Sounds From The Basement

I literally thought they were in Memphis, going out every night eating barbecue and partying

The Stones and the true story of Exile on Main St

It's nearly 40 years since the Rolling Stones fled to the French Riviera and recorded their masterpiece, Exile on Main St. On the eve of its relaunch, Sean O'Hagan marvels that the album was made at all…

The Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons and Anita Pallenberg at Villa Nellcote, France, 1971. One of a series of evocative shots taken by photographer Dominique Tarle. Photograph: Dominique Tarle

There is a great moment in Stones in Exile, a new documentary about the making of Exile on Main St in 1971, when Keith Richards defines the essential difference in temperament between Mick Jagger and himself.

"Mick needs to know what he's going to do tomorrow," says Richards, his voice slurring into a laugh. "Me, I'm just happy to wake up and see who's hanging around. Mick's rock, I'm roll."

On Exile on Main St, though, Jagger, for once, rolled with Richards. So, too, did everyone else involved, from Jimmy Miller, the producer, to Marshall Chess, the young Atlantic Records executive, to the rest of the group and their extended retinue of session players, studio technicians and hangers-on.

Once the decision had been made to record the album in the basement of Villa Nellcôte, Richards's rented house in the south of France, the working schedule was dictated by the irregular hours kept by the group's wayward guitarist, who also had a singularly dogged approach to composing songs.

"A lot of Exile was done how Keith works," confirms Charlie Watts in the documentary, "which is, play it 20 times, marinade, play it another 20 times. He knows what he likes, but he's very loose." Without a trace of irony, Watts adds, "Keith's a very bohemian and eccentric person, he really is."

Exile on Main St is so emphatically stamped with Keith Richards's rock'n'roll signature that it could just as easily have been called "Torn and Frayed" after one of the two gloriously ragged songs that he wrote the lyrics for. The title alone sums up his gypsy demeanour, his elegantly wasted look. Or they could simply have called it "Happy", after another track that was actually recorded in a single take when Richards woke up one morning – or evening – and gathered up the only other people who were awake, saxophonist Bobby Keys and producer Jimmy Miller, who was drafted in to play drums in place of the absent Watts. The whole record was, says Keys, a good ol' boy from Texas, "about as unrehearsed as a hiccup".

Perhaps because he was not the controlling presence on Exile on Main St, which has often been voted the greatest rock'n'roll record ever by music critics, it is not necessarily one of Mick Jagger's favourite Rolling Stones albums. He once described it as sounding "lousy" with "no concerted effort of intention", adding "at the time, Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies."

Jagger may have been miffed that his vocals are sometimes swallowed up in the soupy mix but he sings with real passion throughout and seems galvanised by the raw rock'n'roll the group are making. If anyone should need a reminder that no one before or since has sounded as louche and limber, so raggedly majestic, they should watch the Stones playing "Loving Cup" live on their subsequent American tour. Footage of that performance is a highlight of the documentary, produced by the Oscar -winning film-maker John Battsek, which will be premiered at the Cannes film festival before screening on the BBC later in May.

Despite his former reservations, Jagger has gotten behind the planned reissue of the album, too, which comes in a deluxe package containing 10 previously unheard bonus tracks, some of which are alternative takes of familiar songs while others sound suspiciously like they have only recently had new vocals added. No one in the Stones' camp is coming clean as to whether this is the case or not.

For the purists among us, though, the original version of Exile on Main St, in all its ragged, full-on, rock'n'roll swagger, is all we need. "This is just a tree of life," said Tom Waits, when he selected it as one of his all-time favourite records a few years back. "This record is a watering hole." On the documentary, Caleb Followill from Kings of Leon is taken aback to discover the album was recorded in France. "I literally thought they were in Memphis, going out every night eating barbecue and partying." Which is exactly what it sounds like.

The creation of Exile on Main St, like so many early chapters in the Rolling Stones story, is shrouded in myth and blurred by conflicting anecdotal evidence. The American journalist Robert Greenfield, who was present briefly during the recording, wrote an entire book about — and named after — the album. Its subtitle is "A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones". The book paints an often lurid portrait of Richards and his then partner, Anita Pallenberg. Greenfield places the couple at the centre of a spiral of sustained hard drug abuse and wilfully amoral behaviour. Among the rumours he airs, but does not confirm or refute, is the one about Pallenberg encouraging an employee's young daughter to inject heroin for the first time. Another has Jagger bedding Pallenberg while Richards has nodded out on heroin, thus reigniting an affair they were rumoured to have had while filming Performance under the direction of Nic Roeg in 1968.

Needless to say, the documentary, which has Jagger's controlling presence written all over it, does not dwell on such unsavoury and unsubstantiated matters. The French photographer Dominique Tarle, who chronicled the making of the album in a series of wonderfully evocative shots, and who was Greenfield's entrée into the Stones' milieu, had this to say about the book when I spoke to him in Paris last week: "I read only eight pages and I really felt sick. First of all, how can he not write about the music? And all this stuff about a season in hell with the Rolling Stones? No, no, it was anything but that. We were all young and it was a time of great freedom and energy and creativity. For me, it was a kind of rock'n'roll heaven."

Perhaps, though, it was both. Tommy Weber, who is described as "a racing driver, drug runner and adventurer" in the documentary, and as "a fabulous character straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night" by Greenfield, was one of Richards's inner circle at Nellcôte. His son, Jake, now a Hollywood actor, was just eight when he witnessed the decadence around the Rolling Stones first-hand. In Stones in Exile, he says, "There was cocaine, a lot of joints. If you're living a decadent life, there is always darkness there. But, at this point, this was the moment of grace. This was before the darkness, the sunrise before the sunset."

Bobby Keys, as ever, is more blunt. "Hell, yeah, there was some pot around, there was some whiskey bottles around, there was scantily clad women. Hell, it was rock'n'roll!"

Others experienced more mundane but no less pressing problems. Both Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman missed home and some of their own creature comforts. "I hated leaving England," Wyman reminisces. "You had to import Bird's custard, Branston pickle and piccalilli... you had to buy PG Tips and then deal with the French milk."

The Rolling Stones pitched up in the south of France in the spring of 1971 as reluctant tax exiles fleeing the Labour government's punitive 93% tax on high earners. The group had just extricated themselves, at some cost, from a misguided management deal with the infamous Allen Klein, who was still claiming he owned their publishing rights. In the public eye, though, the Stones were still the rock group that most defined the outlaw rock'n'roll lifestyle, their bad reputation built on an already colourful past that included high-profile drug busts, the death by drowning of Brian Jones, one of their founding members, the near death by overdose of Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger's former girlfriend, and the murder of a fan by Hell's Angels, who had been hired by the group's management to provide security at 1969's ill-fated Altamont festival.

Altamont was viewed by many contemporary observers as the symbolic death of the 60s dream of a burgeoning counterculture; by others as an inevitable result of the Stones' hubris and arrogance. Through it all, though, the Stones' music had echoed their turbulent lifestyle and soundtracked the tumultuous times, from the upfront sexual bravado of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in 1965, through the apocalyptic swirl of "Gimme Shelter" in 1969, to the swagger of "Brown Sugar" in 1971.

Sticky Fingers, the group's ninth album, nestled at the top of the British and US pop charts as the Stones, their families and extended entourage decamped to France to begin their exile. Richards sensed that the reason for their flight from Britain was not just to do with their dire financial predicament.

"There was a feeling you were being edged out of your own country by the British government," he remembers. "They couldn't ignore that we were a force to be reckoned with."

Having searched the coastline and hills around the town of Villefranche-sur-Mer for a suitable recording space, the Stones then opted to start working in the cavernous, multi-roomed basement of Nellcôte, with their mobile recording studio parked outside in the driveway. The house had once been occupied by the Nazis, and in a recent interview Richards describes working there as "like trying to make a record in the Führerbunker. It was that sort of feeling… very Germanic down there – swastikas on the staircase… Upstairs, it was fantastic. Like Versailles. But down there… it was Dante's Inferno."

In the often intense heat of the dank basement, the group struggled to get started. Musicians set up their instruments in adjoining rooms, with Bill Wyman having to play his bass in one space while his amplifiers stood in a hallway. Initially, they were hampered by guitars going out of tune due to the humidity. Basic communication, too, was a problem, with Jimmy Miller continually having to run from the mobile studio to the basement to deliver his instructions.

Then, a few weeks in, Mick Jagger announced that he was going to marry Bianca Pérez Morena de Macias, a Nicaraguan-born model, in nearby St Tropez. The international press and a clutch of the world's most famous pop stars jetted in for the very public wedding ceremony. As Jagger and his bride departed on honeymoon, the celebrations continued for a week at Villa Nellcôte. A week after they stopped, Gram Parsons, the country-rock singer who had bonded with Richards in Los Angeles a few years before over their shared love for Merle Haggard and heroin, arrived with his wife, Gretchen. The couple stayed for a month before they were diplomatically asked to leave by a Stones minion. "The atmosphere kept changing but the party kept going," says Tarle, laughing.

Interestingly, the Stones in Exile documentary does not even mention Parsons, whose closeness to Richards rattled the possessive Jagger. "Keith and Gram were intimate like brothers," says Tarle, "especially musically. The idea was floating around that Gram would produce a Gram Parsons album for the newly formed Rolling Stones Records. Mick, I think, was a little afraid because that would mean that Gram and Keith might even tour together to promote it. And if there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for the Rolling Stones. So, yes, there was tension. You could feel it and I captured it on Mick's face in some of my pictures."

The music the Stones made in Nellcôte reflected those tensions, as well as the sense of exile and uncertainty that hung heavily over the group, and the continuing encroachment of heroin on the lives of Richards and Pallenberg, and on the lives of some of those who entered their orbit. Speaking recently, Richards protested that he was not the only drug user in the group. "At the time, Mick was taking everything. Charlie was hitting the brandy like a motherfucker. The least of our concerns was what we ingested. These sorts of questions [about drugs] are predicated on what came a few years later when… I would play the game. 'Oh, you want that Keith Richards? I'll give you the baddest mother you've ever seen.'"

By October, though, heroin use seems to have been a constant in the lives of Richards and Pallenberg. "I walked into the living room one day and this guy had a big bag of smack," Pallenberg remembers, "and everything just disintegrated." Perhaps it was telling that when Richards bought himself a speedboat, he called it Mandrax.

Heroin brought with it the usual problems of supply and demand, and the usual retinue of shady characters and criminals, both local and from nearby Marseille. Villa Nellcôte was such an open house that, one day in September, burglars walked out of the front gate with nine of Richards's guitars, Bobby Keys's saxophone and Bill Wyman's bass in broad daylight while the occupants were watching television in the living room. "That's how loose and stupid it was out there," says Wyman. The crime was reputedly carried out by dealers from Marseille who were owed money by Richards. The nocturnal goings-on at Nellcôte were also starting to attract the attention of the local populace and the increasingly suspicious police force. "The music was so loud, really, really loud," Pallenberg remembers. "Sometimes I went to Villefranche during the day and you could hear the music there. And it went on all night."

Whatever the truth of the rumour about Pallenberg encouraging the teenage daughter of the resident chef to try heroin, the police eventually raided Nellcôte and, in 1973, both she and Richards were charged with possession of heroin and intent to traffic. The resulting guilty verdict meant that Richards was banned from entering France for two years, and thus the Stones could not play concerts there.

As summer turned to autumn, people started drifting away from Nellcôte and, in November 1971, Richards and Pallenberg followed suit. The album was eventually finished in Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles. In the documentary, Jagger reveals that some of the lyrics were written at the last minute, including the album's first single, "Tumbling Dice", which was composed "after I sat down with the housekeeper and talked about gambling". The words to another gambling song, the frenetic "Casino Boogie", were created by Jagger and Richards in the cut-up mode made famous by William Burroughs, which gives a lie to the notion that the line about "kissing cunt in Cannes" refers to an episode in Jagger's notoriously promiscuous sex life.

Jagger also denied recently that "Soul Survivor" was about his relationship with Keith Richards during the making of Exile. On it, he sings the line, "You're gonna be the death of me".

In places, Exile on Main St does indeed sound, in the best possible way, like an album made by a bunch of drunks and junkies who were somehow firing on all engines. Jim Price and Bobby Keys's horns are an integral part of the dirty sound, as is Nicky Hopkins's rolling piano. Songs such as the galloping opener, "Rocks Off", surely about the effects of a heroin hit, and "All Down the Line" are messily powerful, with vocals fading in and out of focus and the group kicking up a storm underneath. "Tumbling Dice" features one of the greatest opening gear changes in rock'n'roll and a swagger that carries all before it.

In one way, the double album, housed in Robert Frank's contact sheet-style cover, is Keith Richards's swan song of sorts, a final blast of rock'n'roll energy before he descended into a protracted heroin addiction that would often make him seem – and sound – disconnected from the rest of the group during live shows. After Exile, Jagger carried the weight and, despite some great moments on subsequent albums including Goat's Head Soup and Black and Blue, the Stones would never sound so sexy, so raucous and abandoned, so low-down and dirty. Neither, though, would anyone else. By the time punk came and went and indie rock had taken hold, the mix of sexiness and sassiness that the Stones at their best epitomised had disappeared entirely from rock music. So had the kind of survival instinct that the group drew on when the going got tough.

"The Stones really felt like exiles," Richards says. "It was us against the world now. So, fuck you! That was the attitude." You can still hear it, loud and clear, on this messy, inchoate, rock'n'roll masterpiece; the Rolling Stones in excelsis.

Stones in Exile will air on BBC2 on 23 May as part of the Imagine series

COMING TO A RECORD SHOP NEAR YOU SOON – THE NEWLY AUTHORISED VERSION OF THE ROLLING STONES' BIBLE

You don't remain one of the music industry's most lucrative concerns after nearly 50 years in the business by being wasteful and the Rolling Stones are rarely profligate as far as recorded material is concerned. So while a quick internet search will reveal the usual array of bootleg out-takes and alternative versions, thus far, repeated reissues of the band's back catalogue have rarely offered more than remastering existing material and adding fancy artwork.

This is one of the reasons this month's version of 1972's Exile on Main St, released on 17 May, is news and probably why it was held back from last year's unremarkable repackaging of their 70s output. Most of the fresh songs contained among its 10 extra tracks are genuinely unheard, lost-to-the-mists-of-time rarities.

There's been some tinkering, though, with Jagger finishing the lyrics and lead vocals to "Following the River", as well as adding the odd vocal flourish to other tunes. "Keith put guitar on one or two," Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine recently, although Richards himself declared: "I really wanted to leave them pretty much as they were. I didn't want to interfere with the Bible."

The impressively slouchy blues of "Plundered my Soul" has already been aired, gaining a limited release last weekend in support of international Record Store Day. "Good Time Women" is an excellent early incarnation of "Tumbling Dice" that has been knocking about online for a while, albeit in less polished form.

Like much of Exile, it dates from the sessions for 1971's Sticky Fingers, although another new track "I'm Not Signifying" originates from the notoriously drug-addled sessions at Nellcôte in the south of France.

There's a further treat included in the £99.99 deluxe box set version, something that adds to the sense that the Exile reissue is a sign that the Stones may be catching up with their peers and beginning to direct their own mythology more firmly, in the manner of, say, Bob Dylan with his recent flurry of official bootlegs and documentaries.

Among the commemorative hardback book and postcards is 10 minutes of footage from the infamous Cocksucker Blues documentary, shot on the band's particularly debauched 1972 US tour in support of Exile. Inevitably, the edit features Keith hurling a television off a hotel balcony and Mick ordering room service, rather than the infamous sex and drugs scenes that prompted the band to halt the film's full release. (The entire 93-minute version can still only be shown in the presence of the now 85-year-old director Robert Frank.)

Frank's film is named after another lost Stones track, their final single for Decca, rejected by the label because of its title. It made one brief appearance on a German compilation and hasn't been heard since. Apart from on the web, of course.

Discovering keepers of folk music

Decades ago, an Austin family loved singing songs passed down from ancestors. As a result, those cultural treasures live on.

By Michael Corcoran

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Updated: 12:39 p.m. Monday, April 26, 2010

Published: 6:07 a.m. Monday, April 26, 2010

It sure seemed quiet for 10 a.m. on a weekday, when John A. Lomax, who recorded folk songs for the Library of Congress, knocked on the front door of a six-room shanty on the northern bank of the Colorado River. Maggie Gant answered, still in her bedclothes. The children were still asleep, the mother of eight whispered.

"Last night we all got to singing and dancing. We didn't go to bed until 2 in the morning," she told Lomax, which he recalled in "Our Singing Country," his 1941 book that contained four songs collected from the Gants.

"The singing kept us so happy," Maggie Gant told Lomax, "we couldn't go to sleep."

It was 1934, during the depths of the Depression, but the Gant family of dispossessed sharecroppers was rich in music.

Lomax, a former University of Texas administrator, and his son Alan made more than 40 primitive recordings of the Gant family, whose vast repertoire ranged from jailhouse ballads and play ditties to cowboy songs and minstrel tunes.

The most prominent of those, in retrospect, was "When First Unto This Country a Stranger I Came," which Joan Baez sang live and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman recorded in 1993. They all learned it from the 1960s folkies the New Lost City Ramblers, who heard it from the Gants.

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Happy Birthday Albert King

Albert King is the middle of the "King Trilogy" of blues guitarists (B.B., Albert and Freddie).  Freddie is likely the least remembered.  His most famous track was Hideaway, though most probably know it fro the Clapton version on the Bluesbreakers LP  by John Mayall (the record that inspired all the Clapton is God graffiti in London).   B.B. King is surely the best known as he continues to tour and is one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

I have always been partial to Albert (April 25, 1923 – December 21, 1992).  There was something about his sense of style, both in his playing and visually.    He was always playing that distinctive looking flying V guitar and, like Jimi Hendrix after him,  was a left hander playing a right handed guitar upside down.

He made lots of fine records, but if you are only going to hear one recording, shouldn't it be Born Under A Bad Sign?

Born Under A Bad Sign

Happy Birthday Doug Clifford (April 24) and Stu Cook (April 25)

Of course, you know them as the rhythm section of Creedence Clearwater Revival, one of the all time great rock and roll bands.  Drummer Doug "Cosmo" Clifford and Bassist Stu Cook (both born in 1945) were junior high school classmates who eventually backed Tom Fogerty both at live performances and in the studio.  Later younger brother John Fogerty joined the band.  The group really became John's band as he wrote the material sang lead, played lead guitar, produced the recordings and was the band's business manager.  With the Beatles breaking up they were the biggest band in the world for a few short years before tensions between John and the rest of the band broke it apart. 

Sadly, time has not  healed these wounds.  John Fogerty refused to perform with them at the band's induction at the Rock and Roll Hall of fame.  Doug and Stu tour as Creedence Clearwater Revisited while John makes very good solo records.   They were a great rhythm section and along with Creedence engineer Russ Gary they produced one of Doug Sahm's finest records, Groover's Paradise.

CCR - Up Around The Bend

Doug Sahm - Groovers Paradise

Bob Dylan

49 Years Ago Today.....

...Nineteen year old Bob Dylan made his first public appearance in Greenwich Village, N.Y. at Gerdes Folk City on Fourth Street. When Dylan arrived in New York, he was too young to sing in a club. Mike Porco, the owner of Fok City, took him to the musicians Union where Dylan claimed to be an orphan. Porco signed to be Dylan's guardian and the rest, as they say, is history. As an opening act for John Lee Hooker,He performed a two verse version of a song he wrote called "Blowin' in the Wind." adapted from an old Negro spititual, "No More Auction Block."

Charlie Gillett, February 20, 1942-March 17, 2010

We take the availability of books about popular culture for granted, but in the 1970's there were few places to read about the history of Rock and Roll.  I remember spending lazy hours in my college library going through old issues of the New Yorker to find the infrequent pieces by Ellen Willis.  Charlie Gillet's The Sound of the City, which began as his masters thesis on the history of Rock and Roll for Columbia University, was almost alone as a serious history of rhythm and blues and rock and roll when it was published in 1970.  He followed that with a history of the early days of Atlantic Records (Making Tracks).  But, his career really took off as a disc jockey in London where his weekly radio show, Honky Tonk, on Radio London was closely listened to by a very wide audience.  His broadcast of demos by Dire Straits, Graham Parker and Elvis Costello helped to get them signed to their first record contracts.  He managed Ian Drury's first band (Kilburn and the High Roads).  He continued to write and broadcast about music, especially world music up to his final days.

Down In The Boondocks

Joe South, singer, songwriter, producer and session guitarist was born on February 28, 1940.  Among the hits he wrote for others were Down In The Boondocks for Billy Joe Royal and (I Never Promised You A)Rose Garden for Lynn Anderson.  He played on countless sessions, including many for Aretha Franklin, though perhaps his most memorable sessions were for Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde where he played the astonishing lead guitar on Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again.

He had many hits of his own in the late 60's and into the 1970's.  Games People Play was the biggest,  but my favorites are Don't It Make You Want To Go Home and  Walk A Mile In My Shoes.  The death of his brother Tommy in 1971 (the drummer in his band) effectively marked the end of his career as a hit maker as he withdrew from the public eye.

Happy birthday Joe.

Click on the tracks below to sample some of Joe South's memorable recordings.  Right click and save as to download the tracks to your computer.

Don't It Make You Want To Go Home

Walk A Mile In My Shoes

Download 01 Games People Play

Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again

The Return Of An Old Friend

Of course, one of my main passions is music and among the most frenzied of those passions is my love for the music of Bruce Springsteen, especially seeing him live and collecting live recordings.   However with a collection of live recordings that now numbers well over 200 (what excess!) many of these recordings don't get played all that often.  It was not always that way.  Some items  in my collection have been played so often that I have vivid memories of virtually every nuance.

There are many recordings in my collection that I have not played in quite some time.  Also, the circumstances of my migration to the digital music age has also left quite a bit of recorded music unheard.  Most of the time I listen to recorded music on my Sonos Unit which allows me to stream music wirelessly throughout my house and backyard from the digital music on my PC.  While I have over 200 Gig of music on my PC, there are still approximately 1,000 CD's in mu\y collection that I have still not ripped onto my PC (Don't get me started on the 2,500 LPs and 500 45's!) even after almost a year of living in Texas.  The major reason for this is my need to listen and rate each song as it gets loaded in so I can   rate them and set up playlists to enable me to only play the best of the best.  I had to make a trip to Colorado for work this week and would need to drive from Denver to Colorado Springs, so I reached into one of the unpacked boxes of CD's and grabbed a handful of discs.  And there it was......

In many ways, this recording of Bruce Springsteen live at the Roxy in LA in 1978 started it all for me.  I had already seen Bruce live several times and was definitely a fan.  By accident I had discovered that there was a little record store in Bethesda called Record Lords (now long gone) and in the back where it really was a head shop you could flip through some boxes normally kept behind the counter that contained LPs in poorly printed black and white album jackets containing a variety of material you could not easily find anywhere else.  I bought a 2 LP set titled Adam Raised a Cain containing most of the radio broadcast of Springsteen July 7, 1978 club show in Los Angeles.

Bruce was making his real breakout to stardom after having legal entanglements preventing him from recording a follow up to Born To Run.  The show had been the centerpiece of a Rolling Stone cover story on Bruce in Rolling Stone Magazine and now routinely is cited as one of the legendary shows of all time.  As part of the effort to get his music in front of a wider public, throughout the 1978 tour whole shows were broadcast live over the radio, not just this show from LA, but from WInterland in San Francisco (greatest live version of all time), The Agora in Cleveland (I can remember hearing the opening of the show when he played Summertime Blues), The Capitol Theater in Passaic (many people claim the bootleg of this show, Piece de Resistance as the greatest Bruce boot of all time).  All of these are great shows and I have gotten lots of enjoyment from them and many more.  But, Roxy 78 is still my show.

Listening once again to this talisman of my ongoing infatuation with Bruce's music was like putting on a favorite jacket  where everything fit just right.  So many of the tracks are lodged in my mind as THE versions that I remember and remain the standard I measure other live recordings against.  The show starts with a cover of Buddy Holly's Rave On and never really lets up.  My favorite remains the extended version of Prove It All Night where Bruce channels his inner Jeff Beck.  It is no surprise that a large bulk of the live box set was drawn from this show.  Later this month I will head up to Dallas to once aging revel in the Darkness and travel down Thunder Road.

Still Proovin' It Every Night

Once again I have seen Bruce Springsteen live.  The scary thing is that I have seen Bruce so many times over the past 30 years, that I can't really get an accurate count.  This show was in St Paul November 2, 2007.  My company has a suite at the St Paul arena where Bruce was playing and I just happened to have business that brought me to Minnesota on that particular date (real coincidence?).

Every time I go to a Bruce show with people I don't know very well, I have that initial uncomfortable situation:  how do I respond to the inevitable question of how often I have seen Bruce live.  This time was no different.  One of the other people in the suite struck up a conversation with the group and mentioned that he was a "real big Bruce fan" and had seen him 20 times dating back to the mid 1980's.  This started a conversation:  when was your first Bruce show and which one was the "best" show.  When the conversation came to me, I had to admit that I was "a little crazy" and that I had been to something between 70 and 100 shows.  Favorite show was probably Hampden Roads, VA in 1980, but I have a great fondness for the Seeger Sessions rehearsal show in the Asbury Park Coliseum.  How often to you see Bruce in that intimate a setting?

At the start of the show I was a little disappointed in the sound.  The set started with a rousing Radio Nowhere, but the guitars were so distorted as to make it a little underwhelming.  The up tempo roaring continued with No Surrender, but the sound, while better, still was not that good.  Then cane Lonesome Day.  This is one of the best songs on The Rising and the liver performance did not disappoint.  Suddenly the sound was crystal clear, though I thought the guitars were now a little too soft.

Then came the first of several moments that night that helped to explain why people go crazy for Bruce live.  Until Born in the USA came out, I would argue that Bruce, while popular was really a cult artist.  He had plenty of fans who were devoted, but the masses still didn't get it.  The argument that the converted always advanced was "you really had to see him live" to fully appreciate him.  I understood the reasoning, but as one who became a fan of the records and didn't see him live for a few years, I was reluctant to embrace this idea.  However, when Bruce and the band tore into Gypsy Biker, I was reminded of the "you gotta see him live" argument.  I am not a fan of Gypsy Biker, and generally think the production on the new record does not support the songs in many cases.  However, live, Gypsy Biker was nothing less than stunning.   For some reason it made me think of the first time I heard Bruce. 

I went over to Andy Weintroub's house with David Rubin and they played ne Greetings and E-Street Shuffle.  This was sometime in the fall of 1975 before Born to Run was released.  I liked the music, but did not rush out to buy the record.  Sometime later I hear Born to Run on the radio while driving, made the connection and went out and bought the LP.  Soon I was buying Greetings and E-Street Shuffle.  While Thunder Road would be my favorite Bruce recording for a long time, E-Street Shuffle was the record I played the most often.  When Bruce started playing Incident on 57th Street, that made it a special moment for me.