Day: August 28, 2015

Another music-heavy list this week. Including the promised articles about the 40th anniversary of Born To Run.

Rolling Stone shared the full transcript of an interview they did with Springsteen 10 years ago for the 30th anniversary of BTR. Of course, the mythology of the album is that his career may have been over had it not been a success. I think my biggest admiration for the album is how rather than playing it safe while operating under that kind of pressure, he completely went for it, making the biggest, boldest album he could imagine.

Bruce Springsteen on Making ‘Born to Run’: ‘We Went to Extremes’

At Stereogum, Ryan Leas offered this longer rumination on the significance of the album.

The Streets Of A Runaway American Dream: Born To Run 40 Years Later

And finally, no one could have written better or more poignantly about BTR than Joe Posnanski, arguably the man responsible for the impression that all baseball-focused writers are enamored with Springsteen. He took his essay in a direction I did not expect, making it even more wonderful.

Born to Run

OK, how about another icon from more than two decades ago? Duran Duran has a new album due out in two weeks. You can listen to about half of it on Apple Music right now. Steven Hyden has offered some positive advance praise for it. This article is the result of his recent sit-down with the remaining members of the band.

The Reflex

Greg Renoff has a detailed biography of Van Halen coming out in October. Vulture published an excerpt that goes back to when the band was playing backyard shows in Pasadena.

It’s Van Halen vs. the Cops in This Excerpt From a Book on the Band’s Wild Early Days

(An update added after this was initially posted.)

Touching on a subject I hit last week, Steven Hyden dropped a piece this morning about Ryan Adams’ just-completed cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989. It’s a pretty solid – yet quick – look at Adams’ career and how he’s reached the position he’s in today.

Waiting Semi-Patiently for Ryan Adams’s Album-Length Cover of Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’

Switching to movies, I watched Real Genius over the weekend. It’s probably been 15 years or so since I had watched it. It did not disappoint. Everything about it remains fantastic.

Here’s an essay by Phyllis Rostykus who was one of the inspirations for Jordan, the most notable female character in the movie.

The Real Real Genius

Charles P. Pierce on the mess surrounding Baylor football at the moment. If you’re a coach of any sport at Baylor, isn’t your biggest priority, when dealing with off-the-field issues, making sure you are honest and transparent with the public? The last thing you should be doing is covering something up or pleading ignorance. Thank goodness Ken Starr is on the case! I’m sure he’ll get to the bottom of things quickly!

Something Rotten in Texas: Baylor, Art Briles, and Sam Ukwuachu

And finally, you probably are not in danger of becoming dangerously dehydrated if you’re going about your normal, daily business and only drink a couple glasses of water per day.

No, You Do Not Have to Drink 8 Glasses of Water a Day

http://youtu.be/-OZV5i_6Rj4

“She’s The One” – Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band

Born To Run turned 40 this week. You may have read something about that somewhere.[1] The song “Born To Run” is one I remember from way back in, likely, it’s earliest days. It wasn’t a song for me, or about my life. But it was one that got heavy play on the stations my parents listened to. So it was already in my rock ’n roll DNA before I rediscovered it many years later and learned to love it on my own.

The rest of the album, though, was unfamiliar to me until the early 2000s when the joys of file sharing allowed me to dive into more of its tracks. “Thunder Road” became a favorite. I enjoyed the majesty of “Jungleland.” But, honestly, it probably wasn’t until just a couple years ago that I finally listened to the album in whole, front-to-back.

There are many different types of classic albums. There are those that define a genre, or take a fledgling musical movement and force it into the mainstream. There is the perfectly crafted break up record. There is the album full of hit singles. There is the carefully considered concept album, in which a common narrative thread ties every song together.

And then there is that slot that Born To Run fills: the album that projects the beliefs, fears, and dreams of people of an exact age, in an exact moment in time, in an exact place.[2] When you listen to Born To Run, you are transported back to 1975, when kids in their mid–20s weren’t sure about the world into which they were coming of age. Even if you weren’t alive then, or like me were too young to really remember the early ‘70s, Springsteen paints a dramatic, detailed picture of that era. It is an audacious, ambitious album that perfectly sums up the age it came from: the moment just before disco and punk and hip hop were unleashed on the world.

“Born To Run” is one of my 25 favorite songs of all time. It may be the perfect American rock song. “Thunder Road” is an all-time great side one, track one. And “Jungleland” is a perfect closer. But since I discovered the deeper tracks of the album, this song has always stood out for me. It’s a song that sounds incredibly familiar. Part of that is because of the Bo Diddley riff the entire piece us built upon. For children of the ‘80s, there is also the opening piano line and vocal mannerisms that John Cafferty borrowed a decade later for his biggest hit. And also it sounds familiar because this was the first time that Springsteen laid down the basic formula that he based so many of his biggest hits on. A formula that has been followed repeatedly over the last 40 years by countless artists. It’s not his biggest hit. And I can’t say it was his most influential. But it left a broader shadow that you might imagine.