Why nine? Part two: Hughesy's Springsteen background

Friday 20 January 2017

So we know, with nine shows in prospect but each night will be different. But we still haven't explained the need for nine.

This short explanation is that Hughesy's Bruce experience goes right back to the very early days.

I don't know when I heard Greetings From Asbury Park for the first time but I do know where I heard it how it was packaged.

The venue was the flat in Harold Street, Townsville, where I lived for most of 1972 and the album, came in a gatefold sleeve.

I suspect that it was an import copy sourced from the hi-fi shop in Townsville that dealt in such items. Alternatively, my flatmate, Mister Dave may have a laid his hands on a copy in one of the Brisbane stores that sold imports.

While gatefold sleeves were almost de rigeur overseas, Australian companies disliked ornate packaging and saved the fancy stuff for well-established artists.

I know Greetings arrived in a gatefold sleeve because I read, and marvelled at, the lyrics that covered the entire opened out inside.

They may even have seeped over onto the back sleeve, though I would need to go back and check on that minor detail.

I already knew of this Bruce Springsteen individual.

He was one of the pack of new Dylans who had emerged in the wake of the Bobster's motorcycle crash while he was holed up in the wilds of the Woodstock woodshedding with what we later came to know as The Band.

There were quite a few would-be or might-be new Dylans, and they weren't all enamoured of a label that seemed to be a handy catchall classification, an umbrella term that covered any singer-songwriter who delivered in his material with a folky twang.

John Sebastian may have been one of them, but he dated back to the Lovin' Spoonful.

Phil Ochs might have been considered another, but he was Dylan's contemporary and notional peer rather than his successor.

The new Dylans included John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, and various other individuals apart from this Springsteen character.

Looking at the fine print on the inner gate floor fold, it seemed Bruce delivered more than just vague traces of spinning reels of rhyme.

It was back in the days when I wore glasses but took them off to read.

These days, after cataract surgery, I need reading glasses, but if I had to go back to that densely packed inner gatefold, I'd be reaching for the special high magnification spectacles I keep for very fine print.

The album contained some striking material, and it was obviously the work of someone who was worth watching.

So I did. Not necessarily by buying, because buying without the full packaging just didn't make sense.

Recollections about the second album aren't quite as clear.

It reinforced the promise and added previously unnoticed rhythm and blues elements that had been there all along but hadn't pushed their way up into the forefront.

By that stage I was working on Palm Island, making regular trips back to Townsville on the weekends, returning to the palms with boxes of 90 minutes of Hitachi cassettes that had selections from my mates record collections carefully recorded, one album per side.

One of those cassettes had the first two Bruce albums, though it was soon apparent that I needed to buy copies because I needed the lyrics.

But at that point, Springsteen merely appeared to be a reasonably classy songwriter.

The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle had given the distinct impression that here was a guy who'd started by passing himself off as a semi-folky singer-songwriter but was something of a rocker and was duly sneaking hs mates into a share of the action.

Students of Springsteen history know that by this point Bruce was hardly flavour of the month at his record company and that the third album, Born to Run, was going to be the make or break record.

 It arrived with the wave of hype that raised question marks in itself, but those of us who were familiar with the earlier work were probably inclined to take it on trust.

Fortunately, it turned out to be completely trustworthy.

These days, something launched with the same fanfare would probably be taken with a shovel load rather than a pinch of salt.

But it was the mid-70s, and those of us who been around for a while were looking for something that delivered the same buzz we regularly arrived from hearing new things on the radio.

But it was a long time since weird heard anything that made you stop, sit up and take notice the way that, say, A Whiter Shade of Pale did.

Things may have been headed over the top when Bruce appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines, but those front covers had featured the likes of The Band in the past.
But not simultaneously.
I had an import copy of Born to Run by the end of 1975 and the content more than matched the advance publicity.

It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterpiece that synthesised much of what had gone before, recognisable elements served up in a rock'n' roll gumbo with R&B seasoning by someone who knew what cooked.

And again students or Bruce history know what came next.

As Bruce began to break big, legal and contractual hassles kept him out of the recording studio.

They didn't stop them from writing or performing, but he couldn't record the new material.

And, having recruited a damn fine band, he needed to hold them together.

In other circumstances, the artist in question might place his backing musos on a retainer, the way the Dylan that did with The Hawks after the motorcycle crash.

The retainer gave them the wherewithal to transform themselves into The Band, and the whole process gave us The Basement Tapes and Music from Big Pink.

By the time The Band were releasing their second album, they were significant enough to the feature on the cover of Time magazine. And, possibly, on Newsweek.

But not in the same week.
No, if Bruce wanted to hold the E Street band together they had to work. So work they did.

In what it may have been one of the canniest career decisions a working musician has ever made they played marathon three hours shows, up and down Americas left and right posts coasts, many of them simultaneously broadcast in stereo on FM radio.

And where another performer might hold on to the newly written material, Springsteen slotted it into the set lists. After all, they seemed to be a strong possibility that stuff would never be recorded.

At least not officially recorded.

Several shows started with Springsteen exhorting the bootleggers to roll those tapes and Bruce has subsequently gone on to become arguably the most widely bootlegged artist in the recording industry's history.

By the time the court cases were settled, Springsteen had established a niche in the American concert to seeing that he continues to hold to this day. Not, perhaps, a position that slots him right into the mainstream but one that delivers marketability and the opportunity to sell out sizeable venues in significant population centres.

Having had the opportunity to road test new material the fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, consolidated all the gains he had made with Born to Run.

The consolidation continued through The River and Born in the USA while Bruce established himself as a performer who could sell out stadiums in the right markets.

And, all the while, his reputation as a dynamic live performer continued to grow.

As a regular consumer of whatever serious Rock music journals I could lay my hands on I read glowing accounts of epic E Street Band concert performances.

With no sign, and no apparent possibility, of a Springsteen tour Down Under, Australian journalist Stuart Coupe flew to Paris where he reported on a show that is alleged to have started with an acapella rendition of Elvis Presley's I Can't Help Falling In Love With You.

Except it didn't.

Not according to the BruceFanatic app, which suggests that particular song has never been performed live by Bruce.

On the other hand, a show on 19 April 1981 at the Palais de Sports in Paris opened with Presley's Follow That Dream, which fitted the never played before bit.

It was last played at the time of writing sixteen shows ago in Denmark on 20 July 2016 and has featured in the set list 48 times in between.

By that stage, we had a fan sitting in the wilds of North Queensland comfortably resigned to the notion that Bruce Springsteen live was not going to happen on Australian soil.

But, of course, it did.

By that time, however, I had relocated from Townsville to Bowen.

The tour covered major outdoor venues and probably hit Brisbane's QE2 in the middle of the week. Getting to the show would have involved at least two days off work. That's assuming I could fly from Townsville or Mackay to Brisbane on show day and back the day after.

In any case, regardless of timing and location, I had no way to obtain tickets.

So, Bruce down under 1985 was a fizzer as far as Your Humble Correspondent is concerned.

And despite the size of the venues he played, or maybe because of an inability to fill them, the tour was apparently a financial disaster.

 The 1995 solo acoustic tour supporting The Ghost of Tom Joad album played smaller venues in school time with the Brisbane, probably, a one-off midweek gig.

Not much joy there for teachers in a relatively remote rural Australia.

Fast forward to Bruce's next appearance Down under, back with the band supporting The Rising album, and we have another Australian entrepreneur taking a financial bath.

So, for awhile, it seemed that was that.

Rumour in 2012 turned into fact in 2013 but managed to coincide with a tour by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. I managed to catch Neil with the Horse in Brisbane and Sydney, then headed back north to do the same with Bruce.

That meant I passed on to Neil shows in Melbourne.

The second, at Rod Laver Arena, featured much the same set list Neil had played in Brisbane and Sydney, but the first, at the Plenary, a much smaller venue in the CBD delivered a set described as the greatest rock show ever seen on these shores.

And, quite possibly, the greatest Neil Young and Crazy Horse show ever. The Interested Reader can find the set list here.

I, of course, had missed it to catch Bruce, though Melbourne would have been doable if I'd wanted to make the to and fro extra effort.

But that was okay I'd seen Bruce, and I'd seen Neil, so that removed two significant items of the bucket list.

Better still, after the previous financial disasters, Bruce 2013 was lucrative enough to have a frontier touring back up the following year.

I looked at the tool itinerary, noted shows in Perth and Adelaide, and figured that the schedule would allow for second shows to be added in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

As it turned out, the second shows were initially slotted into Perth and Adelaide with a second show in Melbourne surreptitiously added and almost escaping my attention.

So, having returned from that excursion, I was not winding up the audience when I suggested over lunch at Food Freaks that next time I would be going to the lot.

The 2014 experience, however, underlined two significant factors.

The first was the realisation that multiple Bruce concerts were a perfect excuse for an extended stay in the city one might not otherwise be visiting.

Madam and I had four nights in Melbourne that tour and, barring one night when relentless doof doof from a nearby nightclub continued until almost four in the morning, Hughesy found it and enjoyable experience.

Mileages, however, varied.

Madam, having been to the first show, had passed on the second and found Hughes's desire to rest up for number two frustrating when there were places to go and things to do.

Which, of course, explains why this is excursion is being conducted solo and without supervision.

In conclusion, that why nine question can be answerted in a number succinct nutshells.

One. Because they are there.
Two. Because I'm a long time fan.
Three. Because I can. F
our. Because it's a perfect excuse to spend multiple lights in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Five. Because the same opportunity may not arise again.

Satisfied?