Fudged Tunnel of Love

I respect Bruce Springsteen. When I was a kid, I liked Born in the U.S.A. and the nine-minute long video to “Rosalita” that MTV used to play, and I dig much of his classic material to this day. I have no probem with anybody talking about how classic Born to Run, Nebraska, and The River are.

Unfortunately, listening to an album like Tunnel of Love makes me want to take three shots of Ragged Glory washed down with a gulp of Reign in Blood. Alright, so that’s never a bad thing, to want to listen to those latter two albums repeatedly, but what I’m getting at here is that Tunnel of Love is far too dainty and glossy for a dude who always works to project that “earnest blue collar frumpery” (as Ancient Scientist so aptly put it in another post here). Track by track, here are my complaints:

• “Ain’t Got You” doesn’t work. The arrangement and production are far too vanilla to pull off the intended rootsy effect, and this album is in trouble already.

• “Tougher Than the Rest”, huh? Then stop with this wussy shit and get back to some rock.

• Okay, “All That Heaven Will Allow” is even worse. “I can’t be late I’ve got a date with all that heaven will allow.” What the hell does that even mean? See, I don’t usually listen to lyrics in rock songs. I just assume that they suck, and I’m okay with that, if there are other redeeming qualities. When I like a song, and the lyrics turn out to be pretty good, too, then that makes for something special. But, damn, Boss, there’s nothing to save a track like this in instrumental or melodic terms, so you draw me to the lyrics, and I recoil in horror.

• He’s sure belting it out on “Spare Parts”, and with the full E St. Band, this may have worked, but it sounds ridiculous in this context.

• Okay, finally, the fifth track, “Cautious Man” is a good tune that really works with Bruce’s vocals and the acoustic accompaniment, so far the only tune saving this album from becoming a total suckfest. If we can’t have the E St. Band, then this is what I want out of Bruce Springsteen!

• But Bruce fails to sustain the artistic momentum on the stultifying “Walk Like a Man” (which has me dozing off at my keyboard while I’m trying to write this review!).

• The title track isn’t a bad tune, but the cheesy keyboards are far too prominent in the mix. They make Bruce’s Fender Esquire seem like nothing but a prop in the video, which is a shame, because the man can wail, and a little more guitar in the mix, beyond that ridiculously choked and dated-sounding Alex-Lifeson-esque lead, probably could have helped this one.

• Oh no! Listen to those hideous keyboard chirps at the end of “Two Faces”!

• “Brilliant Disguise” is a decent tune, but that obnoxious percussion track almost sinks it.

• A David Sanborn solo would be right at home on “One Step Up”, so I’m glad for Clarence that he didn’t suffer the indignity of being asked to contribute here.

• “When You’re Alone”. Cute there, Yogi Berra. . .way too fucking cute to work for Bruce!

• “Valentine’s Day” is alright, but it’s too late to salvage the album by this time.

There is no way that this should be on a Top 500 greatest-all-time albums list. Instead, Tunnel of Love belongs on the shitpile with other misfires by rock greats who succumbed to ‘80s production issues on some of their worst albums: Go to Heaven by the Dead; Landing on Water and Life by Neil Young; Dylan’s Shot of Love and Knocked out Loaded; Mistrial by Lou Reed; everything Paul McCartney touched; Starship’s Knee Deep in the Hoopla; the Stones’ Dirty Work. Why Rolling Stone doesn’t let this stinker rot away with the rest of ‘em is beyond me. click here to
read it all...

"Can I listen to it?"

“Good morning, honey” Julianne says with a smile clearly realizing that her husband has been up all night working again. “How is the new album coming along?”

“It’s done.” Bruce softly rubs his eyes while trying to feel around for his cup of coffee. “I finished it about two hours ago.”

“Where was the band?” Julianne is starting to get concerned.

“They’re not on the album. Well, maybe I will have them do some fills and some light work, but this is not an E Street Band album.” Bruce has his back to Julianne as he looks out into the yard of his beautiful new home in Rumson, NJ.

“Can I listen to it?” Julianne asks, “I would love to be the first person to hear it!”

…

That is probably how it went. A simple conversation somewhere in the middle of a multi-million dollar mansion. A beautiful Hollywood actress and her rock and roll icon husband.

Every time I listen to the “Tunnel of Love” album I cannot help but think about what that experience must have been like for Julianne Phillips.

I know that she must have known the marriage was not going well at that point, but how did she react when she heard some of these lyrics: Did she call the divorce attorney immediately after the first listen? Did Bruce try to hide the album from her out of fear about how she would react?

I actually start to feel bad for her when the following verse comes up in “One Step Up”:

“It's the same thing night on night
Who's wrong baby who's right
Another fight and I slam the door on
Another battle in our dirty little war
When I look at myself I don't see
The man I wanted to be
Somewhere along the line I slipped off track
I'm caught movin' one step up and two steps back”

The tour to support the album also had some of its own adventures. Bruce started a love affair with his back-up singer - Patti Scialfa - which eventually led to a marriage and three children. There is an infamous picture of a married Bruce Springsteen on the balcony of an Italian hotel with his back-up singer.

Last month I saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Madison Square Garden. He performed “Tougher Than the Rest” as a lovely duet with his wife Patti. The irony of that selection is palpable. As the first verse of the song begins my thoughts once again drifted to Julianne Phillips.

“Well It's Saturday night
you're all dressed up in blue
I been watching you awhile
maybe you been watching me too
So somebody ran out
left somebody's heart in a mess
Well if you're looking for love
honey I'm tougher than the rest” click here to
read it all...

Distance of Love

(Note that in less than 14 hours! Springsteen's diligent cyber-sleuths found and removed the embedded Tunnel of Love music video from this site. If you wish to watch the video follow this link to youtube.)

I'm not saying that this video scared me...but it scared me. Not just the breakdown at the midway point with the jittery close-ups of the carnival barker, the tattooed man, the sword swallower, the fire eater, and the snake charmer. No, the entire video. The deserted winter seaside town, the ferris wheel, the dark empty tunnel ride, the pitch black lighting, the shadows, the blue hues, and Bruce's clearly pained face (which at 1:21 sneaks in an out-of-character charming, smirking smile).

My childhood experiences told me the Jersey Shore was fun and adventurous. My family had taken summer vacations to Wildwood; those were good times. This video wasn't about good times.

I was 13. Too young to understand completely but old enough to understand a little. Love and women and marriage is a day at the beach. Only it's winter, the beach is full of freakish people, it's cold, and there's really no hope unless you "learn to live with what you can't rise above." Which didn't seem like that great a choice.

I'm cynical about most things but I never wanted to be cynical about love. And even at 13 I decided that Bruce's despondent and hardened tunnel of love wasn't a place I wanted to be. He looked too weary, too sad and, well, who wants to go to the beach in the winter?

So now, 20 years later, I'm trying to get into Tunnel of Love but it feels so removed from anything I know. His suspicious and alienated view of love isn't mine. His macho angst, despite its excessiveness, I can relate to but the storytelling style is, er, another story. The obvious metaphors and multiple (but all personal) narrators strike me as a forced literary conceit. Why does Bruce need to establish distance from emotions that are obviously so personal?

"We've read the tabloids, Boss, we know you're marriage is in trouble." Better yet, we love this album because your marriage is in trouble. Maybe we think, "You're our friend, Bruce. With this album you've let us into your life and your emotions. We're here for you and we understand. In fact, they're the same emotions we feel. You've written our lives in your songs. You understand us."

But what if these weren't Bruce's emotions. What if he was just doing what entertainers do: entertain, become what their audience wants, and sell records? There's my cynicism again. What if his doomed, cynical Tunnel of Love character is no more himself than the array of characters that play out his other albums. Surely, they are not Bruce; why should this album be any different? Could that explain his distance? Could that explain the 1:21 smile? click here to
read it all...

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie, Rolling Stone Magazine's #35

exile staff consensus: Top 200 album

the breakdown:
4.5 cannons - eurowags
3.5 cannons - lenbarker and venerableseed
3.0 cannons - angryyoungman and polchic

the essays:
11/5 - Our last Ziggy Stardust post is an Ancient Scientist banger meditating on the end of the 60's, the end of childhood, and a new awakening. Amazing stuff. Now if only I could find a picture of that Ziggy Stardust poster... (UPDATE: I think I did!)

Note that the winning Halloween Bowie persona was Ziggy Stardust and that a new poll is up involving our next (beginning on Wednesday 11/7) album: Springsteen's Tunnel of Love. The question is simple: Bruce or Bowie?

11/3 - LB wonders why Ziggy Stardust fails to completely blow him away, which leads to a few questions and some terrific answers.

11/1 - How about that. The Angry Young Man snuck in with a post about organization which is soooo fascist Bowie. (the organization part, not the post itself) It lingered down at blog bottom for a day or so but now it's up to its rightful place!

10/26 - next up is eurowags invoking another English star of the gilded stage: Laurence Olivier.

10/25 - up first, me, and Why I Blame Andrew Lloyd Webber



the introduction:
A martian, a miscast Messiah, music mythology. Ziggy Stardust. If you can follow the album's story I suppose it makes perfect sense. But what does it mean, man? Well, what does it mean to you? The album's been adored, venerated in film, and played on jukeboxes in the most unlikely and likely of places. Let's listen again.

Poll Question:
which David Bowie persona would you most like to be for Halloween?
Ziggy Stardust - 25%
Halloween Jack - 8%
Aladdin Sane - 8%
Thin White Duke - 16%
Fascist Bowie - 0%
80's R&B Bowie - 25%
Jareth, the Goblin King - 16%
Tin Machine Bowie - 0%

Poll Question:
Bruce (Springsteen) or Bowie?
Bruce - 33%
Bowie - 66%

click here to
read it all...

Bowie Kills the 60's

Just before my older sister got into DC Hardcore (this was the '80's, when Georgetown was cool), she listened to rock music, but rock music that sounded more dangerous and mature than the stuff on the radio like the Thompson Twins or "Karma Chameleon." This was when I was 10 or 11, on the cusp of adolescence but still basically a kid. In this phase, my sister had the holy triumvirate of the 1970's represented on her wall. (No, RS reader, this is not Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles.) I didn't know who any of them were, but I was fascinated by them because they seemed so cool, exotic, and older sister.

There was a poster of Lou Reed, although I didn't know the name, blurred out (it was the "Rock n' Roll Animal" album cover), and a weird poem about "smack" and "jim-jims" and "politicians making crazy sounds and dead bodies piled up in mounds." I didn't know what any of it meant, but I loved reading it because of the way it sounded (the opportunity to discuss this one will come later in the blog's life). Iggy Pop did not have a poster, but was instead represented by some lyrics my sister had scrawled on the wall in ball-point pen next to the phone where she exchanged dark secrets with her cool older friends.

And the king of them all was Ziggy Stardust, in a huge black-and-white poster, gazing down on the room like an alien space God pharaoh, with that disk of make-up on his forehead, glowering. He seemed so weird, I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl, and I didn't even associate that poster with the David Bowie that my sister always prattled on about. I didn't know who this creature was, but I knew he was better than me, knew everything, had to have seen it all, and certainly was able to be cool in a room full of cool older people, and probably wasn't "such a fucking spazz," like me.

I also remember from this period the song "Starman" playing on my sister's tapedeck. I didn't associate the song with the poster or with David Bowie, but I loved it. It sort of seemed like a children's story, but with an extra dose of sadness that I always liked, like "The Little Prince." It was about an alien who knows all this stuff, but he's afraid to come let us know about it because it will "blow our minds." I wanted him to come anyway - I thought that I understood him, and that I could withstand what others who didn't get him couldn't. The song made me feel like I was an insider, and that there were squares out there keeping the world from cool guys like the Starman. But I could handle it, I knew it.

I did not pursue Bowie, and my sister moved on to DC hardcore, as I said, (but, to her credit, never took down the Ziggy Stardust poster), and then she went to college. I started listening to music like Led Zeppelin, the Who, Beatles, Dylan, all those guys, music I loved then and love today. And so when I rediscovered Bowie in high school, it was sort of coming at him through my blossoming interest in 1960's rock music.

Which is very appropriate. Bowie started off as a flower child, admiring Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd at the UFO Club. His grossly underrated first album, Space Oddity, trafficked in the mystical psychedelia of his peers, although it was already showing signs of something different, with the legendary title track's evocation of outer space travel not so much a Pink Floyd-ian freakout as it was an opportunity to meditate existentially on loneliness and insanity. Paralleling Marc Bolan's evolution from Hobbit-rocker Tyrannosaurus Rex to glam-god T-Rex, Bowie went in a new direction as the 1960's, at least on the calendar, came to a close.

Ziggy Stardust is the culmination of Bowie's metamorphosis. Gone was the flower child singing of free festivals and laughing gnomes, and here was this freak celebrity rock star, delivering a new message to the waiting masses from on high. This reinvention was total, requiring a new persona, that of the alien Ziggy with a new message for the kids. What was this message? In a lot of ways, Bowie's still the '60's kid, singing about space aliens, dreams, and freaking out, testing the limits. But things have changed, babies. The alien is not singing about a tribal, communal experience of mind expansion: this exploration is a personal trip. It is a coming-of-age story, telling the young ones, those at the feet of the knowing alien, that the new territory is sexual awakening. I mean, look at the video.



Look at these young girls being flattened, communing with something they had not yet experienced, sex with a superior being, the knowing one, the better one, watch them undulate at the 2-minute mark, watch the girl in post-coital extasy after Mick Ronson's guitar solo has taken her "out... far out..." This is a new message of rock n' roll, purely Dionysian, the rock god celebrity spectacle rather than the tribal communion. It is the moment when the Moon/Teenage Daydream, the devotion to the rock idol, finds its communion in the performance on the stage. It is a return of music to its nature as an ecstatic, sexual rite, away from the everybody politics of the 1960's. Listen Suffragette, leave your feminist trip behind if you want to really go places that are REALLY out there. You can't afford the ticket to my show, you've got too much baggage for the good time. Are you a real freak? Well, no more kid stuff.

This sounds cold, and it can be, this brutal reality. But your rock n' roll momma/poppa, he's been where you are, he understands. "Just turn on with me, and you're not alone." The trip we're taking, the one in which he leave the kid stuff behind, it's a suicide, in a way, the death of your old self so that the new one, a freak alien, but an aware one, unlike those perma-children who never test their boundaries and remain squares with their childish hangups their whole lives, can be born. Bowie was performing a rock n' roll suicide on all of the naive things he cherished - everyone cherished - in the 1960's, signaling that that ego ideology of exploration was reaching its inevitable and logical conclusion. Bowie was killing the 1960's; against the deeper, more basic power that he was representing, that era would seem quaint, nostalgic, too easy ("cuz it ain't easy.")

That's why, as exhilarating as the posters and their promise of coolness and dark secrets in my sister's room were, I also knew there was something scary about them, about what I was going to go through as I said goodbye to my childhood years. At least I would have Bowie to help me. click here to
read it all...

It's Not Muthaf7ckin' Ziggy!

David Bowie's legendary The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is about as bad of an album as it possibly could be.

Seriously.

But I love it anyway.

Here's what I mean: given the superb material and the excellent musicians involved, I don't think that this album could be much worse than it is. When I consider the great songs here unto themselves, it amazes me that this album fails to completely blow me away, leading me to ponder a few questions:

Is it overproduced?

Possibly. Only "Five Years" and "Ziggy Stardust" strike me as particularly strong renditions that really do the material justice. On the other hand, "Hang On to Yourself", the raucous badass opener in D.A. Pennebaker's film of the band's final concert, limps onto the middle of side 2 and barely registers. "Moonage Daydream", "Starman", and "Suffragette City" are all as castrated as Wendy Carlos (whose work from the Clockwork Orange soundtrack can actually be heard playing before Ziggy and the Spiders take the stage in the film!): Mick Ronson's playing is not punchy and present enough in this mix, with too much space given to keys, mellotron/strings, and backing vocals instead. Don't get me wrong, these recordings are definitely enjoyable, and it's not as if one has to listen hard to hear the obviously great songs, which remain evident, it's just that they could have been appreciably better.

I'm not just speaking theoretically here, either: both the Pennebaker film, despite a flawed, inconsistent mix, and the 2000ish archival release Bowie at the Beeb offer glimpses of how much more powerful these tunes could be in the hands of these same musicians in less heavily produced contexts. I do not mean to say that the production flourishes were all bad, either, but they seem to wash out much of the feel and impact.

Was too much time and effort spent on promotion and not enough on the album?

Particularly revealing to me on the recent Rock Milestones DVD, which offers a historical and critical overview of the album featuring interviews with bassist Trevor Bolder, drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, and horror Angie Bowie, is how much emphasis was placed on building Bowie up into a rock star at this time by his handlers, to the evident chagrin of these folks (who were all quickly discarded by Bowie once that stardom was attained).

For example, the US tour consisted of the band playing a show somewhere, then partying for a couple of weeks in order to build up a high profile as extravagant, wild rock stars, although the record company had to subsidize it, since Bowie himself was not wealthy yet. While such theatricality is an undeniably critical, integral element of the whole Ziggy Stardust phenomenon, one has to wonder whether the music itself ended up being neglected in the whole process.

Bowie even neglected to finish writing a story about Ziggy in these songs. If this album can actually be viewed as a concept album at all, then that concept is, at best, half-baked, which is not a big problem in and of itself, since it would have worked out fine had the end result been that Bowie employing the concept as a basis for inspiration, since I would never demand adherence to a concept as a qualification for the creation of a rock album. Instead, the song order apparently follows the intact but skeletal remains of the plotline derived from the original concept, when it probably would have made for a better album if he had departed from those plot-related aspects of the concept altogether in order to attain a better flow, limiting the influence of the concept to a mere thematic nature.

Despite some evidence of overproduction weakening the impact of Ronson's playing in particular, it seems like some of these issues may have been resolved, had there a been a more concerted effort to work out the issues with the mix and song order, rather than making it a priority merely to get a product out there for Bowie to promote. I am definitely not sure on this point, but given what we know about Bowie's activities during this period, I have to wonder where the priorities lay.

Did Bowie step on Ronson's arrangements?

This supposition consists mostly of my reading between the lines, but some of the comments made by the interviewees on the Rock Milestones DVD led me to wonder whether Bowie and Ronson's joint production efforts didn't also lead to some compromises that weakened the album. While Bowie undoubtedly was the ring leader here, Ronson held responsibility for arranging much of the studio instrumentation. Bowie frequently insisted on providing his own touches, for which, despite his lack of technical studio expertise at the time, he deservedly acquired a reputation as having an extraordinary ability to select seemingly randomly instruments that would help beef up a tune. Contrasted with Ronson's more technically adept background in evidence on his arrangements, there was plenty of potential for friction there.

Someone on the Milestones DVD (I believe that it was bassist Trevor Bolder) notes how much he would have liked to have seen Mick Ronson given a shot at a whole project, which seems like an odd comment on its face, since Ronson produced multiple albums over the course of his career, so I take this to mean that what he meant to say, in a roundabout way, was that it was a shame that Ronson could had not been given full rein over this project. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen, since, again, this was Bowie's deal, but it leads me to believe that the commenter felt that Ronson's arrangements had been damaged by Bowie.

What about the vast legacy of this album?

Huge and undeniable. . .but even that could have been greater had either of the two films related to this project worked out better!

Unfortunately, the film quality of the Pennebaker film puts a lot of folks off, and, despite a scorching performance, the inconsistent mix is far from ideal. That said, it is great to have any filmed documentation of that tour, but it's a shame that the film remains so underappreciated, mostly due to technical issues.

Then we have The Man Who Fell to Earth, which, although it is an adaptation of a novel, is a solid film that's pretty much about a character that's extraordinarily similar to Ziggy Stardust, who happens to be played by David Bowie. Sounds great, huh? Well, it falls short of greatness, mainly due to one, glaring problem: no Bowie music! At all. Instead, reportedly due to contractual issues, there's a thoroughly unremarkable soundtrack provided by John Phillips (they just had to find a guy who had even bigger drug problems than Bowie's!) that seems like a placeholder for what should have been the tunes from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which is a real shame when one considers how much more vital the movie could have been with those tunes. Another squandered opportunity!

But you love it anyway?

Oh, yeah, the issues aren't that serious, and I'm definitely overstating and overanalyzing them here. If someone digs Bowie, then they'll love this. However, given the material and musicians, it easily should be a top 20 all-time album, but it's not. It should be Bowie's finest album, but it's not. click here to
read it all...

It's Worse Than Trying to Organize a CD Collection. Much, much worse.

I was originally going to write a whole lot about David Bowie, despite the fact that I don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. Musicians who are about the show first and the music second have never much interested me. So I will sum up what I was going to say that it wasn't until I was in Dublin in 1994 and spending late, drunken nights at this pickup joint called Major Tom's, that I investigated David Bowie a little further.

As an aside, the pickup joint I knew seems now to be Dublin's first and only Australian bar. Who knew there was even such a thing as an Australian bar?

So what I really want to talk about is the all-important topic of mp3 organization. (btw, can we all agree that mp3 is a useful shorthand for music files in general, whether they are actually in mp3 format or not?) Prior to downloading it for purposes of this blog, I did not own Ziggy Stardust. But I did own a 2-disc David Bowie singles collection saved neatly on my hard drive at My Documents>My Music>Zune>David Bowie>Singles Collection, Vol. 1 (and a separate folder for Vol. 2). Volume 1 included 3 of the songs from Ziggy Stardust.

So I was faced with a choice. I could download the entire album, in which case the Zune program would very neatly read the new album and place it in my library at with the album art in the directory which I set up My Documents>My Music>Zune>David Bowie>Ziggy Stardust. That would essentially waste hard disk space on copies of 3 songs already stored in the Singles Collection directory.

Another option was to just download the songs I did not have, and then create a playlist with all of the tracks in the correct order. The downside of this is that when looking at the album in the "album view" of Zune (or any other music player) it would appear to be incomplete. The 3 songs that are in the Singles Collection folder would seem to be missing. And to listen to the album I would have to click on the playlist I created. I would not be able to just click on the album. And were I to save the playlist to my Zune device and listen to it there, as the songs from the Singles Collection folder played, my Zune would display the Singles Collection album art, not the Ziggy album art.

So the choice is to "waste" disk space on 3 duplicate files (albeit with different tags) or to have the album saved all in once place for organization purposes. It's an issue that is going to keep coming up. I have every CD that the Angry Young Woman and I own ripped onto my hard drive. Many of those are greatest hits CDs and multi-disc anthologies from artists on the RS 500, like Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Ray Charles, Al Green, etc. As I obtain the actual full albums on the Rolling Stone list, if I download the whole thing every time (as I did with Ziggy) I am going to wind up with many, many instances of the same song saved in multiple directories with different tags. That's potentially a lot of disk space "wasted" on duplication.

Although as I write this I now realize a third option.: I could have downloaded only those tracks I didn't have, re-tagged the 3 tracks from the Singles Collection and moved them to the Ziggy folder. So in the album view it would be the anthology that would be missing tracks, not Ziggy.

I wouldn't really even need to create a playlist for the now-depleted anthology because if it's just a collection of singles, what difference does it make if a song or 3 is missing from a 40 song collection?

On the other hand, there are certain anthologies, like the Bob Marley Songs of Freedom 4-Disc set, that I would not want to break up in that fashion. Which leaves me right back at my original dilemma of wanting to be a completist with my albums but not wanting duplicate tracks on my hard drive. This is also the most time-consuming option, because it involves re-tagging the three tracks to match the downloaded Ziggy tracks.

How do other people deal with this issue? It must come up for people all the time. click here to
read it all...