The Boarding House was a club in downtown San Francisco that held about 500 people. The sound was great. It was probably the best club I’ve been in to see live music.
Patti Smith and her band were there on February 15, 1976, less than two months after Horses was released.
It’s an amazing show, and lucky for you and me, it got recorded. Patti Smith is still amazing, but this show (and others from ’75 and ’76, are exceptional.
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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.
For the rest of this column, head to Addicted To Noise.
Last night Lucinda Williams performed “Can’t Let Go” at The Troubadour in Hollywood. Great sound!
Check it out.
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Music for Robots is a new EP that Squarepusher made with robots. “The Z-Machines are three robots created by Japanese roboticists with the purpose of performing music that’s too advanced for the most skilled human musicians,” Pitchfork reports. “There’s a guitarist robot with 78 fingers and a drummer with 22 arms.” About working with the Z-Machines, Squarepusher said in a statement: “In this project the main question I’ve tried to answer is ‘can these robots play music that is emotionally engaging?’ I have long admired the player piano works of Conlon Nancarrow and Gyorgy Ligeti. Part of the appeal of that music has to do with hearing a familiar instrument being ‘played’ in an unfamiliar fashion. For me there has always been something fascinating about the encounter of the unfamiliar with the familiar. I have long been an advocate of taking fresh approaches to existing instrumentation as much as I am an advocate of trying to develop new instruments, and being able to rethink the way in which, for example, an electric guitar can be used is very exciting. Each of the robotic devices involved in the performance of this music has its own specification which permits certain possibilities and excludes others – the robot guitar player for example can play much faster than a human ever could, but there is no amplitude control. In the same way that you do when you write music for a human performer, these attributes have to be borne in mind – and a particular range of musical possibilities corresponds to those attributes. Consequently, in this project familiar instruments are used in ways which till now have been impossible.” — Pitchfork
AC/DC Heading Into the Studio: AC/DC singer Brian Johnson told a Florida radio station that the band will be going into the studio in Vancouver this May. The band is also planning a 40th anniversary tour for later this year. — Rolling Stone
Tom Waits Pens Song For Bluesman John Hammond: John Hammond’s new album is called Timeless and includes a song Tom Waits wrote specifically for Hammond called “No One Can Forgive Me But My Baby.” “He came to a recording date I was doing in San Francisco in 1992,” Hammond said. “John Lee Hooker had sat in to do a duet with me, and Tom Waits appeared out of nowhere and said, ‘I have a song for you, man.’ It was about 20 minutes long, with everybody in the Bible coming down to the river. I said, ‘Gee, you know, it’s a great song, but I don’t think I could do anything like that.’ He said, ‘Oh, you don’t like that one?’ So he goes into the control room.” About ten minutes later, according to Hammond, Waits returns with a new song he’d just written. “So I did it,” Hammond said. “He had left by the time we completed it, and so I sent him a cassette of it. And I hadn’t heard from him for a while, so I called — and he had it on his answering machine. I guess he liked it.” — NPR
Spoon’s Britt Daniel Has A Second Side Project: Britt Daniel isn’t content to Lead Spoon and play guitar in Divine Fits. Now he’s got a third band, Split Single that includes Daniel on bass and backing vocals, frontman Jason Narducy (ex-Verbow, also of Bob Mould’s band) and Superchunk/Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster. The group’s debut album, Fragmented World, will be out April 1, 2014. Check out a trailor for the album below. — Pitchfork
Lost album from Johnny Cash: As I previously reported, Johnny Cash recorded an album with producer Billy Sherrill in the early ’80s but the album was shelved when Cash left Columbia Records in 1986. That will change on March 25, 2014 when the album, Out Among the Stars, will finally be released. Here’s another track off it. “I’m Moving On” Bincludes vocals from Waylon Jennings:
The Notwist Return With New Album: Close To The Glass is the new album from the German electro-pop band, The Notwist. Read more about it and listen to the whole thing at NPR’s First Listen. — NPR
Hip-Hop Collaboration: New song, “97.92,” from Sacramento’s Trash Talk and Brooklyn rappers Flatbush Zombies. — Stereogum
Plus a mini-documentary on Trash Talk from Pitchfork:
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New Silversun Pickups’ song, “Cannibal.”
I like this one.
Live on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”:
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In advance of The Hold Steady’s new album, Teeth Dreams, you can check out “Spinners.” The album will be released March 25, 2014.
“Spinners” is pretty good. Not great. But maybe it’ll grow on me.
You can give it a listen here.
The first song, “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You,” was released last month and it’s really great. For sure give this a listen.
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Bob Casale, a founding member of the Akron, Ohio pre-punk band Devo, died suddenly on February 17th of heart failure. He was 61.
Bob Casale helped create the futuristic rock sound that was at its most extreme on Devo’s radical 1978 debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
In a statement, Gerald Casale said: “As an original member of Devo, Bob Casale was there in the trenches with me from the beginning. He was my level-headed brother, a solid performer and talented audio engineer, always giving more than he got. He was excited about the possibility of Mark Mothersbaugh allowing Devo to play shows again. His sudden death from conditions that lead to heart failure came as a total shock to us all.”
Alan Myers, Devo’s drummer during the group’s creative peak, died last year of stomach cancer. He was 58.
Read Rolling Stone‘s obit here.
Devo’s cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” appeared on Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”:
“Whip It”:
“Come Back Jonee”:, France 1978:
“Gut Feeling” / “Slap Your Mammy,” France, 1978:
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Twenty-Three years ago, on February 20, 1991, Bob Dylan received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Award ceremonies in L.A.
Jack Nicholson offered a tribute to Dylan, followed by a montage of film clips and Dylan recordings, and then Dylan performed an unrecognizable “Masters of War.”
Nicholson presented Dylan the Lifetime Achievement Award and Dylan responded with a seemingly enigmatic speech that in retrospect seems quite appropriate given the event:
“Well, my daddy, he didn’t leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this, he did say: ‘Son,’ he said… (long pause) …He say, ‘You know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways.'”
Here’s how Greil Marcus wrote about it in Artforum that year:
Real Life Rock Top Ten Spring 1991
1. Bob Dylan: at the Grammy Awards, 20 February 1991.
Thirty years after arriving in New York from Minnesota, Bob Dylan stepped
forward to be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. With the Gulf War in
progress, the blanket of acceptance that had been draped over the show was so
heavy the WAR SUCKS t-shirt New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg wore to the
American Music Awards a few weeks earlier would have been forbidden here;
maybe that’s why Dylan sang “Masters of War”, from 1963, and maybe that’s why
he disguised it, smearing the verses into one long word. If you caught on to
the number, the lyric did emerge – “And I’ll stand o’er your grave/’Til I’m
sure that you’re dead” – but lyrics were not the point. What was was the ride
Dylan and hid band gave them. With hats pulled down and dressed in dark
clothes, looking and moving like Chicago hipsters from the end of the fifties,
guitarists Cesar Diaz and John Jackson, bassist Tony Garnier, and drummer Ian
Wallace went after the song as if it were theirs as much as Dylan’s: a chance
at revenge, excitement, pleasure. You couldn’t tell one from the other, and
why bother?With this career performance behind him, Dylan took his trophy from a beaming
Jack Nicholson; he squinted, as if looking for his mother, who was in the
audience.“Well,” he said, “my daddy, he didn’t leave me much, you know he was a very simple man,
but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said”
– there was a long pause, nervous laughter from the crowd –
“he say, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world
that your own father and mother will abandon you and if that happens,
God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways.”Then he walked off. He had managed to get in and out without thanking anybody,
and this night it really did seem as if he owed nobody anything.
Watch the whole thing including Dylan’s “Masters of War” and acceptance speech:
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This video for “Forgiven/Forgotten” was released in December, but if you missed it, now’s a good time to check it out
It’s off Angel Olsen’s new album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, which was released today.
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Next Tuesday the new St. Vincent album, titled St. Vincent, will be released.
Check it out now.
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