How I finally got into Bruce Springsteen....a "Totally Shuffled" extract

Just because I've been listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen this week...this extract from "Totally Shuffled"...

October 16^th

Bruce Springsteen-Thunder Road-Live 1975-85

In many ways Bruce Springsteen is the antithesis of one of my other favourite artists, The Fall. I cannot imagine that there is much commonality between the two of them-on the surface at least. I certainly wouldn’t imagine that Mark E Smith has many Bruce Springsteen albums in his record collection and I’d guess that Bruce has never heard of The Fall. Even if he had, even the Fall’s most commercial output wouldn’t figure in his in-car entertainment. Springsteen is famous for covering other artists songs in concert, but I’m not expecting a version of “Who Pays the Nazis?” complete with the full E-Street band to crop up soon. I can live in hope though: it would be interesting. 

Yet liking both The Fall and Springsteen not to the point of obsession, but close enough is, at times, I think an odd choice, and a little bit schizophrenic.  I do find it difficult to switch from a Fall track to one by Springsteen; there has to be a bit of a buffer between them, some sort of transition. 

It’s similar to that feeling I get when having driven a hire car on holiday that’s properly serviced and virtually brand new, with pedals and controls that require the lightest of touches to returning to my 10 year old, 140,000 miles-on-the-clock Citroen and having to drive it with the equivalent of lead boots and arms of steel just to change gears. Both cars do what I need them to do i.e. get me from A to B; it’s just that they do it in different ways. 

Well, that the same thing with Springsteen and The Fall. Both make music unlike anything else and both are utterly unique-but for that reason they are more similar than you might expect. (More of this later).

My interest in and love for Springsteen’s music goes back a long way however and, unlike The Fall, there have been peaks and troughs, and for many years that I’ve either not been bothered or unfairly dismissed it. Thinking about it there are actually three distinct phases.

It really started when, back in early 1980, when my best friend at the time introduced me to “The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle” album as being something I should marvel at. Now, I usually took their judgement as impeccable, but being at the time of post-punk and the height I suppose of my blinkered approach to music, I was dead set against it from the start. To convince me that I was wrong somehow-I  can’t remember how as this was the before the time that videos were generally available- they managed to show me the famous clip of Springsteen playing “Rosalita” live-the one where there is a stage invasion at the end. I think that this was recorded sometime in the late 1970’s and broadcast on the BBC at some point. This is where we must have caught it. I was reluctant to admit it, but there was something about it, about the sheer exhilaration and passion that did make a lot of the music I was listening to at the time seem a bit grey and lifeless. I compartmentalised it to a corner marked “American Guitar Rock” for a good few years, although I always kept a soft spot for that song. (Maybe it was pure sentimentalism based upon memories of good times-I’m just not sure).

It all went quiet however for me Bruce-wise until 1986, and the release of the 5 LP Live 75-85 box set.  I hadn’t been convinced of any of his supposed greatness, and was still writing him off as a mere chest-thumping anthemic stadium filling U.S. star, devoid of any true soul or real insight. 

I was possibly also influenced by Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls”, where Paddy McAloon dismissed Springsteen as writing only about those two topics. That’s how easily influenced I was at that time. I hadn’t actually really listened to any Springsteen, but merely based my dislike of his music on irrational and ill-founded assumptions. But the box seat was issued and received a 5 star full page review, in of all places, NME.

It did therefore cross my mind that I’d been missing something. 

Always ready to fall for a good review, and with £30 that I’d got from work as a birthday present, I toddled off to HMV, pondered long and hard as to whether it would be a stupid extravagance to blow it all on one live box set, worried if I was somehow betraying my “punk roots” (how naïve, but that’s how it was), and ending up going home with the whole 3, nearly 4 hour collection. 

I really didn’t expect that much, and thought that I would end up forcing myself to like it as it had cost me so much.(£30 was not a small amount at the time). I needn’t have been concerned. It was a revelation from the start. 

A 1975 recording of “Thunder Road” is the first track, side one, and I was blown away by the sheer poetry of it all. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all. As I listened to disc after disc, it dawned on me that this was so much more than I could have hoped for. Even the tracks recorded in the stadiums were something special. 

As the massed audience sing the first two lines of “Hungry Heart” and as a huge cheer rises when Springsteen sang about New York in “Jersey Girl”, I felt a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Even today, after hearing a lot of Springsteen’s live music, there’s something about those two tracks that takes me back to that moment and still provokes the same emotions. 

I’d always thought until then that The Velvet Underground’s “Live 1969” was one of the best live albums ever, but I revised my stance after hearing Springsteen’s box set. (I do have a bit of a dilemma now because of Dylan’s “Live 1966 Albert Hall” album. Maybe I could qualify things by saying that the Dylan album in the greatest live show recorded and the Springsteen is the best live compilation. A bit of a cop-out but it works. Sort of).

However much I was, and still am, enamoured by the Live 75-85 box set, there was a long hiatus before I bought another Springsteen record or truly got it. There was always a lot of other music to hear and a lot of other records to buy, and for at least 15 years the Springsteen box set was Bruce’s only representation in my record collection. 

I rationalised it by thinking that it was a good representation of his output, and that nothing could really live up to it anyway. But for some strange reason I can’t recall about ten years ago, my interest in Bruce Springsteen suddenly was re-awakened. This has led until now (and shows no signs of diminishing), to me getting all the studio albums and at least 150 live recordings from the internet.

I can’t believe that for so long I closed my mind to this great, passionate music.  And that’s the connection between The Fall and Bruce Springsteen for me. Irrespective of whether you like either of them, what they make is produced seemingly out of a deep need to communicate and with no eye upon prevailing fashions. It’s just something that they have to do; and it’s made with honesty and truth and love.           

        

This is an extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"

        

  and what "Totally Shuffled" is all about:

One track per day for 366 days on a broken iPod. 

366 tracks out of a possible 9553. 

From the obvious (The Rolling Stones), to the obscure (Karen Cooper Complex). 

From the sublime (The Flaming Lips) to the risible (Muse).   

From field recordings of Haitian Voodoo music to The Monkees. 

From Heavy Metal to Rap by way of 1930’s blues, jazz, classical, punk, and every possible genre of music in between. 

This is what I listened to and wrote about for a whole year, to the point of never wanting to hear any more music again. Some songs I listened to I loved, and some I hated. Some artists ended up getting praised to the skies and others received a bit of critical kicking. 

There’s memories of spending too many hours in record shops, prevaricating over the next big thing and surprising myself over tracks that I’d completely forgotten about. 

But with 40 years of listening to music, I realised that I’ll never get sick of it.  I may have fallen out of love with some of the songs in this book, but I’ll never fall out of love with music.     

Get/read Totally Shuffled here

Kindle:
          

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA 

Paperback:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-/dp/149495687X

Cassette Store Day-Totally Shuffled Extract

Heading up to Cassette Store Day, here's an extract from "Totally Shuffled". Memories of cheap Walkman copies and treasured tapes recorded from the radio....

January 6^th

The Upsetters-Revelation Dub

I was sitting on the train at the station, waiting to head off to Florence on a weekday morning about 11.00 o’clock. It was already very hot and dry. The train was not due to leave for at least 30 minutes. Someone muttered, “What was it all about the trains running on time in Italy?” We had already endured an hours’ local bus journey to the station. Gazing out of the window, across parched fields, I could see an old tractor parked beside a ramshackle shed. Nothing was happening. It was a cloudless sky; almost a cliché-though it wasn’t a deep blue, it was more of a hazy white-ish, palest blue you could imagine. The shimmering heat made everything outside the window look like an impressionist painting animated in slow-motion. The station was almost empty with only a few people wandering about. We were the only passengers in our carriage and lolled languidly upon the seats, not really talking much, but staring distractedly out of the windows across the flat, hot plains.

I rummaged around in my small rucksack for my Walkman. (This being the early 1980’s, and Walkman being the technological height of transportable music). Anyway, it wasn’t really a top-end Sony Walkman (which then would have cost an arm and a leg). I had splurged out at Dixons on an own brand “portable cassette player” a week before we went to Italy for the princely sum of £14.00. I think they would have sub-licensed it from Tomy or the Early Learning Centre, but they had managed to find a plastic that was cheaper and tackier to make the casing. It was also significantly less robust than what a 3 year old could expect. To open the front and to insert the tape (unlike the Sony), you had to prise open the cover which snapped with all the sophistication of being held in place with a single wire spring. (Again, unlike the Sony which had some clever pneumatic damping system).   

Once the cassette was clicked into place however, and the wobbly black plastic “play” button had been pressed, your ears would have been regaled with a sound that would have not disgraced a Bang & Olufsen system. Not really. Even at full volume and with a completely new set of Duracell powering the mighty machine, the noise that dribbled out of the headphones was barely more than a whisper. It was that quiet that it was drowned out by the sound of butterflies passing by. My Dixons “Personal Cassette Player” was the Trabant to the Sony Walkman’s BMW.

I had though brought four cassettes-and only four- with me to Italy. I had recorded them from a BBC Radio Lancashire programme earlier that year. “On The Wire” was a Sunday afternoon Radio Lancashire programme which played an even more eclectic and arcane mixture of music than John Peel’s show at the time-everything from early Japanese noise offshoots from the Boredoms, Tibetan throat singing, newly emerging House from Detroit, free jazz-the lot. Goodness knows what the good folk of Blackburn, Burnley and Bamber Bridge thought when they flicked the radio on with their Sunday dinner. My four tapes-now, after all those years, transferred not only to the iPod, but to disc and every hard drive I have-comprised a four hour “On the Wire” special- “Dubs On the Wire.”  This was a 4 hour show, not interrupted by news or any DJ chatter at all, solely made up of a continuous stream of the best Jamaican dub-King Tubby, Lee Perry etc-ever produced.

As I clicked the first tape number on and stared out of the train window, the spacey sounds of dub flickered in sync with the heat haze on that dreamlike Italian morning in 1985.

This is an extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"

        

  and what "Totally Shuffled" is all about:

One track per day for 366 days on a broken iPod. 

366 tracks out of a possible 9553. 

From the obvious (The Rolling Stones), to the obscure (Karen Cooper Complex). 

From the sublime (The Flaming Lips) to the risible (Muse).   

From field recordings of Haitian Voodoo music to The Monkees. 

From Heavy Metal to Rap by way of 1930’s blues, jazz, classical, punk, and every possible genre of music in between. 

This is what I listened to and wrote about for a whole year, to the point of never wanting to hear any more music again. Some songs I listened to I loved, and some I hated. Some artists ended up getting praised to the skies and others received a bit of critical kicking. 

There’s memories of spending too many hours in record shops, prevaricating over the next big thing and surprising myself over tracks that I’d completely forgotten about. 

But with 40 years of listening to music, I realised that I’ll never get sick of it.  I may have fallen out of love with some of the songs in this book, but I’ll never fall out of love with music.     

Get/read Totally Shuffled here

Kindle:
          

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA 

Paperback:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-/dp/149495687X

Womble 4-new extract! The problems of being a music fan...

So, for the 50th post on the blog, here's a rough and ready, unedited and unpolished extract from the forthcoming Glasto book.

It's the Friday morning of Glasto 2015. I've just polished off some breakfast and and wondering about the nature of music and fandom... 

And that got me to thinking as I sat and had my belated breakfast. I was heading off to watch Courtney Barnett play the Pyramid in a couple of hours and I was really looking forward to it. Whether she’d played a blindingly good set or would be overawed by the whole thing and crumble a bit seemed irrelevant. It didn’t matter to me. Seeing Courtney Barnett at Glastonbury was going to be one of the highlights come what may. I’d paid just over £200 for my Glasto ticket; I’d be seeing Courtney Barnett twice and The Fall once. Just for those three sets alone £200 was money well spent. I was more than simply looking forward to watching Courtney Barnett. I had to admit that I was positively excited by the prospect. This was more than a bit unnerving. So unnerving that I found myself questioning the entire idea of feeling this way about music. It’s something that since that moment I have been unable to fully figure out with any significant success.

This is the thing.

You can tell that I’m still wrestling with this because my ideas are half-formed and not totally worked through, and while this might not seem like much to do with Glastonbury, maybe it’s got everything to do with Glastonbury.

It’s all down to music. 

This is the thing that’s still kind of baffling me. Like many people my age (early fifties), I guess that music has played such an important part of my life that it would be hard to imagine not having music. It always seems to be there. There’s been barely a single day when I’ve not listened to music since I was 10 or 11 years old. In fact I can’t think of a day when I’ve not listened to music. There’s been music when I was at school in the 1970’s (70’s pop/glam rock/ prog/ rock/ punk/soul), at college in the 1980’s (post punk/industrial/blues), when I was married and we first had the kids in the 1990’s (dub/indie/noise) and thereafter to date, well, anything else I can listen to. I’ve gone through  listening to daytime Radio 1, to the still massively missed John Peel, to On the Wire on Radio Lancashire (a great show by the way), Radio 4, Radio 3, Radio 6  and any number of radio programmes from around the world on the net. You think of it; I’ll listen to it. I’ll get the records, listen to the radio, hear it on the net, download it. Thousands of CDs, mp3s, records and tapes. Hundreds of gigs. Music in any way, shape or form. I think the only blind spots I have are folk music and opera, but God knows I’ve tried (and failed miserably) to get into those genres. Anything else is fair game though. Classical, jazz, electronic, hip-hop, grime; there’s not much left.

I sometimes worry that there’s not enough time left to listen to all the music that I want to hear; that I’m flitting from one genre to another, hardly scratching the surface. And yet...

And there’s always new music to hear. Always something new just around the corner. This is what keeps me going. Searching endlessly for that great new sound. And when you just think that it might all be getting a bit boring, well, something incredible pops up that blows your socks off and makes you realise that this is what it’s all about. That record that gives you a shiver down your spine, makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, brings a lump to your throat and a tear to your eye. (Maybe not all at the same time; that would be close to heading towards a medical emergency, but you get the picture.)

If I’m not listening to music, then I’m reading about it, or writing about it or just thinking about it. It’s such an integral part of me that I kind of take it for granted. That’s not quite right; I don’t take it for granted at all. I still find myself marvelling at something new, something jaw-droppingly good, so good that I need to tell people about it. Music still has the power to amaze me. What I do take for granted is, I suppose, that music is so important. I simply cannot understand anyone who “isn’t into music”. It’s simply beyond my comprehension. It’s like saying, “well, I’m not really that arsed about breathing. I can take it or leave it, really.”         

This kind of brings me back to Glasto. Sort of full circle. Because however much I love the place for what it is; that sparkling, magical place like nowhere else I’ve ever been to, well, I have to admit it, I suppose I’d have never really gone if it wasn’t for the music.

As I finished the last of the toast and brushed the crumbs away, I took a ciggie out of the packet, lit up and sat back to think about music. See, always thinking about music.

Now, despite sounding as if I’m slightly obsessed with music, it all seems fairly natural and obvious to me that it’s the right way to be. There doesn’t seem anything wrong with being like that. It’s just like a hobby, I suppose. Like playing Crown Green Bowls or having a shed. Things that maybe I should be getting into at my age instead of fixating on music. But music is my thing.

I watched people queuing for breakfasts, bleary-eyed and hung over. It was like the day before. Nearly everybody who was there was considerably younger than me. I wondered how many of them were at Glasto for the music or if it was something else. What did it mean for them? Was going to Glasto a rite of passage thing for them? Would they still be going to Glasto when they were my age, in twenty or thirty years time? Would Glasto still be going? Would I still be going? I’d be 73 in twenty years time if I was still around. Would I still be into music? Of course I would! I’d be still searching for the next big thing, the new discovery just around the corner, just waiting to happen, just out of reach.

Would I still be into music? Would I still be a fan? Would I still be excited about legging it down to the Pyramid Stage to see 2034’s equivalent of Courtney Barnett? Or maybe I’d still be going to see Courtney Barnett in 2034!

But this was the thing that got me wondering and it sort of relates to sheds and Crown Green Bowling and all that age-appropriate stuff and music and Glastonbury. Yes, I am a music fan and yes, I’m into music. Maybe at my age I should have moved onto something else. Maybe it was time to put those childish things away. Christ, I was a Grandad now! Music- and pop music at that- it should really be something that was part of my past and not of my present or future. But I couldn’t see that happening really. Not really. There would always be music.

I looked up at the sky. It was completely blue by now. Not a cloud in sight. I thought about scribbling a few notes down yet everything was a bit unfocussed. I was still thinking about it all. Maybe thinking about it all a bit too much.

This was the real kicker though. I worked out that it was ok to be into music and be a music fan at my age, however ridiculous it might sound but could I call myself a fan of Courtney Barnett and The Fall and all the rest? Isn’t it a bit daft to say the least to call myself a “Fan”? I think it is. But I was exhibiting all the fan-like signs. Buying all the records, reading about them in the music press, scouring the net, Googling and looking for live recordings? Getting overly excited about seeing them play at Glasto? What is all that about if not being a fan?

Then there’s Dylan of course, Bob Dylan. Although he wasn’t playing Glasto (I might have just mentioned it if he was), I’m sitting here writing this bit and looking at the bookshelf in front of me, I count 27 different books just about Dylan. A whole bookshelf full of nothing else except books about Bob Dylan. To my left is a CD tower with 100 plus live Dylan recordings. There’s three more in the other room. In yet another CD tower there’s all the studio albums. And there’s DVD’s and radio documentaries. And mp3’s all over hard drives on two laptops, three iPods and an external hard drive (just in case). When Jackie says, “Do you really need another book/CD about Dylan?” I suppose she has a point. 

Maybe I'm an afficionado rather than a fan.

Maybe being a Dylan aficionado is acceptable. It sounds better than being called a fan. You can put it down to being a bit eccentric. That’s more of a hobby, a pastime.

But being a fan of Courtney Barnett or The Fall? Or Miles Davis? Or Nils Frahm? Or all the others? 

At my age?

The word “fan” has connotations of being in some awful 1970’s Offical Fanclub thing, you know? Badges and stickers and cheap-shit iron on t-shirts. Membership cards. Pre Smash Hits. “I’m a Courtney Barnett fan.” Or “I’m a Fall fan.” Well, it just sounds...odd.

This is the dilemma then. The question that I can’t still answer. If I tick all the fan-like boxes (the records, the magazine and internet stuff, the gigs etc) then am I a “fan”? There’s not that blind devotion, that hero worship, that they-can-do no-wrong stuff from me. I am not that naive and I’m old enough- much too old enough- to realise that they are just ordinary people with flaws and faults like the rest of us and yet, I do think that they have some extraordinary talent for making great music and great art. I can admire their work, I can love what they make and still not admire them as people. Maybe that’s the difference.  It what they create that’s important. The rest is slightly irrelevant.

So what do I do? Call myself a fan? Or is there another word, another term, a word that fits the bill a lot better? If I don’t call myself a fan then what should I call myself? There must be another word! One that doesn’t sound so daft and geeky when applied to someone in their middle-age? I would love to know!

(Since that late Friday morning in June I’ve been wondering about all of this. Not to the point of worrying. More in a sense of being curious and slightly perplexed. As far as I can tell, I’m not listening to music in a different way or made me listen to any less music or any different music. I’ve not taken up a latent, dormant and deep-seated interest in DIY or some similar middle-age hobby. Music is still there, at the forefront. And it always will be.)   

 

My previous three books about Glasto are all available here-

either as Kindle e books or in paperback:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Turn-Left-The-Womble-Glastonbury-ebook/dp/B0060YCKGW 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Left-Again-Womble-middle-aged-Glastonbury-ebook/dp/B00IBK2V6M 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tea-Toast-Rock-Roll-Glastonbury-ebook/dp/B00Q1UJACC