Holy Shit! It hit me.
He thinks I live in a democracy!
And that means—my mind was racing now—that he doesn’t know the difference between a congressman and a musician, a Democrat and a Republican. To him, I’m an… American.
Whoa. Radical.
I was the least political guy I knew. I couldn’t have cared less. I made it through the entire ’60s without one single political thought in my head.
But the German kid sent me down a path, and I kept going. If America is putting missiles in Germany, through NATO or whatever, and America is a democracy, then I am putting missiles in his country!
A shiver went through my soul.
If I’m putting missiles in Germany, what else am “I” doing? I suddenly had a hunger to do something I had never done through twelve years of schooling. I felt the need to read a book!
When we got home, I went into my local bookstore, Coliseum Books, off Columbus Circle, and bought every book I could find on our foreign policy since World War II. Just my luck, the first one was by Noam Chomsky.
Game over, baby.
The second book was Bitter Fruit, by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, about the CIA’s overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s government in Guatemala in 1954. Now the game was even more over. I felt like a member of the Nazi Party in 1939.
But there it was, America’s ongoing nefarious and immoral activity, right in our own hemisphere.
There was a connection between big business, local slave labor, and military dictatorship? Paid for by American tax dollars? We weren’t supporting democracy around the world? We were the bad guys?!?
Fuck me, I thought. No way. This is not what the Founders had in mind.
I proceeded to single-handedly keep Coliseum in business for the next ten years or so.
I started feeling the need to do more than just read.
I had to try and expose this hypocrisy. I had to at least let people know that Rock and Roll wasn’t in on these decisions!
But how? I wasn’t sure.
All I knew was that hearing foreign audiences singing every word of our songs was absolutely thrilling. The power of Rock to communicate was nothing short of revelatory.
Maybe the ’60s did leave a legacy we could pick up on after all.
Checkpoint Charlie, the kid with the missiles, the ability of Rock music to carry messages—it was beginning to add up to something.
fifteen
Hemingway Appropriately
(1980–1982)
The way to do is to be.
—LAO TZU
“Come over,” Bruce said. “I’ve been doing some demos for the new album.”
Demos? This was new. We had always worked out the songs at rehearsal.
It was him and Mike Batlin, his first guitar roadie, acting as Engineer, with a four-track cassette tape machine!
The whole setup was bizarre.
He then proceeded to play me the wildest bunch of songs I’d ever heard.
They were stark and acoustic and reminded me of the first time I heard Son House or Charley Patton or Robert Johnson or Harry Smith’s Folk recordings. I was completely transported to another time, another place.
Thunder Road. Not the song—the movie. I was suddenly with Robert Mitchum, barreling down the backwater dirt mountain roads of Tennessee and West Virginia, avoiding police roadblocks, or in Pretty Boy Floyd’s Depression-era Ohio.
It was thrilling. The songs were so authentic that I didn’t think about my friend sitting in front of me. But of course he was in them. They were all him, but a new him. Or maybe an old him that was emerging for the first time.
The difference was not just the writing but the acting. Every singer is an actor, whether they know it or not, and suddenly he had become a very good one. He wasn’t narrating anymore. He embodied these songs and made them totally believable.
After listening, I was not my usual effusive and opinionated self. I was quiet.
This worried him.
“What?” he said.
I had to choose my words wisely. It felt like an important moment.
“Well, I only know one thing,” I said. “And I know it with all my bones. This is an album. And not only that, it’s a great album. I’ve never heard anything quite like it. It sounds like field recordings.”
I named names. Harry Smith, Don Law, Alan Lomax.
He laughed. “What do you mean? These are the demos for…”
“Yeah, I get it,” I said. “You thought these were demos. That’s what makes this the most personal, intimate record you or anybody else will ever do. This has got to be released.”
He was genuinely surprised. “Well, wow,” he finally said. I could tell he knew he was going to have to listen to the songs much more intensely, in an entirely different context. No longer just as an exercise to entertain his friends, but as a potentially finished piece of work.
Everybody else in the band and organization thought I’d lost my mind. Judging from the last two albums, they figured a hundred more songs would follow before a record started to take shape.
We even attempted to cut at least a few of those “demos” with the band.
At the same time, Bruce started bringing in more songs. Or maybe Paul Schrader sent Bruce the script for a potential movie called Born in the USA, asking him to write the title song. In using the band to demo it, Bruce realized he had something special.
Those other songs, the ones that weren’t the so-called demos, continued on in the spirit of the “live” sound we’d finally achieved on The River. It worked so well that we took it to an extreme. We did the album live. If a vocal didn’t work, the whole band would play the whole song again. Crazy? Yes. Pointless? Not exactly. The more unrehearsed it was, the more primal it would be.
I worked on fourteen, fifteen, maybe sixteen songs over two weeks. No overdubs. For the mandolin solo on “Glory Days,” I picked it up and played it into my vocal mic!
The more the band work came together, the more the so-called demos were taken seriously as a separate album. At least by Bruce—which meant everybody would be on board soon. So we had both the beginnings of our electric follow-up to The River and an acoustic album by the Appalachian moonshining Folk singer John Hammond thought he’d signed in the first place.
Hammond had retired from Columbia in 1975, so Bruce and Jon had to break the news to Walter Yetnikoff and Bruce Lundvall, the label heads at the time.
They played it smart. They said, We’ve got good news and bad news, and they put on a few of the full-band tracks to get them excited, maybe “Born in the USA” and “Glory Days.”
I imagine the two executives lit up like Christmas trees, cash registers ringing in their heads.
I can hear Lundvall’s mellifluous voice still echoing. “This is wonderful.”
“Exactly the right record at the right time. Congratulations!” Yetnikoff (probably) barked.
Jon had to explain that the Rock record was only coming after the label put out this other record.
And then played them Nebraska.
I wish I could have seen their faces.
The heads of the biggest record company in the world, jobs always on the line, listening as their most important artist, accompanied by acoustic guitar on a lo-fi cassette recording, convincingly portrayed a serial killer on the frozen tundra of Oklahoma yodeling like a demon drunk on poisoned whiskey!
Ha-ha!
Take that, Beancounters of the Universe!
Anyway, Bruce and Jon pulled it off, and I’m proud that I encouraged the truly solo Folk part of Bruce, which I was probably the first to witness, back in his room in Freehold, to become a semiregular part of his work output—even if it was once again against my self-interest.
It’s among the most uncompromising and uncommercial records any major Artist has ever released. It would keep his dignity forever protected and would ensure his credibility would remain forever bulletproof.
I had met Gary US Bonds on th
e oldies circuit back in ’73. Though we never had a real conversation, I liked him a lot. Funny as hell.
Still, when Bruce decided to produce him just after The River, I didn’t get it. Of all the phenomenal ’50s and ’60s cats, he had chosen the guy who sounded like he made party records in his garage?
At first, I was just playing as a member of his band. We did “This Little Girl” and “Dedication,” and Jon shopped the single around. Everybody passed. That’s when Bruce asked me to get involved.
I fixed a few things in the recording, but mostly I brought back Bob Clearmountain to mix it. Bob really got the song popping on that old analog equipment. Every riff from every instrument was perfectly clear. The handclaps were like gunshots, and that was probably ten of us at the most clapping. It would take forty guys with today’s digital shit and still not sound as good.
I ended up taking the completed Bonds record to Gary Gersh, who had just joined Jim Mazza at a brand-new company called EMI America. Gary signed Gary and said he wanted more than a single. He wanted a full album. But Bruce was busy doing something, maybe mastering Nebraska, which took months. (I’m guessing an hour of work and two months of conversation!) So Bruce gave me the responsibility of doing the album. He’d drop in now and then to see how it was going.
Turns out, Bonds was one of the great Soul singers. There was no way to know it from his party records, but somehow Bruce knew.
Now that we had one of the great singers, I figured, Let’s put him together with songs by the greatest songwriters.
There’s an art to covering songs. The Beatles and the Stones both did covers through their first five albums. That alone should tell young bands how significant that stage of development is.
The Beatles mostly kept the original arrangements but still made the songs their own. How? They were the fucking Beatles, that’s how.
The Stones occasionally sped things up, like on their Muddy Waters covers, but otherwise relied on their own strong identity.
The rest of us have to work a little harder. There are five ways an artist can make a cover song their own: change gender, genre, tempo, arrangement, and style.
You don’t need all five. You only need one. But let’s have a little fun. What are the greatest covers ever?
Joe Cocker’s cover of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” comes immediately to mind.
Same gender, pretty much same genre, but Joe (or Producer Denny Cordell) slowed it down, changed the arrangement with the organ intro, added Jimmy Page’s guitar licks, girl singers, and a couple of classic B. J. Wilson drum fills Ringo would have been proud of. Then Joe sang the shit out of it, sounding like Ray Charles, while Ringo sounded like who we wanted him to sound like… Ringo.
Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” may be the greatest cover of all time. Same gender, different genre. Acoustic Singer-Songwriter Country/Rock changed to powerful electric Rock, slowed slightly, different emphasis on the chords, a few classic guitar solos in the arrangement, and a much more Soul Roots vocal style.
The most dramatic cover of all time would seem to be Trent Reznor’s “Hurt,” as performed by Johnny Cash. Surprisingly, it’s not that different! The original catches Reznor in a rather mellow mood—meaning intensely suicidal, but quieter than usual. Rick Rubin took out the dissonance, changed the instrumentation slightly, lost the noise at the end, and let Cash’s immediately identifiable vocal style redefine the context.
So what’s the ultimate example of a cover, the one that satisfies all five criteria?
“You Keep Me Hangin’ On” by Vanilla Fudge.
It checks all the boxes:
Gender: From the Supremes to male Long Island hoods.
Genre: From Soul to Psychedelic Heavy Rock.
Tempo: Slower. A lot slower!
Arrangement: From Funk Brothers precision to B-3 Rock organ, distorted Rock guitar, Rock drums, Rock every-damn-thing!
Style: From foxy-but-tough woman wanting romantic closure to a desperate, tortured man experiencing a Shakespearean tragedy inside a Roger Corman horror movie.
For Gary, I picked songs by Lennon and McCartney (“It’s Only Love”), Dylan (“From a Buick 6”), and Jackson Browne (“The Pretender”). I had a Stones song also (“Connection”) but ran out of time.
I didn’t change the arrangements much, knowing Gary’s super soulful voice would turn the songs into his own.
Bruce found “Jole Blon” on a Moon Mullican record, a radical genre shift that Gary pulled off effortlessly, and gave him “Rendezvous,” one of our countless outtakes.
He also suggested I contribute a song, and since we didn’t have anything particularly personal, I wrote “Daddy’s Come Home” for Gary in an attempt to capture the lifelong struggle of the traveling journeyman with a family at home.
Unbelievably, “This Little Girl” went Top Ten. Some things just hit with the public. We followed up immediately with a second record, On the Line, bringing in legendary Soul vocalists Ben E. King and Chuck Jackson.
I loved working with the ’60s Artists so much that I told Bruce we should start a label and do nothing but that—and buy the Power Station to do it. We could have done it with Sony money, given them distribution. Game over! He was tempted, I could tell. But he couldn’t stand the thought of being in a business of any kind. It’s a shame. Can you imagine what great records we could have made? Not just with King and Jackson, but with Wilson Pickett, David Ruffin, Little Richard, and who knows who else?
There was no hit on the second album, in spite of containing all new, great Springsteen compositions and being one of my favorite productions.
Nobody heard it.
Ms. Destiny must have been lurking quietly during that first Bonds record, because Gary Gersh approached me to do a solo album.
I had never considered it.
“Let me think about it,” I said, and went home to see if I could write some songs that felt like solo material. Nobody needed another sideman singing love songs. I thought about the kid in Germany and all the reading I’d been doing. Would that point me in the right direction?
I’ve always loved the idea of concept albums. There’s something about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts that appeals to me. Bang for the artistic buck. It’s part of my love of big Art. The bigger it is, the more significant the audience’s experience, right? The songs might be great on their own—or the choreography or the lighting or the sets or the costumes—but they’re all so much better if they are serving a story or a theme. Give the audience something to think about. Something to take home with them. That’s why I was disappointed with Love, Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show. Why not make it a story? It’s a great one. Begin with the London bombings and post–World War II depression in black-and-white and then blow it away with brilliant colorful fun led by Sgt. Pepper himself! Enhance it, symbolize it, fictionalize it, whatever, but tell an emotionally engaging story, or the show is nothing more than a momentary distraction.
There weren’t that many true concept albums.
Frank Sinatra had invented the form with In the Wee Small Hours, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely, and others.
But it came to the Rock world with “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” a nine-minute montage of fragments strung together on the Who’s second album at the suggestion of their Producer-Manager Kit Lambert, whose father was a classical composer. It grabbed me right away.
Pete Townshend would take things a step further, loosely connecting the songs with interstitial commercials on The Who Sell Out and then go all the way with Tommy.
Along the way the Kinks had Village Green Preservation Society and then Arthur, the Pretty Things had SF Sorrow, the Small Faces had Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake. Some bands did it loosely, like the Stones with Their Satanic Majesties Request or Pink Floyd with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (they’d do another loose one, Dark Side of the Moon, before tightening things up with The Wall).
A
ll were interesting in their own way, but it was the concept that was abandoned after two songs that changed the world forever: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
It didn’t matter that the Beatles were beginning to disintegrate or that there were mounting drug problems or that they were working strictly by instinct, by circumstance, or by accident—Sgt. Pepper’s was the most important concept album of all time. Not the best or fully realized. That honor would forever go to Tommy. But the most important.
The sounds were fresh and unique, in complete contrast to the lyrics, which were nostalgic and sad, mostly about dysfunctional losers disappointed by life, and printed on the album sleeve for the first time. Why wasn’t Columbia doing that on every Bob Dylan album, one has every right to ask?
It felt like the most extraordinary record made by the most extraordinary band, and it was the last time the world of culture was totally united by Popular music.
Don’t believe all the revisionist bullshit you read now. Yes, Revolver had more innovations and was better song for song, but Sgt. Pepper changed the way our entire culture looked at Rock music.
I was there and I can tell you. You could walk down any street in the Western Freakin’ World that first week of June 1967, and you would hear it playing.
For me, the walk was from MacDougal to St. Mark’s in Greenwich Village, where I heard the record coming out of every head shop, clothing store, restaurant, and car that went by.
It elevated an entire generation’s artistic consciousness and changed the world of Popular music from a singles-oriented, Wild West, fly-by-night hustle to a semilegitimate album-dependent business overnight.
We won’t see that again anytime soon.
If I was going to have a solo career, I decided all my records would be concept records. I outlined five general themes that would help me investigate the world, put to use some of the books I had been reading, explore the relationships of power and control, and answer some important questions. Who has the power? Why? What does it mean? How much of the government is endorsed by the governed? Is Rousseau’s social contract being honored? Who or what controls our destinies? What is humanity’s common ground? How much of a chance do we really have to change things?
Unrequited Infatuations Page 15