Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town [1978]
At this point, I've given this record a close listen about 5 times, and I cannot bring myself to find anything all that remarkable in it. I just don't get what people see in the operatic voice Springsteen uses for choruses ("Badlands," "Someting in the Night") or in the juxtaposition of searing guitar solos and glockenspiels ("Candy's Room"). As [my friend]Anthony put it, "Springsteen's always been kind of [lame]," but he's the workingman's lame-o, supposedly, so I guess (as a non-working elitist who happens to like a lot of "working class" music) I'm supposed to see something in it, but what? There are Springsteen records that I like. I recently, in the course of listening to this one, revisited The Wild The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, a party record from 5 years earlier that has a lot more to offer, I feel. I guess what I mean is, I'm not terribly interested in Springsteen's "grown-up" musings or his "grown-up" affectations. This record starts pretty slow. "Adam Raised a Cain" has some fire to it, but it suffers from the same self-importance as a lot of the other songs on the record. The basic premise is, as a working man himself, the narrator's dad never saw the fruits of a hard life of labor ("Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain") and the same restlessness and desolation was passed on to his son, both literally and symbolically through the baptism ritual -- all of this summarized in screaming, bluesy chorus of "Adam raised a Cain!" There are two main problems, though. First of all, Cain is known chiefly for his lake of filial responsibility and brutality towards Abel. Is our narrator (Springsteen) gearing up to murder his brother? Is that the legacy of a long life of alienated capitalist labor? And secondly, what the hell is his dad so upset about? What form does this pain take? Why has his work left him so hollow? Looking at this record in a somewhat literary lens, the songwriting leaves far too much of its content unstated. If I set my imagination to it, I can think of some ways in which working-class people might experience deep, passionate pain (by incurring huge debts, by sinking into the monotony of middle-America, by feeling stifled by the pressures of monogamy, etc), but Springsteen makes the mistake of assuming that you know all about their specifics already. And that's fine for some people, I guess -- they probably hear a song like "Promised Land," which is for sure the apogee of this record -- and really identify with it. But maybe BECAUSE I'm such a phony and not a Jersey guido who fixes up Mustangs and goes to the annual fireman's carnival, I sort of need it spelled out to me. I need a Raymond Carver or a Woody Guthrie who is going to repeat the details of the banality of modern existence in order to hammer it home WHY these are such horrors to the human spirit. In "Promised Land," our narrator sets the stage for his existence: "Working all day in my daddy's garage / Driving all night chasing some mirage / Pretty soon little girl I'm gonna take charge / The dogs on Main Street howl 'cause they understand / If I could take one moment into my hands / Mister I ain't a boy no I'm a man / And I believe in a promised land." Okay, I get that. He's coming of age, he knows what he believes, he wants to take his life into his own hands. But then the climax of the song: "Blow away the dreams that tear you apart / Blow away the dreams that break your heart / Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted..." But wait -- what were the dreams that the world has forced this guy to defer? What is his life in the way of? Who's lying to him? It's a terrifying proposition of a landscape, for sure, and the album does have a real sense of cohesion (from the "Badlands" to the "Promised Land," all seen from the window of a souped-up stock car, hewn by the singer's own hands, using the same skills he learned in the "Factory," practicing "the work, the work, the working life..." Etc.), but it's all so vague. I suspect all the working-class Joes at Springsteen's sold-out arena shows like to pretend they identify with this kind of angst, and it makes them feel good to portray themselves as complex, conflicted men, but I bet they kinda just want to hear "Born in the U.S.A." or "Rosalita" anyway. "Racing in the Street" is my favorite song on this record, because (a) it's the most specific and honest on the record, and because (b) as a carefully-wrought piano ballad, it's pretty pleasing musically, too. I love the detail about the narrator's wife and how she's getting old and the house is always dark when he gets home from racing, and I love his admission that he only races for the money. It's just a lot realer than most of the pained, lonesome cries on here. And no shitty mid-70s saxophone solos, either.
Willie Nelson – Phases and Stages [1974]
A few things about this album. I think it’s good, and I think it represents one of the best eras in commercial country music: when all the instruments were still being recorded live and for the most part unaltered (ten years later it was all guitar pedal effects and overdubbing) , and when the lines between pop country and pop soul weren’t so clear. “Forget I Ever Happened” is a perfect example of the latter. I love everything about that song, from the trilling mandolin in the beginning to the funky backbeat behind it. It’s great for the same reason that Don Williams’ “Tulsa Time” is great—it doesn’t abandon country’s common roots with the blues, in black folk music, with all its stilted rhythms and swing—but it still makes use of, by my count, seven instruments in twangy accord (I heard guitar, mando, lap steel, regular steel, bass, fiddle and drums). There are other triumphant moments on this record. “Phases and Stages (Theme) Walkin’” is a great, sorta mournful type of self-deprecating Opry song, and “Bloody Mary Morning,” a bluegrass-tinged honky-tonk number, is the rare pop country tune with actually impressive lyrics (“As we taxi down the runway / With the smog and haze reminding me / Of how I feel / Just a country boy who’s learning / That the pitfalls of the city are extremely real”). But other songs are just weird. “Sister’s Coming Home / Down at the Corner Beer Joint” has this jarring transition in the middle from a boyish, interesting song about how a young man learns to understand, via his sister, how not to treat women (or perhaps he’s jealous of his wronged sibling? It’s not entirely clear which makes it intriguing), to a sly, from-a-distance song about how his sister is a free spirit, a fun-lover, and maybe a woman of ill repute. But most importantly, this album is a concept album without a coherent concept. What is Willie telling us about the Phases and Stages of life? What is his folksy imagery (“Cryin’ and ironin’…Ironin’ and cryin’…”) meant to convey? That these are times and feelings and periods that we all go through? What’s the unifying thread here? I don’t exactly get it, and by the time “Phases and Stages (Theme) No Love Around” arrives, the whole trope has gotten really grating. Bottom line, I dig the idea of a life cycle concept album coming out of Willie’s mouth, but this is not that, or at least not that done well.
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