 'lost album' - and certainly not an album from 1983 - more like a rarities clearing house. The idea of Don't Back Down was to program these demos into something that would have the flow and feel of a real album. Which I hope I suceeded at, but let the public (yes, that's YOU!) be the judge of that. So, don't back down and bravely face Bruce, the one man band!

  

Bruce goes further on...with or without you

So, here's the reworked Rising, part two, with all the non-9/11 songs making up Further On. With no particular theme binding these songs together, this is really nothing more (nor nothing less) than a good old fashioned rock album. Considering that, Human Touch apart, almost all albums of Bruce had some sort of concept or conceptual idea behind them, Further On would have come off as a little lightweight, a bit of a distraction. Which, after the heavy work of the thematic and emotional songs on The Rising might have been just what people would have needed, had he put out this record a couple of weeks after a single-album The Rising. 

I already talked a bunch about the songs yesterday, so I'll keep it short today: The fab "Mary's Place" is the perfect album opener to get you in the spirit of things, while "Further On (Up The Road)" with its promise of things to come seems like the perfect album closer. On the original Rising, a track like "Further On (Up The Road)" just came off as an ordinary rock song, with more space around it here, it feels like more. "Lonesome Day", which quickly became a concert favorite, is the prefect kick-ass opener for what would be side two, while the moody "The Fuse" seemed to be the perfect closer of side one. 

Any which way, in Bruce's discography the songs that make up Further On, are minor works, but there is some fun to be had with them, and hopefully more so in this newly assembled version. And if Bruce isn't your jam, in my or any other versions, some other fun stuff will soon come your way, further on (up the road)...

 

When there's too much of a good thing... (...out of a very bad thing)

I liked Bruce's The Rising when it came out in 2002. It was also the first new Springsteen album I bought, after having built my collection of his catalogue. But that's not necessarily why I liked it. I thought the songs that were inspired by the terror attacks of September 2001 were strong, and even the ones that only vaguely alluded to it (or maybe didn't) like "Nothing Man" were strong. There was just one problem with the album, a rather big one, or maybe I should say a rather long one: The album is just too damn long! At almost 73 minutes it is by far the longest album the Boss ever cut, essentially the length of a vinyl double album. It was difficult to get through the album in one sitting, especially because I feel (and this is a very personal impression) that the album sags a bit in the middle, right after "Empty Sky". 

I am not a huge fan of Bruce's dabbling in world music, but it seemed unwise that the two tracks that do are sequenced one right after the other. "The Fuse" is an underrated tune that was at the time used well in Spike Lee's The 25th Hour, itself an underrated, almost forgotten movie. But here, in the middle of this very long album, I'd still skip it from time to time. One track I'd never skip is "Mary's Place", a fantastic throwback number that sounds like the E-Streeters had transported themselves back in time to the late Seventies. It's a calculated move for sure, a 'let's do one like in the old days', but it works like gangbusters. Still, right next to the sad, emotional 9/11 stuff, something wasn't quite right with it. 

Drunken, rambling hobo filmed for Youtube? Oh, no, it's just Bruce in a music video. Difficult to tell the difference sometimes...

In a way, it's understandable that Bruce mashed all this stuff together. He had all these songs written under the impression of the terror attacks, but he also wanted some upbeat stuff on the album, and these world music experiments, have something for the re-united E-Streeters to do etc. etc. So, for the Boss it made sense to to this album in a 'a bit of everything for everyone' style. But really, The Rising is truly two albums in one, and so my inofficial mission is to split them into two albums, which maybe would have been the best way to release this music. 

Let's start with the new The Rising (yes, I kept the title, don't mess with a good thing). This is Bruce's 9/11 album, so I gathered all the songs more or less openly about it from the original album. I mean, yes, "My City Of Ruins" was originally written about Springsteen's old hometown Freehold, but no one would associate that song after its The Rising appearance with that. So those were seven tracks, one short of an album. But there was of course High Hopes, Springsteen's odds-and-sods collection in 2014 which had one unreleased song from The Rising sessions, the ghostly "Down In The Hole" (with all his children in a choir appearance!). So that's eight tracks, for an album length of a little more than 39 minutes. Perfect length for a vinyl album. 

I programmed both 'sides' of the album in a mirror way: moody opener, up tempo anthem, slow song, uptempo-ish closing number. This assures, I think, enough variety in what is obviously thematically samey material. So, what can I tell ya? If you are one of the 'Bruce is a hack, egads' type, there is probably nothing I can say to get you to check out The Rising, either version, but if you aren't, it's probably been a good long while since you listened to this particular Springsteen album. So, maybe my version here gives you a good excuse to listen again...

So, be back tomorrow then for part two of this project, Further On. 

Ciao, Bruce - Ti piace la musica Americana?!

It must've happened sometime in the middle of the 1980s. For almost two decades the Netherlands had been Europe's undisputed capital for everything country rock. And while the Dutch still love their line-dancing and their country music, another relatively unexpected country took their place as the place to be if you like country music and - as it came to be known in the 1990s - alt country or Americana. That place is Italy. Do you know what Italians also like? Bruce Springsteen! So, it seemed logical, for a small group of them, to combine their interests. And from that the idea of For You was born - Italian Americana artists covering Bruce Springsteen. Now here's a concept you don't see or hear everyday...

The most recognizable name of the line-up is...not what you'd expect. I - like a lot of people - discovered Alexi Lalas - at the Football (soccer to our American friends) World Cup 1994. He was instantly recognizable with his long red locks and beard. What I didn't know until very recently was that that appearance was enough to get him signed to a small first-league (Serie A) club in Italy and that he also was a budding musician in his spare time. And so, somehow, Lalas ended up on two tracks from the first For You compilation, both very good and present here. Other than that, the artists here are as much a mystery to me as they probably are for you. If they aren't, do tell me more about Francesco Lucarelli, The Blue Bonnets, Rossana Casale, Ricardo Maffone or the Modesta City Ramblers. These are presumably all low-key regional artists, but that doesn't mean that the job they're doing of bringing the Boss' music to life isn't a good one. 

                         Not the F.B.I. (full-blooded Italian) you were expecting, huh?!

There were two volumes of For You - the original compilation from 1995 and a belated follow-up in 2010. I picked more or less pasimonously from both volumes to make a sort of 'best of' For You, specifically picking the artists that covered some of Springsteen's lesser known songs. For one, because songs that aren't done to death are more interesting - and secondly, because the songs covering the old warhorses often sounded like well-meaning karaoke. Admittedly, I played it safe by opening with The Wild Junkers' cover of "Better Days" which...does sound a little bit like well-meaning karaoke. But the good kind! And from there, things do get a little more adventurous. Deep cuts like "Jesus Was An Only Child", "Tomorrow Never Knows", "Iceman" and "The Angel" make their apparition, often in interesting, arrangements that tweak things in an Americana direction, though not so much as to denature the originals entirely. On these twenty selections here, the artists find the sweet spot between paying homage and doing their own thing. 

So, here it is for you: Italian artists conering that most quintessentially American of songwriters. Some of these work better than others, but all of them deserve the benefit of doubt and a fair listen. So, here they are, For You...

Cowboy Bruce: How Springsteen Won The West And Where It Got Him

Bruce Springsteen's debut album Greetings From Asbury Park was, for all intents and purposes, a bit of a compromised affair. Some at Columbia Records where seemingly still hung up on the acoustic demos he delivered to get signed and Bruce's manager Mike Appel as well as John Hammond thought at first of having Springsteen's debut album strictly a solo acoustic, a man and his guitar-type affair, while Bruce himself was pushing for more involvement of what was at that time still known as The Bruce Springsteen Band. Columbia seemed unsure whether to market Springsteen as a sensitive folkie with a guitar or a boisterous band leader, so listeners got both, thankfully at a 80 to 20 percent ratio in favor of the band (instead of an initial 50-50 ratio on the first, rejected version of the album). The inclusion of "Mary Queen Of Arkansas" still is a bit of a mystery, considering that Hammond didn't like it and thought it pretentious. But there it was anyway. The whole Springsteen with or without band never became a topic again after this album, all the way until he realized that the songs for Nebraska didn't need or warrant the E-Street Band behind them. 

But what if there was an album on which the forces that be were still see-sawing over how to present Bruce? What if, instead of being merely a critical success with so-so sales Greetings sold so well that Hammond wanted an immediate follow-up in the same vein as the debut, while Springsteen was in the middle of recording what would become The Wild, The Innocent and The E-Street Shuffle. Springsteen would declare that he found something special in the ongoing, but unfinished recordings, and he wouldn't want to compromise them. But then Columbia, Appel and him would strike a deal to construct a follow-up to Greetings from material already recorded. To continue promoting him as a serious artist (with a capital A of course!), the brain trust went through Springsteen's catalogue and then devised a concept album. Hearing rumours about new band sensation The Eagles recording an outlaw-themed record for Asylum, Hammond and Appel devised their own record in the same vein, drawing equally from band and solo performances. And thus was (or woud have been) born Bruce Springsteen's The Wild West, a song-cycle about the west and the outlaws that populated it. Side A was to focus on the lawless populating the land, while Side B would be more of a travelogue of the West, ending with an account of how the Wild West would be tamed, thanks to an outtake from the ongoing E-Street sessions that Springsteen sent in to use. The Wild West would cement Springsteen's reputation with critics while giving him time to hone and polish The Wild, The Innocent and The E-Street Shuffle, whose release would then obviously be pushed back to 1974, with The Wild West taking its place as a late 1973 release. 

So, back from music kayfabe into our reality: What is The Wild West? Of the three band tracks, "Don't You Want To Be An Outlaw" and "Look Towards The Land" come from an informal recording session in March 1972 at Tinker "Stinky" West's studios in Highlands, NJ., while "How The West Was Lost" was an early song from the sessions for E-Street Shuffle and is known as either "Evacuation of the West" or "No More Kings in Texas" before getting a new title here to go with the concept. Speaking of new titles: There was some work to be done here. Like his black brother from another mother, Phil Lynott over in Dublin, Springsteen at this time was really high on portentious, if not pretentious song titles that the songs rarely lived up to. Of the four acoustic songs he recorded as publishing demos in early 1973, "The Saga Of The Architect Angel" (written as a, uhm, tribute of sorts to John Wayne of all people!) became "How The West Was Won", after its closing lines. "The Ballad Of The Self-Loading Pistol", while a very fine song, had the problem that it wasn't really about a self-loading pistol, so it is here more appropriately titled "Blood On My Hands". All of these have never been officially released, although a truncated version of "Don't You Want To Be An Outlaw?" found its way onto the 2016 compilation Chapter & Verse as "The Ballad Of Jesse James". This is the full-length 7 minute version including the later excised verse about Billy The Kid. The borrowed cover art is Majesty Of The Old West by Ben Joshua King. 

Sound quality obviously varies, due to the bootleg origins, but is very listenable. And there are some genuinely great songs in here. "How The West Was Lost", by any name, is one of the greatest lost songs of the Boss, and his refusal to issue it officially as part of Tracks or another archival collection is inexcusable. Every discerning music fan should have some space for that song. I think "Blood On My Hands" is also definitely one of the stronger offerings of Springsteen from the epoch, certainly better than some stuff on Greetings. And while admittedly the two Bruce Springsteen Band tracks are a little ramshackle, it's interesting to hear the band stretch out in long semi-improvisation, clearly working towards the form and sound of the E-Street Shuffle period. 

So, giddy up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, 'cause cowboy Bruce is gonna take you on a ride through The Wild West...