Articolo del 1977 quello di questa settimana. Ho ancora diversi articoli ma più lunghi ancora; pensavo quindi di pubblicarli a puntate, che ne dite?

Buona lettura.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S LONGEST SEASON
BY ROBERT DUNCAN
The big news the week of October 20, 1975 was a rock star and a kid who ran into
President Ford’s limo in Hartford.
Quick. What were their names? “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” Andy
Warhol once said. I don’t think James Falamites would argue with that.
Through a misjudgment on the part of Hartford police and the Secret Service,
Falamites was cleared to pass through a Hartford intersection and when he struck the
President’s passing limo, he gained his 15 minutes of fame. Newspapers, magazines
and news shows across the country ran this teenager’s story and later in the month,
he was introduced on Howard Cosell’s ill-fated Saturday Night Live show (not to be
confused with NBC’s Saturday Night).
I don’t think the rock star would argue, either. The week of October 20, 1975 he was
out on a moderately successful tour of the Midwest when, in a quirk almost
unprecedented in periodical publishing, he appeared as the cover subject on the
nation’s two biggest weekly news magazines, Time and Newsweek, simultaneously. It
was a similar misjudgment to that of the Hartford police and the Secret Service. The
news weeklies were tossing around words like “superstar” and “hit single” and
“regeneration of rock” in relation to this virtual unknown. Naturally, the rock press
had preceded them with even more lavish praise. When the ink settled, however, it
may have also been just Bruce Springsteen’s 15 minutes.
In the 18 months since the press’ premature ejaculation, Springsteen’s career has
followed a strangely familiar script. Actually, there are two or three plots progressing
here.
Most visible of the plots, and maybe most familiar to the show biz fans, has been his
legal battle with what some may term his “rapacious” manager. The gist of it is, or so
the reports go: he is not making very much money (relatively speaking) and his
manager is. While at the same time, his manager is trying to tell him exactly what to
do—up to forbidding him to ener a studio with friend/producer Jon Landau to
record. Of course, this means that the follow-up to the muchvaunted Born To Run is
way overdue, and Columbia Records (who is also involved in litigation) is extremely
anxious. Worse, the public presumably is forgetting— cover stories of a year and a
half ago or no, just like they did with what’s-his-name who smashed up Ford’s limo.
The second of the plots here is that Springsteen is, even at this moment, out touring
the country—specifically, the Midwest again—just as he has been on and off since all
the hoopla hit the fan. In other words, he is leading the typical life of any upper
mediumly successful rock ‘n’ roller.
But the punchline, what all rock soap opera fans are dying to know is: WHAT WILL
HAPPEN TO BRUCE Springsteen? Is a quarter of an hour in the spotlight long
enough—or perhaps too long—for the kid from Asbury Park?
I can only argue as an unrepentant fan of Springsteen and tell what I’ve seen and
heard over the past 18 months.
To backtrack: I interviewed Springsteen in Detroit where I was working for CREEM
back in October of ’75. The Time/ Newsweek covers had yet happened. I had seen
him only the week before in Ann Arbor and thought, while he talked too much
onstage, shuffled about a lot like some sort of Jersey citybilly, the show was
ultimately too slick. I’d expected true grit from the hype, and had never stopped to
think that Born To Run was about as far from true grit as a symphony orchestra. I
also never thought about the fact that the last thing an honest-togoodness true grit
person wanted to appear as onstage was an honest-togoodness true grit person. When
you come from a background as mundane as Springsteen does, you don’t celebrate
it—you celebrate release from it. You go for the larger than life. He wasn’t going to be
the bus driver’s son, he would be James Dean or Marlon Brando. While Springsteen
often wore a T-shirt and leather jacket, they were Brando’s and Dean’s wardrobe,
strictly a Hollywood version of true grit.
Something like that.
Anyway, the point is, I went to see Springsteen a week later in Detroit proper to give
him a second chance. He had shaken the cold by then that made him sniff like a
junkie throughout his set in Ann Arbor, and he and his powerhouse band gave a great
rock ‘n’ roll show. Afterwards, I was supposed to meet him, and over the
protestations of an overprotective publicist (you know who you are), Springsteen
invited me along to dinner with him and Miami Steve and one or two other of the
band members. We seemed to be getting along great: loosened up (I’d like to think)
by two beers (Remember? He doesn’t drink or take drugs, Time told us), Springsteen
spun some terrific stories about the agony of recording Born To Run, real tearjerkers
about not being able to finish the damn thing and every night going back to his
girlfriend at the hotel and almost crying. Great stuff.
I fell in love.
When Springsteen jumps on the roof of his publicist’s car, I later report in my article
about the romance (“Bruce Springsteen Is Not God And Doesn’t Want to Be,” CREEM,
January ’76—get it now!), I laugh. It’s the kind of wanton nonsense I expect from
Rock ‘n’ Roll Kings. And furthermore, I climbed aboard the Springsteen publicity
bandwagon. (Next stop: backlash.) About the same time as the interview, Bom To Run
made it to number one on the charts, even—despite what Time and Newsweek might
have you believe about the title cut—without a hit single. Which is a big step towards
fulfilling all the media’s proclamations of “superstar” (Newsweek). Though, as it has
become readily apparent to me from talking to him, Springsteen could care less. He’d
like to make money, sure, and be comfortable, but this hype and this superstar
nonsense is too much. (In the spring of last year, before his first performance in
London, he is caught tearing down some “Future of Rock ‘n’ Roll” posters in the lobby
of the hall.)
But my conversion is further confirmed when, a month and a half after our talk in
Detroit, I’m walking down New York’s fabled Eighth Street one evening and I’m
accosted—in a friendly sort of way—by this collegiate-looking beard in a pinstriped
shirt and pea coat who initially I take to be some long-forgotten asshole from high
school. Only when I catch the glint of a little gold post in his ear do I put together the
sinuous sleaze and the face.
“Springsteen!” I shout, in surprise and embarrassment. And he keeps going on,
friendly as ever, shuffling back and forth in the cold, one hand in his pocket, the
other arm around Karen Darvin, his slender, shy, redheaded girlfriend. I presumed
that he was pleased with me for one reason.
“So you read the article?” I say.
“No,” he responded quizzically. “What? Where?” I tell him and we depart. He heads
for the nearby newsstand. Did I say humble? Friendly? No pretentions whatsoever? I
mean, this guy has been on the covers of Time and Newsweek.
My love grows.
Back in Detroit, three or four months later, I’m elated to find that Springsteen will be
playing Lansing, about an hour and a half away. But, as it turns out, I’m unable to go
to the concert because I have to work that night. I send along a note with friends that
reads: “Go back to Jersey.” The next day the phone message on my desk reads “B.S.
called, wouldn’t leave his name,” and included a Cleveland phone number. I called. I
didn’t recognize the voice that answered, maybe because I don’t believe that you call
phone numbers and get rock stars instead of an endless stream of rock Nubians.
Indeed, the “regeneration of rock” himself has answered his phone, and is trying to
convince me to catch the show there the next night.
The next day Springsteen and I and Peter Laughner are cruising Cleveland in
Laughner’s marginal automobile (B.S. has foregone the CBS rental car), with the
oldies station on per Springsteen’s request. In the meantime, Bruce elaborates on that
great and largely unexamined group of musicians in rock ‘n’ roll known as Frat Bands,
who include, among others, Hot Nuts and the Kingsmen (“Louie, Louie”), with special
notice to the Swinging Medallions. Man, that was a band! (They did “Double Shot of
My Baby’s Love.”)
The concert, as expected, creased the roof—I mean, what do you expect from a
Swinging Medallions fan—and Springsteen
added a new unfinished ballad called “Frankie.” There’s a brief postconcert
party—brief, because these guys do it all onstage—then Bruce Springsteen and the E
Street Band are off in their bus, about which—well, the bus is one notch above the
worst leaky Trailways you’ve ever been on, not something your average “Superstar”
travels in (Johnny Rodriguez moves around in a fivebedroom, TV, stereo, bar, motelonwheels),
more along the lines of a bus the Swinging Medallions might have used.
In Wallingford, Connecticut, one of those adorable New England towns outside of New
Haven, they have an institution called the Choate School. It’s a fine prep school that
boasts among its alumni John Kennedy and Robert Frost, but basically, like all prep
schools, it’s a 24-hour live-in day care center for the teenage children of the wealthy.
It’s May now, and I have just moved to New York from Detroit, when the phone rings
one Friday, and a publicist friend at Columbia asks if I want to see Springsteen in
Connecticut.
“Where?” I inquired.
“Choate,” comes the unusual answer. Which takes me somewhat aback. The adorably
quaint New Englandy Choate is just not my idea of a booking for Asbury Park’s first
cover boy. As it turns out, there are extraordinary motives at work.
John Hammond has asked Bruce to do the show.
John Hammond is retiring from Columbia after some 30 years as an A8R man (aka
talent scout). John Hammond is the man who got recording contracts for Billie
Holliday, Benny Goodman, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan. In other words, this paper
is too light to hold the reputation of Hammond and the respect accorded him in the
music business. To top it off, John Hammond is an incredibly amiable polite person.
And to top all that off, John also signed Bruce Springsteen to Columbia. (He told
Newsweek for the cover story: “The kid absolutely knocked me out. I only hear
somebody good every 10 years, and not only is Bruce the best, he was a lot better
than Dylan when I first heard him.”) In other words, were Bruce Springsteen the
coldest-hearted bastard on the face of the earth, if John Hammond asked him for a
favor for his (Hammond’s) old school, he would do it, no questions asked.
In the past 18 months I’ve seen Springsteen perform about 18 times, in all imaginable
circumstances. I’ve seen him perform in New York, Detroit and Cleveland in halls for
the money. I saw him do a few numbers at the Crawdaddy 1 0th anniversary party,
and absolutely rivet the crowd. But I have never seen him, before or since, play like
he did at Choate. And it certainly wasn’t the audience—they loved him but expressed
their love primarily by sitting in their seats, clapping their hands and wiping ketchup
off their ties. Granted the Asbury gig with Southside was for love and fun, but it was
Johnny’s show, so Bruce laid off. When, after two and a half hours a totally
exhausted, sweat-drenched Springsteen crashed into “Rosalita,” it was clear that he
wasn’t getting paid. “This one’s for John Hammond,” he said. That’s all. The fact that
this may have been one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll shows of all time ever is the
purest tribute one could pay to Springsteen. He did it for love.
STOP.
The attitude was I can do rock ‘n’ roll like a motherfucker and this is how I do it.
Thank-you-John Hammond-for-know ing-that. He never let up. At the end, if you
knew him, you’d realize that here was a man capable of a chilling generosity to an
audience and an art form. The man is fucking rock ‘n’ roll.
Which is why he’s not the rock ‘n’ roll savior. Because more than anything these days,
rock ‘n’ roll is run like a sausage factory. Give us the three-minute sausage and smile,
you bastards. While no one mourns the stinking hippies, and their 45-minute jumbled
jams or the psychedelic posters, the three-minute sausage is not what it’s about,
either. It’s about diabolical abandonment and humor. It’s about wanting to rip your
shoes in half, it’s so good. Listen to “Born To Run.” It’s about that. It’s about crazy.
It’s about not writing stories about guys like Bruce Springsteen. Which is why the
motherfucker took me so long.
I’ll tell you what I think about Bruce. He’s a road musician now, like he should be.
Like he essentially wants to be. He’s a working stiff in rock ‘n’ roll. Nothing
highfalutin. No analysis. No cover stories. No tell-me-what-you-meant.
I’ll tell you what will happen to him. No matter the outcome of all this bullshit
litigation, he will continue on the road. He will continue to write songs and he will be
pretty fucking healthy and happy— because he doesn’t take drugs or crap, he takes
rock ‘n’ roll. And someday all the legal crap will be over (if it isn’t by the time you
read this). And someday he’ll make the best rock ‘n’ roll album of all time. It may not
be the next one or the one after, but someday. He can wait. I can wait. We have no
choice. This man is the first rock ‘n’ roll musician I’ve ever met or read about or
heard about or anything that could be a rock ‘n’ roll musician the rest of his life and
still come up with something great when he’s 70. This guy is a student (OK, I know),
but most of all he’s a lover. With a giant rock ‘n’ roll dick.—

Chissa se è di vostro interesse quest’ articolo dell’ ottobre 1975.

Buona lettura.

LITTLE EGYPT FROM ASBURY PARK
BRUCE SPRlNGSTEEN
D0N’T CRAWL ON
HIS BELLY NEITHER
DAVID MARSH
Bruce Springsteen sits cross-legged on his half-made bed, and surveys the scene.
Records are strewn across the room, singles mostly, intermixed with empty Pepsi
bottles, a motley of underwear, socks and jeans, half-read and half-written letters, an
assortment of tapes, and a copy of Richard Williams’ Out of His Head, the biography of Phil
Spector. The space is small, but Bruce and the two friends listening to Harold
Dorman’s “Mountain of Love” don’t mind. They’re listening for the final few bars of
“Mountain,” in which the drummer collapses and loses the beat—the song slows down
to a noticeably improper tempo, and the effect is nothing less than absurd.
Unfortunately Spnngsteen, unlubricated by anything more than the spirit of the
thing, is having trouble getting the turntable to spin consistently. (One of those weird
things with the green push button that lights up when you press it.) When he finally
does, it tu, rns out the record was warped. It is unplayable. Hysterically, Springsteen
sweeps it under the mass of accumulated debris.
“Here,” he says, “I’ll play ya something else.” He puts on a tape of he and the E Street
Barld at the Main Point in Philadelphia. Suddenly, out of the speakers booms his own
voice, carcking up at what he’s singing. (“That song has some of the best lines,” he
says shaking his head, “and some’of the dumbest.”) “Stan-din’ on a mountain iookin’ down
at the city, the way I feel t’nite is a dawgawn pity.” When the band comes in, the room
is charged. The playing and the singing is rough, even ragged, but it is alive, sparked
with the discovery of something vital in an old, trashy song. It has been a long time
since I heard anyone get this interested in rock and roll, even classic old rock and
roll. It has been a lot longer since anyone has gotten me so interested .
Song done, Springsteen snaps the tap,e recorder off. “There,” he says, with the
characteristic delinquent twinkle in his eye. “If that don’t get a club goin’, nothin’
will.”
Bruce Springsteen is determined to get’em going. The magic is that he doesn’t have to
be so determined to get himself going. Without being constantly “on,” like a
performer, Springsteen is constantly on, like someone who knows how good he is. He
is full of himself, confident without being arrogant, almost serene in his awareness of
what he is doing with his songs, his singing, his band. His music—and nothing gets in
the way of that. Unlike, say, Roxy Music, which makes very exciting music out of a
nearly desperate sense of boredom, Springsteen makes mesmerizing rock out of an
inner conviction that almost everything is interesting, even fascinating.
Take the three songs which, at this point, form the focus of the longawaited third
Springsteen album. “Born to Run” is almost a rock opera. But, rather than building his
concept piece around a derivative European anti-funk motif, Springsteen has built his
masterwork around a guitar line ripped straight from the heart of “Tel star.” It may
be too long (4:30) and too dense (layer upon layer of glockenspiel, voice, band,
strings) to be a hit, but it does capture the imagination with its evocation of
Springsteen’s usual characters—kids on the streets and ‘tween the sheets—and its
immortal catch-line: “Tramps hke us, baby we was born to run.”
Not that he couldn’t write something more classically oriented, if he needed to.
“Jungleland,” the ten minute opus which may very well serve as the title of the third
record, opens with 90 seconds of strings and percussion. But its influences are
classical in the way in which ’60s soul producers like Spector Holland-Dozier-Holland
and GambleHuff absorbed them, rather than in the way that pedants like those
unctuous Britons Yes and ELP have done. Its imagery is magnificient, exceeded only by
its music. Springsteen’s music is often strange because it has an almost traditional
sense of beauty, an inkling of the awe you can feel when, say, first falling in love or
finally discovering that the magic in the music is also in you. Which may also be first
falling in love.
“She’s the One,” on the other hand is pure sex, with a Bo Diddley beat that’s nothing
short of scary. Shorter, and less complicated than the other two, it could be the one.
(The Hollies’ “Sandy” might’ve beat him to it. As Springsteen fans know only too well
the Hollies’ version has almost nothing in common with Bruce’s. But then, what did
the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” share with Dylan’s?)
All of this makes Bruce Springsteen just about what he thinks he is, or at least, hopes
to become: the Complete Rock and Roller. Few in rock and roll have attempted so
much. None of the ’50s rock and rollers were so ambitious—Elvis could have achieved
everything, even intellectual and production brilliance, without drawing a heavy
breath, if he had that ambition—and Bob Dylan never had the patience to, for
instance, make interestingly constructed records. The Beatles had the production
genius, with Martin and Spector and one suspects, without them, but they never
really had to tackle it on stage. In any case, like the Stones, their magic was more
collective than individual as subsequent events have shown. The Stones themselves
couldn’t be everything, because the scope of the group deliberately cannot contain
some of Springsteen’s farthest fetched (and I believe, most successful) ideas. For
instance, it’s hard to imagine Jagger coming out to sing a ballad as his first song, let
alone a ballad sung only against.violin accompaniment. Todd Rundgren had the idea,
and the scope, but—one suspects—not quite the guts or talent or sheer keening
madness to to go out and DO it, as a rock and roller. So he retired to the academy of
his own electronic idiosyncrasy.
And Rundgren’s myth was always internal. Because he spent so much time in the
cloister of the studio, word had to spread the hard way, by those who shelled out for
his records. Certainly nothing to compare with Springsteen’s full-blown stage show,
which lately encompasses such tricks as the new introduction to the slowed down “E
Street Shuffle:” Springsteen recounts walking down an Asbury avenue . Iate one dark
night, and seeing a giant black man at the corner. “I took the money out of my
pockets and threw it on the ground. I took my jacket and threw it on the ground,” he
says, standing in the glare of a single spotlight. ‘Then he put out his hand”—the enor–
mous black palm of gargantuan, spooky saxophonist Clarence Clemmons suddenly
juts into the glare and Springsteen whispers: “SPARKS fly on E Street.” It is a truly
unforgettable moment, taking on a racial fear at the same time that it devastates it
into an almost trivial joke. (And works better because Springsteen’s music so fully
encompasses soul influences.)
So it goes with a number of oneliners. moments (“Brace yourselves,” he shouted at
the beginning of the final chorus of “Quarter to Three,” his third encore one night.
You had to be there to discover how necessary it was to do that), even songs. I’ve
only seen him do Then I Kissed Her,” a remake of the gorgeous old Crystals’ song,
once, for instance, and I’ve been thirsting for it ever since. In this sense, it may be to
his advantage that he has no record. Not only does word-of-mouth have a chance to
spread more completely, but every instant is more special because it is irretrieveable.
That sense that he is special has begun to pervade even Springsteen’s semi-private
life. When he showed up at a party for label mates Blue Oyster Cult. Springsteen
completely dominated the room. So much so that Rod Stewart and a couple of the
Faces no slouches at scene-stealing themselves, were all but ignored when they made
a brief appearance. Yet he has yet to lose his innocence. Going to visit the Faces later
that night, at the ostentatiously elegant Plaza Hotel, Springsteen feigned
awe—although you wondered if it were entirely feigned—at the mirrored, plushly
carpeted lobby.
Fragments of a legend have begun to build. There are the stories about school—in
high school, the time when he was sent to first grade by a nun, and, continuing to act
the wise-ass, was put in the embarassing position of having the first grade nun
suggest to a smaller child: “Johnny, show Bruce how we treat people who. act like
that down here.” Johnny slapped Springsteen’s face. Or in college, the story of how
the student body petitioned the administration for his expulsion, “because I was just
too weird for ’em, I guess.” The newa that his father was a bus driver, which gives
added poignancy to ‘Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street.” (Which begins, “Hey, bus
driver, keep the change.”) Aphorisms are not beyond him: On Led Zeppelin: “They’re
like a lot of those groups. Not only aren’t they doirlg anything new they don’t do the
old stuff so good, either.” On marriage: “I lived with someone once for two years. But
I decided that to be married, you had to write married music. And I’m not ready for
that. ” On the radio: “I don’t see how anyone listens to [the local progressive rock
station]. Everything’s so damn long. At least if you listen to [the local oldies station]
you know you’re gonna hit three out of five. And the stuff you don’t like doesn’t last
long.”
All of this goes only so far, of course. A record, a hit record, is a crucial necessity.
Sales of the first two albums are over 100,000 but that’s nothing in America. There
are still large areas of the country where Springsteen hasn’t played—even important
large cities such as Detroit have been left out—and though the word travels fast, and
frequently, articles like this ultimately seem like just the usual rhetoric without
something to back them up. As one
Californian put it, “I’ve heard enough. It’s like having everyone tell me I’m really
missing something by not seeing Egypt; When’s he going to come out here?”
Presuming he has the hit he deserves, Springsteen should be hitting most of America
over the rest of the year. After an abortive arena journey with Chicago, he is, he says,
reluctant to play large halls ever again. But he is one of the few rockers who would
have any idea of what to do—except blast—in a room the size of a hockey rink. (Mick
Jagger is about the only example who comes to mind, though Rod Stewart and Elvis
do pretty well now that I think of it.)
Suppose that he does hit the big time. Even, suppose that he really is, as the ads have
it, “rock and roll future.” What happens then?
Since I believe that.all of the above is true, and is going to happen, I have been at
some pains to try to figure it out. Certainly, not a new explosion, a la Beatles and
Elvis. Those phenomena were predicated upon an element of surprise, of catching an
audience unaware, that is simply no longer operative. Not with rock on nationwide TV
too many times a week. And not the kind of quiet, in-crowd build-up that propelled
Dylan into the national eye. What Springsteen is after—nothing less than
everything—has to be bigger than that, in mass terms though it obviously cannot
exceed Dyian in influence, his biggest achievement.
Springsteen’s impact may very well be most fully felt as a springboard, a device to get
people to do more than just pay attention. He can, potentially, polarize people in the
way that Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan—all the really great ones—initially did.
(Already, some early Springsteen fans feel alienated by his ever more forceful
occupation with his soul influences.) The key to the success of those four is that as
many hated them as loved them—but everyone had to take a position. God knows
who he’ll drag into the spotlight with him—it might have been the N.Y. Dolls, whose
passion for soul oldies was equal to his or Loudon Wainwright, whose cool, humorous
vision parallels Bruce’s in a more adult (sort of) way—but that ought to be something
like what will happen. Sort of the way Carl Perkins Jerry Lee Lewis and the other
rockabilly crazies followed Elvis.
He’s smart though . He said it all, one night. introducing “Wear My Ring Around Your
Neck,” the Presley oldie. “There have been contenders. There have been pretenders.
But there is still only one King.”
But no king reigns forever.