» Listings for 2024

1. 2023/4 Albums Thing 328 - Bruce Springsteen “The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle”

   Posted on 9:25am Wednesday 1st May 2024

   Bruce Springsteen’s 2nd album was again recorded at 914 Sound Studios in NYC, its title gave his band their name and we add another longterm member to the E Street Band as Danny Federici shows up on Accordion and Keyboards. It’s a VERY different sounding record from his first. I’m guessing after the singer/songwriter debut this is much more what Springsteen and his band sounded like live during 1973. Springsteen has said many times that he saw the early E Street Band as almost a Soul revue band and that style is definitely evident here, and damn, some o’ this gear is funky.  There are a couple of instrumental interludes before and after songs on this album that show this infant E Street Band as a groovy unit indeed and I’m surprised haven’t been sampled by some Hip-Hopper at sometime (maybe they have, it’s not like I’m an expert when it comes to Hip Hop). 

   Two of the first three songs, “The E Street Shuffle” and “Kitty’s Back” show off the band’s chops perfectly. “The E Street Shuffle” ends with one of those instrumental interludes and if I played it to you blind and asked who it was you ain’t never throwing out Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band as a possibility. “Kitty’s Back” starts all Bluesy guitars and extended solo’s (the electric guitars are definitely here on this record) and after a couple of minutes explodes into a Brass driven Southern Soul groover. We saw him and the band play it live in Italy last summer and it was one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen at a Springsteen show.

   Sandwiched between those two foot tappers is, to my ears, one of Springsteen’s great songs, “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”. If you ever read his biography great chunks of this lyric are expanded on as the song is basically the story of the writer growing up in and around Asbury Park. The boys dancing with their shirts open, the greasers, the boys in their high heels, the factory girls, the tilt-a-whirl, Madame Marie…they’re all in there. It’s another of Springsteen’s songs that was covered, this time by The Hollies. A word of warning, never, I mean NEVER be tempted to listen to their version, it’ll put you off the song forever, yes it’s that bad !

   “New York City Serenade” and “Incident On 57th Street” are another pair of homages to that place across the river from Jersey. The latter of the two not only has the most gorgeous, nagging melody ("Goodnight, it's alright Jane, I'll meet you tomorrow night on Lover's Lane”…beautiful) but it also segues into a true Springsteen classic. The first occasion that I knowingly heard Bruce Springsteen would have been the endless times the promo clip for “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” was played on the Old Grey Whistle Test (I think it was taken from the 1979 “No Nukes” benefit concert at Madison Square Garden so that dates it). It seemed like every time I watched the show, it was on. But what a song it is, the tale of a boy in a band whose girl’s Daddy really doesn’t like him but he’s just got a big advance from the record company and he’s going places, with Rosalita. It’s an uptempo, big shit-eating grin on your face, rock ’n’ roll testament and was the song Bruce and his band most often closed shows with from 1973 right through to 1985 (the 3 shows I saw during that period, it was on the setlist at all of them). You wanna know what hooked me in to Springsteen ? It was things like “Rosalita…”.

   On its release the album was lauded by critics but that didn’t turn in to sales. It didn’t chart in the UK until 1985, on the back of “Born In the USA” fever. It’s a far more groovy and at the same time romantic record than “…Asbury Park…”. What’s going on here on songs like “…Sandy”, “…57th Street” and “Rosalita…definitely points toward where Springsteen is going and what’s coming next. Hold on tight cos a wild ride is about to begin…

   Incident on 57th Street - https://youtu.be/ioQcvijom28?si=iRZdit7HpYNmfsNu

2. 2023/4 Albums Thing 327 - Bruce Springsteen “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.”

   Posted on 9:25am Tuesday 30th Apr 2024

   Right then, if you’re not a fan of New Jersey’s finest export since Taylor Ham (or is it Pork Roll ? answers on a postcard please), and if you’re not then shame on you, you may wish to go do something else for however long it takes me to make the next 27 blog posts. And as we’re going to see The Boss and the E Street Band on Sunday it’s appropriate that this is how we begin the week.

   Bruce Springsteen had been playing bars along the (New) Jersey shore since the 1960’s with bands like The Castilles, Child, Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom & the Sonic Boom and the Bruce Springsteen Band. Gig after endless gig sometimes for 4 or 5 hours a night, paying his dues, learning his chops. But he wrote his own songs and dreamed of crossing the river to New York City and making records of his own music.

   In June 1972 his managers secured him an audition with legendary Columbia Records talent scout John Hammond (who was instrumental in the careers of Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Pete Seeger, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen and many others) which resulted in a record contract and Springsteen being in 914 Sound Studios in NYC by October to record his debut album, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.”. He gathered a band around him, some of whom were starting on a very long journey with their new boss. Clarence Clemons on saxophone would remain with Springsteen until his passing in 2011 and bass player Gary W Tallent is a member of the E Street Band to this day. These were supplemented  by musicians Springsteen had played with for years including pianist David Sancious and drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez. 

   The album was originally set to feature 5 songs with a band and 5 with Springsteen alone (management and Hammond preferred the solo tracks, Springsteen preferred those with the band) but when Columbia President Clive Davis heard the record he rejected it saying he didn’t hear a single. Springsteen quickly wrote “Blinded By The Light” (with the help of a rhyming dictionary he later admitted) and “Spirit In The Night” and the revised track listing (2 solo and 7 band songs which makes me think to find out what happened to the 3 solo performances that went missing) was accepted.

   There are songs here that Springsteen still performs live now. When we saw him in 2016 he opened the show with “For You”. He also started to become more widely known as a go to songwriter and songs from this album were recorded by others. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band had a hit in 1976 with a cover of “Blinded By The Light” (probably the first time I heard a Springsteen song, I just didn’t know it at the time) and David Bowie recorded versions of “Growin’ Up” and “It’s Hard To Be Saint In The City” during the sessions for “Young Americans”, sessions to which the songwriter was invited and reportedly found strange and didn’t really like Bowie’s versions of his songs when he finally heard them as it’s said Bowie wouldn’t play them in front of Springsteen.

   It’s a somewhat different Bruce Springsteen from the one we’ve came to know. The solo songs are very Dylan-esque and wordy, one of Columbia’s publicity campaigns proclaimed he had "more words in some individual songs than other artists had in whole albums", not sure if that’s a compliment or not. But the roots of what he was to become are there if you pay close attention. Also, and somewhat surprisingly, apart from on first song “Blinded By The Light” there are no electric guitars to be heard on this album, it’s a very different sound to the Bruce Springsteen of just 2 or 3 years later. 

   “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.” was released on January 5th 1973, on that day Springsteen and his band were in the middle of a 4 night stand at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania (the site of a legendary bootleg recording in 1975). They would stay on the road right up until October 1973, somehow fitting in the recording of their next album which was released in November. As he says between songs on “Live 1975/85”…”it was goodbye New Jersey, we were airborne”.

   It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City - https://youtu.be/B2Rju9FVE2M?si=ioGG5fCeH6ARgPds

3. 2023/4 Albums Thing 326 - Spirit Of The West “Labour Day”

   Posted on 9:25am Saturday 27th Apr 2024

   I first encountered Spirit Of The West when I was In Canada in 1990. The Wonder Stuff were touring the US opening for The Mission, we were in town on a day off and SOTW were playing Vancouver’s famed Commodore Ballroom. I have to point out that I didn’t go to that gig but members of our party did and all were raving about them the day after. Over the next few years I got very familiar with their music as they toured and recorded with us and I can still count co-singer and whistle player Geoffrey Kelly as a friend.

   Spirit Of the West had an ever changing lineup over the years but the core of the band were Geoffrey, singer John Mann and multi-instrumentalist Hugh McMillan. At heart they were a Scottish Folk group but over time they developed and wrote some truly great songs that held on to that folk influence, most famously “Home For A Rest” (aka the alternative Canadian National Anthem). I own half a dozen of their albums and a couple of John Mann’s solo albums but only “Labour Day” on (White) vinyl.

   This was the album that preceded the one where we found them, 1990’s “Save This House” (home to the aforementioned “Home For A Rest”). It’s a more overtly Folk record than those that came after and if you like intricately picked stringed instruments, reeling and jigging whistles and great singers (John Mann had a superb voice) then this might well be for you. Highlights for me are the opening song “Dark House”, “Political” which they went on re-record in a more contemporary Indie/Dance style later in the 90’s and the stunning “Take It From The Source”, a beautiful and brutal takedown of the sort of people that unthinkingly regurgitate others hatred, and remember this was written in the 80’s !

   Spirit Of The West called it a day in 2016, a result of the early onset Dementia that John Mann developed and that took him from us in 2017, he was 3 months older than me. In Canada they are legends but the rest of the world really didn’t catch on.

   Take It From The Source - https://youtu.be/oDEKQrfWh8o?si=FblxuNSSp2JUg1fM