Field of Steve

Saturday Bruce Springsteen brought the band to Seattle and thanks to the availability of one final VIP ticket I got to go. I made a request to go as a media person and got seats next to a group of eight who got their tickets through his manager, John Landau.

I can’t say I was as amped as I’ve been in years past leading up to the concert. About three notes into the first song, “Trapped,” though I was into it for good. I wrote about it in for my paper in a political context, which didn’t impress a couple of folks who were sorry to log into my story.

I need to get this out of the way because I know it’s on Brant’s mind and frankly it’s on mine right now. As soon as I say the name, though, you pretty much have to know how my review is going to come out, because I’m absolutely incapable of being even-handed, impartial or objective about the topic.

Bruce Springsteen has a new disc out.

My review? You seriously need to ask?

Like most of my experiences with Springsteen records, I liked it fine at first, but after a few listens I’m just pretty much hooked. I’m at a stage right now in which I believe this is just about one of his best works ever. Also, as is true with some of Bruce’s other albums, it’s taking me a while to get some of the stories. That’s always worth it, because while Bruce is regarded as a rocker, for me his strength has always been the storytelling accompanied by an appropriate soundtrack.

I may have more on this in the future.

Thanks to a post on Jim Thomsen’s blog, I was inspired to create a list of cities (which you can see by clicking the “continued” button below) I stayed in because of a job I had for two years not long after college.

American Business Seminars sold books and tapes for hundreds of dollars, mostly to people who were desperate to find their way out of their 9-to-5 lives. The company would send about 20,000 “free” tickets in the mail and if 200 or more showed up it was considered pretty successful in terms of attendance.

Each presentation would last an hour to 90 minutes. The major portion was used to describe how the program; such as making money on real estate notes, bonds or 900 numbers, worked. Then the hook would come. If you ordered these things on the phone, it would cost $495. But because they were there at the seminar, they could get it for $295. Oh wait, how about I give you $100 toward the program. That meant coming to the back table where the speaker would hand us each $100 to go toward any person’s purchase of the program.

It was schlocky as heck. I wanted to believe it was legitimate and probably should have quit long before I did.

It’s a period in my life that is the definition of a mixed blessing. I loved the travel, but wished I’d had another way to make that happen. I was no salesman. I hated being around the sales environment and genuinely felt bad for some of the people who bought from us. A couple of people I felt so bad for that I dissuaded them from buying some of our stuff. One woman told me she had so much to spend and asked for a recommendation. What I recommended required her to return something else. Another woman would cry as she bought every book and tape we had. At the end of the seminar I tried to talk her out of some of the programs she had, but she was resolute that day. I’m sure she spent more than $2,000 that day, most of it borrowed from other people. It wasn’t one of my prouder moments and was one that haunted me for years afterward.

(more…)

Bob Woodward was willing to keep William Mark Felt (Watergate’s Deep Throat) a secret for 30 years until Felt’s descendants decided it might be nice to cash in. On Wednesday Woodward revealed he had interviewed President Gerald Ford about four years ago, keeping his conversation secret until Ford died. As a result, I have decided to offer an interview to Woodward, the details of which are not to be revealed until my death. Among the questions Woodward is welcome to ask are:

Itchy or Scratchy?
Boxers, briefs, or something else?
Who ate my brother’s mint cookies?
Who did I vote for in 2000? Bush? Gore? Nader? Buchanan?
What was my connection to Jodie Foster?
Styx or Journey?
Who really shot JFK? (You never know, I might have some information no one else knows about.)
When I finally hiked to the Y in Provo, how did I “mark” the occasion?
Where have these hands been?
Who was Bob?
Do I want fries with that and do I want to Supersize?
In junior high school where did I often spend my lunch money instead of lunch? (Actually, that will probably get answered in the book I’m writing.)
Was Jane all that?
How many of my sweatshirts ended up in the closets of former girlfriends and how much did that cost me?
Speaking of former girlfriends, how many of mine ended up becoming lesbians?
When I went to my second Springsteen concert in North Carolina, during what song did I decide it was OK to leave to go to the bathroom?

You know how to reach me, Mr. Woodward.

Been on a house-preparing kick and getting into the new beat, so I haven’t had the energy or commitment to post here. But today I thought I’d check some e-mail and I put on the headphones, listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Land of Hopes and Dreams, which in 2000 joined Thunder Road as one of my favorite Bruce songs ever. I did a Google search for the song and found this review of the live album from 2001. He doesn’t like the album all that much. What’s odd is that when Bruce released his first live album people criticized that one, saying he should have just recorded a whole concert. In 2001 Bruce does that and this critic says:

If they were going to suck the life out of a Springsteen show, why not just give a collection of performances from the 1999-2000 tours, ala the wonderful 1975-1985 box-set, making no claims at representing one show?

I understand he’s saying the 2001 album misses Bruce’s banter with the audience, but c’mon. He does give credit for Land of Hopes and Dreams and writes well of Springsteen’s ability and the fact that he’s still relevant. The critic, Nicholas Taylor, writes:

What can I say about Bruce Springsteen? I grapple and grapple with him, constantly attempting to reconcile his mythic place as the voice of some sort of American ideal with his increasingly tepid and tame work in the 1990s. Granted, Lucky Town and Human Touch do not tell the whole story — “Streets of Philadelphia”, “Dead Man Walking”, “Secret Garden”, as well as some tracks from The Ghost of Tom Joad have been gripping and impressive. They display a wiser, older, more reflective Bruce that has grown up along with his fans. Even if he sometimes gets drowned in a wash of synthesizers or lame country folk slide guitars, I cling to these bright spots. In fact, I will always defend Bruce Springsteen because of a sense of honor and dignity that I learned from, well, Bruce Springsteen albums like The Wild, The Innocent, The E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, and Born in the USA. 

The felt-need to defend Bruce has also been excited by the general hostility felt towards my hero. He seems horribly anachronistic and corny. All my friends seem to think that all Springsteen is about is “Hungry Heart” and “Dancing in the Dark”. They don’t realize he a poet, a preacher, a visionary of delicate and gripping beauty. They don’t realize that there is probably no greater rock song in the world than “Thunder Road” (I write that in all honesty and earnestness). This hostility, however, is not limited to my ignorant friends (god bless them!) — critics have adopted him as their straw man as well. In a recent Village Voice review of Bruce’s latest live album, Live in New York City (”Used Cars,” April 4, 2001), Todd Kristel admitted that he did not hear the new album, attend the concerts the record is based on, or even watch the HBO concert special: all this “would only interfere with appreciating his greatness as an American icon.” Kristel has immediately written Bruce off as hackneyed, overblown, and past his time. All of us who continue to praise him are living in the past, in awe of his greatness. Kristel, however, does not have the tact or perception to actually face up to Bruce, to take him on his own terms, to actually listen to the album. The truth is Bruce is an “American icon” and therefore deserves more than this nasty diatribe in Village Voice which is beginning to look more and more like a scandal sheet filled with cheap shots and low blows.

Now I’m hearing the song Don’t Look Back.

There’s nothin’ to lose it’s a heartache
The deck’s stacked
So put your foot to the floor, darling
Tonight we’ll blow off the doors, baby
We’re gonna even the score
And honey we won’t look back.

Keep blowin’ off the doors, man.

Field of Steve