October 16th
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
Paperback:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-/dp/149495687X
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