June 30: Like many children of Dylan and the sixties, the Doors championed revolt.  Sometimes it was blatantly political, as in The Unknown Soldier or Five to One, but mostly it was about breaking free from the constraints of convention and conformity.  Writes Tony Magistrale in “Wild Child: Jim Morrison’s Poetic Journeys,” It is certainly true that Morrison is critical of the wasted energies he saw expended in Vietnam and in the maintenance of rigid middle-class mentality at home.  But the thrust of his invective is against our superficial selves, our social and conventional and conforming selves, which he fears will prevent our being true to the deeper self.  In ‘Ship of Fools,’ the poet applies the medieval metaphor to contemporary America, mocking this country’s complacent attitude toward its space ‘progress’ by reminding us of some lingering business neglected at home: ‘People walking on the moon/ Smog will get you pretty soon. . . Hangin in and holding fast/ Hope our little world will last.’  Morrison’s elusive ambiguities are fodder for our conflicts and doubts, for the constant complexities of feelings which constitute daily life in the modern world.  But his social critique, while often searing in its approach to American institutions and their demand for conformity, did not conclude in pessimism or desperation” (Journal of Popular Culture 142)

Ship Of Fools (N.Y. :1970)

June 29: Besides borrowing from Albeniz (see last post), the Doors borrowed from the baroque composer Albinoni for “Feast of Friends,” which was released as part of An American Prayer.  An instrumental-only version by the Doors was released as part of The Doors Box Set (1997), and it’s that version that’s included here, along with a classical rendering by Leppard and the English Chamber Orchestra.  You can have your own do-it-yourself verrecite the lyrics to

Wow, I’m sick of doubt
Live in the light of certain
South
Cruel bindings.
The servants have the power
dog-men and their mean women
pulling poor blankets over
our sailors

I’m sick of dour faces
Staring at me from the TV
Tower, I want roses in
my garden bower; dig?
Royal babies, rubies
must now replace aborted
Strangers in the mud
These mutants, blood-meal
for the plant that’s plowed.

They are waiting to take us into
the severed garden
Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
comes death on a strange hour
unannounced, unplanned for
like a scaring over-friendly guest you’ve
brought to bed
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven’s
claws

No more money, no more fancy dress
This other kingdom seems by far the best
until it’s other jaw reveals incest
and loose obedience to a vegetable law.

I will not go
Prefer a Feast of Friends
To the Giant Family.

Background an Albinoni http://www.baroquemusic.org/bqxalb.html

Doors: Albinoni’s Adagio In G Minor Albinoni_ Adagio For Organ & Strings In G Minor

June 28: So what’s behind the enduring appeal of some of the Doors’ songs?  For one thing, they sometimes are lifted and twisted from the masters.  A case in point: Check out Asturias from Albeniz’ Suite Espanola and then the opening of “Spanish Caravan,” from Waiting for the Sun (1968).  Robbie Krieger must have practiced Albeniz’s music for some time when he was learning how to play Flemenco guitar.  From there, it’s just one small step to an original based on it.  For another, in their better songs, the lyrics mesh with the music.  Here the exotic lyrics blend with the Spanish flavor of the music like water is wet.

Albeniz_ Asturias (from Suite espanola, Op. 47) Spanish Caravan

June 27: “Peace Frog” doesn’t jump out at me as ranking with the better songs on Morrison Hotel (1970), but there’s an interesting story behind it.  In Riders on the Storm, Densmore writes,

‘Peace Frog’ was frustrating.  Robby had this great rhythm likce, but Jim wasn’t coming up with something lyrically to complement it.  One day, when he was around the corner at the Palms Bar with Frank and Babe, we went ahead and recorded an instrumental based on Robbie’s lick.  The track smoked!  Jim finally came in to do some vocals, and Rothchild asked him to bring his poetry notebooks the next day.  The following afternoon Paul and JIm performed a minor miracle.  They superimposed two lyric poems, two lines of thought, on top of each other.  One was a metaphor for Jim’s life: the other, a metaphor for Pam.

She came
Blood in the streets, it’s up to my knee
She came
Blood in the streets in the town of Chicago
She came
Blood on the rise, it’s following me
Think about the break of day

She came and then she drove away
Sunlight in her hair

She came
Blood in the streets runs a river of sadness
She came
Blood in the streets it’s up to my thigh
She came
Yeah the river runs red down the legs of a city
She came
The women are crying red rivers of weepin’

She came into town and then she drove away
Sunlight in her hair

Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind

Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven
Blood stains the roofs and the palm trees of Venice
Blood in my love in the terrible summer
Bloody red sun of Fantastic L.A.

Blood screams her brain as they chop off her fingers
Blood will be born in the birth of a nation
Blood is the rose of mysterious union

There’s blood in the streets, it’s up to my ankles
Blood in the streets, it’s up to my knee
Blood in the streets in the town of Chicago
Blood on the rise, it’s following me

Densmore later goes on to address Morrison:  ”Robby, Ray, and I and our respective mates were enjoying our material success, while you continued to go down in spirit.  Or as you wrote in ‘Peace Frog,’ the blood continued to rise.  A ’spirit’ was taking over your body, wasn’t it?” (pp. 245-24 6).  And here I always thought the blood referred to the blood being spilled in the streets of protest sweeping America at the time.  The green section refers to an incident in which the young Morrison witnessed death on the highway and believed the dead indian’s spirit had invaded his.  ”When You’re Strange,” the recent documentary on the Doors, also  references the  incident.    Peace Frog (live New York)

June 26: Like its predecessor, Morrison Hotel, the Doors’ final studio album with Morrison, L.A. Woman, had a healthy dose of blues.  A case in point: “Been Down So Long,” which took its title and refrain from Richard Farina’s novel, “Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me,” which itself quotes Furry Lewis’ “Turn Your Money Green.” Richard Farina, a contemporary of Bob Dylan, was a counterculture songwriter and folk singer, dulcimer player, and scene-maker in addition to being a novelist.  Some believe he might have given Dylan a run for his money had he not died in a motorcycle accident in 1966, unlike Bob, who survived his.  His best-known song is “Pack Up Your Sorrows,”  which to my ear doesn’t rank anywhere near Dylan’s best folk or rock.  ”Been Down So Long” offers blatant male chauvinism patterned after John Lee Hooker.  From p. 343 of Sugarman’s and Hopkins’ No One Here Gets Out Alive:

I said baby, baby, baby,

Won’t you get down on your knees

C’mon little darlin’

Won’t you give your love to me

From Hooker:

Crawl. crawl, c’mon crawl

Get on out there on your hands and knees, baby

Crawl all over me.

Been Down So Long [Detroit: Live] http://www.richardandmimi.com/beendown.html

June 25: Jim Morrison was schooled at a time when Edith Hamilton’s book on Greek and Roman mythology was standard across much of the country, if not all of it.  Hence, it’s not surprising that he would draw on mythology for a song or two.  In Riders on the Storm, Densmore gives the lowdown on the origin of “Hyacinth House” from L.A. Woman (1971).

“Edith Hamilton’s book on Greek mythology illuminated the Hyacinth myth for me.  She helped me realize that Jim’s song, ‘Hyacinth House,’ was probably the saddest one he ever wrote.  Hamilton wrote:  ’Another flower that came into being through the death of a beautiful youth was the hyacinth.  The festival of Hyacinths/That lasts throught the tranquil night.  In a contest with Apollo/He was slain.  Discuss throwing they competed/And the god’s swift cast/Sped beyond the goal he aimed at/and struck Hyacinthus full in the forehead a terrible wound.

He had been Apollo’s dearest companion.  There was no rivalry between them when they tried which could throw the discus the farthest; they were only playing a game.  The god was horror-struck to see the blood gush forth and the lad, deathly pale, fall to the ground.  He turned as pale himself as he caught him in his arms and tried to stanch the wound.  But it was too late.  When he held him the boy’s head fell back as a flower does when its stem is broken.  He was dead and Apollo kneeling beside him wept for him, dying so young, so beautiful   He had killed him, although through no fault of his own, and he cried, ‘Oh, if I could give my life for yours or die for you . . .’  Even as he spoke, the bloodstained grass turned green again and there bloomed forth the wondrous flower that would make the lad’s name known forever.”

“This passage is a very synchronistic metaphor for our band.  Ray, who had ‘discovered’ Jim, always refers to himself as an Appollonian.  There was no rivalry between us when we wrote and arranged our songs; hence, we split the publishing.  Jim forgot that life is a game, and self-destructed at a young age, although not so beautiful anymore.  The Doors had killed him, through no fault of the band members, and Ray, sacrificing our individuality, never misses an opportunity to promote Jim.  Our songs (flowers) have bloomed with wondrous longevity” (pp. 257-257).

Hyacinth House (demo) Hyacinth House

June 24: Regrettably, the Lizard King checked out of the Morrison Hotel before the Doors were able to record a live version of “L.A. Woman,” his melancholic ode to the city of lost angels.  I’ve heard cover bands do it, and it never fails to satisfy.   A health portion of the album, also titled L.A. Woman (1971), paid subtle tribute to musical predecessors, such as James Brown and Elvis Presley.  This song is no different.  In Riders on the Storm, Densmore writes,

“Another tip of the hat to Jim’s roots was in the song ‘L.A. Woman.’  We had cut the tempo in half for the “change the mood from glad to sadness” middle section, and Jim came up with this phrase he wanted to repeat over and over.  Since it contained the black slang word mojo (for sexual prowess), I got the idea to steadily increase the tempo back up to the original speed, a la orgasm.  It was hard to estimate the original tempo after five minutes of slow music, but we got it on the second take.  After getting the song down ot tape, Jim called Ray, Robby, and me into the back room.                                 ‘Check this out.’                                                                                                                                                                                                       He wrote: JIM MORRISON                                                                                                                                                                        ‘Watch this,’ he said with self-satisfaction.                                                                                                                                                 He then proceeded to write each letter below in a different order, crossing each out in his name, one at a time.  Jim the anagram man.                                                                                                                                                                                                        MR MOJO RISIN                                                                                                                                                                                                  The phrase we just recorded in ‘L.A.’ Woman’!                                                                                                                                            ’God damn, Jim,’ I said.  ’That’s cool!’                                                                                                                                                           ” ‘Very nice,’ Ray added.  Robby smiled.   (p.259).

Ironically, Morrison was losing his rock mojo.  After a promising show in Dallas in December of 1970, the Doors proceeded to New Orleans the next night, where they hit “the lowest note yet.” Ray Manzarek maintains he witnessed Morrison’s spirit leaving him that night.  After the show, the three Doors had a secret meeting and decided they were through performing.   “Three pallbearers, standing in the rain, had just put our live act in the ground.  Finally.” (p. 263).     L.A. Woman

June 23: Bob Dylan made songs of epic length possible with classics like “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,” “Desolation Row” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” to name a few of the more prominent ones.  But all of these were pretty much singular in tone and volume.  In other words, the music itself didn’t change from stanza to stanza, just the words.  With “The End” and today’s featured song, “When the Music’s Over,” the Doors take Dylan’s approach a step further by adding improvisational elements in the middle, by having a range of tones, and by offering a wide dynamic range with sections as soft as a whisper to sections as loud as a full-throated roar.

With a melody that’s a second cousin to “Soul Kitchen,” this Doors’ masterpiece offers just about every facet of their palette:  Existential fatalism in “music is your only friend/until the end”; fear of death: Before I sink
Into the big sleep/ I want to hear I want to hear/ The scream of the butterfly,” here with the organ echoing the sense; a romantic plea, presumably to Pam: “Come back, baby/ Back into my arms”; ecological concern in “what have they done to the earth?  What have they done to our fair sister?/ Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her/Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/And tied her with fences and dragged her down” [ages before BP!); rejection of salvation: "Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection/ Send my credentials to the House of Detention/I got some friends inside," only to be followed later by a climactic and futile plea for it: "Save us/Jesus!", culminating in the lament that music is your only friend.  And last but not least, a rebellious political chant all young people at the time understood, one which yours truly and his friends similarly afflicted with the instant-gratification syndrome adopted as their own: "We want the world and we want it now!"  This line leading to a shattering crescendo.  Throw into the mix a psychedelic guitar solo, percussive bursts, improvisational organ riffs, volume shifts, some cryptic lines, all in a minor key, and you have quintessential Doors before they went soft with The Soft Parade. One of my major concert disappointments occurred when Morrison skipped the climactic "Persian night, babe/See the light,   babe /Save us!/Jesus! Save us!", letting the music speak for itself, which it didn't.  When The Music's Over (Live: In Concert)

June 22: Though well short of a masterpiece, the bluesy rock of Morrison Hotel was a welcome shift away from the string-drenched, syrupy  mush that characterized much of the misguided fourth album, The Soft Parade.  One of the better songs on the album and certainly the one with the most airplay is the blues shuffle, "Roadhouse Blues."  The song is another Morrison is said to have written for Pam, the lyrics a reference to something he'd often say to her as they headed out for a favorite place.

Yeah, keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel
Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel
Yeah, we're goin' to the Roadhouse
We're gonna have a real
Good time

In Riders on the Storm, Densmore gives some background on the recording. "One day Rothchild [the producer] arrived as excited as we had ever seen him.  And he was always excited, but a little extra that day.  ’I just saw Lonnie Mack, the guitar player, walking down the hall and asked him if he wanted to play bass on a blues since Ray Neapolitan called and is going to be late.’  We had used bass players on our albums since the second one, to get that punch.  Robby perked up and muttered, ‘Sounds good.’  ’What was his hit?’ I asked, half impressed.  ’Memphis.’  ’Yeah, that was cool!’ I agreed.”So Mack arrived shortly thereafter, a bit reluctant because he wasn’t a bass player, but after being told it was a shuffle, he assented, saying, ‘Ok, teach me the changes.’

Lonnie sat down in front of the paisley baffles that soaked up the sound.   A hefty guy with a pencil-thin beard, he had on a wide-brimmed, floppy leather hat that had become his trademark.  Lonnie Mack epitomized the blues–not the rural blues, but city blues;  he was bad. ‘I’ll sing the lyrics for you,’ Jim offered meekly.  He was unusually shy.  We all were, because to us, the guitar player we had asked to sit in with us was a living legend.  Three hours later we had gotten the track.  ’Goddamn, Lonnie,” I exclaimed. ‘You laid back as far as pssible on the turnarounds, the let-it-roll sections.  You’re in the back of the pocket, as far back as you can get.’                                                                                                                      ’Is it okay?’                                                                                                                                                                                                               ‘It’s great.  Fantastic!’ I countered.  One beat is about a mile too long, I thought to myself.  Military music is on the front of the beat, black music on the back.  This track we’d just laid down is so far back it’s as if we shifted down into second gear”  (pp. 234-235).   Roadhouse Blues (The Doors In Concert)

June 21: “Alabama Song” (“Whisky Bar”) is Jim Morrison’s signature song even though it wasn’t written by him or his bandmates.  Some background on the song from Wikipedia: “The “Alabama Song” (also known as “Whisky Bar” or “Moon over Alabama” or “Moon of Alabama“) was originally published in Bertolt Brecht’s Hauspostille (1927). It was set to music by Kurt Weill for the 1927 “Songspiel” Mahagonny and used again in Weill’s and Brecht’s 1930 opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In the latter, it is performed by the character Jenny and her fellow prostitutes in the first act. Musically it contains elements of foxtrot, blues and advanced soprano coloraturas, sung by Jenny Corless.”

Though Morrison did all kinds of drugs to excess, hallucinogenic and otherwise, in his effort to go to extremes, at bottom he was a drunk, something that marred or ruined many a performance and contributed mightily to the Doors’ reputation as the bad boys of rock among critics and venue operators.  The Weill tune is a good fit for the Doors because of its cabaret-style mix of music and theater.  ”Unknown Soldier” would seem to mimic the tune.  With the release of the bluesy rock of Morrison Hotel, the Lizard King was hoping to improve his image and consented to a series of PBS interviews with Jerry Hopkins, a correspondent for Rolling Stone, the rock magazine that had done the most damage to the Doors’ reputation.  From No One Here Gets Out Alive:

“At the end of the third session Jim stretched amiably and stared at Jerry, who seemed to have run out of questions.  ’Don’t you want to talk about my drinking?’ Jim asked.  He shifted in the chair, smiling.  ’Well, yeah, sure,’ Jerry said.  ’You’ve got a reputation for . . .’   ‘getting drunk,’ Jim finished.  ’Well, it’s true, all true.  Getting drunk is, uh . . . getting drunk, you’re in complete control . . . up to a point.  It’s your choice, every time you take a sip.  You have a lot of small choices.’  There was a long pause.  Jerry waited for more.  ’It’s like . . . I guess it’s the difference between suicide and slow capitulation.’

Did Jim really believe he was slowly drinking himself to death and not care becaue it fulfilled the poetic tradition of which he was so enamored?  Or did he simply, for dramatic effect, choose to suggest that was his fate?  Jerry decided to try to find out.

‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked. Jim laughed easily. ‘I don’t know, man, let’s go next door and get drunk’ (pp. 245-246).

A few years earlier, he had this to say about drink in response to a former girlfriend’s (Tandy Martin) question as to why he drank so much.  ’I've been drinking,’ Jim said finally, ‘but I’m getting good at it.  I can tell now, I can, uh, gauge everthing so that I stay in one place.  Ever sip is another chance, another flashing chance at bliss’  (pp. 113-114).   In The Crystal Ship, it’s a kiss that gives that chance.  For comparison purpose, here are versions by the Doors and by Marianne Faithfull.  Alabama Song (Whisky Bar) [Doors In Concert]Alabama Song (Faithful: live)

June 20: Here’s a case where an excerpt from the movie When You’re Strange gives a better appreciation of a song, in this case, the comparatively lightweight “Touch Me,” the single of which caused many a Doors fan to shudder at the pop pap being served up complete with horns.  The song climbed the charts, of course, serving as yet another reminder that the public ear is mostly tin and tinsel. Speaking of which, here’s a live take of the song from tinseltown.

Touch Me [Hollywood: 7/21/69] Touch Scares-(By Jim Morrison)-(w Johnny Depp)

June 19: Mozart’s music has been described as having a shadowed joy about it, especially his later compositions.   Much the same could be said about the music of the Doors. Even beneath the most shimmering surface there is a sense of existential dread and sadness.  Take “Summer’s Almost Gone” from Waiting for the Sun (1968), for example.  The melody is beguiling but with an edgy cast.   Then, there are the lines.  The first three follow the course of a summer day and suggest an ecstatic appreciation of the sensuous world, but the fourth line signals the dread in the awareness that summer is slipping away.  But it’s not just summer.  It’s life itself.  In the last verse, “winter’s coming on.”  This song exemplifies the use of natural symbols to point to more universal meanings–summer as life at its fullest, followed by winter, the season of death.   It also exemplifies a technique used sparingly by the Doors–beginning with the chorus instead of the verse.  I think it’s one of their more evocative songs, an ideal summer ender, though a touch thin on development.

Morning found us calmly unaware
Noon burn gold into our hair
At night, we swim the laughing sea
When summer’s gone
Where will we be
Where will we be
Where will we be

Summer’s Almost Gone (S.F. Matrix: 3/10/67)

June 18:  ”Moonlight Drive” is the song that gave birth to the Doors.  In 1965, Morrison had written a number of lyrics that would end up on the first three albums, but there was no music for them, much less a band to play it.  In August, he happened upon Ray Manzarek walking along Venice Beach. They had known each other in film school but were merely acquaintances, ships that had passed in the night.  According to No One Here Gets Out Alive, here’s the dialogue between Morrison and Manzarek:

“‘Hey, man!,”

“‘Hey, Ray, how ya doin’?'”

“‘Okay.  I thought you went to New York.’”

“‘No I stayed here.  Living with Dennis on and off.  Writin’.'”

“‘Writing?  What’cha been writing?”

“‘Oh, not much,’” Jim said.  ”‘Just some songs.’”

“‘Songs?’” Ray asked.  ”‘Let’s hear em.”

Jim squatted down in the sand.  Ray kneeled in front of him.  Jim balanced himself with a hand to either side, squeezing the sand through his finders, eyes clamped shut.  He chose the first verse of ‘Moonlight Drive.”  The words were slow and careful:

Let’s swim to the moon, uh huh
Let’s climb through the tide
Penetrate the evenin’ that the
City sleeps to hide

When he finished, Ray said, “‘Those are the greatest fuckin’ song lyrics I’ve ever heard. [Apparently Ray hadn't heard Dylan yet!]  Let’s start a rock ‘n’ roll band and make a million dollars.’

“‘Exactly,” Jim said back.  ”‘That’s what I had in mind all along.’”  (pp. 60-61).

Soon, the pair was working on songs in Ray’s “small, funky apartment, Jim nervously holding lyrics for security (although he knew them all), standing still and motionless, wishing the moth he was sure was stuck in his mouth would go away”  while Ray played the piano (64).

Moonlight Drive (S.F. Matrix: 3/10/67)

June 17: In a 1967 Newsweek interview, Morrison described what  the Doors were all about:  ”It’s a search, an opening of one dor after another. As yet there’s no consistent philosophy or  politics.  Sensuousness and evil is an attractive image to us now, but think of it as a snakeskin that will shed sometime.  Our work, our performing, is a striving for metamorphosis.  Right now I’m more interested in the dark side of life, the evil thing, the dark side of the moon, the nighttime.  But in our music it appears to me that we’re seeking, striving, trying to break though to some cleaner, freer realm” (No One Here Gets Out Alive 143).  If “evil” describes the Doors’ work, it would have to be evil lite, but the dark side of the moon and nighttime certainly fit.  A case in point, the eerie “End of the Night” from their debut album.  Here we have a dichotomy set up between those born to sweet delight and those born to the endless night, heirs of Poe and Dracula forever denied “realms of bliss” and “realms of light.” Note the explosion of volume on the final verse so typical of the early Doors.   End Of The Night

June 16: Like many performers of the sixties, the Doors were students of the blues, particularly the urban blues of Chicago and Chess Records.  And of course they expressed their love by doing covers of blues tunes and occasionally performing with a bluesman.  But unlike, say, Cream, Hendrix, Dylan, and Led Zeppelin to name a few, they never quite took the blues to a different place.  Their performances are enjoyable, sometimes even smoking, but never truly transcendent.  On their first album, they tackle “Back Door Man,” a Willie Dixon tune made famous by Howlin’ Wolf.  Here’s what Densmore has to say in Riders on the Storm:

Oh, yeah, ma
Yeah, I’m a back door man
I’m a back door man
The men don’t know
But the little girls understand

“Obviously Jim knew something I didn’t understand.  His gutteral grunts in the intro of ‘Back Door Man’ were those of an old black man in the bayou who had been through the wars with women.

You men eat your dinner
Eat your pork and beans
I eat more chicken
Than any man ever seen, yeah, yeah
I’m a back door man, what
The men don’t know
But the little girls understand

“It took me a while to realize that the verse was about the other men only sleeping with their whiles while the singer was sleeping with all of them, but having to steal away in the middle of the night” (p. 118).  Back door man is a double-entendre.  On the one hand, it’s a lover who comes/leaves through the back door as opposed to the hubby, the front-door man.  But it can also mean the style of love-making illegal in many states back then, the kind that would eliminate any chance of pregnancy and detection.  For comparison purposes, I’ve posted a live Doors version and the original by Howlin’ Wolf.  I like both, but one has a lot more menace to it.  Back Door Man [S.F: Matrix: 3/10/67) Back Door Man (Howlin' Wolf)

June 15: Today's theme: All that glitters is not gold. The year is 1969 after the "flasher incident" in Miami and after a four-show gig at a sleazy supper-club place in Mexico in June, where Densmore writes he "could hear the clanking of silverware right in the middle of the Oedipal section" of "The End," Morrison looking strikingly out of place in his leather pants.   Back in L.A. Densmore noticed something odd about the gold album he'd just received for Waiting for the Sun--the number of songs on the label didn't match the number of songs on the disc.  "Wait a minute," he told his girlfriend Julia, "let me see. 'Love Street' is about three minutes long, and there's no way it could fit into this tiny bandwidth! This song looks like it's under two minutes'" (Riders on the Storm, p. 22).

He continues: "After getting a hammer from the kitchen, I took the gold record outside to the trash cans.  I leaned the frame over one of the cans and tapped hard on the glass.  It broke and I carefully pulled out the record, making sure there wasn't any broken glass stuck to it.  I brought it back inside to the turntable.  'This thing is really flimsy.  It isn't a real record . . . some kind of pressing. . . . I wonder if it will play?'  I put the needle down on the first cut, and through lots of audio crackling we could hear a lare orchestra with someone reciting poetry. 'It's Rod McKuen!  It's fucking Rod McKuen!'  'That's funny,' Julia laughed. "Why do you think they did it?'"

I laughed uproariously, yet at the same time I felt insulted.  'I don't believe it.  Theyr'e too cheap to spend five or six bucks on the real thing.  So they just get an old $1.98 Thrifty Drug Store discount bin record and schlock it with fake gold, stick a new label on it, and slam it into a frame!  God Damn.  Another myth shattered" (p.237).   Guess as the song goes, the first cut is the deepest.  "Love Street"'s a good, light song, though with a catchy melody and piano solo.  According to Sugarman's No One Here Gets Out Alive, the song is about Morrison and his soulmate Pamela's "place on Rothdell Trail called 'Love Street" (p.112).  I know of no live version, unfortunately. Love Street

June 14:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land

The opening portion of the "The End" can be read in at least two ways: 1) as the end of a love relationship 2) the end of existence, which is how Apocalypse, Now frames it.  Yet however deserving these lines are of attention, the notoriety of the song stems from the later Oedipal portion where the speaked shouts the desire to kill his father and rape his mother.  So what's the point?  Shock value?  Well, Morrison did like to test boundaries.  But according to John Densmore in Riders on the Storm, there was more to it than that.   Describing a break after several hours of failing to record the song respectably, he writes,

"We walked out into the blinding light of the neon lobby and bought some junk food out of the machines.  Jim began chanting "'FUCK the mother, kill the father.  Fuck the mother, KILL the father.'  He looked deranged.  He caught me staring at him, catching his eyes for a split-second glance, and he responed, 'It's my mantra, man.  Fuck the mother, kill the father.'  At that moment I thought that anything was possible with this guy.  He could murder somebody.

In an interview with Crawdaddy done after the release of the first album, Paul explained Jim's position: 'At one point Jim said to me during the recording session, and he was tearful, and he shouted in the studio: 'Does anybody understand   me?'  And I said yes I do, and right then and there we got into a long discussion, and Jim kept saying over and over kill the father, fuck the mother, and essentially it boils down to this: kill all those things inside yourself which are instilled in you and are not of yourself; they are alien concepts which are not yours.  They must die.  The psychedelic revolution.  Fuck the mother is very basic, and it means get back to the essence, what is reality, what is, fuck the mother is very basically mother, mother-birth, real, you can touch it, it's nature, it can't lie to you.  So what Jim says at the end of the Oedipus section, which is essentially the same thing that the classic says, kill the alien concepts, get back to reality, the end of alien concerpts, the beginning of personal concepts.'  I wasn't so sure, but Paul indulged Jim the rest of the afternoon, and the next day we finally got a take" (p. 88).The End (from Doors Live)

June 13: Although "Light My Fire" was their signature hit, "The End" is the one song that will ensure the Doors will remain in the public consciousness until, well, the end.   The reason is fairly simple.  The song is wedded to Coppola's classic Apocalyse Now, a film that enjoys both popular and critical success, including, most importantly, in academe.  Every time a film student is exposed to the movie, there's another potential fan; every time there's a Coppola retrospective or a forum on Vietnam War films or just war films, there's another potential fan.

This classic song deserves a couple posts.  Here's an anecdote about it involving the legendary groupie, Pamela Des Barres, who slept (speaking euphemistically, of course) with any number of sixties rockers, including the whipmaster Jimmie Page.  Des Barres was living in Laurel Canyon at the time  and awakened one day to the sound of the Doors echoing faintly through her window shade at about two in the afternoon.

In I'm with the Band, she writes, "I knew they had recorded an album, but it hadn't been released yet!  Who had a copy!  Who, who within a hundred yards of my presence had a copy?  . . . I was thrilled to realize that the music was coming from the green shack-house to my left and down a few dozen precarious steps.  In Laurel Canyon, that meant right next door.  I threw on a purple dress and started down the steps to make the acquaintance of the ultrahip neighbor who had a prereleased copy of the Doors' first album.

I decided to peek in a window first so I wouldn't catch this hip person in the middle of an act of intimacy brought on by the sensual moans of Jim Morrison.  I tiptoed over the rickety porch, looked into the kitchen, and clapped my hand over my mouth to capture the scream that threatened to shatter the staggering moment.  Jim Morrison in the FLESH, wearing nothing but his black leather pants, was digging around in the fridge, humming along with 'The End'; 'Mother, I want   to . . .'  Oh, my God!  I pinched myself, peeked again for the sheer joy of it, and scrambled back up the stairs to decide what to do next.  He moves, he breathes, he lives right next door!!!!" [she loves those giggly exclamation points!!!].

Shortly thereafter, after being advised by her roommate Sandy to go introduce herself, she went for it.  ”I don’t know how long it took me to get down the steps; the gongs were always bonging away in my brain, so I couldn’t hear the birds twittering or the cars going by, much less the ticking of my cheap Timex.  When I came to my extremely sensual senses, I was in the middle of a perfect backbend on Jim Morrison’s tatty Oriental rug, my purple velvet mini-dress completely over my head, his redheaded girlfriend glaring down at me.  I expected Rod Serling to appear in the doorway to narrate this ultimate in ‘uh-oh’ moments.  Trying to regain my composure, I stood up out of my backbend and offered the redhead a spot of Trimar, avoiding the lizard king who hovered in the corner whispering ‘Get it on’ under his breath.  She told me I had better leave, and I didn’t even remember arriving.  I backed out the door and ran back up the stairs, berating myself profusely for being such an idiot.”

But soon Morrison was at the door, smiling sheepishly.  ”He  was very interested in the quart of Trimar, accepted my hankerchief, and inhaled deeply.  Social amenities were out the door for the next few hours.  We sniffed the stuff, lolling around the floor, laughing at everything, until the bottle was dry . . .  By this time it was the middle of the night, and I was unable to obtain a second bottle, so Jim said a pleasant good-night and thanked Sandy and me for the wonderful hospitality.  I was disappointed that he made no attempt to lay a hand on me, but I had hopes for the future, the very near future as a matter of fact” (p. 69).

And to make a long story short, she got her man at the Hullaballo Club in L.A., rolling around in a dingy, dark loft while they were stoned until Morrison was drawn down by the echoes of ‘Light My Fire.’  After following him down a ladder, she discovered she was “ONSTAGE with the Doors, [her] mouth hanging wide open, dragging her tatty coat, her half-bottle of Trimar, and her soppy hankies, too shocked to move” (p. 71).  Ah, those were the days . . . .The End [S.F: Matrix: 3/10/67)

June 12: So the question is, how was the serene quality of Jim Morrison's vocals on "You're Lost Little Girl" from Strange Days achieved?  Herein hangs the tale direct from John Densmore's Riders on the Storm:

"'I think your song, Robby, is perfect for Frank Sinatra,'" Ray suggested with his tongue thoroughly inserted in his cheek.  "'Frank should dedicate it to his wife, Mia Farrow.'"  We all chuckled.  The vocal had a serene quality, which may have been due to Rothchild's idea of having Jim's girlfriend Pam come down and give head to Jim while he sang.  On one particular vocal take, Jim stopped singing in the middle of the song and we heard some rustling noises.  Rothschild apparently dimmed the light in the vocal booth, and who knows what was going on in there? We went with a later take, but Paul's idea may have affected the vocal we went with.  It had a tranquil mood, like the aftermath of a large explosion"  [Can't get much more suggestive than that!  'Enclose me in your gentle rain'].  When we finished mixing ‘You’re Lost Little Girl,’ we listened to it twice again.  It sounded  great” (p. 132).  The method of recording may explain why there are no official releases of a live “You’re Lost Little Girl.”  We can only imagine what the obscenity police in Miami and other places would have done had the Lizard King tried to replicate the studio version by using the same method.  You’re Lost Little Girl

June 11: Part of the reason for Morrison’s lackadaisical performances and sometimes outright contempt for his audience was that the concept of the Doors as fusion of poetry, theater, and exploratory music was being lost to sex-god idolatry.  Perhaps the finest example, albeit not the most famous, example of the fusion is “The Celebration of the Lizard,” a twenty-three minute piece whose lyrics graced the inside liner of Waiting for the Sun even though only part of it, “Not to Touch the Earth,” actually made the album, the title of which itself came from a song which wouldn’t show up on album until Morrison Hotel.  Talk about make-shift albums.

In  No One Here Gets Out Alive, Danny Sugarman quotes Morrison on his fascination with reptiles:  ”‘We must not forget that the lizard and snake are identified with the unconscious and the forces of evil.  There’s something deep in human memory that responds strongly to snakes.  Even if you’ve never seen one.  I think that a snake just embodies everything we fear.’  His long poem, he said, was ‘kind of invitation to dark forces,’ but the Lizard King image he projected was not. ‘It’s all done tongue-in-cheek,’ he insisted.  ’I don’t think people realize that.  It’s not to be taken seriously.  It’s like if you play a villain in a western it doesn’t mean that it’s you.  That’s just an aspect that you keep for show.  I don’t really take that seriously.  That’s supposed to be ironic’” (p. 191).  Surprisingly, while Morrison arguably sees  the snake’s role in the Garden of Eden, he misses the Freudian role of snakes as phallic symbols–he of all people.  Whatever one’s take on the meaning of “The Celebration of the Lizard,”  the live version features a fine example of music that dovetails with the lyrics, as in the organ to “cool air heights” and the lashing of brushes to evoke the flash of lizard’s tongue.  ”Not to touch the Earth, not to see the sun” are lines from Jame’s Frazier’s seminal The Golden Bough, a book that traces vegetation myths, beliefs, and practices, including gods like Dionysus.  T.S. Eliot drew on the book for The Waste Land.  Celebration Of The Lizard (Live in New York)

June 10. So what do “My Favorite Things,” “St. James Infirmary,” and “Summertime” have in common?  They’re not only classics but they’re referenced in the live instrumental of “Light My Fire,”  the song that launched the Doors to the top of the pop charts and into public consciousness in 1967 even though the instrumental had be cut out so the song could fit the three-minutes-or-less criteria of AM radio.  The Doors drew from deep and eclectic wells.

Legend has it that when the group was first formed, all agreed to come back to the next rehearsal with an original song but only Krieger managed to produce one, and it was “Light My Fire.”    Obviously songs equating passion with fire have been around as long as the first chant of a caveman around a campfire, so there’s nothing new in the lyrics, but the sensuality and intensity of the last verse–those did stick out even in an era of Jimi Hendrix’s legendary “Fire” and Arthur Brown’s incendiary “Fire.”   The organ introduction to the song is based on what musician’s call the “Circle of Fifths.”  If you don’t think it makes a difference, compare the two versions present here.  Light My Fire (S.F. Matric 3/10/67) Light My Fire (Vancouver 1970)

June 9: In an earlier post, we discussed how the Doors like to alternate between moderate decibels for the verse and double decibels for the chorus, as in “Soul Kitchen” and “Take It As it Comes.”  Another technique they use often is to raise the intensity of the last verse, sometimes even altering the melody a bit.  If you’ve got a strophic structure–same music repeated over multiple verse–intensifying the verse can give a touch of variation and climax to the song.  Morrison was a master at it, but he was also hopelessly moody and inconsistent.  Unlike, say, Bruce Springsteen, who will prove it all night every night, Morrison would go for the jugular one night, retreat into lethargy the next.  In this particular version of Bo Diddley’s classic, Who Do You Love, the Lizard King lashes out in the last verse, perhaps inspired by Robbie Krieger’s screaming slide guitar or the line about the cobra snake for a neck tie.  The song features the patented Bo Diddley beat, which would have made him a millionaire if indeed it could have been patented.

Who Do You Love (Bo Diddley) Who Do You Love? (In Concert CD)

June 8: What does the music of the Doors, Leonard Cohen, and Claude Debussy have in common?   Sensuality.

Here’s a standard definition of the term. sen·su·al (snsh-l)adj.1. Relating to or affecting any of the senses or a sense organ; sensory.2.a. Of, relating to, given to, or providing gratification of the physical and especially the sexual appetites. See Synonyms at sensuous.b. Suggesting sexuality; voluptuous.c. Physical rather than spiritual or intellectual.d. Lacking in moral or spiritual interests; worldly.

“The Crystal Ship” defines sensuality, combining languid and ecstatic music with suggestive lyrics.   The speaker will leave soon on the crystal ship, which offers “a thousand girls, a thousand thrills” (as in standard rock tour), but now he is with a lover, whom, before she slips into unconsiousness,  he’d  like to give him another kiss and flashing chance at bliss  and whom he like to “enclose” him in “gentle rain,” a poetic way of saying blow job.  On the studio version, there’s a piano solo before the last emphatic verse, but on the live version, an organ does the honors.  This is a ballad to be listened to a late summer’s day or early eve.  To get a feel for the sensual, compare it to the selections by Cohen and Debussy.  The Crystal Ship (S.F. The Matrix: 3/10/67) Suzanne (2009) Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

June 7: Strange Days, the classic sophomore effort of the Doors, came out in October of 1967, just in time for Halloween with its eerie and evocative mix of blues and psychedelia.  The warm organ sound that dominated the first album has been replaced by piano and a more edgy organ and guitar, all of which fits the dark poetry.  The cover of the album makes one wish for the return of the album if for no other reason the cover art it makes possible.  Here we see the dancing child with his chinese flute from Dylan’s “I Want You,” along with other characters from a circus troupe.  The music itself could be the soundtrack for a story by Edgar Allen Poe.  ”People Are Strange” is one of the singles from the album.  In August of that year, Morrison had been in a funk, so Robbie Krieger, the guitarist, suggested a walk up the Appian Way for a panoramic view of the city.  Morrison returned euphoric.

“‘What happened?’” Robbie asked him.  ’Look at these lyrics,’” Jim said excitedly.

People are strange, when you’re a stranger/Faces look ugly, when you’re alone                                                                              Women seem wicked, when you’re unwanted/Streets are uneven–when you’re down.

‘These are great, Jim .  Have you got a melody to go with it?’  Jim smiled strangely and hummed a few bars.  Robbie’s ears immediately perked up.  He knew a hit when heard one . . . . ‘It just came to meall of a sudden . . . in a flash, as I was sitting up there on the ridge looking out over the city’”  (Riders on the Storm, pp. 124-125

People Are Strange (Live 1967]

June 6: Like many groups from the sixties, the Doors were big fans of the blues.  Indeed one of my first disappointing concerts occurred when they decided to do a blues-inflected show in Minneapolis featuring Tony Glover on the harmonica.  No offense to the blues or to Glover, at that time a staple on the West Bank and an underground D.J., but like many Doors fans, at that time I wanted flame out, climatic, orgiastic rock.  Blues were a bit too tame.  I have  since come to appreciate them, both southern front porch and north backroom bar.  One of the favorite blues songs of John Densmore was “Crawling King Snake,” by John Lee Hooker.   The scene is Ray Manzarek’s Ocean Park garage apartment.  Morrison and Densmore talking as the Lizard King, fresh from a show, drops on John Lee Hooker album on the turntable.

“Play ‘Crawling King Snake,’” I demanded.  ”I love the groover on it.  When we’re on about our second or third album, I think we could record that.  After we’ve done a lot of originals.  Of course, we have to get a record deal first.”  Which they did, but not until their last album, the bluesy LA Woman (1971), did they get around to recording it–in retrospect, just in the nick of time.  By then, Morrison’s use of reptilian imagery as phallic symbol was firmly established.   Crawling King Snake = Lizard King = Morrison, who believed an Indian had jumped his soul out on the desert.  Here we have Hooker’s version and the Doors’. Crawlin’ King Snake (Hooker) Crawling King Snake (Matrix: S.F.: 3/10/67)

June 5: Years before Patti Smith did her incendiary take-off of Van Morrison’s garage classic, “Gloria,” the Doors did, though only in concert.  Both versions feature a sexually evocative monologue in the middle of the song, breaking away from the tightly structured pop format.  There’s an intriguing backstory to the Doors’ version.  In Riders on the Storm, Densmore writes of being surprised when the teenybopper magazine 16 expressed interest in featuring a notorious and radical group like the Doors.  He soon found out.

“I thought I was a renegade Catholic until I met Gloria Stavers.  A thirty-year-old ex-model and head of 16, she was the first woman I had met who could trade on her power for sex, and it shocked me and shattered my illusions about how liberated I was.  The scene at her magazine office was another nail in the coffin of my innocence.  Gloria personally selected the teen idols who graced her covers, and Steve [head of promotions] said if she liked us–that is, if she liked Jim–it would be great for our career.  She liked. . . . I had heard that if you took a look at the old covers of 16 you could see her conquests” (p. 117).  All of this gives the monologue an extra dimension.    

Gloria (Doors Live 1970) Gloria (Smith: Park West: 1978) Gloria (Shadows of Knight)

June 4: The Doors were either the first rock group or one of the first to have songs with a wide dynamic range, with “The End” and “When the Music’s Over” being two of the more prominent examples.  Most pop and rock songs stay at about the same volume and intensity level throughout, but not those of the Doors.  Today’s song, “Soul Kitchen,” exemplifies one variation of their approach: a volume/intensity increase in the chorus.  Later, artists like Bruce Springsteen, an avowed Doors’ fan, would mimic that.  Think, “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”  And, of course, Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” became famous for its intense burst of rage in the chorus.

“Soul Kitchen” refers to “Olivia’s.  A small soul food restaurant at the corner of Ocian Park and Main.  A roadside diner that belonged in Biloxi, Mississippi (Densmore, Riders on the Storm 40).  Packed with UCLA film students, “It looked like an Amtrak dining care that got stranded at the beach (40).  Olivia “wore the traditional pring apron over a full skirt and had a slight limp in her right leg.  Her vibe was warm, but the big black woman whose name was synonymous with soul never let any patrons in at closing time, and she always tried to hustle out the ones who were there.  She didn’t care about a few extra dollars when she could have some peace.  You knew she loved to cook for people, though” (41).

Soul Kitchen [The Matrix: S.F.:3/7/67)

June 3: In her book, The White Album, Joan Didion writes, “The Doors are different.  They have nothing in common with the gentle Beatles.  They lack the contemporary conviction that love is brotherhood and the Kama Sutra.  Their music insists that love is sex and sex is death and therein lies salvation.  The Doors are the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, missionaries of apolyptic sex . . . . It is Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger and John Densmore who make the Doors sound the way they do . . . but it is Morrison who gets up there in his black vinyl pants with no underwear and projects the idea . . . .”  This month we’ll be exploring the many ways the Doors are different from other sixties groups despite sharing similarities.   The Doors define sensuousness–the sun, the moon, rain, fire, the wind, the sea, sexual pleasure–all of these make up their palette.  But the joy in these is shadowed by an acute awareness of their transient quality.  An example of this doomed sensuousness: “Waiting for the Sun,” from Morrison Hotel, the 1970 album that came out two years after  the album Waiting for the Sun, the cover of which fits the song.  Here the advent of spring is equated with Eden.  The speaker longs for a season at the seashore in the scattered sun at freedom’s.  But there’s a shadow.  His song is falling on resistent ears while he waits for his partner to tell him what went wrong.

Waiting For The Sun

June 1 and 2: An understanding of the Doors has to begin with the inspiration for their name, William Blake (1757-1827), the English romantic poet, painter, and engraver who said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”  In the mid-twentieth century, Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World among other works, took up the idea for a non-fiction book: “In the 1950s Huxley became famous for his interest in psychedelic or mind-expanding drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he apparently took a dozen times over ten years. Sybille Bedford says he was looking for a drug that would allow an escape from the self and that if taken with caution would be physically and socially harmless.

He put his beliefs in such a drug and in sanity into several books. Two, based on his experiences taking mescaline under supervision, were nonfiction: Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). Some readers have read those books as encouragements to experiment freely with drugs, but Huxley warned of the dangers of such experiments in an appendix he wrote to The Devils of Loudun (1952), a psychological study of an episode in French history.http://somaweb.org/w/huxbio.html

Blake and Huxley are joined by other Romantic writers on both sides of the pond from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Emerson and Poe in believing that the rise of science with its emphasis on material fact and reason was reductionist and inadequate to describe the totality of experience.  They believed that there are dimensions of existence and experience beyond our perception and that drugs could be a way to access them, drugs like opium and peyote.  Poe saw hypnogogic sleep as vision into that world, and much of his work is centered on that concept.  Ray Manzarek described the Doors’ first album  as existential, and it is, but it also testifies to and continues the Romantic ideal of transcendence.  The first song on The Doors (1967) is “Break on Through to the Other Side.”   The other side of that window.  They were joined in that quest by many other sixties artists who produced psychedelic tunes, such as the Byrds with “Fifth Dimension,” the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and the Amboy Dukes’ “Journey to the Center of the Mind.”  It was a time to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”

Of “Break on Through,” the drummer, John Densmore writes in Riders on the Storm (1991), that it was “chosen as the single, even though I was worried that the beat was too eccentric for the mass market.  It was  a fast bossa nova, a beat from Brazilian music I had incorporated into my drumming for the song . . . .  When the single came out, we convinced friends and relatives to start calling the stations to request it.  Getting the band off the ground was a twenty-four-hour obsession with each of us.  If we weren’t practicing, we were sleeping.  If we were eating, we were talking about the group.

“One day, I alled the KRLA request line for what was probably the fortieth time.  I said I was Fred Schwartz from West Covina and they said.  ’We know who you are, and if you don’t stop calling we’ll pull the record!’  I hoped I hadn’t ruined our career before it began.  ’Break on Through’ slowly rose to number eleven in LA.  It even made it to the bottom of the national charts, but just for a few weeks” (102-103).  I guess you could also read the title as break on through to the other side of the charts.  04 Poem_ The Doors Of Perception-(By William Blake)-(w Johnny Depp)

Break On Through-(To The Other Side)-(L 1970)

April 30: “Sandy,” officially known as “4th of July, Asbury Park” is a variation on the common Springsteen theme of escaping the humdrum life of adolescent carny rides along the boardwalk to some undefined place where life amounts to something.  The narrator has

got tired of hangin’ in them dusty arcades bangin’ them pleasure machines
Chasin’ the factory girls underneath the boardwalk where they all promise to unsnap their jeans
And you know that tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag
I got on it last night and my shirt got caught
And they kept me spinnin’, didn’t think I’d ever get off

The tilt-a-whirl is an apt metaphor, since it spins you round and round and stirs the senses but never takes you anywhere.   The speaker has managed to get off and now wants Sandy to join him lest she wind up like the waitress described in the lines below.  On the next album, Sandy morphs into Mary of “Thunder Road,” Terry of “Backstreets,” or Wendy of “Born to Run.”  Bruce apparently does not like to hit the road alone.

Sandy, that waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me

I spoke with her last night, she said she won’t set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk
She was always the girl you saw bopping down the beach with the radio
The kids say last night she was just like a star in one of ‘em cheap little seaside bars
And I saw her parked with lover boy out on the Kokomo
Dj’hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do
For me this boardwalk life’s through baby
You ought to quit this scene too

Springsteen sang the song with more conviction when he actually was trying to escape the boardwalk life with success by no means guaranteed, but for some inexplicable reason, he replaced the stellar waitress verse with an inferior one about Harley-riding angels.  In more recent performances, he’s gone back to the original.  But now the song’s sung with less conviction, perhaps because he could probably buy all of Asbury Park and still have plenty left over to fund his daughter’s horse-riding career  and college for the others.   There are two versions here, an older and a newer–the last performance with Danny on accordian.  It’s up to you to mind-meld the two together to make for the ideal version.  J.B.

4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (Palace Theatre 1976)4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (Live Version featuring Danny Federici)

April 29: In the same year that Dylan was cementing his legend with intensely personal songs on Blood on the Tracks (1975), Springsteen was making a name for himself with songs in which he kept his distance as a third-person narrator, an outsider describing what he saw, an empathetic one to be sure, but still an outsider.   “Jungleland” is a case in point.  Writes Dave Marsh in Born to Run: The Springsteen Story: “Springsteen is no more Magic Rat in this song than director Martin Scorcese is one of the crazy aspiring hoods in Mean Streets . . . .  ’Jungleland’ opens with a sweet violin passage that gives way to a tinkling piano.  As Magic Rat pulls into town and picks up his girl, there’s no sense that anthing but another romantic interlude is taking place.  But that mood is suddenly shattered as the Rat and the girl move across a twisted landscaped, pursued for unknown reasons by Maximum Lawmen.  Although their crime is unstated, the fact that, this time, the escapees are pursued for real casts a new light on the hope that was held out in the early songs.  In the second verse, the guitars explode and the drums crash in:

From the churches to the jails
Tonight all is silence in the world
As we take our stand
Down in Jungleland

From this point on the song takes on a furious pace and tone.  Even the rock and roll bands, which represent the rout out of the town full of losers, are transformed into street-fighting gangs . . . .  The scene moves over to a wild dance party, then changes again, via a smoky sax solo, to a funky bedroom where lovers wrestle but love can’t win.  Outside the window, Rat, the potential hero, is smashed on the pavement.  Uncaring, the girl inside reaches for the light.  As it goes out, Springsteen sings.

Outside the street’s on fire in a real death waltz
Between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy
And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of a knife, they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland

Springsteen’s voice takes over, soaring above strings and sax, flat-out wailing.  . . .  Magic Rat isn’t dead, though.  There’s hope. It is not clear how much more Rat (or we) could stand–but the idea remains that we have seen only the beginning of his story, even now.”  I’m with Marsh’s interpretation until he concludes that Magic Rat isn’t dead even though the verse says his dream gunned him down and the ambulance pulls away.  And the pessimism is emphasized by the fact that the poets, they who trumpet legends, can’t meet the romantic dream of dying for an idea or cause but are only wounded.  But be that as it may, “Jungleland” is one of the few epic songs Springsteen still performs regularly.  While some songs like “Something in the Night” get wrecked in the studio, other blossom.  ”Jungleland” is one of them.  Just compare the early version to the post-studio ones.  J.B.

Jungleland (1974) Jungleland (Hall of Fame: 10/29/09) Jungleland-Hammersmith: 11/18/75

April 28:  Years before Woody Guthrie’s populism began permeating Springsteen’s songs, there were the blue-collar anthems of the Animals, the Eric Burdon led group that was part of the British Invasion in the mid-sixties.   On the same Palladium show that featured Ronnie Spector and the wall of sound in November of /76, Springsteen did two Animal cuts, an epic version of “It’s My Life,” and a more conventional version of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”  Never mind that both songs were the product of Brill Building songwriters, they expressed themes that could have come right out of Bruce’s own songbook.  Indeed, here’s the formula for “Born to Run,” which he played that night immediately after “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”:  wall of sound minus bubblegum romance + blue-collar desire to escape dirty heart of rat trap city= song that radio stations played even before official release and despite four plus minutes in length.   The early Born to Runs are spare compared to the later ones with all the extra musicians, so I’ve chosen a version of more recent vintage to better exemplify Springsteen’s wall-of-sound approach.  That it features a duet with Billy Joel should not in any way be construed as an endorsement of this other Jersey boy, who’s heart is in the right place  but . . . .  Indeed, it should be viewed as a rebuttal of all those who think Bruce can’t sing.  Just compare vocalists, and the case will be made by itself.  J.B.

In this dirty old part of the city
 Where the sun refused to shine
 People tell me there ain't no use in tryin'

 Now my girl you're so young and pretty
 And one thing I know is true
 You'll be dead before your time is due, I know

 Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin'
 Watched his hair been turnin' grey
 He's been workin' and slavin' his life away
 Oh yes I know it

 (Yeah!) He's been workin' so hard
 (Yeah!) I've been workin' too, baby
 (Yeah!) Every night and day
 (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!)

 We gotta get out of this place
 If it's the last thing we ever do
 We gotta get out of this place
 'cause girl, there's a better life for me and you

 Now my girl you're so young and pretty
 And one thing I know is true, yeah
 You'll be dead before your time is due, I know it

 Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin'
 Watched his hair been turnin' grey, yeah
 He's been workin' and slavin' his life away
 I know he's been workin' so hard

 (Yeah!) I've been workin' too, baby
 (Yeah!) Every day baby
 (Yeah!) Whoa!
 (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!)

 We gotta get out of this place
 If it's the last thing we ever do
 We gotta get out of this place
 Girl, there's a better life for me and you
 Somewhere baby, somehow I know it

 We gotta get out of this place
 If it's the last thing we ever do
 We gotta get out of this place
 Girl, there's a better life for me and you
 Believe me baby
 I know it baby
 You know it too

We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Palladium: 11/4/76) Born To Run (Rock Hall of Fame w_Billy Joel: 10/29/09)

April 27: Born to Run (1975) and “Born to Run” are Springsteen’s attempt to emulate Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound: A thick layer of instrumentation (drums, guitar, bass, a horn section).  Bruce spend many hours dubbing the guitars over and over on mulitple tracks to get that supercharged effect.  What’s remarkable about Spector’s creation is that he had to do it with just two tracks before the invention of the invention of the mult-track recorder available to Springsteen.  In 1975, while he was trying to get that wall of sound in the studio, Bruce performed one of its prime examples on stage at the Bottom Line, “Then He Kissed Me.”  Later, in 1976 at the Palladium in New York, he invited Ronnie Spector to sing three tunes with the E Streeters providing the wall of sound–and they do a helluva job of it.  Below is some background about Spector’s meteoric rise and sudden decline from History of Rock:http://www.history-of-rock.com/spector_producer.htm

Over three decades since its heyday, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound still stands as a milestone in recording history. It changed the the course of pop record producing and produced some of rock’s best loved music. Spector raised pop production’s ambition and production by overdubbing scores of musicians to create a massive roar.

Spector was a millionaire at the age of twenty-one. He now began recording on the West Coast, where he developed his Wall of Sound in earnest, using session men as guitarists Glen Campbell,Sonny Bono, and Barney Kessel, pianist Leon Russell, and drummer Hal Blaine. Within three years Spector had twenty consecutive hits, including the Crystal’s “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love”; the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” “Baby I Love You,” (The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up,” and “Walking in the Rain”; Darlene Love’s “(Today I Met) the Boy I’m Gonna Marry” and “Wait ’til My Bobby Gets Home”; and Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah.” In 1963 Spector made a Christmas album, featuring Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Some Home)” and the Crystals’ “Santa Claus  is Coming to Town.” In 1964 Tom Wolfe profiled Spector dubbing him “the first tycoon of teen.”

Phil Spector and Philles Records continued to have hits through 1964, the year of the British invasion. By this time Spector had become obsessed with Ronnie Bennett and by 1965  Ronette singles were now being credited to the Ronettes featuring Veronica Bennett. He even started Phil Spector Records which only issued Veronica singles, but by this time even he could not stand up to the British onslaught. He started Annette Records, named for his wife, and discovered Cher, calling her Bonnie  Jo Mason on her first Annette single. However no matter what he did nothing succeeded.

Next he took on the white, blue-eyed, soul singing Righteous Brothers. and produced “You Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” This got him through 1965.

As the Righteous Brothers popularity waned he took a genuine soul act, Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Pairing them with his Wall of Sound, “River Deep, Mountain High” that was to be a glimpse into the future of rock and roll music. Instead it was a miserable failure.

Devastated, Spector turned his back on the music industry and became a virtual recluse. In 1968, he married Ronnie Bennett and made a brief attempt at producing for another label in 1969 with Sonny Charles and the Checkmates, Ltd’s “Love Is All I Have To Give,” “Black Pearl” and a re-make of “Proud Mary.”

He worked with the Beatles and John Lennon, but the magic was no longer there. In 1969, he had a brief cameo as a drug dealer in Easy Rider. His time had passed, and time itself had passed him by. Spector was almost thirty.

Then She Kissed Me (Bottom Line, N.Y.: 8/15/75)Be My Baby (W/ Spector: Palladium: 11/4/76)Walkin’ in the Rain (W/ Spector: Palladium: 11/4/76)Baby, I Love You (w/ Spector; Palladium 11/4/76)

April 26: During his heady years from the seventies to the eighties, Springsteen was known for returning to his motel after a show and writing more songs, some of which would occasionally show up in a concert before they showed up on a record, if they did at all.   “Something in the Night” is a case in point.  The performance here occurred at the tail end of 1976, well before the album the song appeared on, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978).  Sometimes the live performances led to better version on the records, sometimes not.  The Darkness version of “Something” has more sturm and drang and propulsive energy, but the stirring melody of the live version has been lost.  Although I enjoyed the record version, which I heard first, the live version stirred me in a way the record did not.  Here are the two versions so you can compare them yourself.  J.B.

Something in the Night (Palladium N.y.: 11/4/76) Something In The Night (Darkness album ‘78)

April 25: Tunnel of Love (1988), considered to be Springsteen’s equivalent to Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1976), is a breakup album in two ways: 1) a breakup with the E-Street Band for about a decade; 2) a breakup with his first wife, Julianne Phillips, a model and actress.  His divorce from the blonde Phillips and his subsequent marriage to the red-headed Patti Scialfa would seem to prove that while you can take the man out of Freehold, you can’t take the Freehold out of the man.   Embodying the very idea of the Horatio Alger American Dream in which a nobody becomes a rich and famous somebody by dint of his own talent and dogged determination, Springsteen would seem to be deserving of “all that heaven would allow,” yet judging by today’s song, “Brilliant Disguise,” and others on the album, he seems to have felt himself unworthy of a higher-class babe like Phillips, an impostor waiting to be unmasked from his brilliant disguise by a woman whose best asset seems to have been her blinding beauty.  Of course, the persona of the song isn’t necessarily Bruce, but there sure seems to be a lot of correspondences between the conflicts in the songs and those in reality.

When Bruce wed Phillips, the match didn’t set well with his fan base.  According to Elizabeth Stanley, quoted in Nicholas Dawidoff’s “The Pop Populist,” “People felt he should have married a Jersey factory girl.”  Coincidentally, or luckily, he’d hired one for the Born in the USA tour of 1984, the aforementioned red-headed woman, this after having rejected her for a job some years earlier.  And a collision course was set.  ”During the early years of his Phillips marriage, Springsteen would go off for lonely drives central Jersey, ending up in Freehold, where he’d idle in front of the houses he’d grown up in, brooding about the past.”  Meanwhile, his affection grew for Scialfa, “who grew up just ten miles from Freehold in Deal, New Jersey, where her father owned a television shop.”  While separated from Phillips, he got caught, well, red-handed with Patti by tabloid photographers in Italy, and within three years, 1991, Patti was slipping that band of gold on her finger in Deal, New Jersey.  The people had spoken!  But about Phillips, Bruce says: “My first wife’s one of the best people I’ve ever met.  She’s lovely, intelligent–a great person.  But we were pretty different, and I realized I didn’t know how to be married.”  Tact apparently kept him from adding:”Mister, your whole life’s been wasted/till you’ve got down on your knees and tasted . . . ”

Brilliant Disguise (Stockholm: 7/3/88) Brilliant Disguise (Christic Institute: 11/16/90)

April 24: I have a cousin who maintains that Springsteen went downhill when his piano player David Sancious left after The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.  Frankly, I think Bruce wrote too many great songs to mention after that album, and the Professor, Roy Bittan, is as accomplished as piano players come, having taken Sancious’ parts and run with them.  In fact, Bittan has a reputation as being able to do a song perfectly in just a take or two, unlike the other E-Streeters.  Yet Sancious is the one who came up with the parts like the one on today’s featured song, “New York City Serenade,”  and it’s clear that he brought a certain streetwise jazziness that’s gone missing in inaction ever since. For many, hearing “Serenade” in person has been something like the Holy Grail.  Indeed, Rusty Omens of Rockademia U counts hearing it as one of his more treasured musical memories.

In Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, Dave Marsh writes:  ”New York City Serenade” is about . . . self-discovery.  Bruce croons it with all the faith of the truly wild and innocent, describing a fool’s paradise and the rules by which one lives within it.’It’s midnight in Manhattan/this is no time to get cute/ It’s a mad dog’s promenade.  So walk tall . . . or baby don’t walk at all.”  In the end the city and the song merge in a single metaphor: ‘Hey vibes man, hey jazz man, play me your serenade/Any deeper blue and you’re playin’ in your grave.’  There’s great delicacy in this song, with its acoustic guitar and light piano, rumbling bass, and crying strings.  But in the guitar, there’s an edge like a knife, and Bruce’s voice aches with desire.  At the very end of the song’s ten minutes, the music glides and soars with the singsong celebration of a junkman, whose singing, singing, singing becomes a triumph of life itself.  For in this place, beauty is everywhere balanced by something sinister.  Here is Springsteen the great seducer.”  The version here comes from the famous Main Point show, when Bruce was about to turn to a more rock sound with Born to Run.

New York City Serenade (Main Point, Philly: 2/5/75)

April 23: A pair of Oscar contenders: ”The Streets of Philadelphia” (1994) and ”Dead Man Walking” (1995), both showing the deeper and darker side of Springsteen.

From Song Facts: (http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1051)

“Director Jonathan Demme used this to open his movie Philadelphia. Starring Tom Hanks, it was about a lawyer dying of AIDS. Demme met Springsteen in 1985 on the video shoot for “Sun City,” but had not seen him since. Demme first cut the title sequence of Philadelphia to “Southern Man” and asked Neil Young to write a song like it for the movie. Young gave him “Philadelphia,” which he used at the end of the film. Still needing a song for the open, he called Springsteen.

Demme asked Springsteen for a rock song to open his movie. Bruce started writing it based on lyrics he had previously written about the death of one of his friends, but it did not work over a rock beat. Springsteen sent what he came up with to Demme, considering it an unfinished demo. Demme loved it and felt it was perfect for his movie just as it was.

Springsteen recorded this in his home studio in New Jersey, where he did the entire Nebraska album.

This was the first of 5 previously unreleased songs included on Springsteen’s 1995 Greatest Hits album.

The highest charting Springsteen song in England.

This won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1994, beating out Neil Young’s “Philadelphia,” which was also written for the movie. Tom Hanks won his first Best Actor Oscar for his role in the movie.

Demme wanted people not familiar with AIDS issues to see his film. He felt Springsteen and Young would bring an audience that would not ordinarily see a movie about a gay man dying of AIDS. The movie and the song did a great deal to increase AIDS awareness and take some of the stigma off the disease.

This won Grammys for Song Of The Year, Best Rock Song, Best Male Vocal, and Best Song Written For a Motion Picture or Television. Springsteen opened the show in 1995 performing this.

This was the first song Springsteen wrote specifically for a movie. He gave Paul Schrader “Light Of Day” for the 1987 movie, but did not write it specifically for him.

Demme directed Springsteen’s video for “Murder Incorporated” in 1995.”

Streets of Philadelphia (Academy Awards 1994)

Springsteen’s “Dead Man Walking” is part of the movie soundtrack that the Sony Music website describes as “an extraordinary album of music from Tim Robbins’ new film, Dead Man Walking, which boasts major recording artists performing new songs inspired by, and written directly for, the film. A companion piece to the film, the album features twelve songs, each carefully composed to reflect specific scenes and characters in the film.  Included on the album are such prestigious artists as Bruce Springsteen (who won an Oscar last year for his title song for Philadelphia), Johnny Cash, Suzanne Vega, Lyle Lovett, Eddie Vedder with Pakistan’s premiere recording artist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Tom Waits, Michelle Shocked, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Steve Earle, and Patti Smith.”  And for a change, this isn’t all hype.  The soundtrack really is quite impressive, with Bruce’s contribution joined by these:   Ali Khan, Michelle Shocked, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Steve Earle turn in particularly stellar songs, though all are quite good.

• Johnny Cash, “In Your Mind,” produced by Ry Cooder
• Suzanne Vega, “Woman On The Tier (I’ll See You Through)”
• Lyle Lovett, “Promises”
• Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with Eddie Vedder, “The Face of Love”
• Tom Waits, “The Fall of Troy”
• Michelle Shocked, “Quality of Mercy”
• Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Dead Man Walking (A Dream Like This)”
• Tom Waits, “Walk Away”
• Steve Earle, “Ellis Unit One”
• Patti Smith, “Walkin Blind”
• Eddie Vedder with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, “The Long Road”

Ali Khan, Michelle Shocked, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Steve Earle turn in particularly stellar songs, though all are quite good.

Dead Man Walking (Academy Awards: 1995)

April 22: Kitty is one of the many colorful characters who populate the sidestreets, back alleys, and amusement parks of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle– Spanish Johnny, Rosalita, Sandy, Janey, Madame Marie, and Jazz man to name a few.  They all seem to be on the make or being made, looking to scratch out an identity and some turf for themselves as they drift into adulthood.  Kitty seemed to have escaped the rat trap and suicide rap, but now she’s returned.  In “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle,” an excerpt from Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, Ariel Swartley has this to say about Kitty’s return:

“When Kitty comes back, it’s almost too good to be true, for her departure was a double betrayal, forsaking the hometown and the kids in the alley for marriage and the big city, power, prestige, and opportunity.  Her return not only vindicates her small-town admirer, but all of those who’ve never left.  And their victory is as sweet and keen-edged as the notes of Springsteen’s guitar.  Yet her defection raised doubts and questions that still hang like the sax’s final whistling high note.  As envied and disdained as a resort visitor, as threatening and tempting as the city, adulthood glimmers just over the horizon, too.   And like the Corner or the Street, it has to be claimed.”

There are many stellar live versions of this song, which many  consider one of the better rock shuffles and bar songs ever written, but this rendition from a Conan O’Brien appearance, probably made possible by Mighty Max’s being Conan’s drummer, too, features an outstanding horn section and that extra juice being on national TV can supply.  It’s also a rarity for TV–a nine-minute song.  I kept waiting for them to cut to a commercial.  J.B.

Kitty’s Back (O’Brien Show: 12/11/02

April 21: Like “Born to Run” and “The Promise,” Springsteen’s soul-styled “The Fever” was a favorite in the underground before it saw the light of day.   According to Dave Marsh in Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, it was “released to radio stations only in tape copy” in 1974.   What that omits is that Springsteen didn’t like the song and scrapped it.  However, his manager Mike Appel had a different take and snuck the song to radio stations, another reason Bruce fans own him some thanks.

Southside Johnny recorded it on his first album in 1976, and he and Bruce performed it together live, as well, but Springsteen’s own official release of the song didn’t occur until Tracks, his four-cd release in 1998.  By then, the song had acquired legendary status, especially since he played it live now and then starting with the Darkness tour.  Equating desire with heat is hardly a novel idea, but Springsteen pulls it off with aplomb, as he does with “Fire,” “I’m on Fire,” and other songs.   Long before Springsteen, though, there was Peggy Lee and her rendition of the similarly titled “Fever,” a jazz classic.   Was this the inspiration for Bruce’s version?  I don’t know.  Or really care.  They’re both excellent members of the Torch Song Hall of Fame.

The Fever (Winterland: 12/15/78) Fever – Peggy Lee

April 20: Monumental, titanic, stupendous, stupifying–the first three superlatives describe Springsteen’s long version of “Backstreets.”  The last word describes the decision to edit the long version on Live 1975-1985, presumably in an effort to squeeze more songs in and attract more customers–never mind that vintage Springsteen got squeezed out.   I was fortunate enough to see Springsteen perform it 1977 and 1978, and it ranks among my more memorable musical experiences, especially the first time.   I am not alone.  In “The Promise,” Backstreets founder Charles Cross has much to say about the song’s impact on him.

“‘One soft infested summer me and Terry became friends, trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in.’ So begins Bruce Springsteen singing ‘Backstreets,’ for my money one of the most emotional and affectionate songs ever penned.  Within this one tune, Springsteen addresses all the major elements to his work: rebellion, liberation, love, death, friendship, and salvation.  These are themes that speak to my own human experience and no doubt, to yours, too.”

Later, after describing how he and his friend Carl were still reeling after breakups with emotionally unavailable women, he writes:  ”We were driving through the seamy part of townand I popped the Winterland ‘78 tape in the stereo as Carl had never heard the ‘78 version of “Backstreets,”  the one that includes the ’sad eyes’ seque.  I think it’s the best thing Springsteen has ever done, the emotional zenith to his body of work.  . . .  Carl was completely transfixed by it: ‘I’d drive all night, just to buy you some shoes and to taste your tender charms/to have you hold me in your arms/for just one kiss/for just one look from your sad eyes,” Bruce sang, ‘Just one look.’

Springsteen only played the song this way for a few months in 1977 and 1978, and they edited it off the Live album for reasons that have never been clear to me.  He’d always vary the story told in the song, but it was always intense and true.  The version from Orlando in 1977 with the story about watching some kids burn down a bard, and watching the fields catch on fire and how the flames rushed towards him and his lover sitting on the hood of a car, is monumental.  I’ve liked all I’ve hear but particularly am moved when Bruce added the line ‘just to hear you tell me you loved me.’  It was as tender as Springsteen gets.”

Then after describing how his own lost love had sad eyes, Cross writes: “Which is why I understood the depth of emotion in Springsteen’s voice when he gets to the part of the song where he literally screams ‘But baby, YOU LIED!’ It’s as close to a primal scream as I’ve ever heard, and it’s a scream that sums up his loss, Carl’s loss, my loss, and loss of every other broken-hearted hero who ever looked into someone’s eyes and felt a spark.  Carl was stunned.  He’d later say that listening to the tape was one of those experiences where the world just stops around you and there’s nothing but you, and it is looking you in the face, and you can’t turn around and you can’t go back.  You just can’t.”

All I can add to that is that seeing it in person was even more revelatory.  That YOU LIED still rings in my ears decades later.   Rarely does a performer allow himself to stand exposed in the spotlight like that, yet Springsteen did repeatedly from 1976-1978.   Two versions are included here for comparative purposes.  The first is from Boston in 1977, which is similar to the Orlando version Cross describes; the second is from Cleveland show on New Year’s Eve of 1978, the second-to-last or the last time he did the long version.   (If you want to hear the Winterland version, the whole concert streams at Wolfgang’s Vault.)  Notice how the song gets more disciplined and scripted.  The later version has a drum roll accompanying the crescendo.  Notice too how “drive all night” later became a song in its own right on The River.   I much prefer it as part of “Backstreets’ and can’t listen to it without wanting to cut and paste it back in its original and rightful position.  J.B.

Backstreets (Boston: 3/25/77) Backstreets (Cleveland 12/31/78)

April 19: ”Trapped,” written by the reggae great Jimmy Cliff, is another example of Springsteen’s ability to interpret a song and lift it to a whole other level.  The original is quite good, but Springsteen’s cover of it is transcendent.  Debuted during The River tour, the song proved to be one of the highlights of his concerts to many.  Long before Nirvana made a name for itself with “Smells Like Teenage Spirit” with its abrupt shift of volume and intensity between the verse and the chorus, Springsteen had mastered the technique.  Think “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” for example.  A key difference between the Springsteen concerts of the seventies versus those of the eighties and after is the dynamic range.  Through ‘78, Springsteen had a number of songs which modulated between soft and loud and/or which built in intensity.  It was one of his defining traits.  But commencing with The River tour, such songs became fewer and farther between.   “Trapped,” therefore, stood out more than it might have otherwise.  The version here is from the We Are the World record.

Trapped (We Are the World) Trapped (Cliff)

April 18:  ”The Ghost of Tom Joad,” the title cut from the 1995 release of the same name, is another song inspired by a movie based on a book, specifically the John Huston film of 1940 based on John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940.   It could also be influenced by Woody Guthrie’s “Tom Joad” songs, posted below.

According to Wikepedia, ”The film tells the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma family, who, after losing their farm during the Great Depression in the 1930s, becomemigrant workers and end up in California. The motion picture details their arduous journey across the United States as they travel to California in search for work and opportunities for the family members.”

Somewhere around the time of Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen turned from simply reflecting blue-collar America to specifically and consciously writing to it, in a sense becoming a latter-day Woody Guthrie.  Whereas Dylan started with Guthrie and moved on for the most part, Springsteen started with classic rock and soul and gravitated towards Guthrie, where he remains to this day, a rock star who’s also a populist and political activist.  Personally, though I think Bruce’s heart is in the right place, I believe it’s a death trap and  a suicide rap to limit your songwriting options by writing with a particular audience and set of values in mind.   Since becoming a blue-collar champion, Springsteen’s topics have narrowed, as if he’s been cornered by his role and ideology.  By contrast, Dylan’s have broadened.  Because he kept one step ahead of any particular label, he can do just about any type of song now without his followers crying foul.

But be that as it may, The Ghost of Tom Joad album is Springsteen’s retro-folk equivalent to Guthrie’s The Dustbowl Ballads, a bookend to Nebraska, and an updated complement to the stories of John Steinbeck all in one; and the title song itself remains relevant.  Perhaps if the market had crashed into another Depression, it would be an anthem.   The version here features Tom Morello’s ear-popping solo, he of another group with a populist bent, Rage Against the Machine.  J.B.Tom Joad Part II (Guthrie)

The Ghost Of Tom Joad (w/ Tom Morello: 2008) Tom Joad Part I (Guthrie)

April 17: “Shut Out the Light,” a song that would have fit nicely in Nebraska, always reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s work.   When Hemingway was an ambulance driver during WWI, he was struck by a bullet  that shattered his psyche as much as it did his body, and a significant portion of his work derives from existential questions prompted by that startling and harrowing brush with death.  He was never able to sleep without a light on, a trait shared by some of his characters, who, like Hemingway, have no confidence in society, order, God, or personal triumph.  The best man can hope for against the encroaching darkness is “a clean, well lighted place,” to conduct himself with dignity and show grace under pressure.

Johnny, the character in “Shut Out the Light,” has returned home from untold horrors he experienced in the jungles of Nam; and the simple banalities of sex, family, “polish[ing] up the chrome” of a car, and returning to his factory job  can’t beat back  that “river without a name” with its cold, black water.”   For him, the light and the arms around him are the only comforts he knows, and they’re not enough.  This is Springsteen at his deepest, singing of grim realities without sugarcoating them for the sake of a larger audience.

Shut Out The Light (1985) Shut Out The Light (Asbury: 11/26/96)

April 16: ”I never saw the movie, only the poster in the theatre lobby.”  Thus said Springsteen of the inspiration for the title of the opener of Born to Run, the timeless tour de force “Thunder Road.”  The movie, released in 1958, featured Robert Mitchum, who also co-wrote the title song with Don Raye.  InBorn to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, Dave Marsh writes that the song is a ”statement of purpose; in its way, it encapsulates the whole story of the album.  It cleebrates the virtues of day-to-day living and loving, while articulating the hero’s deepest fears:

So you’re scared and you’re thinking                                         
That maybe we ain’t that young anymore
Show a little faith there’s magic in the night
You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright
Oh and that’s alright with me

This is not a story of salvation or heroism (searching for such imponderables is declared a ‘waste’”), yet there’s always a chance if the girl (here Mary, though she has other names) will only believe as deeply as the singer:

roll down the window
And let the wind blow
Back your hair
Well the night’s busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere

Cars and guitars are not a panacea, of course–but they may be a way of escaping these cruel streets, of leaving the poverty and desperation of the empty lives around them.  The singer has both car and guitar, and he’s splitting; it’s up to Mary (and to every listener) to take a chance with him, or to risk being trapped.   To call this temptation isn’t fair–anyone half-alive has to take the chance; this romantic ambition is too seductive to ignore. . . . It’s such a brave boost that the fact they’re going to drive in circles doesn’t really matter–at the moment.  Later, it might be the only thing that counts.”

In its way, “Thunder Road” is a carpe diem or seize-the-day song along the lines of “Prove It All Night”–hop in and hit the road with me before it’s too late, time is of the essence.  This sort of seduction song has a long history, suggesting it WORKS, especially if you’ve got a way with words.  Springsteen’s setting is urban whereas those of antiquity are more pastoral, as in Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” the first stanza of which goes:

COME live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

I

In later efforts, Springsteen signifies the death of that romantic dream with songs like The Promise and Wreck on the Highway. What makes the song particularly remarkable and enviable to other songwriters is its sophisticated, aria-like structure.  If you follow along carefully, you’ll notice that it doesn’t have a rigid and predictable verse/chorus or verse/chorus/bridge structure.  Yet it all hangs together seamlessly and is easy to remember because of the repetition of thunder road.  If you try to play it on the guitar or piano, you’ll see what I mean.  In masking its structure, the song is reminiscent of Roy Orbison, who, fittingly, is singing for the lonely as the radio plays.  Since there are many great live versions of the song available, I’ve posted a less commonly known piano only version from the show at the Guthrie Theater in Mpls. in 1975.  This show is the only one I know of that features piano only versions of both that and “Incident on 57th street.”  The Multimedia page has an excerpt from his 1977 St. Paul show.  J.B.

Thunder Road (Guthrie: 9/21/75) In Dreams (Roy Orbison) The Ballad of Thunder Road (Robert Mitchum)

April 15: DID YOU PAY YOUR TAXES YET?  READ NO FURTHER TILL YOU HAVE.

It has to be intimidating to perform  a song Frank Sinatra made famous as he sits at a table in front of you while a nationwide television audience looks on, especially when your style of music couldn’t be more different and you’re both sons of New Joisey, yet that’s what Springsteen did when he joined Dylan and others in feting Sinatra on his birthday in late 1995.  His spare performance of “Angel Eyes” sounds like a Nebraska outtake, only here the protagonist disappears in drink instead of a New Jersey turnpike in the dead of night.  It was reported that after the birthday bash, Springsteen and Dylan partied with Sinatra, who took a liking to their maverick, hard-driving spirits even thought his wife thought they were seedy dudes.

Angel Eyes (Sinatra) Angel Eyes (11/19/95) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lxAUYfgLL4

Some background on the song from WICN Public Radio:

“Composer Matt Dennis wasn’t happy with the title of the song that he and his lyricist, Earl Brent, had just written: “Have Another Beer on Me’’ didn’t sound right. Brent changed the song’s title to “Angel Eyes” and a saloon ballad to rival “One for My Baby” was born.”

. . .

“After Frank Sinatra had become a solo performer, he recorded “Angel Eyes” on his legendary 1958 album Frank Sinatra Sings For Only the Lonely. His rendition has been called the definitive version of the song, and today the song is most closely associated with him. He excelled at singing drinking songs and claimed, “Being a saloon singer, that’s my racket.” His treatment of “Angel Eyes” displayed the master in peak form. Instead of beginning “Angel Eyes” at the chorus, as do most singers, he began at the release, “So drink up all you people”, which proved to be very effective and moving. In 1971 Sinatra announced his retirement at age 55, and began his series of farewell concerts. He closed these concerts with “Angel Eyes”, exiting the stage after singing the last line, “Excuse me while I disappear.” Despite this dramatic finale, Sinatra didn’t stay retired, returning to the stage in 1973 and continuing to perform and record until 1995.”

April 14: Like its album mates on the existential masterpiece Nebraska (1982), “Atlantic City” was a startling departure from the hard-driving rock fans had come to expect from Springsteen.  The darkness formerly on the edge of town had settled in the souls of these characters straight out of Terence Malick’s Badlands and Flannery O’Conner’s Wise Blood. That darkness was reflected in the spartan arrangements, blank, uninflected vocals, and unflinching looks at that gray landscape beyond the windshield of the car on the cover of the album.  If Springsteen wanted to capitalize on his rising popularity after The River, this was exactly how not to do it.  Yet for my money, Nebraska ranks next to Born to Runas his seminal achievements of songcraft across an album, and the pity is he left off equally worthy songs like “The Losing Kind” and “Child Bride,” later turned into the vastly inferior “Working on the Highway.”  If there’s an album with more depth, I don’t know of it; it’s as good as a book of short stories, and lot quicker to get through.

Always an empathetic writer, Bruce seems to have inhabited the very mindset of  the characters, all of whom have no illusions about which side of the line they’re on.  In Glory Days, Dave Marsh connects the songs from Nebraska to counterparts in earlier albums.  ”The loser daring the big score in “Atlantic City” was a near relation to the one in “Meeting Across the River.”  The version here is from 1984.  Bruce’s more recent versions have a communal feel during the bridge, as if the power of shared hopes and dreams can overcome the bleakness being lived out in the song itself.

Atlantic City (11/19/84) Atlantic City (Brixton: 4/24/96)

April 13: If Springsteen’s use of the car as metaphor in”The Promise” is as good as it gets, the same can be said of his use of the river in “The River,” his 1980 masterpiece with two sources of inspiration.  The first was the real life pregnancy of his older sister. Nick Dawidoff writes in “The Pop Populist”: “The girl who gets pregnant at 17 in The River is [Bruce's] older sister.    The other is the “hurt” songs of old timers like Hank Williams.  According to Bryan Garman in “The Ghost of History:  Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, and the Hurt Song,” in the late 1970s, “as Springsteen continued to to write about working class lives, he found that for inspiration he went ‘back further all the time.  Back into Hank Williams, back into Jimmie Rodgers. Because the human thing in those records is just beautiful and awesome.’  Captivated by the deep emotions Rodgers and Williams expressed, Springsteen drew on the pain embedded in their hurt song “to make a record like today, one that’s right now.  Several songs on The River (1980) were influenced by his studies.  The title song was based on William’s ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues . . . .’” Though Springsteen continues to play the song today, performances of “The River” during the 1980 tour had an urgency and immediacy that come when a song and its themes are fresh and in the moment.

The River (Nassau: 12/30/80) Long Gone Lonesome Blues

April 12: Another great Springsteen creation that didn’t make the Darkness album, “Because the Night” was recorded by Patti Smith on her Easter album and earned her a top twenty hit in 1978.  In Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, Dave Marsh describes what happened:  ”After Jimmie Iovine [a recording engineer who went on to found Interscope Records] took a demo for “Because the Night” to the studio next door, where he was producing a record for Patti Smith, Springsteen let Smith finish the lyric . . . .” Despite leaving it off the album and The River that followed, Springsteen did perform the song regularly during the Darkness tour, using his own lyrics exclusively.  The versions here are from 1978 and 200.  The former is distinctive for its incendiary introduction, the latter for Nils Lofgren’s stupendous solo.  If there’s a bad performance of this song, I have yet to hear it.

Because The Night (Cleveland: 12/31/78) Because The Night (Paris: Summer 08)

April 11: When I’m asked for an opinion on Springsteen’s concerts, I say “great through 78, after that, too late.”  Sure, he and the E Streeters still put on exciting shows which invariably feature a handful of great performances, but his shows have never hung together or had the intensity they had through 1978.  ”Prove It All Night,” “Backstreets,” “Growin’ Up,” and the rarely performed “It’s My Life” are but shadows of their former selves, the epic versions having given way to the standard issue ones. The other case in point is the song featured today–”She’s the One.”  In ‘78, Springsteen’s preface to the song featured Bo Diddley’s “Mona” or Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” w/ “Gloria.”

What was inspired about this is that in less than fifteen minutes you had the lineage of the Bo Diddley beat from its origins in Africa all the way through the fifties and into the seventies with Bruce’s use of it.  The jungle howls and yelps over the beat at the beginning of the medley are fun but also serve to signal the origins.  The medley also shows how musicians lift and twist a beat or a theme to their purposes.  Hard to imagine a more engaging music lesson.  When I hear the song today, it’s still welcome, but I miss the context.  If you’re interested in a video clip of a ‘78 version, albeit only about three minutes long, go to the Multimedia page.

.Mona/She’s the One (Roxy: 7/7/10)

And here’s a bit more about Bo Diddley and the beat from an article following his death.

“His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.

Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and radical.”

April 10: ”Independence Day” is one of a number of Springsteen songs that lose something in translation when they’re given the full band treatment, something that happened the classic Nebraska, an album recorded and released with just Bruce on a cheap four-track recorder after E Street workups failed to produce winning songs.  Written around the time ofDarkness and “The Promise,” as Bruce will tell you in the intro of this piano only version, this “rite of passage” song offers a more tender take on his relationship with his father.

Around 28 at the time he wrote the song, Bruce would seem to fall into a typical behavioral pattern as described by Gail Shehy in Passages, the celebrated book about the predictable stages of life.  Does this sound apropos? “Buoyed by powerful illusions and belief in the power of the will, we commonly insist in our twenties that what we have chosen to do is our true path in life.  Our backs go up at the merest hint that we are like our parents . . . .  ’Not me’ is the motto,’I'm different.”  And in Bruce’s case he was, though he has said in a more recent interview that nowadays when he looks in the mirror he sees his father.  Scary thought!

Independence Day (Roxy: 7/7/78)

April 9: ”Prove It All Night” is a classic example of a carpe diem song.  No, that’s not a genetically altered super carp cleaning out the Great Lakes but a Latin phrase for  ”seize the day.”  This motif goes back ages, and to paraphrase one of many commercials that exploit, its dominant argument is to grab all the gusto you can now because you only go around once in life.  It’s an argument that probably wouldn’t sway Shirley Maclaine and adherents to religions which believe today’s bejeweled rich could return as tomorrow’s bedraggled poor or vice versa, depending on their karma, but it has always played well in the West.  More often than not, there’s a sexual context, as in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” in which he tries to convince a resistant woman to

“tear our pleasures with rough strife,

Thorough the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

Compare that to Bruce:

“Baby, tie your hair back in a long white bow

Meet me in the fields out beyond the dynamo

You hear their voices saying not to go

They’ve made their choices and they’ll know

What it means to steal, to cheat, to lie,

What it means to live and die

To prove it all night.”

Some things never change!  This song has become a staple of Springsteen’s shows, and Nils Lofren’s incendiary solos at the end must be heard to be believed, but I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing Bruce would return to the live version from 1978, which had one of the most inspiring guitar intros ever, one with a building intensity that suited the theme of the song perfectly.  Bruce might not have the pyrotechnics of other guitar slingers, but when he plays a solo, you feel it, and the intro to this song is a prime example.  Shame on the Live: 1975-1985 box set  for leaving this off, forsaking quality for more titles to hook the casual fan with, many of the tunes not what made Springsteen a live legend.  To demonstrate how Bruce develops a song over the course of a tour, you have an earlier and a later versions here.  If these don’t convince you of the greatness of Bruce and E Street Band in those early days, maybe you should try Rick Springfield live.

http://www.amazon.com/Rick-Springfield-Live-and-kickin/dp/B002GXKBSA/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=digital-video&qid=1270757617&sr=8-6

Prove It All Night (Roxy: 7/7/78)

Prove It All Night (Winterland:12/15/78) The whole show streams at Wolfgang’s Vault www.wolfgangsvault.com/

And here’s another famous carpe diem poem:

“Get Drunk!”, by Charles Baudelaire

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters;
that’s our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time’s
horrible burden one which breaks your shoulders and bows

you down, you must get drunk without cease.

But with what?
With wine, poetry, or virtue
as you choose.
But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on steps of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the bleak solitude of your room,
you are waking and the drunkenness has already abated,
ask the wind, the wave, the stars, the clock,
all that which flees,
all that which groans,
all that which rolls,
all that which sings,
all that which speaks,
ask them, what time it is;
and the wind, the wave, the stars, the birds, and the clock,
they will all reply:

“It is time to get drunk!

So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time,
get drunk, get drunk,
and never pause for rest!
With wine, poetry, or virtue,
as you choose!”

April 8: Written at a time Springsteen was in serious danger of losing control of his music to his prior manager, MikeAppel, ”The Promise” debuted at Red Bank N.Y. in August of 1976 and was a special encore through 1978 or so.  I had the misfortune of missing much of it in 1977 in my haste to leave his Chicago concert at the Auditorium Theatre after what I’d presumed was the last song.  I was almost at the lobby when I learned my mistake and hurried back to see Bruce by himself at the piano playing this arresting ballad.  I never made a premature exit again, but neither did I ever hear “The Promise” live again.

In Dave Marsh’s Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, John Milward gives an excellent explication of the song:  ”The song’s metaphor is ‘The Challenger,’ a race car that the singer has built by hand ‘to carry the broken dreams of all those who have lost.’  But the real twist comes during the song’s bridge, when he sings the words ‘thunder road’ and immediately transforms his car into his rock and roll dreams.  In ‘The Promise,’ Springsteen mythologizes himself and compares his struggle to be true to his art to the desperate struggle of the young racer.  He sings in ‘Thunder Road,’ that ‘tonight’s the night all the promises will be broken,’ but the dream etched in ‘The Promise’ and put into perspective by Springsteen’s own experience is clearly a romantic notion that is not easily shattered.  Despite a landscape filled with losers–the singer eventually sells his car when he need money–it’s clear that in Springsteen’s hearth the Challenger’s potential will never die.”

Along with the scorcher “Don’t Look Back” and the heartfelt ballad, “Independence Day,” another slant on his relationship with his father, “The Promise” was a candidate for Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), but after many failed attempts to find a niche for it, Bruce left it off.  He would record a piano version for Tracks, but it’s rushed, omits a verse about his father, and is sung with less urgency and conviction than the early versions when so much was at stake.

The Promise: (live ‘78). The Promise (studio ‘78)

April 7: When he was a rock critic, Jon Landau said of Springsteen that he had the power of making you think you were hearing music for the first time.  Anyone who witnessed Bruce’s overpowering version of the Animals’ anthem of independence between 1976 and 1977, “It’s My Life,” would understand exactly what he was talking about.   Set to ominous and brooding music, Bruce tells a narrative about his conflict with his father to chilling and compelling effect, giving a context to the song itself that puts it on an epic scale, the tale of all sons trying to liberate themselves from the rigid rules and restrictions of their fathers.  And for those who grew up in the sixties, when so many fathers did battle with their songs over long hair, race, the Vietnam War, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll, to name a few issues, the story-song will have  special resonance.  The version here was recorded on the last night of the ‘76 tour, capping six straight sellouts at the Palladium.  In a few days, an incomplete video of his performance in St. Paul in 1977 will be posted at the Multimedia page.  Check back then, if not sooner.

It’s My Life: (Palladium N.Y.: 11/4/76)

April 6: Comparatively speaking, “Rendezvous” is one of Springsteen’s fluff songs, but a good one in the style of Mannfred Mann or the Searchers, not a wincing one, and since I also happen to have a partial video of it from his 1977 St. Paul show, I felt it worth inclusion, as a sort of twofer.  During his 1976/1977 tours, it often occupied the number two slot in the setlist, coming immediately after “Night.”  A Dylanite who was slow to warm to Springsteen for various reasons (more on that in an upcoming podcast),  I didn’t see a Springsteen concert until February of 1977, and I remember “Rendezvous” as being a welcome melodic followup to the percussive and gnarly “Night” that preceded it.

It was the first song I really liked that night, but by no means the last.  In fact the show become increasingly awe-inspiring and revelatory.  I was hoping he’d put it on his next album, which turned out to be Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), but it didn’t quite mesh with the other material and never made it to an official album until a live ‘78 version was released as part of Tracks (1998).  He still performs the song from time to time, and I’ve included a more recent version.  To see videos from ‘77 and 2008, go to the Multi-media page.  I leave it to you to compare and contrast the versions.  J.B.  More videos from St. Paul to come.

Rendezvous (N.Y. 11/4/76) Rendezvous: (Paris: 6/27/08)

April 5: If, as Bob Dylan once wrote in the liner notes to Another Side of Bob Dylan, “a poem is a naked person,” so too can a song be.   In 1996, Springsteen had no band to hide behind when he toured with a collection of reworked oldies and tunes from the spartan The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). Looking something like an unemployed Greyhound bus driver going to seed with his drab grayish outfit, slicked back hair, and Fu Manchu, he had only a set of guitars and harmonicas to help him make his way through a couple hours’ worth of material.  Of all the songs he performed, the one that showed him at his most naked and mesmerizing is “Across the Border,” in particular the ethereal and haunting hymn he does right before the last harmonica break. Few performers would dare to allow you an unobstructed glimpse into their soul, but I know I’m not alone in sensing that’s exactly what Bruce was doing.  As a friend commented at the time, it made your hair stand on end.  

Across the Border (Stockholm: 3.13.95)

April 4:  ”Adam Raised a Cane,” the second song on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), reflects the influence of Springsteen’s new manager, Jon Landau, in two ways.  1)  Unlike Bruce’s former manager, Mike Appel, who thrilled to the epic story-songs that marked the earlier albums, Jon Landau–yes, the former rock critic famous for declaring “I’ve seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen” (not to mention his own future)– preached the gospel of the short, commercially viable song. Hence, along with all the other tunes on the album, “Adam” is fairly short.  2)  A film critic,too, Landau also began exposing Bruce to the works of novelist Flannery O’Connor, John Ford, Terrence Malick, and Elia Kazan, specifically his film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

I think the long-form, occasionally operatic quality of Springsteen’s work is actually what distinguished him from the pack for many, but if Bruce’s adherence to his manager’s view has spared us from epics the quality of “Outlaw Pete”  with its convoluted evocation of a Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone spaghetti western soundtrack, I guess we owe him a muted thanks for that.

But there can be no question that the literary/film exposure sparked some of Springsteen’s greatest work.  ”Adam Raised a Cane” is a case in point.  Here we get Bruce as an estranged James Dean who’s east of Eden (the American Dream) and who feels the stain of original sin like the characters in O’Connor’s Wise Blood, a favorite work of Bruce’s that exists in both book and movie form.   As East of Eden centers on a father/son conflict, so too the song, one of many in which Bruce tries to exorcise the demons of his relationship with his father (more on this in later posts).

With this song and the album, the Bible and his Catholic roots begin to play a prominent role in his work, albeit in secularized fashion.  The choral mob  before the last verse is a great touch that almost has us ducking from those who would cast the first stone.   There are many stellar versions of this song, but this one from Stockholm has the benefit of a horn section and that extra juice that comes from knowing you’re being broadcast across the world on the day before the 4th of July.

In the Bible Cain slew Abel
And East of Eden he was cast,
You’re born into this life paying,
for the sins of somebody else’s past,
Daddy worked his whole life, for nothing but the pain,
Now he walks these empty rooms, looking for something to blame,
You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames,
Adam raised a Cain.

Adam Raised a Cain (Stockholm: 7/3/88)

April 3: So what’s a beach ball got to do with Springsteen?  According to Fred Goodman’s The Mansion on the Hill,Springsteen’s manager Mike Appel “pulled some strings just prior to the recording of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle and got Springsteen an opening slot on an arena tour by Chicago, then at the height of their popularity.  The twelve-date tour would allow him to play to his largest audiences yet–between ten and fifteen thousand per show. 

Initially, the dates went well.  But when the band played the Spectrum in Philadelphia, a city Springsteen considered his home territory, it proved a humbling and frustrating experience.  Kids were throwing rolls of toilet paper during ‘For You,’ Appel recalls.   When a beach ball landed on his piano, Springsteen had had enough.  Kicking over a chair backstage, he vowed he’d never open another tour.  ”Mike, we can’t do this anymore,” he yelled.  ”We can’t do this!  When this tour ends, we’ll call it quits and go back to the clubs and start from zero!”   Jump ahead more than thirty years, and Springsteen is playing it on piano in Paris before thousands, but not before playing an electric and electrifying version in a small club in L.A. with a large radio audience tuned in. It’s probably safe to say no beach balls were flying.  J.B.

For You (Roxy: 7/7/78)

For You (Paris: 6/27/08)

April 2:

On the same Main Point show that gave us the definitive piano Incident, we got Bruce’s superlative interpretation of Dylan’s “I Want You.”   Never mind that he muffs some of the words and the playing gets a bit spotty in the middle, Springsteen does what all superior artists do with cover songs–make them their own. With Danny Federici’s impromptu rendition of “The Anniversary Waltz” as a preface, you can almost visualize the “dancing child with his Chinese flute.”  Springsteen’s singing is tinged with passion and loss, as if he’s not sure he’ll get what he wants.  You should keep in mind that all of Born to Run had yet to be recorded at the time of this show and that the band was in a state of flux. Interestingly, David Brooks cited the show in a recent column as a source of inspiration.  Guess Republicans like bootleg recordings too.

Incidentally, just as many fans swore Dylan off after he turned to rock, a sizable number did likewise when Springsteen went from jazz-inflected street waif to rock star.  Ditto when he went from lean rock star to Iconic Hunk.   To their minds, if you didn’t catch him live by ‘75, you were too late.  As to me, I say ‘78.  Not that he hasn’t done some wonderful live performances since then, but those early shows had an epic and titanic intensity you get only when a young turk is on the do or die cusp of making his mark.   With his first two albums having flopped, Bruce had one last chance to make it real or be dropped from Columbia.   With Born to Run, he learned how to make his guitar talk in the only language record companies understand, sales.   J.B.

I Want You: (Main Point: 2-5-75)

April 1

This post is the first of many that will form sort of a super concert of the best of live Springsteen.  For reasons I’ll describe in an upcoming podcast, the piano version of “Incident on 57th Street”  Springsteen performed on his Born to Run tour of 1975 has a special significance for me.  It was the first song where I thought Jon Landau’s pronouncement that he “saw the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen!” might be more than just a half-baked and hyperbolic allusion to Charles Dickens.   It turned out that Bruce wasn’t actually the future of rock, as punk, grunge, and rap were just around the bend, but he sure was the future for a particular brand of literate and spirited rock, and today he stands among a select few as an enduring icon, too much so if you ask me, and probably him too, since pedestals seem unbecoming of rock’s anti-authoritarian roots.

Though there are many beguiling versions of “Incident” from that tour, including one from the Guthrie Theater in Mpls. that I’ll be playing in an upcoming podcast, the one from a live broadcast Springsteen did at the Main Point  in Philly is the definitive one, featuring Suki Lahav on violin and an evocative siren at the end that helps put you on the unforgiving streets of  Harlem on a dying summer night.  Lahav, who’d sung the choir-like vocals on “4th of July, Asbury Park” and played the violin on “Jungleland,” was gone from the band a month later.

The electric version of “Incident” is from the flip side of the single, “Fire.”  The snap, crackle, and pop you hear is one reason I prefer the digital format.  The record was released around the mid-80s and the song is available as an import but at a highly inflated price.  This version has a distressingly tinny piano sound, but Bruce’s lead guitar is phenomenal, and many consider this version to be the best electric one.   After this performance, for reasons no one can fathom, Bruce deep-sixed this stellar song until 1999.  I’ve sat through many lackluster tunes wishin’ and hopin’ he’d play it, along with “New York City Serenade,” but all to no avail.  Can’t always get what you want, I guess.

Incident On 57th Street: The Main Point 2/5/75

Incident on 57th Street: Nassau Coliseum: 12/29/80.

And, finally, here’s a link to a site with tons of Springsteen covers.

http://www.ict.mic.ul.ie/brucecovers/default.html

This podcast tells the story behind this picture of Bruce and a devoted fan with brassy daughter in the Borders bookstore in Minneapolis on October 4, 2004.

Incident on Lake & Hennepin (33 min. podcast)

PODCAST:   A House Haunted: Two Slants on “My Father’s House” (32 min.)

See MultiMedia for Bruce videos!

This video clip on “Night”  is one of several a brother of mine shot using a Super 8 camera.  We’ll be showing the rest over the course of the month.  Because you could shoot only about 3:20 at the time, this particular song is the only one he captured in its entirety, but Bruce die-hards will still enjoy the other clips, especially a pair on the epic version of “It’s My Life.”  Some years back, I traded a copy of the VHS, and so the clips have recently shown up on YouTube.  The clips at this site are recorded directly off the VHS master that was made of the Super 8 film, so they’re as good as you’re gonna get.  Two versions have been posted, one in high quality, one in I-Pod quality.  J.B.

Night (St. Paul: 2/19/77)

Night-Ipod (St. Paul: 2/19/77)

Note:  This is not a podcast, as mistakenly described by Expecting Rain.  It’s a mixtape.

“When you’re lost in the rain and Juarez, and it’s Easter time too . . . .”  Dylan

Dylan, Boss, & Co. Do Good Friday & Easter (A mixtape)

A bit of T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and e.e. cummings joined with Stravinsky, Zemlinsky, the Doors, and the Beatles on the subjects of April and spring.

April Medley (@ 15 min. long)

SPRING

by: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

• O what purpose, April, do you return again?

  Beauty is not enough.

  You can no longer quiet me with the redness

  Of little leaves opening stickily.

  I know what I know.

  The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

  The spikes of the crocus.

  The smell of the earth is good.

  It is apparent that there is no death.

  But what does that signify?

  Not only under ground are the brains of men

  Eaten by maggots.

  Life in itself

  Is nothing,

  An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

  It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

  April

  Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Here’s a mixtape of various Dylan performances of Visions from 1966 to 2004.  He’s done it since then, but we wanted to limit the selection to a CD’s worth.

Versions of Johanna

Below is an I-Pod or enhanced version of our Visions of Visions of Johanna podcast complete with supplemental images like the one of Baez:”The ghost of ‘electricity howls in the bones of her face.”

Visions of Visions of Johanna (Enhanced Version)

Come April, Springsteen will be our Poet Laureate . . . .  But Dylan will not go unattended.

A Disclaimer: If you’re looking for the final Word on Dylan’s “Series of Dreams,” you might as well keep on keeping on to another joint.   There are many brilliant analysts who could add all sorts of insights, amendments, qualifiers, and so on to whatever we say about the song.   As with many Dylan songs that are riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas, our slants on it are works-in-progress, to be continued indefinitely.  Just take what you need and leave the rest.  And if you got your own two cents’ worth or more to share, add your own insights in the Comments section.  J.B.

Series of Dreams & What It Means (32 min.)