At Home in Hespeler

One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Rush – Spirit of Radio.

I wasn’t always a Bruce Springsteen fan. When The River was released in 1979, I well remember the hype CHUM FM gave the album, and not having a clue what the fuss was about. Where’s the hot guitar solos? Springsteen himself wears a suit vest onstage for gosh sake. All hype, seemed a reasonable response.

It’s not that I disliked, you understand, not really. Born to Run, I would have to admit was a great song. And the other songs I knew, Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, Candy’s Room, Prove it All Night and later Hungry Heart, were all good songs. And if I had sat and put it together in that way, thought about his songs, I probably would have been a convert much earlier than I was.

There really was no excuse. Darkness on the Edge of Town is a great album, a work of art as much as any album of the rock era can be called that. I was 15 when Darkness was released in 1978, so I had no excuse. Except, I knew nobody who had it, liked it, talked about it. An album that good, by an artist that good, an artist we all knew just never listened too, and it seems nobody in my high school bought it.

I regret that I didn’t get Springsteen then. I was doing the concert scene by then, and had I seen Springsteen in ‘78, I would have been catching an astounding performer at his absolute peak. Even a few years later, when I had less excuses, I would have been seeing him perform at a level that few others ever do.

The conversion would take a few more years. It began in the middle of the night in 1983. I was working midnights at the local Food City, and had the night off. I stayed up, and when the TV was done for the night, turned on the radio. At 4:30 the DJ said he had tickets to Springsteen’s legendary sidekick and saxophonist, Clarence Clemons, and his band, the Red Bank Rockers at the El Mocambo. I called, got through immediately and had my name put on the list for the show – apparently virtually nobody else was listening at that time. On one days notice, and knowing nobody who was a Springsteen fan, I couldn’t find any takers for the second ticket, so I went by myself.

Upstairs at the El Mocambo was a small place, wider than it is deep with a low ceiling. It holds maybe a hundred people, who sit four each at a table. Rows of table run only 2 or 3 deep, thus about ten across. It is, it must be said, an intimate setting. I took a seat about ten feet from the stage and settled in to see I had no idea what. All I really knew was he played saxophone for Springsteen, and was on that album cover, the one where he’s leaning on Bruce. Hey, I was going to be ten feet away from a man on an album cover, and that was pretty cool. However, I was only ten feet away should it prove to be not very good and I wanted to leave halfway through.

I needn’t have worried. I remember sprinklings of the night. He started and ended with a couple of instrumentals. He brought out a little guy who sang great R&B, and had an on fire band behind him. He played for what must have been close to an hour and a half, but it seemed like ten minutes. And by the last song, Fire, I was dancing on my table, as was everybody else in the place.

I had often heard it said that music has energy, that it could be electric. I had no real idea what that really meant until that night when, like Ben Franklin standing in the storm with his kite, I learnt exactly what that electricity felt like. It was magical. I have said before that I learnt the meaning of the phrase raised the roof that night. The energy was so palpable in that little tiny room it felt like the roof must have moved upward so that the walls wouldn’t blow down.

How sad to hear the Big Man, he was 6’5” and 270 pounds, with the ever present big smile died yesterday, one week after suffering a stroke. He was 69, too young, too talented. I’ve seen Springsteen six times now, seen Clemons absolutely nail that astounding Jungleland solo. Seen him hanging out beside the speakers, like hoods at the drug store, while playing Rosalita. Seen him standing on one edge of the stage, while Bruce was on top of the piano, yet Clemons is the guy who was hard not to look at. I’ve even seen him kiss Springsteen, the singer on his knees after sliding across the stage to where Clarence was playing. But what I’ll always remember is that night 28 years ago when he seemed to come within’ an inch of literally blowing the roof off the El Mocambo. The night I learnt Rock ‘n’ Roll didn’t have to come wrapped in loud guitar solos and wailing singers.

No, Rock ‘n’ Roll is good time music, and nobody did good time better than Clarence, the Big Man, Clemons.

Springsteen is still Boss, The Freedom of Music Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen, CHUM FM, Clarence Clemons, Darkness on the Edge of Town, El Mocambo, The Red Bank Rockers, The River

Bruce Springsteen tells the story from the stage. After a gig, a young Bruce and sidekick Steve Van Zandt are walking the Asbury Park beach late one summer night. Walking towards them is a huge guy, dark, frightening looking guy. There’s nobody else on the beach, and as tension mounts they realize, he’s carrying a…a…a… saxophone!

Thus goes the story of how Bruce met the guy who would be his on stage foil for the next forty years (and counting).

A former football player, Clarence Clemons said in his autobiography, Big Man, that he had stuck with Springsteen all these years because he loves his music. It’s not hard to argue a large reason that music is so lovable is the linebacker with the saxophone.

Happy 70th Birthday Clarence Clemons, for being the Big Man, and for that solo in Jungleland. Never has a saxophone felt so at home in rock and roll.

Birthday Wishes Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons

One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Rush – Spirit of Radio.

Dec 31, 2010 6:25 PM
This shall be one long lonely night.

The above was written on the Facebook wall of somebody I’m close enough to be bothered by it. It wasn’t serious, not a cry for help or a desolate person in desperate need of company. But left alone on new years, she felt a little saddened by it.

I didn’t have a wild and crazy new years eve myself, although I was out among friends. A few drinks, some nice finger food to nibble on and the conversation of a couple of good friends. Did I drink? Why yes you honour. Much? No, not very much at all. Which perhaps explains how, at around noon on New Years Day, I was working out.

I put Bruce Springsteen’s Live at Hyde Park, a Christmas present, in the DVD player to work out with. As it was playing, Dancing in the Dark came on:

Message keeps getting clearer,
Radio’s on and I’m moving around the place.
I check my look in the mirror,
I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.
Man I ain’t getting’ nowhere, just sittin’ in a dump like this
There’s something happenin’ somewhere, baby I just know there is.

Stay on the streets of this town, they’ll be carvin’ you up all night.
They say you gotta stay hungry, hey baby! I’m just about starving’ tonight.
I’m dying for some action, I’m sick of sittin’ round here trying to write this book,
I need a love reaction, c’mon baby give me just one look.

Springsteen has always had that one line, that phrase that could express so much. The intensity and passion of Born to Run, summed up in:

I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight,
In an everlasting kiss.

The sadness of The River:

And for my nineteenth birthday,
I got a union card and a wedding coat.
We went down to the courthouse,
And the judge put it all to rest.
No wedding day smile, no walk down the aisle,
No flowers no wedding dress.

You kind of know that’s not going to be a happy song.

But Dancing in the Dark was always different. It was the pop song, the song Courtney Cox danced to. It meant, well, nothing much.

In fact, it may have meant something very much more. During recording of Born in the USA, Springsteen’s manager and producer Jon Landau sent him home one night with a simple instruction: the album is good to great but it needs a hit. It needs a radio song. Go home and write it.

He did. Interesting then that he references writing so prominently in Dancing in the Dark:

I’m dying for some action,
I’m sick of sittin’ round here trying to write this book,
I need a Love reaction…

Suppose you change the word book for song, and it’s not hard to imagine you are looking into Bruce Springsteen’s very heart at that moment. It seems light enough, until…

“This shall be one long lonely night.”

It’s the knowledge that someone you love is lonely that changes the song. It becomes not a dance song, but a sad song with a happy face.

When the Born in the USA album came out, there was a fair bit of remark about Springsteen’s appearance. A once gaunt, skinny, weak looking kid (well, young man), he was now muscular, built up on weights. Meanwhile his foil, The Big Man, Clarence Clemons, had also hit the weights, adding bulk, losing fat. Springsteen gained weight, it was reported, Clemons lost. It seems unremarkable, except:

I check my look in the mirror,
I wanna change my clothes my hair my face.

Again you ask yourself, was Springsteen giving us a peek into his very darkest place, at 120 beats per minute of happy synthesizer pop?

And again you remember the words of Jon Landau: “go home and write a hit song.” Not a carefully crafted examination of your psyche. Not a scream for help. A pop song. So Springsteen did, all the while leaving a song that 25 years and hundreds of listens later, there was still something there to be discovered.

“That’s why,” as Clemons said in his recent autobiography, Big Man , “he’s the boss.”

Springsteen is still Boss, The Freedom of Music Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, Dancing in the Dark, Live from Hyde Park, The BIg Man, The Boss, The River

One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Rush – Spirit of Radio.

Pictures from my youth. The family is gathered around the Christmas tree. It’s Christmas morning and wrapping paper is flying. A flat square, wrapped in red paper, gets passed across. There can be no mistaking what it is: a record. Twelve inches of vinyl that when rotated 33 1/3 times a minute with a needle stuck in it’s grooves, produced music. The question isn’t what is it? – although it is often asked with humour – but which record is it? The Christmas in question peeling back the wrapping paper produces a familiar red cover, with what looks like an impatient vulture, staring into the distance with it’s arms folded.

It must be twenty years between receiving an LP for Christmas, but the musical landscape is changing and this Christmas brought Them Crooked Vultures in all it’s double LP, gatefold cover glory. I reviewed the album via you tube download, when it first came out. If your interested in what I have to say about the music, that review still stands.

The bigger question is, why am I getting it on LP? How did it come to pass that 2009’s super group, Them Crooked Vultures, are releasing their inaugaural disc on vinyl? The answer, in my opinion, is two fold. LP records are back, and they came back because they make more sense as a keepsake in the era of MP3s, and because humbled record companies are, finally, giving their customers what they want.

To the latter point first. Records, or fans of the record, have never gone away. Always a substantial minority, CDs began to overcome records only after the record companies started restricting records. Up went the price, down went the supply and that’s a bingo, we live in a CD universe where the record companies profits double per unit sold and Yuppy morons were trading in their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack LPs and buying Phil Collin’s and Sting CDs. Soon the rest of us had no choice and, in the name of quality, we are buying our second copy of Born to Run, this time on CD sourced from the same LP we still have. Who voted for this business model?

Actually, no one voted for it because there never was a choice. Not for ten years or so anyway. But soon enough choice reared it’s ugly head in the name of Napster and in the form of MP3s. Suddenly there was another way to listen to music, and people voted for “not the CD.”

To be sure, CDs had their advantages, convenience being the main one. You could throw it in the CD player, play song 2,4,7 and 9 without having to hear the rest and without scratching your record or having to turn it over. It didn’t take long before you could program your CD player to play those songs, and soon after you could buy a CD player that holds 5 CDs, push on random and not have to hear the same song twice between dinner and the Tonight show. I was at many parties between 1988 and 1995 when the home stereo was turned into a muzak player, with a constant rotation of Sting, Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and The Eagles (if the hosts put as much thought into the selection of beer as they did music, I never made it to Sting song #2).

Eventually CD’s became portable. It took a while, but the hardware makers developed the Discman, and you could stick a CD player in your pocket and listen while in the line at the bank. You couldn’t move and listen to it without it skipping, but you could still take it with you. Eventually they solved for walking, even if running was still a problem. By the time portable CD players became obsolete, they had solved the running problem too.

They put CD players in cars too. In a list of life’s great mystery’s, one has to include the following: how do they get the Caramilk in the Caramilk bar? Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong? How come they had CD players that didn’t skip in cars by 1990 but you couldn’t do the Terry Fox run without your CD skipping until 2005? But they did it, they had CD players in cars. You could plunk it in and go. Buy that Spin Doctors CD and sadly discover that while you could listen to Two Princes from Milton to Niagara Falls, you would gladly stick knotting needles in your ear before you listened to any of the other songs on the CD again? No problem, just keep hitting the back button and you could repeat the same song over and over. Because it was CDs, and if the music they were putting on them was, on the whole, crap, the CDs themselves were a great convenience.

But the advantage of CDs ends with their convenience. The quality argument never really held water and even if CDs had superior quality, what MP3s prove is that people don’t care that much about the quality. It was good enough on record, and it’s still good enough on the far inferior MP3s.

And if we can stand the sound of MP3s, they’re extremely portable, can be got or purchased without leaving your bedroom, are available for free, although often not legally, and work regardless of whether you put them away properly. Soon came the MP3 player, and suddenly it’s never mind Terry Fox, you could do Jump Rope for Heart and not have your music skipping. You can program them, carry around hundreds of albums and literally thousands of songs. Five CDs playing a random selection of songs? Now you can DJ a wedding with nothing but a good amplifier, 2 good speakers and an I-pod – and never play the same artist twice. DJs used to show up in vans, now if the hall has a good in-house PA they show up on a Vespa and still have room for an assistant.

MP3s, however, don’t make for a good collectable. If you can have far better variety of music on hand at all times without causing a bulge in your pocket, CDs lose their convenience. But if you want to collect music, LPs have always been a better choice. Bigger covers mean that you can print who played keyboards on song #3, or the songs lyrics in a font bigger than that found on an Asprin bottle. And the new LPs are being made of more, and better quality vinyl, creating a quality of sound inarguably as good as anything you can get on a CD. They stack nice against a wall, and look good doing so, while the smaller yet bulkier CD take up more floor space. LPs also allow for cooler covers. Now you don’t have to have a close up shot of the singer, you can do some actual art.

LPs are back, made useful again because the advantages they always had over CDs still exist, the advantages CDs had over LPs are made redundant by MP3s. And the record companies, losing customers, power and money had no choice but to listen to what their customers demanded: 20 years too late perhaps, but finally they listen.

And finally, a new record under the Christmas tree. Yes Virginia, you can go home again.

The Freedom of Music, This Week on my I-Pod Born to Run, CD, Celine Dion, LP, Mariah Carey, MP3, Phil Collins, Saturday Night Fever, Spin Doctors, Sting, The Eagles, Them Crooked Vultures, Two Princes