Reason to Believe
As Bruce Springsteen Tours the World, Yesterday's Tornados Meets All Tomorrow's Service Fees
This week features an excerpt from my book review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, plus an interview with author Warren Zanes.
Tim Riley interviews Warren Zanes:
Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska
by Warren Zanes (Crown, 2023)
…BACK IN 1978, nobody thought we would get to see Springsteen at 73, storming stages with the thrill of a teenager, singing beyond what many younger vocalists might attempt, while leading audiences through a catalog surplus that traces his music’s curves over 50 years. But why throw all of that history and power behind Ticketmaster when you could use it to lead your audience into a more equitable system? Even worse, critic Brian Hiatt described the elitism he saw at Madison Square Garden that many paid big bucks for, like a Mad magazine parody of HBO’s Succession:
“Just look at the dude captured on camera standing right next to the stage, texting relentlessly without a glance at the band during a tour premiere of ‘Jungleland,’ or the group of middle-aged finance-y bros in a lower side section who engaged in a bellowing conversation about their kids’ SAT scores during Springsteen’s hushed version of ‘Last Man Standing,’ dedicated to his late Castiles bandmate George Theiss.”
When the Cure’s Robert Smith laps you as the workingman’s Quaalude, you’re looking at serious brand damage…
Nebraska gave us the sounds of a reality that Bruce Springsteen described in grim detail in order to escape. Now that he’s back on tour, waving off Ticketmaster obscenities like a fait accompli, you can argue about how much good faith is left in his tank.
also mentioned
More Springsteen links at timrileyauthor.com
Jon Landau in the Real Paper, 1974, archived at Northeastern’s library
Warren Zanes’s author site
Crown Publishing book site
july playlist
The vagaries of taste: Rob Sheffield wrote a revisionist piece on George Harrison’s Living in the Material World recently, so I cued up “Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long,” which he says contains a “gorgeous simplicity.” Hm. Stephen Holden’s original review called it a “gorgeous, rollicking love song.” Double hm.
That album’s single, “Give Me Love” (notable lyric “Keep me free from birth…”) sparred with Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” for jangly summer single status in 1973, rather, both songs circled the same summer tingles. Elsewhere, Greil Marcus answered a question about Swamp Dogg, Sara Evans has a song called “Otis Redding,” Dan Charnas mentioned Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Outside Your Door,” and Megan Maroney wins this summer’s single tingles (so far) with “You’re Not Pretty.” (Still none surpassing Kelly Willis’s “Only You,” from 2018.) And what to make of Luke Combs’s muscular take on Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” (1988)?
tweet of the month
From Spy Magazine’s Kurt Andersen:
"What was it that Roy C*hn got the Rosenbergs electrocuted for?"
noises off
More to come: interviews with Joyce Millman, and Quantum Criminals author Alex Pappademas
fixed Bill Janovitz’s Leon Russell biography audio segment here
more links at the riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites
(@timrileyauthor “A plastic bust of Elvis greeted me when I walked into Robert Gottlieb's @aaknopf office in 1985 to meet the person who'd bought Tell Me Why... cover by Chip Kidd”)…
