One More Into the Murky Depths

)

We Now Live in the Kind of World

Where Bruce Springsteen gets more attention for doing parodies with Jimmy Fallon than for having a new album out.

Tramps like us, baby...

Big Birds Flying Across the Sky

There is a Town in North Ontario... or North Jersey

I forget which...



(They're not booing, they're yelling "Neillllllll.")

My Clothes, My Hair, My Face

Nothing But Tired, part 2

She lived on a mountain.

Her house was built at an angle, so it became part of the rock of the mountain. And her soul also was tilted, also attached to the mountain.

She thought nothing of living at an angle, thought everyone did the same thing.

Until one day when she followed a goat down the mountain. And wandered into a village.

It wasn't even big enough to be a town... and certainly wasn't big enough to be a city.

But there were people there.

And music.

And exotic foods and drinks.

For a girl who lived on a mountain and was used to adjusting everything so it would work at an angle, this was a revelation.

And even after she returned to the mountain, she thought often of the village.

And of changing her life.

By going down the mountain. And dancing.

Nothing But Tired

Wanna Change My Clothes, My Hair, My Face

The quality of the light, you say.

The quality. Of the light.

But the light is long gone. It's the middle of the night, the middle of the winter.

And you're walking, alone in a group. In a city far away.

Looking for something.

Food. Drinks. Companionship.

Something.

But the wind starts to blow and you put on your hat and can't hear much of the conversation anymore.

The conversation about the quality of the light.

You won't sing karaoke tonight. Even if your throat didn't feel like razorblades you wouldn't want to sing.

But you might. You might sing.

Thinking, hoping, that might provide some small warm light in the dark, cold, night.

You let your thoughts wander, figuring out the perfect song -- one you could sing reasonably well, but still one that would sustain your ironic detachment from irony.

But there is no karaoke. Not that night.

And the three hours of sleep don't help your throat and barely help your mood.

You're still starving, looking for something that will satisfy you, not willing to take in the empty calories held out for you.

Still, today is another day.

Filled with quality. The quality of the light.

The Wheat's Growing Thin

Some of it Was True...

Welcome Clashblog readers! Hang out a bit and let me know what you think...

Two bizarre covers and a summer rerun:






The following was originally published in January 2009:

My friend Julie loved the Clash.

When Joe Strummer was buried, his friends put two bumper stickers on his coffin. One said "Vinyl Rules" and the other said "Question Authority."

Julie was cool. She had the first Clash album (the UK import, not the American version, which she said was inferior, thus winning instant punk cred with everyone she knew). She bought London Calling on the day it was released and is one of the only people I've ever known who owned Sandinista on vinyl (and regularly listened to all six sides). She saw the Clash live once and proudly argued with anyone who'd listen that they really were "the only band that matters." The politics went right over her head, but she tapped directly into the passion that exploded out of her speakers when she played their records and that was really all that mattered. (And she was so committed that you could overlook the absurdity of a suburban American blonde girl singing along to quintessentially English punk songs.)

Every March, Julie would celebrate the release of the Clash's first single ("White Riot") by skipping school (or later calling in sick to work) and watching her old VHS tape of the movie Rude Boy and listening to her old records (vinyl only, no CDs) for hours. That's what she did in March 1987, on the tenth anniversary of the Clash's first record being released. Then she went out driving in her beat-up (but still gorgeous) white convertible, top down despite the winter weather, her long hair buffeted by a cold wind, listening to this song, written and first recorded by Sonny Curtis -- now better known for writing "Love is All Around," the theme song for the Mary Tyler Moore Show (link for Gmail subscribers):


Now I'm not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure Sir Isaac Newton said something about how impossible it is to drive slowly when you hear songs like this. And Julie was flying. A State Trooper pulled her over and said he'd clocked her going 86 in a 60 zone. He asked why she was speeding. She's pretty enough to have gotten out of the ticket by flirting, but instead she explained she'd been listening to the Clash because it was the tenth anniversary of their first record coming out. The Trooper then told her about how he had discovered the Clash and how he'd seen them exactly once. As it turned out, they went to the same show. So he let her off with a warning.

Joe Strummer died before the Clash were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. Later that year, there was a Clash tribute at the Grammy awards. It took Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, Steve Van Zandt, and Elvis Costello to take Joe Strummer's place (link for Gmail subscribers):

Julie reminded me recently that, when Joe Strummer died (a few days before Christmas in 2002), she went driving again. Different car, this one not a convertible, her hair a little shorter and the heater blasting. Also blasting was "London Calling."

Again, impossible to drive slowly with a song like that.

So Julie was pulled over; this time clocked at 70 in a 55. When the cop asked why she was speeding, Julie explained that Joe Strummer of the Clash had died. She talked about the band, she talked about the show she'd seen, and she even mentioned that she had just listened to Sandinista on vinyl. All six sides.

The cop patiently listened to Julie's story, eyes hidden behind mirror sunglasses, face stripped of emotion. Finally Julie asked him what type of music he liked.

The cop thought for a minute, then said "Britney Spears."

And wrote her a ticket for $78.

Who Knew?

Season of Surprises

You live long enough you discover that real life is much stranger than you ever thought.

For example, who knew that Billy Joel does such a good Springsteen impression?


Bruce's impression of Billy Joel, however, is not so great -- but you gotta give him props for trying.

To Her Cheshire Smile

To skate away on... to some alien, distant shore.

I don't know what it is about dreams. They sneak up on you, torpedo you with anxiety and hopes, then drag you across the cluttered floor of your subconscious.

And why are the scariest dreams the ones that sound the most benign and mundane when you describe them?

The other night, I dreamed I was in a meeting about a project. I don't remember what the project was, but in the dream I was very excited about it.

And I came out of the meeting, which was in an old duplex house with curved doorways and dark grey adobe stones.

And I looked into the other unit of the duplex -- which was a mirror image of the one I'd come from -- only the walls were painted a deep, rich ocean blue. Then I saw her.

And she said she was surprised to see me. So I mumbled something about the meeting. Then she said "I didn't think I was allowed to talk to you." Which is weird because I thought I wasn't allowed to talk to her.

And it's been many, many years since I've seen her. But she got into my blood like a virus and I'm still not sure I have all the antibodies I need.

So we talked and the party she was at swirled around us. She was selfish and sad and her life was one long emergency. But I loved her then more than either of us could understand. And being back in her presence, even if just for a moment, even if just in a dream, was intoxicating. And very, very, very sad.


And as we talked, I realized she was in danger. If she went to Hungary she would die. And the thought froze me, terrified me. And I let myself think for a moment about what that would mean if she died... and whether that would make her finally vacate that chunk of real estate in my brain she's occupied (without signing a lease or even paying her share of the utilities) for so long.

I must have gotten quiet, because she suddenly grabbed my arm and looked me in the eyes. "Why did you come here?" she asked.

I wanted to say this.


But I'm not Bruce Springsteen. Hell, on my best days I'm barely Manfred Mann.

So I didn't tell her. But I did say "don't go to Hungary." Her smile turned confused, gradually fading. (Even when I'm wide awake, it lingers behind her, leaving the hint of her essence.)

And then, though it took every ounce of effort I had, I got up and I left.

You Know What They Said? Well, Some of it Was True

Three Quick Springsteen Stories:


Jackie was from Revere and she had the thickest Boston accent I'd ever heard in my life. She was also a Springsteen fanatic (we listened to three sides of The River together in the fall of 1980) and a Roman Catholic with interesting religious views. She was (theoretically) opposed to pre-marital sex, but felt that things happen and as long as you confess, everything's cool.

The one exception she made was for Springsteen. If she ever had the chance, she told me, she'd do Bruce Springsteen. "And even the Pope would understand" she said. Best of all, she wouldn't have to confess because her love for Bruce was pure. In fact, she told me, Heaven is a place where a bunch of people hang out, partying, and listening to Bruce Springsteen.

Which sounds pretty good to me.

***************************************

Because Bruce Springsteen tours with the E Street Band (a group with 17 guitarists), it's easy to forget that he's a pretty great guitar player.

When Warren Zevon was dying, he publicly announced that he wanted to record one last album. Springsteen flew to Los Angeles in the middle of a tour, walked into the recording studio, plugged in and played the guitar solo that appears in the song "Disorder in the House" in one take. It blazes. Afterwards, Zevon looked up and said "You really are him." (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


***************************************

After Joe Strummer died, Bruce Springsteen (along with Steve Van Zandt, Dave Grohl, and Elvis Costello) sang a great version of "London Calling" on the 2003 Grammy Awards show.

This summer, Springsteen performed in London at Hyde Park and again sang "London Calling," his voice is hoarse, but he channels Joe Strummer (and plays a great guitar solo that makes you forget the other 16 guitarists onstage).


***************************************

And remember, the crowd's not booing, they're yelling "Happy Birthday"!

Springsteen Tests Your Lactose Intolerance

Here I am down in Kingstown again.

Some songs carry with them clear and vibrant associations, even if the associations make no sense.

When I first heard the Bruce Springsteen song "Hungry Heart," I wasn't thinking about the great Flo & Eddie (from the Turtles) backing vocals, or Springsteen's own vocal, which was sped up slightly to add urgency to the track. I wasn't thinking about how Springsteen wrote the song for the Ramones, but his manager (who had seen the future of rock 'n' roll and its name was Bruce Springsteen) said it would be a big hit and wouldn't let the Boss give it to someone else to record.

None of that.

What I thought about was the opening lines:

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back.

Instantly, the first time I heard it, I changed the lyrics in my head to:

Got a wife and kids in Monterey Jack
I put them in cheese now they'll never talk back.

It made little sense thirty years ago. And it makes even less sense now.

But I still can't think of that song without thinking of those lines which aren't even in the song and make no sense in or out of context.

For me, "Hungry Heart" is and forever will be the cheese song.

(Video filmed in 1995 in a small Berlin cafe.)

Bruce Springstone Live at Bedrock

At the end of summer in 1982, a strange and wonderful record snuck onto the radio for a few weeks.

A singer with a fairly good Bruce Springsteen impression ran through what by then were already well-established Springsteen cliches: populist spoken word sections, fantastic sax solos, heartfelt wailing of a beloved girl's name, etc. Except the song was the theme from "Meet the Flintstones" and the spoken-word section was all about laborers getting off work at the quarry and powering stone cars with their feet.

The record (a 45 with "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as the B-side, also in Springsteen style) was available in several of my favorite stores and after hearing it on the radio a few times, I forked over two dollars and bought it. The cover showed Fred Flintsone and Dino leaning against each other like Bruce and Clarence from Born to Run. I wondered who was responsible for these songs, but never found out and eventually forgot all about it. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)

[Sorry, YouTube yanked the video after this was posted -- follow the above link to see/listen on MySpace, but embedding is disabled...]

Fast-forward nearly 27 years. I hear a live Bruce Springsteen song on XM radio and the structure of it reminds me exactly of Bruce Springstone. Years earlier, I might've wondered about it for a few days, then moved on. But today, music-lovers have an orgy of online facts and music at their fingertips.

So now I know that Bruce Springstone was the brainchild of Baltimore cartoonist/musician/writer Tom Chalkley (who used to perform Springsteen-ified versions of songs as a party trick). Chalkley sang lead and also drew the back cover image (Springsteen sliding into home plate while holding a guitar). Other musicians included drummer/cartoonist John Ebersberger (who drew the front cover), keyboardist and comics scholar Suzy Shaw, guitarist Craig Hankin (who also did the arrangements with Chalkley), and lead guitarist Tommy Keene.

Two years later, Keene's EP Places That Are Gone got rave reviews and led to a big record deal with Geffin. His album Songs From the Film (including the song "Places That Are Gone") was one of the highlights of the brief power-pop revival of the mid-80s. I couldn't find the "official" video online, but here's a pretty good live version from 1986:


According to Ask Mr. Pop History (and with a name like that, he must have massive cred), the Bruce Springstone single sold 35,000 copies before Hannah-Barbara slapped the musicians with a cease-and-desist order because they felt the cover art infringed on their trademarked images. (Since H-B is a cartoon company, I'm pretty sure their in-house lawyers must have been twirling their evil mustaches while they wrote that letter.)

And is it wrong to draw some solace from the knowledge that Fred Flintsone's stone-age lawyer is bound to get a hernia from lifting a briefcase filled with stone legal tablets?

Artifact From An Album That Never Was

Blown Away With the Sands.

A friend of mine from college once told me late at night that every time he heard David Bowie, he thought of sand dunes.

Every grain of sand was a potential new career Bowie could have had -- each one strong enough to act as the foundation for a giant dune, but each easily blown away by the wind in favor of a new grain of sand (and a slightly different dune).

So, after a series of cartoonish singles in the late 60s (which then were endlessly repackaged on compilation albums -- "The Laughing Gnome," anyone?), Bowie settled in for a decade of flirtations with hippie folk, glam rock, Philly Soul, electronica, dance pop, and punk-lite.

Following, the commercial and artistic triumph of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars, Bowie hauled the Spiders back into the studio to record an offbeat collection of British songs (from groups like the Who, the Pretty Things, the Who, the Easybeats, the Yardbirds, and Pink Floyd) Bowie had loved in the 1960s . The resulting album, Pin Ups, is a strange and wondrous anomaly whose appearance served as a signal that Bowie's career would be built on a foundation of anomalies.

A year later, the Spiders from Mars were gone (with Mick Ronson shifting permanently into a Mott the Hoople/Ian Hunter orbit) and Bowie's musical adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 morphed (after Orwell's widow refused to sell the rights) into a dystopian concept album called Diamond Dogs.

Bowie toyed with the idea of recording a sequel to Pin Ups featuring American songs from the late 60s and early 70s, but only completed on song -- a Bruce Springsteen number (plucked from Springsteen's self-consciously Dylanesque debut album) called "Growin' Up":


Bowie's version wouldn't surface until the 1990s, when RykoDisc reissued all the early Bowie albums with a great collection of bonus tracks. Ryko put "Growin' Up" with the other covers on Pin Ups, but the song vanished after Virgin/EMI bought the rights to Bowie's catalogue. The song reappeared a few years later as a bonus track on the 30th anniversary edition of Diamond Dogs (don't worry, there won't be a quiz).

I mentioned Bowie and the grains of sand theory to my friend from college the other day. He insists he never said it and speculates that I dreamed the entire conversation "because isn't college like a four-year dream?" Maybe so. Or maybe it's like Springsteen would say "I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and came out with my soul untouched." (But with lots of great records.)


Still, I would've loved to have heard the whole American Pin Ups album (or even have known what else would have been on it). The one thing I do know is that Bowie (along with Mick Ronson and the other Spiders From Mars) recorded a version of the Velvet Underground's "White Lines/White Heat" during the Pin Up sessions. That song has never been released, but Bowie gave the track to Mick Ronson, who kept erased Bowie's vocals and recorded his own, releasing it on his Play, Don't Worry album. One year, I had a temporary job cleaning up dorm rooms after students moved out. In one room, I found a huge pile of sand in the corner, along with an unopened bottle of Tequila and a vinyl copy of Play, Don't Worry. I gave away the Tequila, kept the record, and swept up the sand, which blew away in the breeze like the shifting sand dunes of David Bowie's career.

Ten Top Problems with Top Ten Lists

Again, I scour the internets so you won't have to.

While hunting for a digitized version of Bruce Springsteen's "Held Up Without a Gun" (the studio version that only appeared as the B-side of the "Hungry Heart" single and has never been on an album and never appeared on CD, not the live version), I stumbled upon a wealth of musical Top Ten Lists.

And realized there are a lot of problems with many of the Top Ten Lists online. So many problems that I came up with a Top Ten list of Problems with (musical) Top Ten Lists:

10. You gotta actually number the list. (And I'm talking to you, ThrowawayBlog!) Yes, people will quibble with your placement of the Top 10 Science Fiction songs of all time... but isn't that why you posted them? Besides, it fools no one when you include 11 songs in your Top Ten and think no one will notice just because they're not numbered!

9. Don't confuse best and worst. When you're making a list of the Top Ten Best Band Names of All Time, you want "the Mr. T Experience," when you're making a list of the worst band names of all time, not so much.

8. Don't forget that not all of your readers will be named Stacey... especially when you're making a list of Top Ten Best Songs About Your Mom.

7. Yeah, it was weird when Run-DMC and Aerosmith teamed up on the remake of "Walk This Way," but it actually worked. So maybe that wouldn't belong on the list of Top Ten Weird Musical Collaborations. On the other hand, the James Brown/Pavarotti collaboration is so bizarre it might just deserve two places on the list.

6. You gotta start at Number 10 and work your way down to Number 1. Otherwise people see that you selected "Pac Man Fever" as your Top Novelty Song of all time and just stop reading.

5. Number 6 is especially true with a bizarre list like the Weirdest Songs Played at Funerals (and please, reporters, verify that someone really played "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" and you weren't just hearing a joke from the weird cousin no one likes).

4. If you have a wide-ranging list, such as the Top Ten Weird Al songs, you might want to state how you chose them. Otherwise it's just random.

3. Speaking of Weird Al, can you really have a list of Top Ten Songs to Munch On and only include one of Weird Al's food songs? Although what can you expect from someone who thinks Pop Tarts suck toasted? :)

2. Don't be afraid to include items on your list that don't really belong but are still cool. But don't be surprised if this upsets people. And don't say things like, "if I put MP3s on the headless Barbie USB drive, it would sort of fit in the list"! (On the other hand, the fish-stick drive would be a great way to store all the songs from Number 3.)

1. No one can possibly believe deep down in their heart that the accordian is geekier than the theremin.

More Weird Stuff from the Internets

I scour the Internets for weirdness, then bring it back safely to you.

They're not booing, they're yelling "Tuba" (link for Gmail subscribers):


"The Final Countdown" on cellos?! Hell, yeah!


USB drive dressed up as mix tape for Halloween. And it still sounds okay after you leave it in your car's glove compartment over the summer!