Scratched Into Our Souls

Complicated Game: Learning How to Listen Again

I did something yesterday that I hadn't done in almost a year, something that I used to do at least once a week: I bought a compact disc, My Morning Jacket's The Waterfall, to be precise. I'm pretty sure the last CD I bought was Gaslight Anthem's Get Hurt in June of 2014; before that it was The Hold Steady's Teeth Dreams and Bruce Springsteen's High Hopes. (Insert your snarky comments about "dad rock" here.) That's four CDs in the past 15 months or so, though there were a few iTunes album purchases in that stretch. Still, I've bought maybe 10 albums since the beginning of 2014.

From the time I first entered the University of Wisconsin in 1984 until just about a decade ago, Tuesday was my favorite day of the week—new release day! Even during my time as a music journalist, when I'd get plenty of promotional discs for free in themail, there would always be a few I'd need to shell out my own hard-earned cash for.On my lunch break, or sooner if I could get away, I'd make the trek to B-Side Records or The Exclusive Company and pick up as many new discs as my paycheck would allow.

Even after I'd discovered file-sharing services like Napster, Limewire, and Bearshare, I'd still sink plenty of cash into my music collection, which I approached not as a leisure expense but more like a utility. I'd no sooner have bypassed electricity or water than I would the new R.E.M. or Drive-By Truckers album. In fact, given the choice, I'd put off paying the utility bills, which may explain why the electricity got shut off that one time in 2000.

By 2002, Napster was gone, and legal digital music services were popping up. Between iTunes and eMusic—which for a glorious stretch offered unlimited downloads for less than $10 a month—I paid for plenty of downloads (and blank CDs on which to burn them for listening in the car and on the home stereo), in addition to my weekly CD purchases. By 2005 or so, I had run out of room for my CDs, so I got rid of all the jewel boxes and started storing them in plastic sleeves. In 2010, I paid someone to digitize my CD collection, and started listening almost exclusively through the computer, sometimes streaming from it to the components in the living room or kitchen. But I was still buying albums.

That all came to an end when Spotify came to the U.S. in 2011. Not quite the "celestial jukebox" that Napster was, it still offered access to just about everything I had on CD, as well as much more that I'd never purchased. At $10 a month for the premium membership, which allows me to download up to 3,333 songs for offline listening on my iPhone, it'sa steal.

But I can't help but feeling like digitization and streaming services like Spotify have cost me something. With everything available at my fingertips, I find I'm less emotionally invested in music than I've ever been. I don't listen to music all day like I used to, something I attribute to both listener fatigue that comes from compressed digital audio (I'm no audiophile, but everything I've read about ear fatigue and compressed audio rings true, or maybe I'm just looking for a fall guy) and the fact that music (at least with lyrics) distracts me from my work. And spending time on Spotify is only slightly less potentially distracting than spending time on YouTube, where one song makes me think of another, which I sometimes jump to without even finishing the first. I often have to force myself to listen to a complete album from first song to last.

I'm not discounting two very important, non-digital factors: First, I'm almost 50, long past the age when lots of folks simply stop listening to as much music as they once did. But I'd never simply been a casual music listener, and if you'd told me 10 years ago that I wouldn't be listening to much music now, I'd have laughed at you.

Second, I've got two young children, so I've got less time to listen to what I want to, though that's offset by the fact that I listen to a lot of "their music" and find myself appreciating stuff that I previously might have never given a chance. But the money that once would have certainly gone toward CDs is now going towards the latest Pixar release or, you know, food.

Some people claim that streaming services devalue music by making so much of it—just about everything, for all intents and purposes—freely available. I'm not sure I buy that. I don't think that unfettered access automatically makes for reduced appreciation.I've certainly listened to a wider variety of music, both new and old, than before I started using Spotify. And I certainly never felt like radio devalues music, and I will say that there's nothing quite like the thrill of encountering a new song on the radio and feeling, if only for a few minutes, like it might be the best thing you've ever heard; Paramore's "Ain't It Fun" had that effect on me when I first heard it in an airport shuttle in New York.

(Streaming services certainly further devalue the labor of the artists they play, but that's just a matter of degree. The big record labels have always screwed artists; it's just worse now than ever before. But that's a different topic.)

So what's the problem? Age? Kids? The nature of streaming services? Ear fatigue? Am I doing all of these mental gymnastics to avoid blaming the music itself? The last album I bought that grabbed me by the shirt collar and wouldn't let go was Frank Turner's England Keep My Bones, which I listened to incessantly from the moment I popped it into my car's system. As I wrote at the time, "it seemed like forever since a rock album shook me by the shoulders and said 'This is what it's all about'."

Actually, that's not true. Since I wrote the paragraph above (I've been working on this blog post for more than a week), I've spent more time with James McMurtry's Complicated Game,  and in that time I've confirmed my initial reaction to the album: It's the best thing he's ever done, with stories and songs that are rich and nuanced and complex, execeptionally so, even by McMurtry's standards. (My friend Kevin Lynch wrote the definitive review of the album on his "Culture Currents" blog.)

Complicated Game came out in February, and I listened to it a few times before I saw McMurtry perform a wonderful acoustic set at the Continental Club's Gallery in Austin in March, but it wasn't until the last week that I've been able to spend time absorbing the album. And it took repeated listenings for the characters—like the soldier who comes home in "South Dakota" only to find a world that's, in its own way, as desolate and hopeless as the one he left behind—to reveal themselves fully, and for the understated beauty of the songs to insinuate themselves into my consciousness. (For instance, it wasn't until the ninth or tenth listen that the doo-wop chorus at the end of "She Loves Me" bubbled to the surface.)

Maybe it's as simple as that: While some songs (like Complicated Game's "How'm I Gonna Find You Now" or "Copper Canteen") come to you, others demand that you come to them. Perhaps I've been asking too much of the music, without doing the work that sometimes the music asks of me—an investment of time, the effort to meet the music in conversation, and the willingness to set aside distractions and give the music the attention it deserves. The delivery mechanism—CD, streaming, vinyl, radio—doesn't really matter, as long as the receiving mechanism is fully engaged.

(Photo by the author)

Easter 2015: Listening to the Lion

For a decade now, the Easter season makes me think of two things: Mel Gibson and a stranger at my front door.

In 2004, less than two years after I'd converted to Catholicism, Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ came out on Ash Wednesday, to equal parts acclaim and disdain. As beautiful as it is cynically manipulative, as faithful as it is divisive, The Passion of the Christ was one of those rare movies—and there haven't been too many since—that held sway over public discourse for weeks. On one hand, there was the fundamentalist Christian (both Protestant and Catholic) embrace of the film and its focus on Christ's suffering and crucifixion—people started buying miniature spikes and wearing them as necklace charms as a display of their devotion. On the other was the movie's anti-Semitism and archaic take on Catholicism, not to mention Gibson's defensiveness in interviews when asked about the film's portrayal of Jews. (Both Gibson and his father practice so-called "Catholic traditionalism," which rejects Vatican II and looks back fondly on the more reactionary outcomes of the Council of Trent.)

A friend and I saw the movie the day it came out, to try to get a sense of what all the fuss was about. At the time, I was still feeling the pull of my newfound Catholic faith, as well, and was hoping the movie might have the same effect on me as Jesus Christ Superstar and The Last Temptation of Christ had many years before. I admit that parts of The Passion of the Christ moved me, too, but in the end, it felt like the movie encouraged more divisiveness than connection, and I believe that was part of Gibson's intent.

Coincidentally or not, a few weeks after the movie's release, I witnessed the first and only anti-gay demonstration I've ever seen in Beaver Dam, the small Wisconsin town (population roughly 16,000) where I live. Driving home from work on a sun-drenched spring day, I saw a handful of young adults with signs bearing anti-gay slogans at one of our main intersections. It was awful stuff—not quite Westboro Baptist-level vulgarity, but vile enough that my blood boiled as I thought of young gay and lesbian teens walking home from school only to face signs telling them that they were less than fully human, that they were sinners in the eyes of the Christian god. (It's worth noting, of course, that there's nothing inherently homophobic about Christianity, contrary to what fundamentalists argue.)

As soon as I got home, I scoured the house for posterboard and a Sharpie, determined to go downtown and stage a one-man counterprotest. Coming up short on supplies (and, to be honest courage), I opted instead to write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper expressing solidarity with LGBT citizens of Beaver Dam and outrage at the bigotry I'd seen on the corner of Spring and Main. A few nights after it was published, I was home with my teenage son when there was a knock on the door. My son answered and called for me; on the front porch was a middle-aged woman I'd never met before, in the driveway a car running with, presumably, her husband sitting inside. She told me she'd read my letter, and that she was praying for me. She handed me a gift card to the local movie theater and implored me to see The Passion of the Christ.

I was too taken aback to say much of anything, but I accepted the card, said "thanks," and shut the door. I could sense that she wasn't looking for a discussion anyway. I called my wife and told her about the exchange; she was just thankful that the person at the door had been peaceful and reminded me that we live in a small town, she works in a public field, and our address and phone number were listed. When I'd written a letter to the same newspaper a year earlier to express my disgust and despair over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I'd gotten a few phone calls (two supporting, one not), but it never occurred to me that someone might read a letter to the editor and go to the writer's house.

In the years since, I've given my visitor the benefit of the doubt. She felt so passionately about her beliefs that she felt compelled to try to change the mind and heart of someone whom she saw as sinful, I told myself. She was acting out of a spirit of love and faith, I reasoned. At least she didn't write something hateful on my front door.

But I think I've been too kind in my assessment of her motives. What made her assume I wasn't Christian? What made her so sure I hadn't seen The Passion of the Christ? What gave her the right to decide that I needed saving? The charitable assessment is that she just wanted me to "find god," whatever that means. The flip side, of course, is that she believed I hadn't found god, and that I was hellbound because I'd dared assert that gays and lesbians are people. I forgive her, but what she did wasn't that much different from what those people did with their signs on the street corner.

Like a lot of people, I wrestle with issues of faith and spirituality on almost a daily basis. I've learned from Christ and from Buddha, from the Bible and the Koran. I meditate, and I still go to Catholic mass sometimes. I've read the "new atheists," and find Hitchens and Dawkins, despite their rhetorical flair, to be as narrow-minded in their ways as religious fundamentalists are in theirs. I'm not about to disparage or dismiss the faithful in any religion—unless they're using their religion to disparage and dismiss others, like those protesters on the corner or the woman at my front door. 

Ultimately, Christianity is like many other religions: Part fact, mostly fiction—the result of human beings' attempts to grapple with the great unknown and the spiritual power that resides not out there but within us all. Crucifixion, resurrection, and saviors are all metaphors for the struggles and miracles that manifest within our hearts and in the connections we have with others. God? God resides in each of us, and in the world we inhabit, all that we can see and cannot see. I still find much of Christian mythology, ceremony, and iconography incredibly powerful and moving, but I see and feel the spirit as much in so-called secular literature, art, and music as I do in any psalm or prayer.

In a collection of essays called How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon quotes a letter his aunt wrote to her brother, Kiese's uncle: "You taught me that love without acceptance and understanding isn't love." She was writing about love on an interpersonal level, but the same applies to love on the communal and spiritual level.

Movies like The Passion of the Christ have at their foundation the belief that there is only one path to salvation, and they condemn those who don't follow it. I believe there are many paths, that salvation comes from within ourselves and from each other, and that in loving ourselves and each other is how and where we find God. The metaphors of religion and myth are powerful and useful, maybe even necessary.

For me, though, there's no single answer, just a never-ending quest that leads me down many roads. This Easter, I'm finding my way (as I have every Easter since I've been a child) with the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar, because it tells a human story about God. But I'm also listening to the lion.

Lost Tracks: Alice Cooper's DaDa

There's little point in arguing for the greatness of the singer Alice Cooper (Vincent Furnier) after he left the band Alice Cooper in 1975, and my friend Bill Glahn does a terrific job of explaining why the band is so important over on his It's a Highway Song blog. But outside of those early albums and a few post-band singles, Alice Cooper the singer released one record that's remained in my heavy rotation since I first heard it in the mid-1980s: DaDa.

A loose concept album that explores typical Cooper themes—insanity, alienation, depression—with an equally typical Cooper mix of humor and horror, the Bob Ezrin-produced 1982 DaDa combines straight-ahead guitar rock with the synths and new wave sounds Cooper had been trafficking in since the late 1970s. Opening with the eerie title track, in which you hear snippets of a therapy session in which the album's narrator is clearly out of touch with reality, the rest of the album takes you through all the things that led to what is, presumably, his institutionalization—a hateful father ("Enough's Enough), a hidden-away brother ("Former Lee Warmer," a delicious, sinister pun on a dead body grown cold), loveless sex ("Scarlet and Sheba"), and American consumerism ("I Love America," featuring a meta-take on Alice Cooper the character as a used-car salesman), and a suicide attempt (the devastating "Pass the Gun Around").

Along the way, there's a stop in "No Man's Land" as a shopping mall Santa that features some of the funniest lyrics Cooper ever wrote:

I got a job in Atlanta
In a mall playing Santa
Not because of any talent
But because I was the only one the suit would fit

Oh, and there's a song about a vampire, too. Or maybe it's a werewolf. Possibly just a cannibalistic serial killer ("Fresh Blood").

In other words, if you were going to come up with a parody of an Alice Cooper album, you just might come up with DaDa.

Thing is, it works, for the same reason great horror stories always work: Because they conflate reality and fantasy, because they make us confront the monsters inside ourselves. And on DaDa, Cooper presents an entirely believable character; as unhinged and fantastic as some of his tales are, there's no escaping the fact that he believes every one of them happened.

Musically, it certainly helps that Cooper and Ezrin are joined by guitarist Dick Wagner, who played on Lou Reed's classic Rock 'n' Roll Animal as well as some of Cooper's own classic work, both with the Alice Cooper Band and as a solo act. Wagner's guitar work gives the album a heft it might have otherwise lacked, and he's listed as co-writer on most of the album's songs. The result is an album that marks the high point of Cooper's post-band work, before returned to the eyeliner and guillotine and opted for the cheap scare instead of real horror. 

 

Lost Tracks: The Cicadas, "We Want Everything"

"Lost Tracks" is my attempt to re-boot this blog by reckoning with songs (mostly old ones but I'm not ruling out the new) that slipped through the cracks of popular culture and attempting to listen to and understand pop hits and classics with fresh ears and a personal perspective. 

"We Want Everything" opens with a tense, arpeggiated guitar line that creeps around like a stranger in your bedroom, before the drums kick in and the arpeggios turn into a muted, pulsating heartbeat. The song starts at the end—the end of a friend's life by his own hand—and builds in tension as the singer tries to make some sense of the suicide.

I don't know why you done this thing
To me it makes no sense
But sometimes our dreams just won't let us live
And we die in self defense

The singer professes not to understand, but in almost the same breath admits that he knows exactly what happened, that the weight of his friend's dreams and despair—two sides of the same coin, really—simply became too much for him to bear. He acknowledges as much in the song's beautiful chorus, singing "we want everything / Some of us try for it / We want everything / Some of us die for it."

The second verse begins with a combination of scorn and understanding, with the singer asking if his departed friend is in a better place: "Do the angels have respect for you? / Does lady luck treat you fair?," knowing damned well what the answers are. The bitterness grows in the song's bridge, with singer Rodney Crowell—who, after two decades in the music biz and his own struggles with addiction, had surely seen his fair share of people lose their way—spitting out phrases like "Where do we go from here, man, no one really knows, but we deserve better than this from you." But then he and the band come crashing back into the chorus, sonically exemplifying just how quickly we can turn from optimism to abject despair and back again, revealing understanding—if not acceptance—inside the anger and the sadness.

"We Want Everything" ends by returning to that arpeggiated guitar line, this time accompanied by the full band, including a slashing, sympathetic electric guitar and haunting, wordless falsetto vocals. For a full two minutes the familiar stranger creeps around your bedroom again before stealing away into the darkness. 

For almost twenty years, the song has been a lifeline in my own times of despair. I've never been truly suicidal, but like anybody with a pulse and a conscience, I've had plenty of dark nights of the soul. And what hits me hardest about "We Want Everything" is its insistence on empathy, even for someone by whom we might feel deeply betrayed. 

"There but for the grace of God...," as the cliche goes. I'm not talking only about mental illness, chemical imbalance, and addiction, and I don't think Crowell is, either. I'm talking about making your way through a world that's all too often harsh and unforgiving, and how easy it is to understimate the battles everyone around is is fighting even as we're fighting our own (and even—maybe especially—when we feel like we're winning). We live in a society that's constantly telling us we're not good enough, that we need to be more and do more and have more, that too often rewards the wrong kinds of success instead of rewarding the victories of the heart and spirit. In the end, "We Want Everything" is a song about what happens when we succumb to those forces rather than following our own hearts.

 

The Cicadas performing "We Want Everything" on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1997.

The Backstory

After almost twenty years of mainstream country success as both a performer and a songwriter, Rodney Crowell took a detour in 1997 with The Cicadas, a group in which he was joined by his longtime guitarist Steuart Smith, bassist Michael Rhodes, and drummer/singer Vince Santoro. Sitting in a sweet spot at the intersection of rock, pop, and country, the group's sole, self-titled album set the stage for the great records Crowell would go on to put out since, most notably his crowning achievement, 2001's semi-autobiographical (and damned near perfect) The Houston Kid.  

The Cicadas (available for purchase on Amazon and streaming on Spotify) isn't nearly so monumental; aside from "When Losers Rule the World,"  "Our Little Town"—both of which are exemplars of Crowell's ability to imbue straight, simple tunes with an emotional heft that belies their breeziness—and a killer cover of "Tobacco Road," most of it failed to live up the the standards Crowell had set for himself over the prior two decades. But "We Want Everything" stands out as a stone classic.

For more on Rodney Crowell's career, particularly as it intersects with Emmylou Harris, check out Kevin Lynch's post on his Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak) blog. 

Merle Haggard's America

Merle Haggard: The Running Kind by David Cantwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an absolutely riveting critical discussion of one of the greatest American singers and songwriters. David Cantwell brings his encyclopedic knowledge and deep love of country music to bear on Merle Haggard's entire career, with just enough biographical details and sociopolitical analysis to provide context. He explores all of the complexities and contradictions of Haggard's populist vision and romantic heart, but what really stands out is his unparalleled ability to write about how the music sounds in a way that crackles and bursts off the pages. Whether you're a Haggard fanatic or a neophyte—or somewhere in between—this is consistently compelling, and often quite funny (though usually darkly so, just like Hag himself). What's more, the prose is as light on its feet as it is substantive. One hell of an accomplishment from one of the best music writers working today.

View all my reviews

Woody: A Darned Good Dog

In June of 1998, my wife Kris came home from a weeklong road trip with a friend of hers. I swear to god, her first words when she got out of the van were "We're getting a dog."

Kris had wanted to get a dog for a while, but I wasn't so keen. I knew dogs, especially puppies, took a tremendous amount of energy and effort to care for, and I didn't want to be tied down. Kids you can take just about anywhere; not everyone or every place is so welcoming to dogs. So we discussed and debated and researched, ultimately deciding that golden retriever was the breed for us. We picked out a breeder, and I bought supplies, but by the time I was convinced I wanted—no, needed—a dog, Kris was having second thoughts. So, with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation, we decided to take the plunge. We went to the breeder, picked out a puppy from the litter of eight-week-old goldens, and brought Woody home. I was on a Woody Guthrie kick at the time, and the name seemed to fit his personality.

When we got him home, we decided that he'd sleep in the basement. We could just set up a baby gate in the doorway of the root cellar, which had a window and stayed nice and cool. The morning after his first night with us, I marveled at how quiet he'd been. Then I opened the door to the basement steps, only to see him on the landing, staring up at me, ready to go out. Clearly, Woody (like his namesake) would do things his way. When we took him in the backyard on a leash to "do his business," he jumped and chomped at the leather; when we tried to take him for walks, he sat his butt down on the driveway and wouldn't budge, no matter how hard we cajoled and pulled. We'd pull on the leash until his collar came right over his head, and he'd remain planted firmly on his butt. Thank goodness we lived across the street from a park where, as long as nobody was playing softball, he could run. For the next two years, we didn't take him for walks. He took us to play. We got another dog in 2000, a beagle named Dilly (and she was a dilly), and only then would he go for a walk, when he had both of his people and his "sister" with him.

Woody was a classic golden retriever—loving, playful, loyal, gentle with kids. But it's his little quirks that I think about the most. His nose was brown only for the first few months of his life, after which it turned pink. He loved eating napkins and paper towels, whether or not they contained any morsels of food. His favorite food, though, was bread: I can't count the number of times we'd come into the kitchen and find him with his front paws on the countertop, eating the rolls we had set out for dinner.

For more than a decade, Woody came almost everywhere with us, except the few that wouldn't allow dogs. I've worked at home for much of time Woody's been with us, and I couldn't even open the back door without Woody prancing on up, waiting to go with me on even the shortest journey. He's been at my feet as I've worked at home for the last seven years, save for 10 months when we lived in a place that didn't allow pets. Luckily, my sister and her family took him in until we ended up in our current house, which was a perfect place for him to spend his last months. Big yard, birds to chase, rabbit turds to eat—all the things a golden retriever loves, except water, but by the time we moved here, his swimming days were behind him.

By the time he turned 14 in 2012, he'd slowed down considerably, though he still insisted on coming outside with us whenever we opened the back door and still loved going on car rides, even if by now I had to lift him up into the van. He especially loved playing in the snow, but this last winter, I'd have to help him out of or over the snowdrifts he'd dive into. When we took him to his last annual vet appointment, the vet gave us "the talk;" when I took him in again recently for a bladder infection, the vet told us he looked happy and as healthy as you could expect from a 15-year-old dog, but that he had "weeks to months" left. We figured he wouldn't see winter again.

Of course, we focused on the "months" he might have left, and forgot just how quickly dogs, like people, can decline once they reach a certain age. When I left on a business trip on June 14, he was his slow but happy self; five days later, Kris told me that she thought it was time. When I got home on June 21, Woody could barely lift himself up, and needed help getting up or down even a single small step. So we've spent the last week petting and talking to him, bringing him water and food even though he's only eaten once in the last seven days. Seeing him like that has been hard, but helping him through his last days—carrying him outside, bringing him water when he's panting but just can't muster the strength to get up—was the least we ould do for him after all he'd done for us. I'll never forget this time, but I'll try to remember all the times I saw him swim and jump and roll around on the grass and do all of the the other things that made him happy.

The vet came to the house yesterday, and we stroked Woody's head as he passed. It was only then I realized how tough life had become for him, and I cried out of relief rather than sadness. We put Woody to rest in a nice shady spot under the trees in the backyard. He was the very definition of a good dog, and I'll miss his silent presence in our house for a long, long time.

Just before bed last night, our 4-year-old son said "I want to say goodnight to Woody first." We reminded him that Woody wasn't here anymore. He reminded us that yes, he was, and so we grabbed our flashlight, walked to the tree line, and said goodnight to Woody.

 

Lost (and Found) in Springsteen

For the second time in four years, a business trip to London just happened to coincide with a Bruce Springsteen appearance there. My friends and family accuse me of some sort of conspiratorial connivance, but I assure you it's nothing of the sort. As Bob Dylan sang, "I can't help it if I'm lucky."

And lucky I was in 2009, when Springsteen played Hard Rock Calling, in a terrific show that was recorded for posterity on the London Calling DVD. But if I was lucky four years ago, I was positively blessed Saturday night, when I got to see what was one of the best two or three out of the two dozen or so Springsteen shows I've seen since 1984.

For a while there on Saturday, I wasn't even sure I'd make it. I arrived in London at 11 a.m., having only slept a fitull two hours on the plane. And as I waited in the hotel lobby at 2 p.m. to check into my room and watched the rain pour down outside, I momentarily considered a quiet night of room service and bed. A friend's Zevon-quoting text erased any doubt about what I'd be doing, though. I'll sleep when I'm dead, indeed.

Approximately one-tenth of the queue to get into one of three general admission gates, roughly 90 minutes before showtime

The queues for tickets to the pit (called the "golden circle" in this instance) were legendary; I thank my lucky stars (and a good friend) that I didn't have to wait in the rain for the wristband granting me access to the front-of-stage area. But even though I didn't have to get my pit access wristband until late in the afternoon, I still had to wait in the longest line I've ever been in just to get in the stadium.

Me and my new friends at Wembley.

No complaints, though; I had to fly 3500 miles just to see a show on this tour (what's up with skipping Milwaukee for the first time since 1975?). And once I got in, I got a great spot in front of the left-hand (stage right) video monitor, and struck up a conversation with a lovely bunch of fans from south of London. We shared the usual pre-show banter—what's the one song you've never heard him play ("Lost in the Flood" for me); if he plays a whole album, which one do you want to hear (Darkness on the Edge of Town was the consesus request, though everyone figured Born in the U.S.A. was more likely, given the iconic 1985 Wembley show on that tour). 

All that aside, though, I couldn't help but worry we'd get a "pretty-damned-good-but-not-great" Springsteen show, the kind that's typical of the first concert after more than a week off, the first concert in a country on the current leg of the tour. And while the evening's first song suggested I might be right; the second one made apparent that we were in for an evening that would be not just good, not even just great, but something rare and special.

The first song was "Land of Hope and Dreams," a tune that anchored the end of Springsteen's shows in the 1999-2000 reunion tour and frequently showed up late in the set ever since. It's one of Springsteen's great songs, and it's only gotten better with age, particularly with the edgier, harder-rocking treatment it got when it finally appeared in "studio" form on the 2012 Wrecking Ball album. 

The second song was "Jackson Cage," and it hinted that tonight would be something more than just a great stadium rock show. While "Land of Hope and Dreams" is about exactly what the title says, "Jackson Cage" is about circumstances as hopeless as a prison cell you share with your lover, but are divided from her by a six-inch-thick glass wall. Whereas "Land of Hope and Dreams" is about the promise of freedom, transcendance, and community, "Jackson Cage" is all about confinement, hopelessness, and isolation.

But...

The last line of the last verse of "Jackson Cage" offers the tiniest bit of light in the darkness, imploring that no matter how trapped you are, you—and nobody else—might be the "hand that turns the key." 

So there you have the two extremes of Bruce Springsteen's music: the brightest light and the blackest darkness, the strongest hope and the deepest despair, the biggest spaces and the tightest cages. None of which, of course, are extricable from their apparent opposites. And when he followed up "Jackson Cage" with "Radio Nowhere"—a song that takes the prison of "Jackson Cage" and recasts it in the atomized, media-saturated virtual prison of way more than 57 channels with not a goddamned thing on—it seemed as if Springsteen and the (relatively) newly expanded E Street Band would spend the evening in hard-rocking, inward-looking mode.

But...

Audience requests have filled the backend of Bruce and band's main set for almost half a decade now, but tonight he was going for the crowd's signs before we could even catch our collective breath. The first request was a shocker: the gentle, comforting "Save My Love" was an unexpected tonic after the bitter "Radio Nowhere," but the next song proved that all bets were off for the night. After taking a sign for "Hungry Heart" and rejecting it ("This is too easy!"), Bruce and the band tore into "Rosalita," a song he plays rarely, and even more rarely before the encore. You had the feeling that he might just take requests all night, and you couldn't complain, especially when he followed "Rosalita" with the Born in the U.S.A.-era "This Hard Land." 

But...

He took another request, the story of a guy, a Vietnam vet, the kind of guy who might have been the brother in "This Hard Land" if he'd managed to live that long. It was "Lost in the Flood," the one song I've wanted to hear him play (but hadn't) more than any other, more than even "Incident on 57th St." And the renditon was both majestic and harrowing. While I have to admit that my favorite single moment from the entire three-hour-plus show might have been seeing Bruce smile, just a bit, after the line "nuns run bald through Vatican halls pregnant, pleadin' immaculate conception," it was the performance in toto that blew me away. In hindsight, you realize just how much of the next 40 years of Springsteen themes were introduced in that song; in the moment, though, you're just amazed that he delivers it with such unwavering insistence this many years after he wrote it, not to mention that he does it with a blazing, tormented guitar solo, just gunnin' that bitch. It might not have been as good a performance, or even as good a solo, as the version on Live in New York City, but that hardly mattered. It was the one song I wanted to hear more than any other, and it wrecked me in the best possible way.

Making it talk (top) and closing "Lost in the Flood"

And then..

And then, just when you thought he might play requests all night, he offered the crowd of 71,000 a choice. "We can either keep taking requests," he said, "or we can play the entire Darkness on the Edge of Town album for you." The audience unsurprisingly chose the latter, and if "Lost in the Flood" was on my bucket list, then Darkness was the whole damned bucket. Springsteen himself said that "this album forms the core of what we do every night," and if "Lost in the Flood" laid out many of the themes he'd explore for the rest of his career, Darkness crystallized them. If there's another rock album that both plumbs the depths of despair and reaches for the heights of freedom with such clarity, precision, and honesty, I've never heard it, and Saturday's performance was a reaffirmation of the album's place in the rock canon. And while the core of the E Street Band handled most of the album, several of the songs—particularly "Adam Raised a Cain"—benefitted from the horn section and backing vocals, bringing a gospel vision to the album's blues center. As a friend of mine pointed out after the show, you can see how Springsteen's vision has grown since he's read Craig Werner's A Change is Gonna Come; it was overt back on the reunion tour, but now it's more organic and interwoven in the fabric of everything Bruce does onstage. Whereas Darkness was once a blues album through and through (in spirit if not composition), it became both blues and gospel at Wembley.

Each song's performance was noteworthy, from Bruce's wails on "Something in the Night" (my wife Kris's favorite Springsteen song, which I point out for no other reason than it's one of a million reasons I love her, and if that ain't relevant to this, I don't know what is) to Max Weinberg's thundering drums on "Candy's Room" to Nils Lofgren's guitar solo on "Prove it All Night" to Roy Bittan's piano (alternately gentle and pounding) on "Racing in the Street," which received a performance at least as good as the legendary version from Milwaukee in 2008. 

Closing the performance of Darkness on the Edge of Town

All of which more than made up for the fact that Springsteen played only three songs from Wrecking Ball, and one of those wasn't even that good; "Death to My Hometown" was plodding and draggy, lacking the snap that the album version offers. But "Wrecking Ball" and "Shackled and Drawn" were majestic, bringing together the best of Darkness' hard-rock edge and The Seeger Sessions' swinging spirit.

As for the rest of the show, this review from The Telegraph does a fine job of capturing both the details and the essence. It's amazing to think that a performance as rousing as "Hungry Heart" or "Dancing in the Dark" is simply de rigeur for Springsteen; for any other peformer, they'd be showstoppers. That he closed the main set with a kick-ass "Light of Day" and opened the encore with a Mardi Gras-worthy "Pay Me My Money Down" was just a bonus; I could have gone home after the last piano chords in "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and felt no less fulfilled.

 

Cloud Visions

The other night (Tuesday, May 15, I believe) storms moved through the area in three directions around us, but managed to miss us entirely. The skyshow, though, was spectacular—an amazing mix of rolling, dark clouds (kind of like the storm in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), a beautiful sunset, and rays of light shining up from horizon to sky -- in the east, directly across from the sunset. I'm sure there are meteorological words for these kinds of clouds and those rays of light, but I'd just forget 'em even if I learned 'em. I'll settle for being in awe of their beauty.

Plum Tree Blossoms

The plum tree outside my office window has been blossoming for the last week, enough that its flowers clogged a downspout last Thursday night. Can't eat the fruit off of it, but it sure is pretty.

Dandelion, Dandelion

Last week, our neighbor's lawn was covered in dandelions. My seven-year-old daughter caught a glimps as we drove past and shouted "Wow! Look at all the flowers! How come we don't have any flowers on our grass?" I started explaining that those "flowers" were actually "weeds," and we really didn't want them on our lawn, but couldn't bring myself to even finish the sentence. Leave it to a seven-year-old to make you question the place of human beings in the ecosystem, deciding which plants (and birds and other animals) are "good ones" and which ones we had the right to exterminate just because they inconvenience us.

Like my friend Marques Bovre sang:

Well I tried to be normal, I mowed my lawn,
‘Til considering the dandelion.
How it pushed right on from dusk to dawn.
How it paid my plans no mind.
How the dandelion paid no mind,
To the poison Green Machine.
It couldn’t be confined inside my lines,
Painting yellow on my green.

Dandelion, dandelion, color of the sunshine.
Any friend of dandelionís is a friend of mine.
Dandelion, dandelion, makes a mighty fine wine.
And you do to me and mine, what you do to dandelion.

Sure, I put some weed and feed on the lawn last week. But I have to admit I was more than a little happy to see some dandelions popping up the other day.