![]() |
Via Google |
Whole country's doing a fix
It's doomsday doomsday
Riding around, riding high
Riding around with my babe
Speeding on down the skyway
![]() |
Suicide, 1979. Photo: Adrian Boot |
![]() |
Via Google |
Whole country's doing a fix
It's doomsday doomsday
Riding around, riding high
Riding around with my babe
Speeding on down the skyway
![]() |
Suicide, 1979. Photo: Adrian Boot |
![]() |
Romero |
If this isn’t what you want, baby
Don’t come knocking, knocking, knocking, knocking
If you’re halfway out the door
Oh no, I won’t be calling no more
I had a standing joke in the 80s, unfunny to most, that the only bands that could drive me out of a bar were the Cure and the Smiths, two groups I couldn't stand and yet whose rabid fans—among them some of my best friends—I'd eye enviously as they lost themselves on the dance floor. Less smug and narrow-minded now than I was at twenty-one, twenty-two, I have clearer purchase on what I was instinctively rebelling against then. It wasn't that I couldn't relate to what I heard as the moodiness, affected doom, and sighing melancholy in these and other like bands; the problem was that I related too much. I had the voices of Robert Smith and Morrissey running in my head all day long; the words weren't theirs, but the edgy, disconsolate tone was theirs, a tormenting, claustrophobic ennui that I fought against in my worst moments. I didn't want to hear that on the dance floor, have my inner thoughts amplified; I wanted to get away from that, leave my head and body, exchange my depressiveness, self-doubt, and hyper self-consciousness for the grins and good times of rock and roll. Beers and barre chords! Riffs and hooks! (I ended up writing a 420-page book about one of those bands I loved.) Echo and the Bunnymen's "Bring on the Dancing Horses" might've sounded great at Cagney's or Back Alley Cafe, but it was the Godfathers who raised the roof for me, and in whom I found an urgent sense of purpose. There was a reason why I was teased at 'MUC as the guy who played The Knack (including tracks off of their third album) and The Slickee Boys more often than say, Siouxsie and the Banshees or New Order. Even when I did spin songs that soundtracked my inner dejection, they were usually sung by R.E.M. Rain Parade, or Pop Art—never too far from jangle.
I sought out manifestations of my complicated moods instead in books and art, Joyce and Eliot and Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell, and on long walks in the then-decrepit Old Downtown in Washington, D.C.. My morose reflection was cast back at me most graphically in my art history, literature, and philosophy courses, where in the quiet of reading, or in the endless stacks at the campus library, I could stoke my melancholy and self-pity across the centuries. Though I've never warmed to the metronomic "Blue Monday," my distaste for the song in my twenties blocked a rightful appreciation I ought to have felt then for Joy Division, another band who I resisted at the threshold, fearful of how swiftly they might invade. Of course, back then I hadn't really listened to the Cure or the Smiths, to Bauhaus or Coctueau Twins or for matter much of what I'd overheard or read was Gothic—childishly, I wouldn't let myself. We forgive a lot for youth and yet it turns out, of course, that the Smiths were a great guitar band all along! Johnny Marr's trippy vibe in support of Morrissey's emotionally nakedness was sadly beyond my ken when I was twenty, putting me at odds not only with my friends but with pop culture, and history. If I'd only looked through my beers more closely at the dance floor I'd have seen guys and girls rejoicing and identifying, in their authentic way—in a foreign language, sure, one I was too petulant or cowardly to try and learn. But the release on their sweaty faces and in the limbs transcended language, as great music does. These regrets are minor relative to others that haunt me from those years, yet I wished I'd opened up some neural pathways earlier than I did. I'm catching up.
File all of this under A Pity I Didn't See It At The Time, a bulging, still-growing folder.
Top: Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground), Francis Bacon, 1969. (2014 Estate of Francis Bacon/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/DACS, London)
This is what some folks had to say:
[Bonomo] looks at the ways music influenced and underscored events throughout his life. The best essays here extend that gaze beyond his own life and into those of other artists and their audiences . . . [a] great collection.―Publishers Weekly
The writings he collects for this mix tape of memories are deep cuts . . . That is the appeal of this genre-spanning collection, along with the mix tapes: no special musical expertise is necessary for appreciating Bonomo’s point of view or the richly described nostalgia. Just drop the needle, hit play, scroll, or turn the page and enjoy. ―Booklist
The collection’s 18 essays do what the best music writing is supposed to do—they make the reader care, regardless of whether they enjoy, or are familiar with, the material being written about; I was mostly willing to follow Bonomo anywhere he wanted to go.—Los Angeles Review of Books
~~
What is music? More importantly, what isn't music? In Field Recordings from the Inside, Joe Bonomo looks at family and faith, country and culture, Mississippi and Memphis, life and death, with sharp eyes (and ears) and a strong heart, shining a light on the past to help arm the present to make sense of the future. If you want beautiful writing in the service of powerful emotions, you want this book.―Ben Greenman, author of Mo Meta Blues and The Slippage
It’s so easy for critics to spend all their time worrying over how pop music gets made – the granular technical details, what a song or record means in its various historical or social contexts. Joe Bonomo understands those things, but still returns to what’s arguably the most crucial component of art: how it makes us feel and what it does to our lives. Field Recordings from the Inside is a beautiful, revelatory book about what it means to be a human with headphones on. ―Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records
Part memoir, part criticism, Field Recordings from the Inside maps the ways music can define and shape our lives―which, in Joe Bonomo's case, encompasses local bands and Top 40 one-hit wonders, Hank Williams and Frank Sinatra, everything that gets inside if your ears are open enough.―Alan Light, author of The Holy or the Broken and former Editor-Chief of Spin Magazine
Field Recordings from the Inside is the first book I’ve encountered that expertly blends my two favorite kinds of writing: music criticism and the literary essay. Joe Bonomo combines sound, the self, and the “roll and prank” of an essayistic mind to create a book that skates between discussions of history, records, coming of age, literature, relationships, and great rock-and-rollers. This book is a thoughtful and sonorous pleasure from start to finish. ―Elena Passarello, author of Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses
After a short while, I headed home to join Patti and pick up our children from school. As I drove over the gravel of the beach club parking lot, I hesitated before pulling into traffic on Ocean Boulevard. Just then a car careening off Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge shot past, its window down, and its driver, recognizing me, shouted, “Bruce, we need you.” I sort of knew what he meant, but...
When Springsteen pulled out of that parking lot, made contact with a random fan, and heard that he is needed—that is a different story entirely. That morning, Springsteen had been at home, again as millions of us were, eating cereal and watching the news. Then he felt compelled to drive closer to the horrors. For Springsteen, leaving the cocoon of his secluded, 400-acre farm in Colts Neck, New Jersey and driving the ten or so miles to a public beach is not an idle drive of a suburbanite—it was the journey (I wince, but there's no other word, really) of a public artist with the burden of a vocation. "In the late afternoon, I drove to the Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge," he wrote in Born to Run. "There, usually, on a clear day the Twin Towers struck two tiny vertical lines on the horizon at the bridge’s apex."
Today, torrents of smoke lifted from the end of Manhattan Island, a mere fifteen miles away by boat. I stopped in at my local beach and walked to the water’s edge, looking north; a thin gray line of smoke, dust and ash spread out due east over the water line. It appeared like the smudged edge of a hard blue sheet folding and resting upon the autumn Atlantic.
Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge, looking north toward lower Manhattan, November 2021 (Google Maps) |
Sea Bright Beach, looking north toward lower Manhattan, January 2021. Photo by Vitalli Beliaiev (Google Maps) |
~~
Naturally, Springsteen's response to the unfolding tragedy was to write songs. But his brilliance came in trusting his impulse to write at the edges of post-9/11 suffering, in the inevitable wakes moving from the wreckage of the World Trade Center back into the small towns that produced so many of the victims that day. The politics on The Rising are subdued, polemics nowhere to be seen; instead, Springsteen looks unblinking at the carnage, and then to the side where what smolders does so with a different yet no less destructive heat, and imagines into song the kind of characters he always has, those who live modest, unspectacular lives. When we listen to The Rising in the coming decades I don't believe that it will sound overly of-its-era (minus some production touches, perhaps) precisely because Springsteen recognizes that loss takes many shapes, from the absence next to you in bed and the photographs we grieve on the mantle to the unrecoverable at Ground Zero and a Tower-less blue sky.
Nearly half of the album's songs ("Waitin' On A Sunny Day," "Nothing Man," "Countin' On A Miracle," "Let's Be Friends (Skin To Skin)," "Further On (Up The Road)," "My City Of Ruins," and possibly "Lonesome Day" and "Mary's Place") were written before September 11, and this is revealing, in that Springsteen recognized not the specifics of 9/11 but its outline resonating through songs he'd already written, or begun. That's key to the album, I think, in that Springsteen likely felt liberated from having to compose an entire album's worth of songs in the burdening occasional mode. The songs that he did write after the attacks—"Into The Fire," "Empty Sky," "Worlds Apart," "The Fuse," "You're Missing," "Paradise," and of course "The Rising"—blend seamlessly with the earlier material, to my ears. I’m not sure that the reputation of the title track isn’t greater than the song itself—but then again I wasn’t listening to it in the dread echo of 9/11, when the song might’ve transformed for me.
In Born to Run, possibly in light defensive posture against those who felt that the album was too long, Springsteen justified The Rising's blend of the upbeat and the morose. The inclusion of “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” feels wholly appropriate in retrospect, but others backed into the sequencing. "We recut 'Nothing Man,'" he wrote, "a song I'd had since ’94," adding that "It captured the awkwardness and isolation of survival." "Worlds Apart" and “"Let’s Be Friends" are described as "Beach music!" and "the band tearing down the house," respectively. If "Mary's Place," one of his great late-career uplifting rockers, was indeed written earlier, than Springsteen was shrewd to include it, a "house party" that the album "rises to...party music with the blues hidden inside." He added that he wanted "some of the warmth and familiarity of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, a home place, the comfort music and friendship may bring in a crisis."
Finally we circle back around to “My City of Ruins," the soul gospel of my favorite sixties records, speaking not just of Asbury but hopefully of other places and other lands. That was my record.
"The dead have their own business to do, as do the living," he added (a line so good I'm surprised he didn't save it for a song). In the end, the lower-pitched songs on The Rising resonate the most for me, those moments between seemingly endless grieving and the yearning for transcendence, no matter how brief that redemption might be. “Nothing Man,” “The Fuse,” and the quietly devastating “You’re Missing”—each below—are among the strongest songs Springsteen has written, modest, respectful portraits of men and women navigating the long spaces between communion and desolation, and unity and brokenness. Eternal gestures, those, stretching back in history and forward into the future, released, always, from the lousy specifics of our own daily, though crucial, lives.
~~
"Our band was built well, over many years, for difficult times." From Born to Run.
When people wanted a dialogue, a conversation about events, internal and external, we developed a language that suited those moments. We were there. It was a language that I hoped would entertain, inspire, comfort and reveal. The professionalism, the showmanship, the hours of hard work are all very important, but I always believed that it was this dialogue, this language, that was at the heart of our resiliency with our audience. The Rising was a renewal of that conversation and the ideas that forged our band.
Sometimes it’s just a stone-cold, drop-dead-in-your-tracks pronouncement that a new phase has dawned:
Doncha ever feel like goin’ insane
When the drums begin to pound
Ain't there ever been a time in your life
You couldn't believe what the band is puttin' down
I knew nothing about the band; I didn't have the hallucinatory cover sleeve (detail above) to check out, though I saw those colors anyway when I listened. I wasn't aware that the band was from Ohio, which would've pleased me, as I cherished my family's annual summer visits to Coldwater, in far western Ohio, to visit my grandparents. I didn't know that the band recorded the song reluctantly, feeling obliged to their label, nor that the song was a Brill Building special concocted to order by the band's manager, Paul Leka, and his songwriting partner Shelley Pinz. I didn't know that the song was a gentle exploitation of psych rather than an authentically deep response to a changing world. (Though down the line, maybe it was both?) I wasn't aware of the adult bittersweetness of a "one-hit wonder." "Bubblegum" was what I chewed tirelessly while flipping baseball cards, riding my bike, or walking in the woods.
What I did know was that the song was irresistible beyond language, that the trippy play-yay-yay-yay in the chorus did pleasingly strange things in my head and tiny chest, that the serpentine guitar sounded, and felt, exotic before I knew that word (or for that matter, the word serpentine) but that the descending part before the verses sounded scary, that the changes in the two bars before the chorus, which I would've ID'd excitedly as "that part, there!", moved me inexplicably, and that the tune was fun to sing and goof on with my brothers and sister. The single vanished from my parents' house at some point, as records do. I grabbed the single for a dollar last week (that's it below). An early childhood contact high, both the deep and the ethereal vibrations of which are still sounding deep in me.
Such were the circumstances that led the lovers I’d envisioned in “Born to Run,” so determined to head out and away, to turn their car around and head back to town. That’s where the deal was going down, amongst the brethren. I began to ask myself some new questions. I felt accountable to the people I’d grown up alongside of and I needed to address that feeling.
As I page through my thirty-year-old “Darkness” notebook, I see a young man filled with ambition, a local culture/B-movie-fueled florid imagination, and thrilled to be a rock ’n’ roll songwriter. The nights of listening to Lieber and Stoller, Goffin and King, Barry and Greenwich, Mann and Weil, the geniuses of early rock ’n’ roll songwriting had seeped deep into my bones. Their craft inspired me to a respect and love for my profession that’s been the cornerstone of the writing work I’ve done for the E Street Band and my entire work life.
Bobby said he’d pull out, Bobby stayed in
Janey had a baby, wasn’t any sin
They were set to marry on a summer day
Bobby got scared and he ran away
Jane moved in with her ma out on Shawnee Lake
She sighed, "Ma sometimes my whole life feels like one big mistake"
She settled in in a back room, time passed on
Later that winter a son came along
Spare parts and broken hearts
Keep the world turnin’ around
I changed every “I” to “we,” so as to share the blame that was entirely my own, and then changed “I” to “he” to further cover my tracks.
Knowing that Costello's first marriage crumbled in acrimony only a couple years before he wrote this song, I wonder at how knife-edge of all of this must've felt for him. He's singing in the third person, but the persona he conjures and mercilessly mocks is so vivid and absurdly melancholy that you feel you're in his skin. Who's mocking whom? Form and content, that eternal marriage. The whole thing just drones.For all the appearances that these songs were a diary or a confession, I’d say that real life was much more harrowing and happens in slower motion than its dramatized form in song.
The day ended as it began
He was seconds older than the man he was this morning
And the world has wiped its mouth since then
Or maybe it was yawning
The Kingsmen’s song wasn’t explicitly dirty, but playground and high school hallway rumors would have none of that, and desire took over, told its story, all manner of lascivious imagery and blue phrases filling the heads of kids all over the place. (A side note: The Kingsmen’s insane “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” released in 1964, has always sounded a lot filthier to me than “Louie Louie.” Recorded “dirty” with tons of distortion at what sounds like a single-bulb basement-party, the excitable percussion and rumbling floor-toms are impossibly sexy and nearly take the song down. Shake it, shake it, Lupe. I don’t know how the thing was released sounding as unbuttoned as it does.) Iggy Pop squeezed the mystery out of “Louie Louie,” making what was kinda-sorta heard (and certainly desired) into explicit, poor man’s porn, and that aggressive, bullying move was punk as hell, if unsubtle. Iggy and The Stooges Did It Themselves. What both versions of “Louie Louie” can’t extinguish is the mystery in the music, the eternally renewing three-chord majesty, the perpetual motion machine those chords create, the primal hip shake of it all. “Louie Louie” will never end.
The mixes and album completed, Peter, Keith, and Faulkner turned to a harebrained idea that they’d batted around in New York: Hoodoo Gurus backing Peter and Keith for a one-off show. Dubbed the Gherkin Milkshakes (a slyly explicit reference to male ejaculate) they played a smashing set of Fleshtones songs at the Hopetoun Hotel in Sydney, a crowded venue packed with Gurus fans digging the two New Yawk frontmen doing their thing. Observed a local journalist wryly, “That night will long be remembered for its frenzied scenes, reminiscent of an old Easybeats film clip, or at the very least, a balmy summer’s evening on the Hill at the Cricket Ground.”