Bob Dylan and band at the Paramount Theater, Oakland, CA.
I’m jazzed that the folks over at bobdylan.com have included a link to my review of Bob Dylan’s recent killer show on October 30, 2014 at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA in the “Hype” area of Dylan’s website.
“Hype” is where they link to articles about Dylan that they like.
You can get directly to the review with this link.
And if you haven’t yet read my new column about The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11,here.
—
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan and his band at the Paramount Theater. Photo by Michael Goldberg.
The clang of an ancient gong announced that Bob Dylan was in the house, and that his first set for the final night of a three-night gig (October 30, 2014) at the beautifully restored Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, CA, had begun.
Was I excited, yeah baby! Yet I was worried too. How could he compare to the Dylan of old?
“Ah, but I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now,” he once sang, though not on this night.
And it was good he didn’t. Those lines made sense when he wrote them, when he was in his early 20s.
But Dylan is 73, he’s so much older now.
I last saw him live at the Greek Theater in Berkeley in June of 1986, and it wasn’t the best show. Frankly, it was a shadow of the show I saw in 1974 when Dylan and The Band played the Oakland Coliseum and tore the place up. That was incredible.
Think about it though. 1986. That was nearly 30 years ago. Ancient history. Another lifetime.
Bob Dylan, age 73. What would that be like? I’d seen John Lee Hooker perform at the Sweetwater when he was past 80 and he was fantastic. And I saw Muddy Waters when he was 65, and he was damn good too. There’s a wisdom that sometimes comes with age.
But Dylan? With his ragged frog of a voice. And no guitar, ’cause he doesn’t play guitar anymore. How’s that gonna work?
Whatever my pre-show worries, as soon as the band kicked off with “Things Have Changed” I relaxed.
This was gonna be good.
Dylan came onto the stage, a character out of one of his more surreal songs. The flat-brimmed white hat, something a Spanish Don wore in the ’20s perhaps. And a black frock coat with white trim. Dylan was dressing up for us. He wasn’t showing up in his streetwear — jeans and a hoodie. No way, he was here in a grand old theater and he had dressed the part.
A band leader. A performer. An artist.
Dylan is the master of great looks.
He still has style. And you know what, Dylan dressing up the way he does each night, sends the audience a message before he even sings a note. This isn’t gonna be Chuck Berry doing just another gig. This is special. Bob Dylan got dressed up on this night for this crowd. He cares.
I was there with a long time friend, and later during the show he asked me how this show compared to when I’d seen Dylan in 1974.
Well you can’t compare the Dylan of the past and the Dylan of today, I said. It’s like he’s a different person now. It’s like the folkie protest Dylan was one guy, and the Highway 61 Revisited Dylan was another, and the man who recorded the Basement tapes and John Wesley Harding was someone else again.
The Dylan of 2014 is yet another Dylan.
The show.
First of all, I thought Dylan was in great voice, and having listened to a recording of the show I can say that with even more force. Sure his voice is different. More Tom Waits than Woody Guthrie. But if you give it a chance, it grows on you and pretty soon you find yourself totally digging it. And it’s totally Dylan’s voice. On this night he was a live wire.
Dylan as piano man. He’s always had his own bluesy piano style, and over the years he’s gotten even better. So while I miss Dylan on guitar, his whorehouse piano on numerous songs including the snaky tango, “Beyond Here Lies Nothing,” was just right. And while some have derided his harmonica playing since the early days, I’ve always been a huge fan. On this night his harp breaks were dead-on perfect.
He seemed totally in-the-moment and with us as he sang his songs — all but one being his own compositions.
But what knocked me out the most was the set list. Of the 18 songs Dylan sang, 14 were ‘new’ songs, written in the 21st century. Only one, “She Belongs To Me,” was written in the ’60s, and two, “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Tangled Up In Blue,” came from the mid-’70s. The final song of the night was Dylan’s version of a song Frank Sinatra made famous, “Stay With Me.”
That’s gutsy. That’s self-confidence. And you know what? These 21st century Bob Dylan songs are killer.
While Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones go out and play oldie-but-goodie greatest hits shows, Bob Dylan plays material from his most recent albums.
Dylan these days comes across onstage as a working musician. He doesn’t talk to the audience. He’s there to play music.
“He’s a real song and dance man,” my friend said.
Dylan was either at the piano, standing fairly still before the microphone as he sang, or swaying in place as one of his band members took a killer solo.
And speaking of the band, another thought I had as I took in the music was that this current band are as good as The Band.
Dylan has assembled his version of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, or Merle Haggard and the Strangers.
What I mean is, this band is like those great country-western bands, musicians who play with soul and really have their chpps down. Now I’ve been cheering the raw, imperfect sound of punk bands since the early days of The Stooges and the MC5, and if I’ve got to choose between soul and spirt, or musician ship, I’ll take soul and spirit every time.
But Dylan’s guys, they are some of the best musicians you’ll ever hear; they’ve got a total feel for Dylan’s music. As used to be said of a great jazz band, they swing.
Bassist Tony Garnier (on upright), drummer George Receli and rhythm guitarist Stu Kimball are a rock solid rhythm section. They ground the songs and let Dylan, lead guitarist Charlie Sexton and mutli-instrumentalist Donnie Herron (pedal steel, lap steel, electric mandolin, banjo, violin) add beautiful texture and solos.
Both Sexton and Herron are simply incredible. I love pedal steel guitar and Herron added hip country riffs to “Things Have Changed,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Duquesne Whistle,” and others.
Meanwhile Sexton added electrifying riffs and solos.
Dylan has become a great band leader. Years on the road, and certainly his perfectionist demands, have turned this band into one of the best.
Highlights? The beautiful ballad “Forgetful Heart” was love on a moonlit night, with rhapsodic violin from Herron, and a mournful harmonica solo from Dylan. “Long And Wasted Years” was a triumph, from that unforgettable opening riff and Dylan’s defiant vocal, to the final lines:
“So much for tears
So much for these long and wasted years.”
There were many other highlights. “Early Roman Kings,” “Simple Twist Of Fait,” “Scarlet Town,” “Pay In Blood,” “High Water (For Charley Patton)” — I could go on.
After nearly two hours of listening to Dylan’s new music, it’s clear that just as Dylan and the Hawks had a very unique sound in the ’60s, so too do Dylan and his current band.
Leaving the Paramount, I said to my friend, the music Bob Dylan now makes is totally its own thing. It has nothing to do with current trends, and it’s not some retro trip either. The only reference point for Dylan’s new music is Dylan. He’s created something unique that works for him in 2014, and his fans love it. Dylan being Dylan, and nothing could be better.
You could call the music Dylan and the band make Americana, an umbrella term that covers blues, rock, rockabilly, jazz, folk, country, western swing and more, but if were going to name Dylan’s sound, I’d want to come up with something more unique. But really, what’s the point.
It’s 2014 Bob Dylan music, a thing all its own.
The musicians:
Bob Dylan — vocal, piano, harmonica
Stu Kimball — rhythm guitar
Donnie Herron — pedal steel, lap steel, electric mandolin, banjo, violin
Charlie Sexton — lead guitar
Tony Garnier — bass guitar
George Receli — drums, percussion
Set List:
Set I
Things Have Changed
She Belongs to Me
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
Workingman’s Blues #2
Waiting for You
Duquesne Whistle
Pay in Blood
Tangled Up in Blue
Love Sick
Set II
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Simple Twist of Fate
Early Roman Kings
Forgetful Heart
Spirit on the Water
Scarlet Town
Soon after Midnight
Long and Wasted Years
Encore:
Stay With Me
—
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
“True Love Scars” rises to #18 on the Amazon Bestselling Literary Satire chart.
Fantastic review by Simon Warner, author of “Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture.”
TRUE LOVE SCARS
Michael Goldberg (Neumu Press)
Review by Simon Warner
The great rock novel? The pursuit of that ultimate piece of fiction that distils the primal energy, the ecstatic power, the neurotic craziness, of popular music has been something of a holy grail in recent decades and, in True Love Scars – a deeply ironic nod to Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ – one-time Rolling Stone journalist Michael Goldberg is the latest contender for this Lonsdale Belt of rock‘n’roll writing.
His protagonist Michael Stein is a Californian teenager in the later 1960s, tangled to distraction in the sound and image of his hero Bob Dylan, a paradoxical blend of cocksure kid and deluded hipster, bruising his fragile ego in the choppy shallows of high school romance, then sabotaging his increasingly complicated love tangles in a haze of drug indulgence and casual disloyalty, and all to a backbeat of Highway 61 Revisited, the Stones and the Doors.
It’s the story of a disaffected geek and self-imagined king of cool who turns out to be much more naïve nerd, as his promising upward trajectory hurtles into reverse. But True Love Scars, the first part of Goldberg’s ‘Freak Scene Dream Trilogy’, is as much about style – the way he tells the tale – as it is about content. Penned in a staccato amphetamine grammar, its narrative is fractured and deranged, often unsettling but frequently compelling, an unsparing portrait of the teen condition: assured then despairing, would-be sex god then impotent has-been, from erection to dejection, an only child battling the wills of his domineering father and interfering mom in the anonymous, suburban fringes of Marin County.
Goldberg’s work recalls a number of those post-war stylists who have tried to capture the uncertainties of adolescence into adulthood, the lure of escape and the quest for forbidden fruit. It has elements of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, a flavour of Richard Fariña and his smart college satire Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me, and more than a dash of that frenetic gonzo gabble that Hunter S. Thompson utilised to frame the madness of the modern world as the American dream unravelled, around the very time that Stein is doing his incompetent best to grow up. The great rock novel? Perhaps we still await it but, for sure, this writer has made a creditworthy tilt at this literary crown, and produced a very good one.
Simon Warner is the author of Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture. He’s a lecturer, Popular Music Studies, School of Music, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
In a review of my novel, True Love Scars, in the new Rolling Stone (Taylor Swift on the cover), reviewer Colin Fleming compares me to Lester Bangs!
Too much!
Here’s the review:
Getting Lost in the ‘Real’ Sixties
A veteran rock writer explores the crazy side of Sixties nostalgia
True Love Scars
Michael Goldberg Neumu
If Lester Bangs had ever published a novel, it might have read something like this frothing debut by longtime music journalist Michael Goldberg. (It’s part one of a series called The Freak Scene Dream Trilogy.)
The year is 1972, and the book’s chatterbox narrator, 19-year-old Michael Stein, is the kind of Sixties-besotted college kid who shaves his hair off because John Lennon and Yoko Ono did it. His quandary: trying to figure out how to reclaim the “authentic real” spirit of the 1960s as the decade fades into memory. Stein spends most of the book flashing back to one sex-and-drugs-steeped Sixties misadventure after another.
If you’ve ever obsessed over bootlegs or argued with your friends late into the night about which Beatles or Bob Dylan album is the best, True Love Scars will hit home.
Goldberg’s style recalls the rush of the earliest rock criticism. He was a senior writer at ROLLING STONE during the Eighties, and he founded Addicted to Noise, an important online music publication, in 1994. His intimacy with the classic records Stein fetishizes comes through again and again. Yet, unlike his protagonist, Goldberg doesn’t idealize the Sixties. Instead, he’s fascinated by the ways in which we crave authenticity.
Readers from any musical era will come away with a deeper appreciation of how nostalgia can shape our lives, for better and for worse. COLIN FLEMING
The Flamin’ Groovies ’70s classic, “Shake Some Action,” is one of the ten songs Greil Marcus writes about in his new book. Pictured is the cover of an early ”90s single by the group.
Ten songs that shook the world!
By Michael Goldberg
I’ve learned quite a few things from the critic and cultural historian Greil Marcus over the years, but maybe the first – and the one I keep coming back to — is that when listening to music, the artist’s intention isn’t so important. What really matters is what you and I, as listeners, hear.
You know, what we get from the music.
“I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant,” Marcus wrote in the prologue to his book, “Bob Dylan, Writings 1968 – 2010.” “I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people’s responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it – I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it, through it, inside of it, behind it was my way of doing that.”
Marcus has been sharing his response to the music since the late ‘60s. In “Mystery Train” and “Lipstick Traces,” “The Old, Weird America: The World Of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes” and other books he uses art as a doorway, and steps through it to find vast secret histories, histories of America and Europe that mostly hadn’t made it into the history books – at least not in the way Marcus writes.
After reading “Lipstick Traces,” which starts with Johnny Rotten and then proceeds to spin into a history of anarchistic rebellion going back long before Johnny Rotten was born – I haven’t been able to listen to a Sex Pistols or Public Image Ltd. song without thinking of Dada and the Situationists and the May ’68 protests in France and so many other things that Marcus wrote about in that book.
This new one, “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs” (Yale University Press, 320 pages), is all about what Marcus hears when he listens to ten songs, and what he hears is unexpected and sometimes revelatory. It’s not any kind of history of rock that you or I have ever read before, because Marcus sees no point in revisiting the same old story that we’ve read numerous versions of since the ‘60s.
“Shake Some Action” is one of ten songs Marcus writes about in the book.
One of the big ideas in the book is that the chronological history of rock ‘n’ roll – that blues and country begat Chuck Berry and Elvis begat Dylan and the Beatles and so on and so on, is, if not irrelevant, beside the point. Or if not beside the point, well, we’ve been there. We all know, or think we know, the contours of that story. Marcus has a different story to tell.
“Whole intellectual industries are devoted to proving that there is nothing new under the sun, that everything comes from something else – and to such a degree that one can never tell when one thing turns into something else,” Marcus writes in the introduction to his book. “But it is the moment when something appears as if out of nowhere, when a work of art carries within itself the thrill of invention, or discovery, that is worth listening for. It’s that moment when a song or a performance is its own manifesto, issuing its own demands on life in its own, new language – which though the charge of novelty is its essence, is immediately grasped by any number of people who will swear they never heard anything like it before – that speaks. In rock ‘n’ roll, this is a moment that, in historical time, is repeated again and again, until, as culture, it defines the art itself.”
He continues:
“’It’s like saying, “Get all the pop music, put it into a cartridge, put the cap on it and fire the gun,’ Pete Townshend of the Who said in 1968. ‘Whether those ten or 15 numbers sound roughly the same. You don’t care what period they were written in, what they’re all about. It’s the bloody explosion that they create when you let the gun off. It’s the event. That’s what rock and roll is.’ Any pop record made at any time can contain Pete Townshend’s argument. … which is to say that this book could have comprised solely records issued by the Sun label in Memphis in the 1950s, only records made by female punk bands in the 1990s, or nothing but soul records made in Detroit, Memphis, New York City, San Antonio, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Chicago in 1963.”
And more:
“From that perspective, there is no reason to be responsible to chronology, to account for all the innovation, to follow the supposed progression of the form. The Maytals’ ‘Funky Kingston’ is not a step forward from the Drifters’ ‘Money Honey,’ or Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya’ a step forward from ‘Funky Kingston.’ They are rediscoveries of a certain spirit, a leap into style, a step out of time. One can dive into a vault as filled with songs as Uncle Scrooge’s was filled with money and come out with a few prizes that at once raise the question of what rock ‘n’ roll is and answer it.”
I’ve been reading reviews and books by Marcus since the late ‘60s, and he’s dead serious about what he puts on the page. And about what he discovers when he listens to and then writes about rock ‘n’ roll. This is serious stuff, life or death, and if you think music is nothing more than entertainment, well this book is probably not for you.
Reading Marcus is hard work because you have to think when you read his sentences. He takes for granted that you know a hell of a lot about music and art and film and literature. He’s not into coddling the reader. So when he calls his book “The History Of Rock ‘N’ Roll In Ten Songs,” it’s not that you’re going to get the literal history of the music, what you’re going to get is a theory about rock ‘n’ roll, and then ten examples that, in different ways, back up that theory.
So Marcus takes his ten songs and writes an essay about each. He works hard to tell us why these songs matter so much to him, why each in its own way contains the history of rock ‘n’ roll, and why they should matter to us too. And after you read this book, they likely will.
Read the rest of this column at Addicted To Noise, and dig many other great music features, news and reviews.
Veteran rock journalist Michael Goldberg, of Addicted To Noise and Sonic Net fame, is clearly working through some personal demons in his debut novel, a kind of poetic-license memoir rendered in a vivid 1st person voice containing echoes of Holden Caulfield, Sal Paradise and Danny Sugerman (who of course was not a fictional person, being a member of the Doors inner circle, but certainly wrote with a definite ego swagger in his own memoir). And in a very real sense, True Love Scars contains echoes of my own voice, because in reading the book I felt some of my demons from that time being stirred up, including initial musical alliances with key albums/concerts, mixed feelings toward my relationship with my parents and friends and memories of my first few crushes (not to mention losing my virginity).
Indeed, Michael Stein’s recollections chart an emotional arc as striking as I’ve seen a novel’s lead character experience, from naïve and tender to streetwise and hip to cynical and wounded, with Dylan lyrics seeming, to him, laden with meaning and Rolling Stones tunes, likewise, churning with prophecy. When he meets, for example, the girl he calls Sweet Sarah and they embark upon a doomed courtship, Dylan’s there as their guide and their muse. Later, though, following a breakup and a dark descent into teenage debauchery, Stein’s haunted by mental echoes of the ominous slide guitar riff powering the Stones’ “Sister Morphine.” Similar musical reference points from the time abound, as befits novelist Goldberg, who cut his teeth as a rock writer and came of age in that same era; it’s tempting to play the is-it-or-ain’t-it-autobiographical game with the book, since Goldberg has a temporal, geographical and personal backstory that mirrors, to a degree, Stein’s. (Stein’s nickname in the book is “Writerman,” which should tell you something.)
Later in the review Mills writes:
Goldberg advises us that True Love Scars is the initial installment of his “Freak Scene Dream Trilogy,” full of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll plus the inevitable heartbreak and roadkill that comes with the whole package. “How the dream died and what there is left after,” he concludes. It’s worth noting that despite the timeframe outlined above, Stein/Writerman is actually narrating in retrospect from some as-yet-unspecified point in the near-present. So we know that despite the gradual sense of dread building up over the course of the book and present at its abrupt ending, he will manage to survive in some form and fashion despite whatever adventures—good, bad, ugly, tragic—will go down over the course of the next two volumes of the trilogy. I can’t wait to read ‘em.
After rave reviews of her memoir, Just Kids, she’s now on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Book Review with an essay about the new Haruki Murakami novel, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.”
Smith is an excellent writer, she knows Murakami inside and out, and her review is a joy to read.
Here’s the first few graphs”
A devotional anticipation is generated by the announcement of a new Haruki Murakami book. Readers wait for his work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. There is a happily frenzied collective expectancy — the effect of cultural voice, the Murakami effect. Within seven days of its midnight release, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” sold over one million copies in Japan. I envision readers queuing up at midnight outside Tokyo bookstores: the alienated, the athletic, the disenchanted and the buoyant. I can’t help wondering what effect the book had on them, and what they were hoping for: the surreal, intra-dimensional side of Murakami or his more minimalist, realist side?
I had a vague premonition this book would be rooted in common human experience, less up my alley than the alien textures woven throughout “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Yet I also sensed strange notes forming, coiling within a small wound that would not heal. Whichever aspect of himself Murakami drew from in order to create “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” it lies somewhere among the stones of his mystical labors.
He sits at his desk and makes this story: a young man’s traumatic entrance into adulthood and the shadowy passages he must subsequently negotiate. His protagonist’s name, Tsukuru, means “to make,” a metaphor for the writer’s process. He is 36 years old and builds and refurbishes train stations, continuously observing how to improve them. He has the touching habit of sitting in them for hours, watching trains arrive and depart and the symphonic flow of people. His love of railway stations connects him with each stage of his life — from toys, to study, to action. It is the one bright spot in an existence he imagines is pallid.
In a sense, Tsukuru is colorless by default. As a young man he belonged to a rare and harmonious group of friends wherein all but he had a family name corresponding to a color: Miss White, Miss Black, Mr. Red, Mr. Blue. He privately mourned this, sometimes feeling like a fifth leaf in a four-leaf clover. Yet they were as necessary to one another as the five fingers of a hand. As a sophomore in college, without explanation, he is suddenly and irrevocably banished from the group, cut off and left to drop into a murky abyss. Belonging nowhere, he becomes nothing.
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.
Or watch an arty video with audio of me reading from the novel here.
Of just buy the damn thing:
–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Following The Cure’s two-night run in London benefiting the Teenage Cancer Trust, The Guardian critic Caroline Sullivan wrote a review complaining that the band played two many songs.”
Responding to a comment from a fan who disagreed, she responded:
“I have it on good authority that the band have read the review and liked it.”
On The Cure’s Facebook page Robert Smith responded:
“I have it on good authority that the band have read the review and liked it.” Caroline Sullivan… WHAAAT?!!
SHE WAS COMMENTING ON HER OWN GUARDIAN ‘REVIEW’ OF OUR EPIC 45 SONG 213 MINUTE FRIDAY RAH TEENAGE CANCER TRUST SHOW
TO BE CLEAR – AND ON THE BEST AUTHORITY – THE BAND HAVE INDEED READ THE REVIEW – BUT DID NOT LIKE IT!
THE REVIEW WAS – TO PUT IT POLITELY – LAZY NONSENSE… swampy… numbing… yet to work out how to build up a show… GULP!!!
BUT WE NOW KNOW WHERE WE HAVE BEEN GOING WRONG ALL THIS TIME: Condensed into 90 minutes, this would have been one of the gigs of the year
WE PLAY TOO MANY SONGS! DOH! BUT… IS IT NOT VERY OBVIOUS THAT WE PLAY OUR OWN SHOWS (AS OPPOSED TO FESTIVAL HEADLINES) FOR FANS OF THE BAND?
THAT IS WHY WE PLAY A MIX OF SONGS, AND WHY WE PLAY FOR AS LONG AS WE DO…
WHEN WE GO TO SEE AN ARTIST WE ARE FANS OF, WE DON’T WANT THE PERFORMANCE TO END… THAT’S WHAT BEING A FAN MEANS… ISN’T IT?
WE HAD TWO FANTASTIC NIGHTS, PLAYING TO GREAT CROWDS FOR A WONDERFUL CHARITY… THE GUARDIAN ‘REVIEW’ WAS SAD BITTER JUNK
PS. AS FOR THE TORYGRAPH HACK… sigh… ONWARDS
That wasn’t enough for Sullivan, so she wrote another piece in The Guardian, ending:
“OK, Robert. Buy you a drink?”
And got this in return on Facebook from Smith:
LAZY NONSENSICAL CONTENT ASIDE; WE WERE DRIVEN TO REACT TO CAROLINE SULLIVAN’S ‘REVIEW’ BY THE BLATANT DISHONESTY OF HER ACCOMPANYING COMMENT
“I have it on good authority that the band have read the review and liked it.” IT WAS SIMPLY TOO MUCH TO IGNORE…
HAVING EXPOSED THE LIE, WE FIGURED WE WOULD AT THE VERY LEAST GET SOME KIND OF A HANDS IN THE AIR “IT’S A FAIR COP GUV” FROM HER FOR ATTEMPTING SUCH A BANAL SELF SERVING DECEPTION… WE THOUGHT THERE MIGHT EVEN BE A FAINT CHANCE THAT SHE WOULD BE MOVED TO APOLOGISE TO HER READERS FOR MAKING STUFF UP!
BUT AS COMMENT BY COMMENT SHE DIGS HER EVASIVE HOLE A LITTLE DEEPER, IT WOULD SEEM WE HOPED FOR TOO MUCH…
A SHAME. WE ALWAYS THOUGHT THE GUARDIAN AND ITS JOURNALISTS VALUED TRUTH?
“OK, Robert. Buy you a drink?”… gulp!!!
HONESTLY? ummm… WE WOULD PREFER YOU JUST REVIEWED WITH A TAD MORE UNDERSTANDING AND HONESTY AND CONSIDERING LINES LIKE “Not as scary […] as Robert Smith in full fig” MAYBE THREW A FEW LESS STONES? OR MOVED OUT OF YOUR GLASS HOUSE?!!
“Rock is about grabbing people’s attention.” REALLY? THAT’S WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO ‘BE ABOUT’? YOU THINK THAT’S IT? IT WOULD EXPLAIN A LOT
WE WILL NOW DRAW A LINE UNDER THE ‘SAD BITTER JUNK REVIEW’ EPISODE, AND SLIP BACK OUT INTO THE WORLD WITH A SHAKE OF THE HEAD AND A SMILE…
PREFERRING THE OLD GOTH DISNEY DICTUM TO ROCKER SIMMONS’;
“WE ARE NOT TRYING TO ENTERTAIN THE CRITICS; WE’LL TAKE OUR CHANCES WITH THE PUBLIC”
I love the English rock scene.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –
An artist who was once at one with the times tries (again) to reinvent himself
By Michael Goldberg.
Bruce Springsteen was once a myth, a myth we all could pretend was real. He was a myth the way Bob Dylan was a myth, is a myth.
During the Sixties it stopped being OK to be an entertainer. Musicians got onstage wearing the same jeans and t-shirts they wore around the house. It was cool to keep it real. But it turned out that the jeans and t-shirts were as much a costume as Elvis’ crazy stage garb.
So when Bruce Springsteen showed up in the early ‘70s with his leather jacket, his jeans and his motorcycle boots singing about the Jersey shore – one of the ‘New Dylan’s’ that were appearing with frequency — we wanted to believe it was real.
And I did believe it.
I didn’t think of Springsteen as a writer creating a persona, a cast of characters and a story that was ultimately spread across seven albums. I thought he was the guy singing stories from his crazy youth: ‘Rosalita’ and ‘Mary Queen of Arkansas’ and ‘Blinded By The Light’ and ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Born To Run’ and all the others. Sure he was writing in an almost embarrassingly derivative style that owed everything to Dylan’s mid-60s surrealistic word games, but Springsteen pulled it off. And by 1973 the real Dylan seemed to be losing his luster anyway. (And soon enough Springsteen settled into his own voice and sound.)
I found a version of myself in Springsteen’s songs. When he sang in ‘Thunder Road,’ “It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win,” I knew that was me. Fuck yeah, I was going to become a successful writer, write for the New York magazines, leave all the chumps I’d put up with in high school and college behind.
Sure I was working as a copy boy at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1975, but that was gonna change. That was temporary, a way to pay the bills until I broke into the writing business.
In the late fall of 1975, two months after the release of Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen toured the west coast. There were five of us loaded into Karen’s car the night of October 29, 1975, Our destination was the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium in downtown Sacramento, the state capital, a two-hour drive north east of San Francisco. Two hours? We didn’t care. I mean this was our chance to see Bruce Springsteen!
In the car were me, my girlfriend Leslie, my best friend Dave, Dave’s girlfriend Karen and another friend, Dana, who co-led a band with Dave. Springsteen was also playing at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, but that show was sold out, and anyway, there was something romantic, Springsteenesque even, about driving two hours in the early evening to Sacramento, a town seeming stuck in the past. The Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, after all, had been built in 1926, and it looked it. It was like time-traveling when you passed through the front doors – it’s one of those grand old theaters.
