Posted on 09/01/2013 4:19:27 PM PDT by nickcarraway
An entire generation has dismissed The Boss' music as lame "dad rock." Here's why they're all wrong
Every few weeks or so, I’ll be talking to someone at a bar or club or house party, and the conversation will inevitably turn toward Bruce Springsteen. The exchange is usually as follows:
BAR PATRON/PARTY GUEST: So, what kind of music do you listen to?
ME: Oh, a little bit of everything … blues, jazz, funk, Bruce Springsteen (brief pause) … you know, my tastes are super eclectic.
BAR PATRON/PARTY GUEST: Um, why do you like Springsteen?
ME: So, you don’t like Bruce Springsteen?
BAR PATRON/PARTY GUEST: Ugh. No.
(Long pause)
ME: (Shuffling away while muttering angrily, like an elderly woman being chastised for feeding pigeons) Well, you should.
This person will then enumerate the list of reasons why he dislikes Bruce Springsteen, usually employing four out of six of the following arguments:
He’s old. He sucks. He sucks because he’s old. He’s old because he sucks. He sings about being a member of the working class even though he’s made millions and millions of dollars over the past 30 years “Born in the USA” sucks. In my 24 years as a die-hard Bruce fan, I have had this conversation approximately eight or nine hundred thousand times. While the people on the other end tend to skew toward a specific demographic — white, male, in a creative profession, dating someone with bangs and an Egon Schiele tattoo — they come from a wide range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, from Bushwick installation artists to a bouncer I met in Ireland, who used his loathing for “Born in the USA”
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Glenn Miller does not suck. But Bruce does.
they are both devil worshipers as far as I am concerned
There is a small glimmer of hope for the continuation of the Boss’s legacy, however, which comes in the form of the next generation. I have met one of their number. She was 10 years old, and her name was Amanda. She was one of my campers when I worked as a bus counselor a few years ago, and when I wasn’t cleaning up puke or yelling at kids to buckle their seatbelts, I would sit with her and we would listen to “Magic” on her iPod while we talked about Bruce.She told me that she had already been to two concerts, and that her parents played Bruce around the house all the time. She told me that she liked to watch the 2000 DVD of his show from Madison Square Garden, and that she loved to dance with her dad when Bruce kicked off his set with “Prove It All Night.” I told her I used to do the same thing with my dad, who also introduced me to Bruce: I wasn’t particularly cool in high school, so I spent countless Saturday nights watching the MSG show with my dad while we got drunk and danced to “My Love Will Not Let You Down.”
"I told Amanda that my dad was also the reason why I loved Springsteen in the first place, and why I continued to hold strong to that love long after I actually started going out on Saturday nights and quibbling over Bruce with racists at bars."
Apparently if you don't like Bruce, you must hate white people or something.
See the Black and White Night, the 1988 tribute to Roy Orbison produced by T Bone Burnett with all kinds of rock stars supporting Roy and gladly stepping into the background to only copy the original arrangements from the early ‘60s. Bonnie Raitt as a lowly backup singer, imagine that! Well, not the Bruuuuce, who has to bring attention to himself and take an amateurish guitar solo, on, if memory serves, “Dream Baby”, nearly succeeding in spoiling the whole affair.
T Bone Burnett — loooooooove his work! And yes, no one can touch Roy Orbison, especially the seashore bar band boss.
PS
Saw Bonnie Raitt live in Washington Crossing park in 1970, where she was playing right on the ground under a tree on a summer day, and everyone could just wander up and meet her and her bandmates. She was/is amazing. Her guitarist Freebo was dating a friend of my roommate, so they came home with us for a lively intellectual discussion of whether pot would ever be legalized. Those were the days.
T Bone Burnett goes way back, I’ve just learned, he produced the first Delbert & Glen album back in the early seventies (Delbert & Glen just got back together after 40 years for another excellent album), and recently has been producing John Mellencamp, whom I haven’t followed, but will have to check out now.
This here below is producer’s work, I’m convinced.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-eY3fSRUQk
Pity the poor fool. I've talked countless times to countless someones "at a bar or club or house party" and the conversation never once inevitably or otherwise turned "toward Bruce Springsteen"!
“Have you heard about Amway?”
“Have you ever tried Scientology?”
“What are you doing to protect the Earth from Global Warming?”
Cultists never can give it a rest at bars and parties.
Now THAT’S a classic!
True that. Had to replace one of the LPs -- Led Zeppelin III -- I wore it out. Now my son has it on CD and plays it in the car when I ride with him. That's love!
LOL, it’s a proud day in a Father’s life when he passes down his Zep collection to his son.
Someone gave me "Nebraska" as a gift. He was all over the phony Okie accent like dirt in the dustbowl. One listen, and I put it the whole album the Goodwill bag, and I'm a Scottish hoarder. It was that bad.
Oh, no, I'm a mom; and my son had to buy the CD himself -- he'll only get my LZ albums if I die.
So I guess we were at the same concert. No, wait, It was '73 that I saw him there. David Sancious had a baby grand pointing diagonally into the crowd from the upper right corner of the room -- no stage, no real separation from the audience, and the rest of the band were on the left of the piano. You could just walk up and talk to them afterward. I remember how incredible Clarence Clemons was in person. Also, at one point Sancious reached in and plucked the strings of the piano -- I thought I'd die. A friend of mine knew a Rolling Stone reporter and he took us backstage to meet Bruce.
Ditto. Others sing 8 notes per octave. Dylan uses 16.
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