40 Years In The Wilderness With Bruce

I came out with my soul untouched. The liberating prophet of rock and roll performing at Max's Kansas City in New York, Aug. 20, 1972.
Hat tip to No Depression

"The Weight," Bruce Springsteen

Put the load right on me. Performing with the expanded E Street Band on May 2 in Newark in a tribute to the late Levon Helm (and to songwriter Robbie Robertson).

Ink-Stained Hustlers

Rough being Richard Nixon this week, with his diabolical influence being plotted well into the 21st century (he resigned in 1974 and died in 1994). Steve Donoghue blames him for Iraq, calling Nixon's national security fixation "an inky stain on the nation, and it spread forward in time" to what Donoghue calls an illegal war launched by his former operatives. In his March 29 Rolling Stone interview with Jon Stewart (not available in full on-line; I'm a proud subscriber), Bruce Springsteen also waxes metaphorical in saddling Nixon and his men with Wall Street greed, the subject of his new song "Easy Money":

That's the street criminalization of the big-money Wall Street hustle. That's the guy that's saying, "Everybody else is getting theirs, and not paying for it, I'm going out to get mine." That hustle has been legitimized over the past four years, when you have the level of risk and greed at the top of the financial industry, and people basically walking away, relatively scot-free, completely unaccountable. That lack of accountability is the poison shot straight into the heart of the country. It goes back to Watergate. Watergate legitimized the hustle at the top of the game -- it legitimized every street-corner thug. You almost had the country brought down by it, basically. All the radical hippies, longhairs -- no one ever came as close to sinking the USA as the guys in the pinstriped suits.

"We Take Care Of Our Own"

The first single from Bruce Springsteen's new album, "Wrecking Ball." Details here. Hat tip to Lisa Golden.

"Thunder Road"

Bruce Springsteen and Melissa Etheridge. I post this every year or so because it's one of the best things in the world. Watch for the line he lets her sing.

Every Life About This Time

Dave Alvin, co-founder of the Blasters, briefly guitarist for X, and all-American, all-Los Angeleno troubadour, raised the roof and a few ghosts during his set Sunday night at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. During "Run Conejo Run," a tribute to fallen bandmate Chris Gaffney, he glanced over his shoulder at the stairs leading up to the dressing room as though his friend were about to step in with his accordion. "Black Rose Of Texas," from his new album Eleven Eleven, was for another lost musician friend, Amy Farris. Introducing his first encore, his classic "Fourth Of July," he bonded with audience members over Foxy's Restaurant on Paramount Blvd. in his native Downey and Pup 'N' Taco, a born- and died-in-LA chain. And he opened with "Ash Grove," a boogie about the legendary LA folk club that he used to sneak into as a boy to hear blues legends who have died long since. The closing verses deserve to be quoted at length:

Well I can’t say I been all sinner
Can’t say I been all saint
I’ve done some good deeds and I’ve made big mistakes
I been in and out of love
Said words I regret
I been drunk, been sober
Smoked too many cigarettes
And I’m out on this highway travelin’ town to town
And the news on the radio just brings me down
Intolerance and fear
Ignorance and lies
It’s the same old same old I heard a million times
And I’m thinkin’ of friends and lovers
And how they come and go
Like look-alike houses on the side of the road
Full of everyday people tryin’ to get ahead
Tryin’ to find a reason just to get out of bed
‘Cause we all need somethin’ just to get us through
Well I’m gonna play the blues tonight man
‘Cause that’s what I do

If you've been 56 (like Alvin) or 57 (like me) and the vast ocean of loss is shimmering on the horizon, you feel that way sometimes. Kathy, while no blues hound, enjoyed the show and said it was a blessed thing when someone can make a living doing what he loves. As for me, I rely on the canon of my aging songwriters almost as much as my prayer book and NRSV -- Springsteen, Tom Russell (with whom Alvin wrote "California Snow," which he performed Sunday), John Hiatt, Robert Earl Keen. Alvin's the only one in the pantheon who sings anywhere near as low as I do. I was following the capo up and down the fretboard of his pretty cutaway Martin and staring at his fingers, trying to learn the chord shapes.

With such a prolific and eloquent songwriter and poet, one is also curious about the shape of his life. While Alvin interacts graciously with his audience, he's reticent about personal matters beyond mentioning menthol cigarettes a couple of times and sipping self-consciously from the half-finished Bud Light he carried on stage. His voice is so mellow and supple that you want to tell him to keep on medicating it however he wants. He's written songs that ache with desire, regret, and tormenting jealousy, probably bits of narrative peeking between what Mark Knopfler called the bars of a rhyme. If you want to hear social commentary, check out the powerful medley of his song "Jubilee Train" with Woody Guthrie's "Do Re Mi" and Chuck Berry's "Promised Land," all the peril and promise of living in America packed into a seven hard-rocking minutes.

Alvin performed 15 songs Sunday night and could've done a hundred. I'll be back again hoping to hear "Every Night About This Time," "Out In California," and the achingly beautiful new song, "Manzanita," which I mean to essay with the St. John's folk circle. He played acoustic guitar the whole time, with longtime collaborator Chris Miller filling in on electric. And what a treat when his elder brother, Dr. Phil Alvin (mathematics, UCLA, shown at left above at an earlier gig), joined him for three, including "Marie Marie," which Dave wrote for Phil to sing in their band the Blasters, and "What's Up With Your Brother?", in which they work out some sibling rivalry. On the album version, Dave acknowledges that he likes to have his privacy respected. "Loose lips sink ships, mi hermano," he says. Fair enough. But we do get the picture from the songs, and it does help.

Bruce Juiced

Bruce Springsteen became a superstar in the mid-1980 as the anti-Reagan, a working class patriot expressing a hermeneutic of skepticism about authority. Insiders say his upcoming album has the same energy:

"He gets into economic justice quite a bit," a source with knowledge of the upcoming album told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's very rock'n' roll. He feels it's the angriest album he's ever made. Bear in mind, though, that [Springsteen] wrote and recorded the majority of the album before the Occupy movements started, so he's not just setting headlines to music."

Richard, Arnold, And Maria

How did Arnold Schwarzenegger choose a political party? Richard Nixon (who would've been 99 today) was the one:

I heard Nixon speak [during the 1968 campaign]. He was talking about free enterprise, getting government off your back, lowering taxes and strengthening the military. Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air. I said to my friend, "What party is he?" My friend said, "He's a Republican." I said, "Then I am a Republican!”

They met for the first time at the Nixon library in November 1991, after the future governor of California arrived by chopper from a movie set to attend a reception in 37's honor. As library director, I introduced them, not that they didn't recognize one other already. I was on a flight with Nixon in the 1980s when he ran into Maria Shriver and huddled with her for 20 minutes, sharing stories about politics and their respective political clans (this was before she married Schwarzenegger, with whom, it's rumored, she may be reconciling). I also met Bruce Springsteen because of Nixon, but that's another story.

"Hard-Core Troubadour," Steve Earle

Don't you want to get your guitar out and learn the chords right now? Listen for the Springsteen reference.

"Because The Night," Bruce, Patti, and U2

During the 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert, Bono reunited Springsteen and Smith for "the song we wish we'd written," the song Bruce gave away during the "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" sessions. Listen for the 23-second bridge, the most majestic of Bruce's peerless bridges, a bridge of Wagnerian proportions.

"The Rising," Springsteen & the E Street Band

An Easter hymn about Sept. 11. "May your precious blood bind me, Lord, as I stand before your fiery light." The St. John's folk circle will attempt the song at the May 7 women's brunch.
Hat tip to Paul Arndt (who will pay the guitar solo)

"Because The Night," Springsteen and Stipe

R.E.M.'s lead singer, performing with Springsteen and the E Street Band during the John Kerry campaign in 2004. The background here.

"Fortunate Son," Fogerty and Springsteen

Two great American rockers rock David Eisenhower

Levon And Bruce

At a documentary film festival in Copenhagen, Stewart Nusbaumer reflects on the lives of two great American voices:

With Levon Helm, the musician is traveling down the homestretch of his life, the riotous past is present yet mostly behind him -- he is proud he did it his way, and today he loves his land in Woodstock. With Bruce Springsteen, he looks back upon a crucial transitional time in his life, when he learned not only to make the album he wanted to make ["Darkness on the Edge of Town"], but to be the man he wanted to be.

How Do You Not Release "Sherry Darling"?

Re-watching the wonderful HBO documentary about Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" sessions in 1977-78, I'm amazed by his stubborn insistence on his vision of a formalistic, unsmiling record rooted in the bottled-up Protestant heart of small-town middle America.

He'd been listening to Hank Williams and other country artists, and they lured him far from Asbury Park and New York City. The revealing videotapes made during the sessions and integrated with present-day interviews in the documentary make clear that his notebooks were brimming with East Coast exuberance -- classic songs like "Sherry Darling" (below, in a 1984 performance in Toronto; four years before, I was in the audience), "Fire," "Talk To Me" (which he gave to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes), "Because The Night" (which he gave to Patti Smith and which became her one and only hit), and the lusty roadhouse rocker "Ramrod" (which he saved up for "The River").

"Sherry Darling" has one of Bruce's most achingly beautiful bridges:

Let there be sunlight, let there be rain
Let the broken heart love again
Sherry, we can run with our eyes open wide before the tide

Neither it nor any of those other songs made it onto "Darkness." Too much love and joy for an album that begins, "Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland." How many rock stars put that kind of authenticity ahead of sure-fire hits?

Bruuuuuuuuuuce

I remember going to Tower Records in San Diego in the spring of 1978 and buying "Darkness On The Edge Of Town." I remember speeding home to Clairemont Mesa in my Chevy Vega, taking the album out of the yellow bag, unwrapping it, putting it on my roommate Daniel Shawler's turntable, and listening to it all the way through twice. I remember not liking the lean, angry, even threatening music as much as 1975's towering "Born To Run" and deciding that it didn't matter, because it was Bruce Springsteen's new album, and I'd make it my business to love it, which I did.

Tonight HBO aired a wonderful documentary about the year Springsteen and his colleagues spent in the studio grasping after a sound characterized by what he calls "apocalyptic grandeur." iTunes has just released one of a score or more of previously unreleased songs from the session, "Save My Love," with lots more to come on Nov. 16 (including a song called "The Promise," which sounds amazing, based on the snippets we heard tonight). Springsteen's a canny businessman who's extruded old material in time for Christmas before, and I'm glad, because when there's new music from the greatest rock and roller ever, even when it's old, life is good.

Blue-Eyed Soul Songs: "I Played The Fool" (1978)

Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, performing in Germany in 1982. Steven van Zandt, who played Silvio Dante on "The Sopranos," wrote the song for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes' seminal 1978 album "Hearts of Stone." Bruce Springsteen also wrote or co-wrote three songs on the album (bandleader Johnny Lyon, like van Zandt, is an old friend from Asbury Park days). Disciples of Soul trombone player Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg, shown here, also played in in the Jukes horn section. He's now a member of Max Weinberg's "Tonight Show" band.

Hanging With Bruce Songs: "Sherry Darling" (1980)

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, performing his happiest song ever at a concert I attended in Nassau Coliseum on New Year's Eve in 1980

Among The Eggheads On The Boss's Birthday

From an academic symposium last weekend to discuss the work of the greatest single figure in the history of rock and roll:

"His music can call us to a higher purpose," said Dr. James Kelly of Carlow University in Pittsburgh...

Amen.

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

Perfect Songs: "If I Should Fall Behind" (1992)

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. Happy birthday to the Boss.