sixstr stories

Today is Bruce Springsteen’s birthday.

He was born on September 23, 1949 in Freehold, NJ, the first child and only son of Douglas and Adele Springsteen. At the age of 13, he bought his first guitar at a pawnshop for $18.00. Years later he told author Dave Marsh: “The first day I can remember looking in a mirror and being able to stand what I was seeing was the day I had a guitar in my hand.”

When Bruce released his first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. in 1973, he was hailed as the next “New Dylan.” So, I thought that I’d pattern this post a bit after my post from May 24, 2010, celebrating Bob Dylan’s birthday.

In the vast ocean of all that has been said and written about Bruce Springsteen, including all that he has said about himself, it seems to me that the most important thing is his music: his songs, his records and his performances. But where at this point in the Dylan post, I ask you, the reader, to name your favorite Dylan song, I am instead going to ask you: what is your favorite Bruce Springsteen record? (This can be a recording of a single song or an entire album.)

Why the difference?

To me, Bruce writes great songs, but what he does best is make timeless, amazing records and give incredible live performances of the songs from those records.

In the recording studio, Bruce is famous for laboring over instrumentation, arrangements and the sound of his records. He has spent countless hours over days and weeks and months, getting his recordings to sound the way he hears them in his head. Dylan is famous for going into the studio with a group of musicians, quickly showing them the chord changes and outline of a new song and then launching into it, leaving the session players to catch up, follow along and hopefully, in the immediacy and inspiration of the moment, create something magical. Maybe he’ll try a second or third take, but if nothing seems to be working, he’ll often just move on to another song. So it seems that for Bruce, it’s the records (as well as his live performances) that matter the most.

Now, my answer to my question is: the album The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. To narrow it down even further: on side 2, “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).”

I love this record. Every time, every single time in all the hundreds of times I’ve put the vinyl on the turntable or the cassette tape in the car tape deck or the CD in the CD player, this record makes me sing along at the top of my lungs, dance around the room (or in that car seat) and smile my biggest smiles. It never fails, never lets me down. It always rock and rolls me right down to the core.

“Spread out now, Rosie, doctor come cut loose her Mama’s reins…”

And off it goes. Whew! What a ride it is.

So now it’s your turn: what is your favorite Bruce Springsteen record?

Click on “leave a comment” below and share you answer

P.S.: In my post of May 18, 2010, I ask the question: “How do you calculate the influence of a song in your life?” In it, I write about the influence Bruce Springsteen and his music have had on my life.

Check it out.

Happy 61st Birthday, Bruce Springsteen. Thank you for everything.

In 1937, Georgia Turner was 16 years old, a “thin, pretty, yellow-headed miner’s daughter,” living in Middlesboro, Kentucky. Around her neighborhood, Georgia was known for her singing and, more specifically, for singing a song about a house in New Orleans and the sad, poor girl for whom it had “been the ruin of.”

In September of 1937, Alan Lomax and his wife, Elizabeth, with an advance from the Library of Congress, a supply of big, black, blank acetate discs and a portable disc-cutting recording machine, were traveling through the mountains of Kentucky collecting songs. They believed that those mountains had “protected for generations a rich heritage of Elizabethan song, manner, and speech” that was quickly disappearing and needed to be documented and preserved.

On September 15, 1937, the Lomaxs arrived at the Middlesboro home of Tillman Cadle, a coal miner, union activist and lover of Folk music. Through their acquaintance with his wife, New York University teacher Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, the Lomaxs had contacted Cadle in advance, asking for help in finding local singers who would be willing to share their songs. Georgia Turner was among the group he had gathered at his home that day.

When it was her turn, Georgia offered two songs for the Lomaxs to record. The first, with neighbor and fellow-teenager Ed Hunter joining in on harmonica, was called “Married Life Blues.” The second, Georgia’s favorite song, she sang alone.

It started: “There is a house in New Orleans, they call the Risin’ Sun. It’s been the ruin of many poor girl and me, oh God, for one.”

How Georgia Turner knew this song is anyone’s guess. It seems that neither she or Alan Lomax had heard the Ashley & Foster recording from 1933. (See my post of September 6.)

In his 1960 compilation, The Folk Songs of North America, Alan Lomax describes the song as being “so far as I know, unique.” In the first publication of a transcription of the song (done from the recording by Ruth Crawford Seeger) and found in the 1941 songbook Our Singing Country, Lomax wrote: “The fact that a few of the hot jazzmen who were in the business before the war have a distant singing acquaintance with this song, indicates that it is fairly old as Blues tunes go.”

What is known, is that Lomax liked the song well enough to share it with his friends back in the New York City Folk music community. By the early 1940s, people like Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Pete Seeger had recorded versions of the song, sometimes calling it “The House of the Rising Sun.”

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Greenwich Village Folk musician Dave Van Ronk was performing a re-harmonized, minor key version of the song that caught the ear of the new kid in town, Bob Dylan.

In 1961, Dylan recorded his version of Van Ronk’s version on his first album.  (No, he didn’t ask Dave first.)

In 1964, the British Invasion band, the Animals recorded their version, markedly similar to Dylans, that stands as the most well known recording of the song.

The Georgia Turner recording would not see the commercial light of day until 2003 and Rounder Record’s release of the CD Alan Lomax: Popular Songbook. It is track 21, entitled “The House of the Rising Sun (Rising Sun Blues)” For some reason the first two words, “There is,” are not there, as if Georgia couldn’t wait for Lomax to get the machine going before she started to sing.

Every time I listen to this recording, I understand more and more what Ted Anthony wrote in his fabulous book Chasing The Rising Sun about how he felt after the first time he heard Georgia sing: “I have just listened to The Moment – the nexus where generations of folk expression and oral tradition flowed in and the seeds of modern recorded, produced, marketed music flowed out. From the little cabin on September 15, 1937, we can chart a direct course into and out of the folk revival, to Bob Dylan and the definitive version recorded by the Animals – and everything beyond, across america and across oceans.”

Thank you, Ted Anthony.

Thank you, Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress.

Thank you, Georgia Turner.

As my father would say: “Age before beauty.”

On September 11, 1847, the song “Oh! Susanna,” by Stephen Foster, was given its first public performance. It happened in Pittsburgh, PA, at The Eagle Ice Cream Saloon. The performers were a small troupe of singers under the musical direction of Mr. Nelson Kneass, an actor, singer, pianist and banjo player.

According to Stephen Foster biographer Ken Emerson, from his book Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (1997), that event makes September 11, 1847: “a firm date for the birth of pop music as we still recognize it today.”

That’s the first, here’s the second.

On September 11, 1945, Leo Kottke was born in Athens, GA.

At the age of 11, Leo’s mother bought him a cowboy-stenciled guitar to try to cheer him up as he recovered at home from a long and serious bout of mononucleosis. Somehow, while fooling around with the instrument, he discovered the fingering for the E major chord. Within two weeks he was well enough to get out of bed. He later once explained: “The guitar gave me something to do for the rest of my life.”

Leo recorded his first album, 12-String Blues, in 1968 for a small Minnesotan label and his first album for John Fahey’s slightly larger Takoma Records in 1969. That album, 6 & 12-String Guitar, containing 13 steel-string acoustic guitar instrumentals, launched his career and led to his debut album with Capitol Records in 1971.

Leo Kottke, through dozens of subsequent albums and countless (on going) live performances, has been credited with popularizing solo, steel-string acoustic guitar music and establishing it as serious concert material. Writing in an album review in Acoustic Guitar magazine, Jeffery Pepper Rogers wrote that Leo is: “one of acoustic guitar’s most evocative and enduring voices.”

If you’ve never heard Leo Kottke before, the best place to start, in my opinion, is with his Live CD. Released in 1995 and recorded on an Easter Sunday at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, CO, it captures some of his best guitar pieces and songs in spectacular performances and even features a few of his renowned in-concert stories that make his concerts such hilarious as well as spellbinding events.

Always good for a colorful quote, my favorite from Leo is found in the book Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar (2000). Leo says: “A guitar sounds good even if you drop it on the floor. A beginner can find music in the guitar that has escaped the virtuoso. It’s a magical instrument, constrained by a short range and a peculiar tuning, that produces music beyond the limits of its own nature.”

And last but not least, the third.

On September 4, 1962, the Beatles (21-year-old John Lennon, 20-year-old Paul McCartney, 19-year-old George Harrison and 22-year-old Ringo Starr) entered Abbey Road Studios in London, England, to record the songs for their first record.

Under the direction and guidance of producer George Martin, the Beatles rehearsed and then recorded multiple takes of two songs: “How Do You Do It” by Mitch Murray and “Love Me Do,” a Lennon & McCartney original.

At their next recording session, on September 11, 1962, the Beatles abandoned “How Do you Do It” and recorded two more original songs: “P.S. I Love You” and “Please Please Me.” They also took another stab at “Love Me Do,” but this time with a change.

George Martin had not been happy with Ringo’s drumming on “Love Me Do” at the previous session. So, he brought in 32-year-old Andy White, a well-respected London recording session drummer, to play on the re-recording of the song. The resulting takes produced the version that now stands as the A-side of the Beatles’ first single: “Love Me Do”/”P.S. I Love You” 

But the very first run of 45-rpm records released in the UK on October 5, 1962 had the September 4th version with Ringo on drums. Sometime in 1963, Parlophone Records changed the pressings to contain the September 11 version with Andy White on drums. When Please Please Me, the Beatles’ first album came out in the UK, it also contained (and still does on the CD) the September 11 version.

The September 4th version is on the Past Masters, Vol.1 CD.

So, it could be argued that technically, the Beatles first single was recorded on September 4, 1962. But the recording of “Love Me Do” that most of the world knows and loves was recorded on September 11.

Here’s a question for you: besides who’s playing drums, what’s the difference between the two versions?

Leave a comment with your answer!

Information for the section of this post about “Love Me Do” came from the book The Beatles Recording Sessions (1988) by Mark Lewisohn. If you can find it, buy it. This is a must have for any Beatles fan. Highly recommended.