April 26 – The Boss Blew The Dust Off The Acoustic Guitar

It might be surprising to realize, but Born in the U.S.A. was only Bruce Springsteen‘s seventh studio album. Since then he’s released 14 more; yet for all the praise and glory surrounding those first seven, many fans would be hard-pressed to even name the more recent ones. Case in point, his 13^th album, Devils and Dust, released this day in 2005.

It came out about three years after his more-famous The Rising, but was a stark departure from it in sound. That because the 2002 album was something more or less typical of The Boss – a rock record with his E Street Band behind him. Devils and Dust however was his third “solo” album comprised of downbeat acoustic music, after Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad. The Guardian perhaps wisely intuited “The Rising...sounded like Born in the USA, but didn’t sell like Born in the USA, which may have influenced the decision to dismiss the E Street Band again.” Bruce assembled 11 songs he had kicking around and in many cases had done demos of dating back to 1996; “All the Way Home” in fact was a song he’d written for Southside Johnny before that, with Johnny releasing his version back in 1991. Various recording sessions dating back as far as ’96 but as late as three months before the album release were used, and while Bruce did most of the work (playing guitar and keyboards throughout the record and even playing drums on “Jesus Was An Only Son”) he had help here and there like current Rolling Stones drummer Steve Jordan on several songs, and The Boss’ wife, Patti Scialfa, singing backing vocals. And in a nod perhaps to move with the times (or else placate Columbia executives) he did bring in Brendan O’Brien to help him produce it as well as play bass. O’Brien had made a name for himself in the ’90s producing the Stone Temple Pilots among others; maybe the reason a few reviews felt the production quality was better and smoother than his first pair of acoustic albums.

The songs sounded rather downbeat, and often invoked the Wild West, even by their titles – “Devils and Dust”, “”Black Cowboys”, “Silver Palomino” and “Reno” for instance. The latter garnered most of the attention for the album, being a dreary but fairly explicit account of a lonely guy hooking up with a prostitute in a motel room in the city. It’s said it was the main reason Starbucks dropped out of negotiations to sell it in their cafes. Bruce said his voice varied a little “in tone, that sounded like the characters I was singing about.”

It was released on LP and cassette as well as two disc options – a standard CD and a package with a DVD as well. The DVD included several live performances of the songs plus an interview with Springsteen. In a sign of the times, allmusic note that the CD wouldn’t play in computers “so it cannot easily be ripped to mp3s”.

Most reviews were good. Rolling Stone and Pop Matters both gave it 4.5-stars. The former considered it his “most audacious record since the home demo, American Gothic of 1982’s Nebraska” and figured it “sparkles in the right places, like stars in a clear Plains night.” Years later allmusic gave it 4-stars, calling it “somber” and suggesting the songs are “written as if the songs were meant to be read aloud, not sung.” For all that they concluded “the key to (it) and why it’s his strongest record in a long time is that the music is as vivid and varied as the words.” Britain’s The Guardian was the only significant naysayer of sorts, giving it 3-stars suggesting that references to naughty sex in “Reno” wasn’t as surprising as his vocals which at times, they suggested ripped of Bob Dylan (“Silver Palomino”, still a “fine song”) and on “All I’m Thinking About” he was either doing “an homage to, or a parody of, Neil Young.”

The good reviews were borne out by the Grammys, with him getting five nominations for Awards from it, including Song Of The Year for the title track. As with the title track from The Rising, it got the nomination but lost; this time around it lost out to U2’s “Sometimes you Can’t Make It On Your Own.” He did pick up the trophy for Best Rock Solo Performance however.

The public… semi-liked it. His diehard fans, it would seem rushed out to get it – it debuted at #1 in the U.S. , becoming his fifth chart-topper, and the first one without the E Street Band. However, after three weeks it was gone from the top 10 and with no hit single emerging from it, it seemed quickly forgotten. It also hit #1 in the UK and Sweden and #2 in Canada, going gold in all those places plus more, and reaching platinum in Ireland.

His next effort returned to more traditional rock with his band back behind him, but in between, The Boss gave his fans a treat playing a 76 show tour to support Devils and Dust, featuring many of his acoustic songs plus a few “unplugged” style versions of old hits. Most of the shows were in smallish, upscale theatres such as the Pantages in L.A. and Royal Albert Hall in London. It didn’t play any shows in Reno though.

January 1 – In With The New

A happy new year to all of you, dear readers! Let’s hope it will be one of health and happiness for each of you and a more peaceful globe for all of us to reside upon.

What better way to ring in 2024 on A Sound Day than with the way many of us ring in every new year, at about one second past midnight on New Year’s Day – “Auld Lang Syne.”

The song dates back to the 1700s, created from a Scottish Gaelic poem written by Scotland’s national hero, Robbie Burns. He wrote the ode to the out with the old, in with the new, with its title meaning “old long since”, or approximately “days gone by”. Someone put it over a traditional Scottish folk melody and a tradition was soon born that would sweep the world much more effectively than haggis!

For our version of it, we’ll go back to the first minutes of 1979. Many would have been at home watching Dick Clark and friends ring in the new year from New York, but about 20 000 people in the Cleveland area were out doing something else – being at the Richfield Coliseum, watching Bruce Springsteen wrap up his seven-month long “Darkness” tour, promoting his Darkness on the Edge of Town album. A show Dec. 31 and one on New Year’s day there were the finales for the 115 concert tour. At midnight, well into his long set, he marked the moment by playing “Auld Lang Syne”… although really sax man Clarence Clemons steals the show on this one! He’d also play it two years later, at a New Year’s Eve concert on Long Island.

Since then, one must guess Bruce prefers singing it at home with his wife and friends; subsequent tours, while often spanning over a year, have always taken a break over the Christmas-New Year’s Season.

Here’s to new acquaintances…but remember, old acquaintances should in fact, not, be forgotten!

December 18 – Wrapped Up Like A What?

One could say Bruce Springsteen’s biggest hit hit the top 40 on this day 47 years back. But one probably wouldn’t, because that would not only be confusing, but rather misleading. Still, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band‘s take on “Blinded by the Light”, which charted this day in 1976, is the only song written by The Boss to ever be a #1 single in the U.S., surprising as that might seem.

Now, that it was a hit wouldn’t have surprised Springsteen, or shouldn’t have. It was the first song on his first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, and he wrote it as a late addition to it when Columbia’s boss Clive Davis told him he liked the record but it needed something that could be a radio hit. Springsteen quickly came up with this one and “Spirit in the Night” to try and deliver just that.

Springsteen said he used a rhyming dictionary extensively creating “Blinded by the Light” and that the song was one of his which “is like when you’re walking down the street. My songs are what you see, only distorted.” He ran together various disparate scenes from his hometown and memories in rapid-fire pace. They included a few references to baseball – the “Indians in the Summer” line, for instance refers to his little league baseball team, and “merry go round” slang for a pitcher who keeps walking batters – and people he knew. The “silicone sister” was a local stripper and as Songfacts put it, the phrase was “arguably the first mention of breast implants in popular music.” And then there was that line. Springsteen wrote and sang “cut loose like a deuce, another roller in the night.”

Hearing the Springsteen version, one can see how he could have been compared to Bob Dylan back then. The lyrics were poetic yet seemingly unintelligible and the delivery straight out of the tortured troubadour playbook. But hear it you might not have done back then; it was released as Bruce’s first single but flopped commercially.

Which is where Manfred Mann comes in.

His Earth Band had already cut another Springsteen song – coincidentally “Spirit in the Night” – and had minor success with it in 1975, especially in Europe. So they decided to try and see if they could get lucky twice and do a Springsteen cover for their seventh album, The Roaring Silence. They picked “Blinded by the Light.” they added some two minutes to The Boss’ five minute-plus telling (although conversely the record company edited it down to under four for the radio version) and with Mann’s soaring keyboard crescendos and Dave Flett’s guitar, complete with Wah pedal effects, it sounded bold and upbeat; Chris Thompson sang it energetically. And just a wee bit differently.

He changed “cut loose” to “revved up”, but with his British accent and what Mann described as poor recording equipment, it sounded to most like he was singing “wrapped up like a douche.” Oops!

The band’s namesake said Warner Brothers weren’t happy. “The southern Bible Belt radio stations think that it’s about a vaginal douche, and they have problems with body parts down there!” He said they tried to recut it, but it sounded worse, so they left it as is. Much to Bruce Springsteen’s chagrin, perhaps. “I don’t think that Springsteen liked our ‘Blinded by the Light’ ‘coz (he thought) we sang ‘wrapped up like a douche…if I ever saw him, I’d avoid him and cringe.” Something The Boss seemed to confirm. “Deuce was like, ‘Little Deuce Coupe’, as in a two-seater hot rod. Douche is a feminine hygiene procedure. What can I say? The public spoke.”

Indeed they did. It was easily Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s biggest hit and the first big hit Mann had been on since “The Mighty Quinn” about a decade earlier. It hit #1 in the U.S. and Canada, #6 in the UK and pushed the album into the American top 10, 30 spots better than his next best. It is, in the words of Songfacts, “one of the most triumphant covers ever recorded.” It also, as noted it curiously the only American #1 single Springsteen wrote, the best of his own singles (chart-wise) being “Dancing in the Dark”, which came oh so close, at #2.

October 17 – River Floated Bruce Up To Superstardom

Perhaps Bruce Springsteen proved he really was “The Boss” at Columbia Records 43 years back. He had an album, entitled The Ties that Bind sent to them for final mixing, with an eye to it being on the shelves for Christmas, 1979 shopping. Then he pulled the plug on it. “The songs lacked that kind of unity and conceptual intensity I like,” he explained. So he and his E Street Band went back to the New York City studios again for much of the first half of the next year, recording 50 tunes in total, including some from that ’79 recording (such as “The Ties That Bind” itself) and some which had been outtakes from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions in ’78. They whittled that down to the best 20 tracks and 83 minutes, and the result was his double-album The River, which came out this day in 1980.

Twenty songs gives a lot of space to work with, and Springsteen made a conscious decision to try and not get stuck in a rut on the album, mixing tempos and tones well to reflect “life had paradoxes – a lot of them. You’ve got to live with them.” The songs varied in sound but were pretty consistent in quality, and many came to be staples of his catalog in later years : “Hungry Heart”, the title track, “Fade Away”, “Indpendence Day”, “Cadillac Ranch” . He says the title track, “The River” was written for his brother-in-law who’d just lost his construction job and was going through tough times. Not only did it work as “a record that was a sort of gateway to my future writing,” it also set him on the direct path to his next album, Nebraska. Curiously, the big hit on the album, “Hungry Heart”, was one he wrote with an eye on passing it along to the Ramones to record. His manager Jon Landau wisely suggested he keep it and record it himself.

Critics loved it then, and now, for the most part. At the time it was released, New York’s Village Voice rated it “A-” and weeks later picked it as the second-best record of ’80. Rolling Stone graded it 5-stars, saying it was “a rock & roll milestone…filled with an uncommon common sense and intelligence that could only have come from an exceptionally warm-hearted graduate of the Street of Hard Knocks.” About two decades later, the same magazine would pick it as the 250th greatest album of all-time (though only sixth best of his albums), saying he and the E Street Band “tear up bar band R&B rockabilly, country and their own brand of epic rock on it.” Even Britain’s Q gave it a 5-star grade in a country which isn’t as fawning over Bruce as we tend to be here.

The wait was worthwhile for Columbia. The double album was his biggest to that point, hitting #1 in the U.S. and Canada, and #2 in the UK. In France, it ended up being the fourth biggest seller of the year. And while “The River” gave him his first top 40 single in Britain, “Hungry Heart” made it higher than any of his previous singles had over here – #5 in both the States and Canada.

Needless to say, the success of this album helped him have the clout to put out the less-commercial and more downbeat Nebraska two years later, which in turn led to the counter-balancing effect of the multi-million selling Born in the U.S.A. which established him as the public’s choice as their favorite American rock singer, as well as the critics.

September 23 – Eddie ? John ? Two Names, Two Hits

Life imitates art, or perhaps art imitating life imitating art? It’s a bit confusing, but so too could be making sense of the artist who rose to stardom with a movie released this day in 1983. Eddie & the Cruisers wasn’t necessarily one of the decade’s most memorable movies (Ellen Barkin who was in it described it as a job to do to pay the rent). Wasn’t memorable unless you were John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band, that is.

Cafferty and his six-man band had been slogging it out for about a decade, having marginal local success in and around their home in Rhode Island, but had never had a big break. Allmusic describes them appropriately as akin to today’s birthday star : “Springsteen-esque.” Rather straight-ahead mainstream rock with a few ballads and a sax player in the mix.

Eddie and the Cruisers was a relatively well-known novel by P.F. Fluge which was being turned into a movie by director Martin Davidson and Embassy Pictures. It was a drama set in the present day (which is to say, early-’80s) which looked back at a one-hit wonder band of the ’60s, whose name gave the book and film their title. The band had basically disappeared and a journalist looks into it. They needed music for the film, and while they could cast actors (Michael Pare starred) to play the parts of the musicians, they couldn’t make the music themselves. Someone involved in the film knew of Cafferty and was a fan. They fit the sound Davidson wanted, a retro-sounding rock reminiscent of Dion & the Belmonts but with a touch of Springsteen thrown in as the fictitious group came from the bars of New Jersey. Presto! John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band.

While the movie makers were able to buy rights to use one Dion song (“Runaround Sue”) and a couple of other oldies, they got Cafferty to come up with seven new songs for “Eddie.” Two were instant go-tos for Cafferty. “Tender Years” and “Wild Summer Nights” were together on a 7” single Cafferty had released in 1980 (using the name Beaver Brown) which had done well for an indie single, in some New England markets but were unknown much outside of Providence or Hartford.

The movie came out… to yawns. It actually lost money at the box office. Consequentially, the soundtrack didn’t rocket up the charts at first. However, when HBO got it and started playing the movie, soon to be followed by a VHS release, the film gained popularity and close to a year after it came out, the soundtrack started up the charts. Eventually it made it into the U.S. top 10 and picked up a platinum disc.

“Tender Years” was released as a single, this time internationally, and made it to #31 in the U.S., but the biggie that made Eddie…or John… a household name briefly was “On the Dark Side.” The very Springsteen-like single (even down to the Clarence Clemons-style sax solo) got to #7 on Billboard and topped mainstream rock charts. A real hardcore fan of Cafferty might be on the lookout for different releases. Both of the hit singles were put out first under “Eddie and the Cruisers” as the artist, but later under the real name, “John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band.”

The fame got them signed to Scotti Bros. Records, an arm of Columbia/CBS back then, and they put out three albums with them in the ’80s. The first, Tough All Over did make the top 40 in North America, and generated two minor hit songs “C-I-T-Y” and the title song. After that though, things were… well, tough all over as sales dropped precipitously and they returned to their nightclub roots.

Remarkably, six years later they made a sequel, Eddie & the Cruisers II, with Cafferty again doing the music, but the movie raked in less than $1million and the album failed to dent the top 100.

September 2 – If Not Human Rights, At Least It Delivered Good Music

George Harrison really started something. His Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 changed the way the public viewed rock musicians to some degree and changed some of the artists own perceptions about their ability to affect change. Enter the ’80s, and Prince Charles was reluctantly sponsoring rock concerts to raise money (and the profile of) for his own personal charity and then of course came Live Aid. And after that, everything might have seemed a little bit of a denouement, but similar shows continued on. Case in point, this day in 1988 when a whole charity tour kicked off. The first Human Rights Now concert was 35 years ago, in London’s Wembley Stadium.

The tour was truly an international affair that put on 20 concerts in five different continents and before wrapping up in Argentina on October 15. Sponsored by Amnesty International (and also by Reebok as a corporate backer), it designed to take some big names all over the globe while promoting the acceptance of the Declaration of Civil Rights, a document which urged basic human rights be given to everyone, no matter race, nationality, gender or status within their lands. It had been adopted early on in the United Nations, back to 1948 (being overseen by American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt) but of course, not paid much attention to in far too many countries. So they set out to have people hear a little about it, and the goals of Amnesty International, be able to sign petitions… then hear some top notch rock. And that they got. The tour was headlined by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, with Peter Gabriel along as well as a surprisingly long-haired Sting, up-and-coming Tracy Chapman and Gabriel’s African talent find, Youssou N’Dour. Each concert would also feature one or two local stars as well; k.d. lang appeared at the Canadian shows, Joan Baez at all the U.S. ones along with a few others like U2’s Bono and The Edge at L.A. shows. Not that U2 is local to California, but no one was going to complain if they wanted to perform I’m sure.

The majority of the shows were outdoors in large football (be it European style or American type) stadiums, although a few like Toronto’s and Paris’s were indoors in arenas. Paris was the only city where they did two nights resultantly. It was a busy time for the artists, who made their way to such far-flung locations as Budapest, Athens (Greece), Montreal, Oakland, Tokyo, Africa’s Ivory Coast and Sao Paulo among others.

One might think this would have been especially tiring for The Boss. Springsteen had only the previous month finished his “Tunnel of Love” tour that had run most of the year in support of the album of the same name he’d put out the year before. But he was enthusiastic and even put out a special live EP from that tour to coincide with this one and raise funds for it. (That would be Chimes of Freedom in case you were wondering, a 4-song one which included his cover of Bob Dylan’s song of that name.) Gabriel had been off much of the year to that point after doing a 111 city tour for his 1986 So album, most of which had N’Dour along with him. Although British producer Martin Lewis was in charge of putting the tour together, one might guess Peter had a lion’s share of it coming to fruition as he’d personally highlighted Amnesty Internaional on that last tour of his and made sure they had displays at his shows and mentions in his tour program.

The tour was a success, at least in terms of music and fund-raising. It sold 97% of the tickets available over its run, and the Barcelona, Spain show by itself was in front of 90 000 people. Sadly, it’s highly questionable how much positive effect it had on human rights around the world. But one can’t fault The Boss, Gabriel, Tracy and the others for giving it a shot.

July 4 – US Bonds Celebrated Along With USA

Happy July 4 to all our American readers out there! Who (besides perhaps America) could it be more appropriate to feature today than a guy with the country’s name in his – Gary U.S. Bonds ? He had a huge comeback in 1981, hitting #11 this day 42 years ago with “This Little Girl.” It was his first foray onto hit radio in 19 years.

Bonds, born in Florida as Gary Anderson, was one of rock’s early teen idols. A producer came up with his new name, thinking it would be memorable and if seen in headlines, one that might get notice because people might think it was about government savings bonds! He quickly rolled out five top 10 hits between 1960-62, including a #1, “A Quarter to Three.” But as with many of his peers – think Dion, Neil Sedaka – his career quickly lost momentum in the ’60s as tastes changed and they didn’t. Or at least not enough. While Bonds put out a number of singles through the psychedelic-half of the decade, few paid any attention and by the ’70s, he was a second-string bar performer. He did have an important fan though in Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen grew up listening to Bonds’ early hits and often played “Quarter to Three” in his own concerts. He met Bonds at an Atlantic City bar around the end of the ’70s, asked if he could sit in for a set, which Gary agreed to, not knowing who Springsteen was! But he noticed the crowd reaction when Bruce appeared beside him. The two became friends and Springsteen offered to help rejuvenate Bonds’ career. Which he did in a big way with the ’81 Dedication album. Bruce wrote three tracks on it, including this retro-sounding hit, which came out of a song he’d worked on but not finished for Darkness on the Edge of Town. The Boss also let his E Street Band, Max Weinberg, Clarence Clemons and all, perform on it. Springsteen, “Miami” Steve Van Zandt and Rob Parissi, Wild Cherry’s one-time star performer, worked together to produce it.

The combination worked. The album sounded like a throwback but still modern and relevant. As allmusic pointed out, Bonds’ “elastic tenor” was heard “in much more clarity than it ever was” before. The album sold well and “This Little Girl” hit that #11 peak at home and #7 in Canada, and a respectible #26 in Australia. Springsteen continued being Bonds’ musical fairy godmother by writing his next (and last) big hit, “Out of Work” from his following album.

Bonds just turned 84, and considers himself an “Honorary New Jerseyian.”

June 4 – A Worldwide Phenomenon No Matter Where It Was From

“The Boss” got promoted on this day in 1984. Bruce Springsteen put out his seventh album, the iconic (and perhaps ironic) Born In The U.S.A. While Bruce was already popular and had already famously been on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously, this was the record that took him to an entirely new level of worldwide popularity.

The cover photo is iconic, being right up there with the other mega-hit of the early-to-mid ’80s, Thriller, when it comes to fame and recognition. It’s also where the irony begins. It looks about as patriotic and flag-waving as it could be – it has the flag as a backdrop after all – but hides the fact that much of the record’s message is about the problems of America in the 1980s and the woes of the ordinary American. Barry Miles noticed that discrepancy, but gave Springsteen some latitude for it. Writing in The Greatest Album Covers Of All Time, he opines “the choice of working class symbols (such as the baseball cap and Levis) rather than the symbols of corporate America reveal Springsteen’s leftward leanings and pro-working class stance.” Of course, the only leads into the title track and it’s similar dichotomy of an anthemic, in-yer-face “Born in the U.S.A.” bellowed between gritty lyrics about the country’s disregard for its veterans. Journalist Bruno MacDonald noted that as well, pointing out “millions heard the song but not all listened – then-president Ronald Reagan cited the song’s ‘message of hope’”.

The rather discouraging lyrics on songs like that one, “Glory Days” and “My Hometown” don’t stray far from the downbeat themes of the album’s predecessor, the acoustic Nebraska. But the sound itself was something entirely different – mainly loud, rocking and enthusiastic. Springsteen himself says of it, “if you look at the material…it’s actually written very much like Nebraska – the characters and their stories, the style of writing. It’s just in a rock band setting.”

Whether people heard it as a message of a middle class in decline and indifferent politicians or just a great Friday night party soundtrack, hear it they did… and buy it. It was easily the biggest of his career, hitting #1 in most major markets including his homeland (where it topped the charts for seven weeks), Canada, Australia, the UK and Germany, where he’d never even had a top 30 hit before. When all was said and done it had sold something in the range of nearly 30 million copies – about 15 times that of Nebraska. It ended up as the biggest-seller of 1984 in Canada and of 1985 in the U.S., helped along by a major world tour of huge outdoor stadiums and the many singles.

The album dropped an incredible seven singles – there were more singles than songs not released as 7” 45s on it – and more incredible, all seven hit the Billboard top 10, something only Thriller could match in the decade. From the first, the lively “Dancing In The Dark” (which went platinum as a single in both the U.S. and Canada) to the final one, “My Hometown”, the singles dominated rock radio for fully two years.

Critics at the time largely loved the album. The Village Voice picked it as the top album of 1984; LA Times gave it a 4-star rating (their highest) loving how he got his political message out to a wider audience with solid rock songs, and Rolling Stone lauded his “rowdy indomitable spirit”. It said of the songs, he “May shove his broody characters out the door” but at least “he gives them music they can pound on the dashboard to.” The same publication would rank the album among the 100 greatest of all-time nearly thirty years later calling it “immortal” and buoyed by a “Frank mix of soaring optimism and the feelings of, as he puts it, ‘being handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper’s Ford.’” Allmusic rate it a perfect 5-stars, noting that he “remembered that he was a rock & roll star” and for the “first time… Springsteen’s characters really seemed to relish the fight and to have something to fight for. They were not defeated and they had friendship and family to defend.”

And yes,if you haven’t noticed it before, that is a young Courteney Cox he dances with in the video for “Dancing In The Dark”. Imagine how big the record would’ve been if he’d used Jennifer Aniston!

April 25 – The Boss Overcomes A Quick Session To Make A Great Record

After over 30 years performing, 13 studio albums, several of them selling well into the millions and numerous world tours, it’s understandable that an artist might want to shake things up a little and not get too comfortable in a routine. And that’s just what Bruce Springsteen did this day in 2006 with the release of We Shall Overcome : The Seeger Sessions. It was a tribute to great folk singer/songwriter Pete Seeger, and shake things up for Bruce it did.

Seeger of course was a renowned folkie in the ’60s who made the old spiritual “We Shall Overcome” a popular rallying cry and wrote a number of hits for other artists like “Turn Turn Turn” and “If I Had A Hammer.” But he also sang many old traditional tunes, and that was the part of his career The Boss wanted to highlight.

The title track had actually been recorded for a 1997, multi-artist tribute to Seeger. Apparently he mentioned doing more and with some encouragement from his daughter, curiously enough, decided to make a full album. He and his wife Patti Scialfa (of his E Street Band) rounded up a number of local session musicians, who dubbed themselves the Sessions Band, including trumpeter Mark Pender who’d played on Max Weinberg’s Tonight Show Band and violinist Soozie Firschner. They got together for just two brief sessions and recorded live. Springsteen himself at times played mandolin, tambourine and organ besides his regular guitar.

The standard edition of it (a double LP or single CD) contained 13 songs often performed by Seeger, although surprisingly enough, not written by him (although a few had been modified from their original form by Pete). They included old chestnuts like “O Mary Don’t You Weep”, “Jacob’s Ladder”, “John Henry” and even “Froggie Went A-courtin’”. It also came out in some deluxe versions which included a DVD and a few extra tracks like “Buffalo Gals.”

You can be forgiven if you didn’t notice it when it came out; Columbia didn’t release any singles off it and hence radio more or less ignored it utterly. But reviewers didn’t, and by and large it got raves. The Guardian and Rolling Stone both graded it 4-stars, Pitchfork 8.5 out of 10; Entertainment Weekly an “A-”. Uncut called it “a great teeming flood of Americana…a powerful example of how songs reverberate through the years.” Pitchfork declared it “a boisterous, spirit-raising throwdown on which The Boss tackles the tangle of war, strife, poverty and unrest without sacrificing joy.” Although there were a few dissenting voices, like The Observer which deemed it “too corny.” Later on, allmusic graded it 4.5-stars noting how quickly it was made and that it “does indeed have an unmistakably loose feel” but was still “unique” because “he has never made a record that feels as alive as this.”

Perhaps the most important opinion was that of Pete Seeger himself. The singer who was 86 at the time called it “a great honor. He’s an extraordinary person as well as an extraordinary singer.”

As for the public, considering how odd it was compared to most of his releases and its lack of single, it did quite well. It reached #3 in the U.S., Canada and Britain and actually went to #1 in Italy. The album was certified gold in both the states and Canada and an impressive double-platinum in Ireland. What’s more, it won Bruce his 14th Grammy, this one for Best Traditional Folk Album… which surprisingly he’d won once before, for The Ghost of Tom Joad in 1997.

April 14 – Turntable Talk 13 : Next Stop, Asbury Park

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! Thanks once again to all the regular readers and welcome to any new ones. If you’re keeping count, this is our 13^th instalment…hopefully lucky 13! For any new readers, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is This Song’s Going Places! We’ve asked our guests to pick a song, or even album that is all about going somewhere…there’ve been tons of great songs about traveling, either geographically or mentally , not to mention ones about specific destinations. A big category, and I look forward to seeing what piqued the others imaginations.

Today we check in with Max, from Power Pop blog, where currently he’s on a well-deserved short spring break but normally he discusses great tunes from the ’60s through ’90s as well as thought-provoking sci-fi TV on a daily basis. His tastes are varied, so where will he go with this?:

After Dave asked us to write a post about traveling, it was between “Promised Land” by the Big E and this one by Bruce Springsteen. I had to go with this one: “Does This Bus Stop At 82^nd Street”?

This song is a journey through an enjoyable play of words. It was written about a bus journey to a girlfriend’s house. I listened to it so many times that I know every word to this day. I was surprised to see that he still plays this in concert every now and then…but you can’t beat the studio version.

I was around 19 (1986) or so when I found this album, or when the album found me, and I was going through an angry young man phase. I had just bought a 1976 Fender Musicmaster guitar (I still have it) and a black leather jacket so I was ready. The imagery flows like water with Greetings From Asbury Park, Bruce’s debut album in 1973. It’s not very polished but that adds to it. The songs have a stream-of-consciousness feel to them. It was critically praised but did not have huge sales. The album only peaked at #60 in the Billboard Album Charts.

This album is my favorite of Bruce. Yes, I love Born to Run and Darkness… along with it, but I love the wordplay in this album. I think the only song that halts the album is “Mary Queen of Arkansas”. This song is based on people and places Springsteen met in his early years as a songwriter. His father was a bus driver for a time, which helped inspire the song.

I hear some Dylan and a very strong Van Morrison influence on this album and song. It is rough and raw and unpredictable.

“Wizard imps and sweat sock pimps

Interstellar mongrel nymphs

Rex said that lady left him limp

Love’s like that (sure it is)

Queen of diamonds, ace of spades

Newly discovered lovers of the Everglades

They take out a full-page ad in the trades

To announce their arrival

And Mary Lou, she found out how to cope

She rides to heaven on a gyroscope

The Daily News asks her for the dope

She said, “Man, the dope’s that there’s still hope”

Songs like this helped give Springsteen the tag ” the new Dylan” and he was the one performer who actually lived up to it…strap in and ride the Springsteen driven bus.