Give me your music, your art, your huddled masses of words and rhythms yearning to breathe free.
August 25, 2015: I took a road trip with “Born to Run” yesterday. It’s the 40th anniversary of Bruce’s groundbreaking album, and there’s no better way to experience it than by blasting it in your car, with the windows open and the wind blowing back your hair. Cars and tunnels and backstreets and highways are … Read more
Some of my fondest memories are of the times spent carpooling to work with my dad in the early 80s, gauging his reaction to the hits of the day and the humor of the morning DJs. “Those dirty bastards,” he’d chortle at the double-entendres of the radio hosts. Here’s a little ditty about Daddy for his birthday.
“What did you do in the war, Daddy?” That’s a question most kids eventually get around to asking when they learn their fathers served in the armed forces. Almost all of my childhood friends had dads who served in either World War II or the Korean War. In those days it wasn’t uncommon for veterans … Read more
At a show at New York’s legendary Apollo Theater a few months back, Bruce Springsteen joked that he was the “hardest working ‘white’ man in show business.” Bruce made this remark in homage to one of his idols, the late James Brown, the soul-funk sensation long known as the “hardest working man” in the business. James, the Apollo apostle, often performed up to 330 one-night shows per year, in extravagant bop-till-you-drop style. Growing up in extreme poverty may have driven James Brown to work till exhaustion, but what inspired a middle-class white boy from Long Branch, New Jersey, to rock his heart out onstage for four hours, night after night, from beach bars to coliseums? “His love of his fans” is one easy answer. But it goes much deeper than that, as I was reminded after reading a fascinating profile of Bruce in the July 2012 issue of “The New Yorker” magazine.
Snow came down like course sea salt on a big ugly Tupperware bowl of pale popcorn. It was January 1977, the coldest month in Pittsburgh history. I was a pint-size high school senior living in a small town 40 miles east of the steel city, serving my time and awaiting the day in late May when I would “commence.” I was, in the words of Paul Simon’s “My Little Town,” savin’ my money, dreamin’ of glory, twitchin’ like a finger on a trigger of a gun. I look back on the stay-at-home snow days of that brutal January – sheltered, sans-siblings, in the bedroom of our four-room apartment – as one of the most beautifully sad, soul-expanding periods of my life. With no actual school work, I was free to feed my psyche with all kinds creative matter. I was free to ponder the meaning of life — to dissect the mysterious beast of High School Land.