Tag Archives: “Bruce Springsteen”

Many Musicians Make Millions. Most Don’t.

Photo by Thomas Loyens/CC2.0

A few months ago MusiCares, a nonprofit organization that provides a range of safety net resources for musicians, partnered with the Princeton University Survey Research Center to publish a report highlighting the challenges and opportunities that musicians face. The 1,277 musicians who responded to the questionnaire were asked not only about their financial state, but also about topics that included health issues, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Take this as a spoiler alert, because I’m going to jump right to the conclusion of the report:

The survey findings described in this report suggest that many professional musicians face a multitude of problems, including high levels of depression and anxiety, high rates of substance abuse, relatively low incomes, and work-related physical injuries. And while many musicians find features of a musical career particularly alluring, the life a musician presents many challenges … and the rather disturbing findings call for further monitoring of the conditions faced by many musicians, and support for those musicians who suffer from severe emotional, physical, and financial hardships.

When you’ve chosen to follow your artistic passion, hopes, and dreams, this report reads like the directions to a highway from hell. I’ll bullet point a few of the statistical findings:

* The most common income source is live performances, followed by music lessons and performing in a church choir or other religious service.

* The median musician in the U.S. earns between $20,000 and $25,000 a year.

* Sixty-one percent of musicians said that their music-related income is not sufficient to meet their living expenses.

Many musicians shared that they most liked the “opportunity for artistic expression, performing, and collaborating with others,” as well as the “aspirational and spiritual aspects” of being a musician. So much for the good news.

Performers have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse than the general population, and 72 percent of women musicians — who are already disproportionately underrepresented throughout the music industry — report that they have been discriminated against because of their sex. Sixty-seven percent report that they have been the victim of sexual harassment. And 63 percent of non-white musicians stated that they have faced racial discrimination.

While Americana-branded music and all its various “inside the big tent” sub-genres has grown in popularity over the past dozen years, my personal unscientific observation is that for the majority of musicians there is a marked deficiency in the nine‐factor analytic model of conceptions for the desire to be famous. That’s a fancy way of saying they don’t necessarily strive for “superstar” status and financial success and even if they did, it’s doubtful they’d be very happy if they accomplished it.

Edward Deci, a professor at the University of Rochester who was speaking about his research into success and happiness in 2009, put it like this: “Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to having a satisfying life. The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community.” (This man clearly has never flown on a private jet to Paris for a lunch date at the Guy Savoy restaurant with 21-year-old billionaire Kylie Jenner to munch on whole-roasted barbecued pigeon, oyster concassé, and monkfish among aubergine caviar with sautéed ceps.)

Let’s flip the switch and talk about what it looks like to be defined as successful by many people: money. Take a look at Forbes‘ list of the wealthiest musicians for the year 2017, beginning with the top ten:

1. Diddy ($130 million)
2. Beyoncé ($105 million)
3. Drake ($94 million)
4. The Weeknd ($92 million)
5. Coldplay ($88 million)
6. Guns N’ Roses ($84 million)
7. Justin Bieber ($83.5 million)
8. Bruce Springsteen ($75 million)
9. Adele ($69 million)
10. Metallica ($66.5 million)

Bruce is probably the closest thing on this list to a down-to-Earth working-class-value folkie musician (cough, cough), and if you want to find the people who occasionally wear cowboy hats you’d find Garth at #11 with an annual income of $66 million, followed by Kenny Chesney at $48 million. Going deeper on the list, the elder generation are represented by Elton John, Sir Paul, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. (Both Flea and Anthony Kiedis turn 56 this year.) Hip-hop artists dominate the rest of the top 25, along with a few women who are best defined as pop singers that can dance like crazy and have superb social media skills.

Almost every musician in the survey reported that 75 percent of their income is from live performances, but there should be a giant asterisk next to Jimmy Buffett’s name, since most of his $50 million annual take was not directly from music but rather his chain of restaurants, hotels, and casinos. In discovering that Buffett has a net worth of over half a billion dollars, I’ll never look at a parrot, lime, or bottle of tequila the same way. And ditto with Diddy: He made $70 million by simply selling his Sean John fashion line and cashing out.

When I consider many of the musicians I know who travel by car or van from gig to gig, hang out at the merch table after their show to make a couple extra bucks selling stuff, and either crowdsource or borrow from friends and family to record an album, pigs are likely to be seen flying across the sky before they make the Forbes list. And with the exception of maybe three dozen Americana performers that I can think of, they’re destined to stay mainly in the world of small venues, house concerts, and, if they’re truly lucky, a slot on the festival circuit and a month or two each year in Europe and Scandinavia. They likely won’t be making a fortune, but success is best measured by your heart rather than a bank statement. Keep on truckin’.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

They Blew Up the Chicken Man

If I didn’t write one more word past that title, it wouldn’t surprise me if you knew exactly which road I was driving down. Just six short words, part of a longer sentence, from the first verse of the second song on Nebraska. Recorded on a four-track Tascam 144 cassette player and never meant to be released in its stripped down format, at this very moment I believe it could be the greatest song that Bruce Springsteen has ever written. In the past month I’ve listened to dozens of covers, some that I’ll share here. But this song, and the black and white video of “Atlantic City,” still stands.

 

 

Well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night
And they blew up his house, too.
Down on the boardwalk they’re ready for a fight
Gonna see what them racket boys can do.
Now there’s trouble busin’ in from outta state
And the D.A. can’t get no relief.

Like a lot of kids who were born in the ‘50s and grew up in Philadelphia, I loved Atlantic City in all its splendor and decay. it was just a nickel toll to drive over the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge into Jersey. Down the highway to the second traffic circle, you’d stop at a space-age looking diner for breakfast, smell the salt air as you cruised through Egg Harbor, and park the big Pontiac or Buick sedan as close to the beach that you could possibly get. You had to be there early if you wanted to pay 50 cents to rent a locker, change into your bathing suit and stash your dress-up clothes for the evening stroll. While the kids and mom staked out a spot in the sand near Convention Hall, dad would run down to Captain Starn’s to try and get dinner reservations. If he failed, it would be either Wolfie’s, Tony’s Baltimore Grill, or The White House. It was our Disneyland.

 

After just a couple of hours in the ocean, we’d eat a packed lunch from the cooler and make our way north to Steel Pier for the afternoon shows. Matinees were cheaper. First there were carnival-style games up front, and then you passed the Diving Bell, a small steel capsule that you’d get locked into and they’d drop you to the bottom of the sea. Usually saw nothing but a couple of little fish. And stretching far out over the water there were several music theaters. One day I watched a 13-year-old Little Stevie Wonder perform “Fingertips” while my folks went to see the Count Basie Orchestra. Another time I was surrounded and crushed by female teen pandemonium when Herman’s Hermits came onstage. But the real reason you came was the beautiful women with long hair who would sit on top of horses and dive from a platform from about a hundred feet in the air into a tiny wooden tub. But that was the ’50s and ’60s, and things were about to change.

 

It really was a “tale of two cities.” As kids we just knew about salt water taffy, Mr. Peanut, and the rides on Million Dollar Pier. Barkers with clip-on microphones selling knives that wouldn’t dull, cut crystal glasses from France, and gizmos that chopped your onions up into tiny little pieces. At night everybody got dressed up in their finest summer clothes, and you’d either stroll along the wooden boardwalk or, if you came from the Main Line, you’d pay someone to push you in a wicker basket cart with wheels on it. And when the kids got too tired, you’d walk a block inland and catch a Jitney on Pacific Avenue to your hotel, if you were lucky enough to spend the full weekend.

Close to midnight, when things started to get quiet along the beach, and the kids got tucked into bed, the great jazz clubs and showrooms would fill up with guys and dolls. The white folks had their clubs in the middle of the city like The 500 Club, where you’d see Sinatra or Martin and Lewis, and the black clubs were at the north end: The Harlem Club, Grace’s Little Belmont, and Wonder Gardens. Although Boardwalk Empire was a reality-based fictionalized account of the Roaring ’20s, long after Prohibition ended and probably still to this day Atlantic City was always a mob town. Booze, prostitution, gambling, loan sharking, murders … it was all there. And pretty soon, Donald Trump would take it for a spin.

 

Before they legalized gambling and started to tear down the old great hotels to put up walls of glass and steel, the city became a pre-Jersey Shore teenage wasteland. The families went south to quieter towns and the gangsters got political and started jockeying for position. By the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the boardwalk got ultra tacky and half the kids hung out at High Hat Joe’s while the rest were north at Playland. The common denominator was dope, sex, and music, and there was also a lot of fighting.

Freaks, geeks, and a few clean-cut kids. The greasers from South Philly and K and A, who’d knock you out for just looking at them. I got dragged under the boardwalk one night with a knife to my throat, and damn if I can remember how I got out alive. Living in a boarding house with an old man, six cats, no litter boxes, and five girls from Montreal, I worked odd jobs at probably a half-dozen hotels and was working at the front desk the night Tyrone Davis, who just had a massive hit on the radio with “Turn Back The Hands of Time,” tore up half the rooms. And I mean he outdid Keith Moon, using an axe handle and hammer on the doors and furniture. They hauled him off, leaving his tour bus in the parking lot for a couple days.

 

The only time I went back down to Atlantic City in the ‘80s was to visit Russ Meyer’s Record Shop on Atlantic Avenue. They had a huge collection of oldies and also dealt to the jukebox guys, and I worked for a distributor that owned about 30 percent of the market. It looked like war-torn Beirut: blocks and blocks of housing were bought up by developers and knocked down, left empty for the next casino to be put up. Everywhere you looked they were building these grotesque monoliths and Trump’s damn name was everywhere. The state tried to muscle out the mob, but they were smarter. Who ran the unions, owned the construction companies, supplied the liquor, food, and entertainment? There were more ways to take money off the table.

The first casino opened in 1978. The Press of Atlantic City writes that when Gov. Brendan Byrne stood on the Boardwalk and warned organized crime bosses to “keep [their] filthy hands out of Atlantic City,” two men – Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the now-former boss of the Philadelphia crime family, and his nephew and second-in-command, Philip “Crazy Phil” Leonetti – were watching the speech live from just a few blocks away. “Doesn’t he know we’re already here?” Scarfo asked his nephew.

In March 1980 the boss of the Philadelphia crime family, Angelo “The Gentle Don” Bruno, was killed by a shotgun blast in the back of the head as he sat in his car in front of his home. It is believed that the killing was ordered by Antonio Caponigro (aka Tony Bananas), Bruno’s consigliere. A few weeks later, Caponigro’s body was found stuffed in a body bag in the trunk of a car in New York City. About $300 in bills were jammed in his mouth and anus (to be interpreted as signs of greed). After Caponigro’s murder, Philip “Chicken Man” Testa led the family for one year until he was killed by a nail bomb at his home. (Wikipedia)

Donald Trump spent 25 years owning a number of properties in Atlantic City, all of which now stand empty. He filed bankruptcy four times. “Early on, I took a lot of money out of the casinos with the financings and the things we do,” he said. “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time.” The town still looks like hell, and maybe there’s a song in that story too.

Everything dies, baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies some day comes back.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

 

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at the No Depression; The Journal of Roots Music website.

The Alternative Fact of “Buffalo Gals”

In 1844 a blackface minstrel named John Hodges, who performed under the name “Cool White,” wrote and published a song titled “Lubly Fan.” Over the years it became quite popular throughout the country, and touring minstrels would often switch up the lyrics to appeal to wherever they were playing. Now considered a traditional American folk song, almost everybody knows the chorus.

Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight?
Come out tonight, Come out tonight?
Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,
And dance by the light of the moon.

According to an article from the Library of Congress, the Ethiopian Serenaders, a white band who also performed in blackface, published sheet music for “Philadelphia Gals” with similar lyrics and no attribution for a composer in 1845, and then again in 1848 for “Buffalo Gals,” presumably for Buffalo, N.Y.

 

That’s a 1929 recording from The Pickard Family, which sounds pretty authentic to the times, but here’s a more homogenized version by Gene Autry that was used for the 1950 film Cow Town. It should be noted that Hollywood used “Buffalo Gals” quite often: It was featured prominently in High Noon, Texas, and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

 

Pete Seeger learned the song when he was recruited by Alan Lomax in 1939 to work on cataloging field recordings at the Library of Congress in Washington. This version was recorded for Moses Asch years later, and is still available on the Smithsonian Folkways set titled American Favorite Ballads.

 

In true folk tradition, the tune was appropriated and lyrics changed for rockabilly singer Ray Smith’s version, and he sold over a million copies in 1960 for Judd Records.

 

In 1958 a group called The Olympics had a top-ten single with “Western Movies,” which was written by Fred Smith and Cliff Goldsmith. Two years later, those two composers adapted “Buffalo Gals” in a completely different way:

 

Skipping ahead about 15 years, Malcolm McLaren was a British visual artist, performer, musician, clothing designer, and boutique owner. He supplied stage costumes to the New York Dolls and eventually became well known as the manager of the Sex Pistols. After they self-destructed he was involved with Adam and the Ants, Bow Wow Wow, The Slits, and Jimmy the Hoover.

In the early ’80s I managed a record store in Santa Monica, and an unlikely album captured my attention. McLaren had teamed up with producer Trevor Horn and a duo of radio disc jockeys – The World’s Famous Supreme Team – from New York City who hosted a hip-hop and classic R&B show on WHBI 105.9 FM and were among the first DJs to introduce the art of scratching to the world. Duck Rock was on my turntable almost every night in 1983, and it was this version of “Buffalo Gals” that is my hands-down favorite.

 

Somewhere along the way I lost the album, but 20 years later I found a used CD reissue at Amoeba Records. It always traveled with me in the car along with the twang stuff I listen to, and my kids – who were about ten and seven at the time – learned all the lyrics. Together we could all recite the spoken word interludes that were ripped from the radio shows of Sedivine the Mastermind and Just Allah the Superstar.

A few weeks ago my oldest son and I got to talking about that album, and he reminded me he wrote a paper in college about the evolution of “Buffalo Gals.” I asked him to send it to me, and while he might be disappointed that I strayed from his original narrative and main topic, I have to give him credit for prompting me to write this column. It’s just a great song and the perfect example of how a folk song will twist and turn, with each version presenting an “alternative fact” of the original.

Alright kids, I’ll leave you with my second-favorite version of the song. Play it through and play it loud. And thanks for the catchphrase, Kellyanne.

 

This was originally was published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression dot com.

Was Bruce Springsteen Born in the USA?

As you know, over the past several months, the mainstream media, which is controlled by … well, I don’t need to say it … has been been running articles and news stories virtually every single day in advance of Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born To Run.

The book is being published by Simon and Schuster, a company founded by a man with German-Jewish ancestry who incidentally was the father of singer-songwriter Carly Simon who was once married to a musician known to authorities as a heroin addict. Currently the publisher is a subsidiary of CBS Corporation, which is an international multimedia conglomerate that just so happens to also produce the television series Sabrina the Teenage Witch. So to be crystal clear, an organization that broadcasts a subliminal Satanic message aimed directly at young children is now assisting in advancing a possible lie that a politically subversive popular guitarist and singer was born in the USA.

I don’t have to tell you that many people have often questioned the heritage of Bruce Springsteen, who has spent much of  his career associating and advancing the music and politics of people like Pete Seeger, the late activist who refused to answer questions from the US Congress surrounding his membership in the Communist Party. Our huge and experienced investigative team of reporters has been working around the clock in fact-checking an early advance of Born To Run, and we’ve uncovered many inaccuracies that raise more questions about just who this man is.

For example, we have uncovered that the author writes at length in the book about his father’s Irish-American heritage, a man who went by the name of Dutch Springsteen. Consulting a world map and  encyclopedia, as well as scrutinizing Where’s Waldo?, our geo-political specialists now confirm the close proximity to Germany of the former Dutch Republic currently known as the Netherlands. The importance of this is that origin of the name Springsteen is now in question.

It is a well documented fact that in an article published in 2013, TheNew York Times “misspelled” the Boss’s last name as “Springstein,” which I’m not saying actually means something, but most of us can clearly see the unintended link to Gertrude Stein. A self-described lesbian, Stein (who as you know, is often pronounced as Steen) promoted pro-immigration and democratic policies throughout her life, with a mix of reactionary and progressive ideas. Although I’m not trying to insinuate it, the coincidence is troubling.

While none of these actual historical facts (and there are hundreds more that will be revealed in the next few weeks) can be linked to Bruce Springsteen, in the shadows of this new dark autobiography, there are some people who are beginning to question his political views and heritage, wondering out loud if his most popular song, “Born In The USA,”  was written and released to cover up his true nationality.

I now can officially report to you that despite sending hundreds of telepathic messages to New Jersey officials through a medium located inside a Brooklyn storefront on Flatbush Avenue, these government bureaucrats have absolutely refused to provide me a copy of Bruce Springsteen’s birth certificate. My amazing attorneys are preparing a lawsuit which will be filed very soon in federal court and I can promise that I will get to the bottom of this conspiracy and report my findings no matter how long it takes.

I dashed off the above piece of fiction the morning after Donald Trump attempted to erase years of his own infamous lies and deception directed toward President Barack Obama. In his role as the loudest and most vocal spokesperson of what we identify as the “birther movement,” Trump has built his political career based on racism and bigotry. Along with his ability to consistently state lies and falsehoods that too often go unchecked, he teaches all of us how easy it is to cast doubt and suspicion through innuendo and fear. He is everything wrong about the values and beliefs of our great country.

I apologize to Bruce Springsteen for using him and his new book as a vehicle for making my point, and want to be clear that this represents my own views and not those of either owner and publisher, editor or staff of No Depression website or magazine, nor any parent or subsidiary companies.

Let’s close it out with a little music … and please use your vote to keep America safe, sane and free forever from demagogues and con men.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression dot com.

Damn the Hype, Praise the Boxer

jack_johnsonIf I was a baseball player you might say I’m in a slump. I feel as though, when I’m up to bat, I swing at air. If a ball speeds toward me, I reach up to catch but it just sails through my glove. I could grow a beard, shave it off, lower my right shoulder, raise my left, shuffle my feet, or tug at my ears. No change. And that’s probably the best analogy I can come up with, as to my current relationship with new music.

This affliction is hardly new, and I’ve been struck by it several times in the past few years. One cure that seems to work has been for me to take a break from the new stuff and get back to the tried and true — simply immerse myself in old favorites. I might spend a month listening to only the Carter Family Border Radio set, or something completely off the wall. Last year, it was 60 days of the complete Elvis Costello discography.

I realize that it can wear a little thin when those of us who have the good fortune of being able to share our discoveries and opinions with readers on a regular basis are constantly dragging out endless stories about the good ol’ days. I have attempted — but perhaps not always succeeded — to strike a balance. After all, No Depression‘s new tagline is “The Journal of Roots Music,” but I think it’s fair to say that the majority of the subject matter and content that dominates this website and others like it is primarily focused on new releases: artists currently on tour, upcoming festival lineups, reviews of recent concerts.

About four months ago, I started to aggregate and post a minimum of three news stories per week on my various social media platforms that related to roots music. Relying on two dozen websites that emphasize folk, blues, jazz, alt-country, bluegrass, old-time, and the ilk, I soon discovered that everybody is (more or less) reporting on the same news, the same artists, and the same albums. While I still budget my “ear share” to listening to a dozen or so new albums each week, I find that very little of it is sticking.

Now, this isn’t a situation where the old curmudgeon doesn’t think there’s great music out there, waiting to be heard. At least I hope it isn’t coming off like that. To the contrary, I think there’s almost too much of the good stuff and too little time to find it. I find myself feeling as though I’m being manipulated by high octane hype that’s beginning to stifle my overall interest. Throw in the weekly Top 40 chart from the Americana Music Association along with dozens of stories about the artist-album-flavor of the week from Sturgill, Hayes, Parker, Margo, or the Jayhawks, and it just makes me want to … what … listen to Bruce Springsteen do “Purple Rain” again?

For now, I’m alternating my listening time between Norman Blake’s Flying Fish output and hundreds of various jazz titles that have been ripped from old 78s, digitized, and sent to me from a friend in Europe.

Meanwhile, Ernie in Kansas City piqued my interest when he sent me a note asking if I knew about the famous boxer Jack Johnson, who went by the nickname of “The Galveston Giant.” He was the first African-American world heavyweight champion, from 1908 through 1915. In the 1920s, after serving time in prison, he recorded a side or two for Ajax Records. He has an amazing life story and Ken Burns produced a film about him you might want to check out.

Recently I found this clip and it’s reminds me of why I love music. Both old and new.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column on the No Depression website.

Photo by Otto Sarony/1908 CC 2.0

1975 Rewind: Pet Rocks & Bruce to Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes

I doubt that anyone could have missed the news this week that, 40 years ago, Bruce Springsteen released his Born to Run album. Somebody somewhere was working hard behind the scenes, getting the word out. Stories popped up all over major television networks and cable channels, national magazines, local newspapers and morning shows, trade publications, websites, social media, and blogs. There were the usual suspects like Rolling Stone and Billboard magazines, as well as the unexpected mentions at Fox Sports and the Absolute Punk website.

I was 23 in 1975, and living in Philadelphia, which was close enough to Freehold and Asbury Park that we considered Springsteen a local boy. His first two albums were played in heavy rotation on our FM radio stations. He performed often in the area, up and down the mid-Atlantic coast. And in February of that year he and the band delivered a spellbinding set at Bryn Mawr’s famed folk club, The Main Point. It was broadcast live on WMMR, was instantly bootlegged, and, remarkably, is still readily available in both the US and UK on a large internet marketplace that begins with the letter A. And you can stream it on the ‘Tube. This clip was shot later that same year in London and the band was still raw and rockin’.

Although my long-term memory is usually laser sharp, when it comes to the mid-’70s, I admit to having a musically blank slate. I suppose we can just chalk it up to high times and one too many Dead concerts, but today I refreshed my brain by scanning all the releases from 1975. I also looked at the singles and album charts and read back issues of the industry trades. It took a little time of sifting through the mud to spot the gems.

The first release of that year was from Elvis Presley and the last in December was from the Bay City Rollers. The number one song was “Love Will Keep Us Together” by The Captain and Tennille (backed by The Wrecking Crew — catch the fabulous documentary film of the same name). At the bottom of the Top 100 for the year was….wait…I’ll get to it in a sec or two.

On a more roots music tip, a few artists released not just one, but two albums. Dylan had Blood on the Tracks and also The Basement Tapes with The Band. Emmylou Harris brought out Elite Hotel and Pieces of the Sky. Richard and Linda Thompson offered Hokey Pokey and Pour Down Like Silver. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Chip Taylor, and Joan Baez each delivered their highest charted albums. There were solo albums from Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, John Fogerty, Stephen Stills, and two from Neil Young.

John Prine, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Steve Goodman, Fairport Convention, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, The Strawbs, Steeleye Span. Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie all released albums that year. So did Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Burning Spear, Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffett, Hot Tuna, Little Feat, and Guy Clark. Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Charlie Daniels, Waylon Jennings, Stanley Brothers, Statler Brothers, Roy Clark, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner, Kris Kristofferson, and Chris LeDoux released new albums and Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger entered the world. All things considered, not a bad year at all.

Now if any of you out there remember Sir Monti Rock III, congratulations. You’ve managed to maintain your brain cells much better than I. Sitting at the bottom of the Top 100 was his band, Disco Tex and The Sex-O-Lettes. I share this video for educational purposes only, and please be advised of momentary nudity with Saturday Night Fever flashbacks.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Roots Music Journal.

Memories of 1975…Tom Russell, Norman Blake and Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen 75

The horses are in the barn, the chickens in the coop, the cat is laying on my toes and the glow of the fireplace makes this room seem like an old time moving picture as the shadow of the flames dance across the walls and ceilings. While the talking heads spent the last several days whipping up everyone into a frenzy with their warnings of the impending blizzard, here in the Hudson Valley we awoke this morning to find maybe a foot of snow dusting the meadows…merely a freckle on the face of a red headed girl. Oh it’s indeed cold and windy as promised, which makes me feel not too guilty as I do some inside chores while listening to both old and new music, and taking the time to let my thoughts and memories spill out across this electric screen.

The year was 1975, and I was a twenty three year old purveyor of recorded music in the form of singles, albums and eight tracks. In my light blue VW Super Beetle I traversed the turnpikes and back roads throughout Eastern Pennsylvania, going from town to town with a thick binder of catalogs that offered for sale roughly thirty-five per cent of all recorded music. It was a time when independent distributors ruled the airwaves and sales charts, unknowingly just four years away from the shift to a corporate controlled American art form.

Allentown, Scranton, Williamsport, Lock Haven, Lancaster, Reading. These were coal and steel towns standing on the edge of the cliff, still surviving on their last gasp of breath. Tom Russell from California wrote a song about those days, and I often find myself listening to it at times like these.

In the little town of Bethlehem along the banks of Monocacy Creek in the Lehigh Valley, there was a record store called Renaissance Music and a fellow who ran it named John helped me get a handle on the Flying Fish and Rounder titles I was selling. Even forty years ago both of these labels offered a large repertoire of traditional American music and it was John who helped guide me through a world of great bluegrass and string bands, Delta blues musicians, the hammered dulcimer players and Welsh folk music. Being a guitar player transitioning from electric to acoustic music, John thought I might like this new fellow who had just released one or two albums by the name of Norman Blake.

If you’re reading this you probably don’t need me to tell you about Norman, nor his spouse and musical partner Nancy. If you’d like some education, just enter his name into “The Google” and you can spend a day or two reading his credits and sampling his work. I remember seeing these two perform at an outdoor venue in Ambler, and sitting on the lawn at his feet just staring at his left hand. With fingers that flew effortlessly across the fretboard, and vocals that took me back to some nineteenth century porch in Georgia, I thought he was the most amazing guitarist I’d ever seen.

In 2006 when he and Nancy released Back Home to Sulphur Springs a publicist whispered in my ear an ominous message that “this will be the last record they’ll ever make”. Hardly. At least five more have come out since then, and most recently Devon over at Hearth Music sent me Norman’s latest recording of all self-written songs. His first of such in thirty years.The voice has grown tired and at times a bit shaky, but the guitar playing is simply as traditionally-innovative as always. Guess I could drop in a sample here if I was trying to sell it to you, but frankly I’m partial to this older clip with Nancy.

Since it seems as if today I’m stuck in this time bubble of forty years ago, let us take a moment to talk about Bruce. There was a disc jockey back in Philadelphia by the name of Ed Sciaky who worked at a number of local radio stations, but is mostly known from his time (twice actually) at WMMR-FM. Along with promoting the hell out of Billy Joel’s Cold Spring Harbor album, his real legacy is the role he played in exposing Springsteen to an audience beyond just Freehold and Asbury.

A man schooled in mathematics and self taught in musicology, his shows were like doctoral thesis on the origin of the songs and artists we listened to back then. I can still hear his deep voice that he kept soft as it worked its way through the speakers of my car radio late at night. The sadness came when diabetes caused his right foot to be amputated in 2002. Two years later while in Manhattan with his wife, he collapsed while on the sidewalk outside Penn Station and died at age fifty-five from a massive heart attack.

He and Bruce come to mind because the other day I found myself in possession of a digitized soundboard recording (we used to call these bootlegs) from Philly’s Tower Theater on December 31, 1975. It was the last of a multi-night run, and although for decades the tapes have been reproduced, sold and traded among fans, a different mix from Sciaky’s collection is now in circulation. I like the name of this album…Last Tango in Philly…and you can find more than one version from start to finish on You Tube.

While during this time frame Bruce was in the midst of his Born to Run tour, the track list includes a few oddities, including the oft-bootlegged “Mountain of Love” and “Does The Bus Stop At 82nd Street”. Seeing that it’s the official beginning of our New York winter, here’s a 1978 version of one of my favorite tracks, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out”. Until we meet again…