BRUCE - RACING IN THE STREET

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT4pSt4kie8

I don’t pay much attention to the age of rock stars but it’s still hard to believe that Bruce Springsteen turned 70 yesterday. I always thought he was a good bit younger than me, certainly more than two years anyway, and when I watch him do his thing his energy befits a man 20 years my junior. Footage of Bruce popped up all over my news feed yesterday, but none of it showed him performing this song which, over time, has edged past the pack to become my favourite from a catalogue that simply refuses to stop growing, and one that holds its place among the shifting playlist of old and new songs I listen to all the time. 

         ‘Racing In The Street’, from 1978’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town, is not really about racing cars at all. It is a metaphor for the terrifying, uncertain prospect of growing up, far more so in fact than the hi-energy but rather wordy song of that name that appeared on Springsteen’s second album in 1973. In this respect it can be likened to the songs that Pete Townshend found himself writing for The Who By Numbers when age was catching up with him, so yesterday, as Springsteen entered his eighth decade, I felt like writing about how much I love this song.

         On first hearing you could certainly be forgiven for thinking ‘Racing In The Street’ was another of Springsteen’s songs about cars, their performance and taking girls for rides in them, subject matter he once seemed lumbered with like Chuck Berry or The Beach Boys. But that’s just the first verse, the sharply detailed opening that sets the scene against a measured but edgy musical backdrop with hints of The Crystal’s ‘Then He Kissed Me’ and, in closing couplets loosely repeated throughout, a clever juxtaposition of lyrics from Martha & The Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In The Street’. This was youthful music for youthful escapades that are abandoned midway into verse two, reluctantly perhaps, since there’s a realisation that they can’t – and won’t – last forever.

         This is when Springsteen looks despondently around him as his peers pack away their dreams, symbolised by the cars in which they race, and he’s conflicted. To stay the same or grow up; to ‘blow ’em off in my first heat’ or ‘start dyin’, little by little, piece by piece’? It’s a dilemma we all face sooner or later, and one that those of us who love our rock’n’roll that bit more than maybe we should tend to defer to our cost. (And perhaps it’s because I waited until I was 44 to marry and have children, far later than average, that ‘Racing In The Street’ resonates in me as much as it does.)

         By the beginning of verse three the weight of his choice, of growing up, of the inevitable, has taken its full toll, and Springsteen is staring into the beyond. Is this all that life has to offer when once I was racing in the street? There’s trepidation when his girl stares forlornly into the night – is he right for me? – but force of will surmounts and as the final verse winds down he’s come to grips with his dilemma and is riding to the sea with his girl to wash their sins – their past – off their hands. Well, that’s my reading anyway.

         But there’s another, more specifically Springsteenish, interpretation I think about when I listen to ‘Racing In The Street’, and this is that the song connects the contradictions of Springsteen the performer. On the one hand, in the earlier lines, there’s the kid with that old Broadcaster who doesn’t want to grow up, who bounces on stage like he was born to rock, singing requests from the audience like that joyous cruise through ‘You Never Can Tell’ that you can’t avoid on YouTube, or getting a girl up on stage to join him for ‘Dancing In The Dark’, or racing through party anthems like ‘Sherry Darling’ or ‘Out In The Street’. This is Bruce the Younger, the kid who worships rock’n’roll and will go to his grave defending it as the most fun you can have with your clothes on, the romantic whose electric guitar has unlocked the door to a personal paradise.

         Then, in the song’s conclusion, there’s the guy who sings about decay and change in ‘4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)’, or hard times in ‘The River’, or injustice in ‘American Skin’, or a life lived on the wrong side of the tracks on Tom Joad, or tragedy in ‘Wreck On The Highway’, or even ‘Badlands’, as powerful a rocker I know about the price you have to pay. This is Bruce the Elder who grew up and got married, had kids and, although he’s banked a pirate’s treasure, tries his best to stay grounded, to retain a conscience, a responsibility that comes with the weight of fame that, like The Beatles, he must carry a long time.

         ‘Racing In The Street’ links these two Bruce Springsteens together for me. Its stately, sombre, minimal piano-driven pace makes it more profound than any of the other ‘serious’ songs he’s written and when, in more recent live versions, it reaches that instrumental coda, all five minutes of it, we are ever-so-slowly lifted up by this repeated surge, rim shots becoming pounding drums, a swirling organ, ringing guitars, a gradual escalation in intensity, crescendo after crescendo like an incoming tide as the E Street Band join him from every angle, rising and rising so as to restate the message of that final verse, that despair can turn to joy, and the question ‘Did you make it alright?’ is finally answered. Yes, we really can grow up and make it alright. It really is the greatest song he’s ever written.

For the record, I listen to four versions of ‘Racing In The Street’ – the original on Darkness…, live versions from 1978 (Agora, Cleveland) and 1981 (Meadowlands, New Jersey) and an embryonic version on The Promise, also from 1978 – and a live version by Emmylou Harris that is suitably reverent but instead of the lengthy coda features a lovely vocalised sign-off. I found the pic with the lyric on Google (credited to YouTube) and the version of ‘Racing In The Street’ on YouTube I attached above is from 2009, Paramount Theatre, Asbury Park, where it all began for Bruce. Happy 70^th birthday old man.

WAYFARING STRANGER by Emma John

Two songs of which I never tire are ‘Kentucky’ by The Everly Brothers and ‘Green Rolling Hills’ by Emmylou Harris. The former, taken at a stately, languorous pace, is a showcase for Don and Phil’s uniquely kinship vocals, its syllables stretched out like pastry beneath a rolling pin, its harmonies as sweet as the ensuing apple crumble. It’s an old song, written in 1941 by Karl Davis and brought to classic status six years later on a recording by The Blue Sky Boys. The latter, which appears on Emmylou’s 1978 album Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town, is a simple country ballad about the perils of coal mining, often titled more expressively as ‘The Green Rolling Hills Of West Virginia’, and it was written by Utah Phillips, an American labour organiser, probably in the 1960s.

         The key element of these gorgeous songs is how they extol the virtues of the American landscape enclosed within the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and the western fork of Virginia, an area dominated by the southern tip of the Appalachians, colloquially known as the Blue Ridge Mountains. If the lyrics of these songs are to be believed, and their beauty leads me so to do, this part of the world is the ‘nearest thing to heaven’ on earth, and I’d like to think that Emma John heard them before embarking on the six-month pilgrimage that is the subject of her book.

         Wayfaring Stranger is a music travelogue, an investigation into the world of bluegrass in which she seeks out its most skilled players in their own habitat. It’s a book about a closed world, a semi-secret society, and a tradition kept alive in much the same way as ancient skills like dry stone walling in Yorkshire or fishing through ice holes in the Arctic. It’s also a fiendishly difficult music to play, not just because of the lightning speed of better known pieces like ‘Orange Blossom Special’ and ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ but because achieving the right ambience and attitude is crucial to its performance. These disciplines are at the book’s heart: can Emma become a competent bluegrass musician herself, and is she able to successfully transfer her abandoned training as a classical violinist to the art of bluegrass fiddling?

         Gingerly taking her antique violin from its case to enter the fray, Emma encounters a peculiarly social music in which most of the players know one another and meet up for jams and festivals that take place throughout the summer in the states where bluegrass is cherished. Players, well most of them, are forever encouraging one another to improve their skills – a marked contrast to the competitive and rather bitchy classical world that Emma recalls – and there are certain principles laid down by the music’s originators that must be upheld, many of which relate to the repertoire and how it is delivered in the 21^st century.

         Outsiders might assume that bluegrass players are old men with beards, dungarees and check shirts, but I was surprised to learn how many teenagers join in the sessions, and how good they are, as if the skills have been handed down from generation to generation. Nevertheless, there are important traditions to be upheld, one of which is always to pepper a set with bluegrass classics that will be known to the audience, “[like] a rock festival where everyone was expected to make at least half of their set Lynyrd Skynyrd covers,” she writes. “Where every act played from the same repertoire, on the same instruments, in an attempt to capture the same sound.” By the same token, the subject matter of the songs remains startlingly similar, the most popular themes a longing for some abstract ‘home’ where a log cabin awaits, the love of an absent woman or family to whom the singer is desperate to return, or the hope that up there in heaven a dear but departed mama and papa are anticipating your eventual arrival with open arms.

         Emma’s mission takes her to US States that are avowedly Republican, God-fearing and insular, where guns are freely obtainable, rebel flags fly and Jesus slogans on billboards signpost the next town. Setting aside her natural liberal tendencies – she’s a Guardian writer – Emma boldly enters a world where she clearly doesn’t belong, and comes away from it wiser and more sympathetic to a relaxed way of life that is in stark contrast to the bustle of London. While her unmarried status arouses immediate suspicion, once it is established that her intentions are honourable the innate hospitality of the region – they really do mean it when they say ‘Mind ya’ll come back soon now’ – wins her over. Meanwhile, her progress as a bluegrass fiddler is not without its setbacks and gives Wayfaring Stranger a storyline that kept me turning the pages.

         All of which Emma Johns covers in occasionally droll but never less than honest, and sometimes self-depreciating, prose. She has a pleasing way with words – one musician she encountered sports ‘a beard that curled around his chin like a sleeping possum’ – and an easy-going style that mixes her own thoughts with factual observations, vivid descriptions of the countryside and a surprisingly honest appraisal of how the experience enabled her to learn more about herself, all of which leads to an unexpected conclusion. With alternate chapters devoted to the history of bluegrass and (very) potted biographies of its leading figures, Wayfaring Stranger is more than just a book about bluegrass music, more a book about how music, whatever its hue, can enrich our lives.

         Time was when my only exposure to bluegrass music was the chase sequence in Bonnie & Clyde, the soundtrack to the Beverly Hillbillies and a couple of tracks on a Byrds box set that feature the picking of Clarence White. The first two led to me Flatt & Scruggs and The Byrds to White’s Kentucky Colonels. Emma John’s book, to which I was alerted by The Blue Moment, my old MM colleague Richard Williams’ first-rate music blog, has opened up a whole new music world for me to explore.

         And, yes, towards the end of the book Emma reveals how friends she made did tell her, in line with the lyrics to ‘Kentucky’ and ‘Green Rolling Hills’, that the Blue Ridge Mountains are, indeed, like ‘heaven on earth’.

RIVERBOAT SONG by Gillian Welch

In November of last year I wrote approvingly about Boots No 1 – The Official Revival Bootleg, a double CD set of outtakes and alternative versions from Gillian Welch’s 1996 album Revival, her much acclaimed debut recording. In particular I have come to love a song therein called ‘Riverboat Song’, a gently swaying ragtime tune with a hint of blue, about the river that flows past the singer’s door, a lament for a time when this river, referred to always as ‘she’, carried far more traffic than it does today and seemed to have a greater purpose beyond ‘[tumbling] to the sea to find some company’; in truth it’s a rather melancholy song of sympathy for the barren times on which her treasured river seems now to have fallen.

Set to a gorgeous melody that, like many of Welch and her partner Dave Rawlings’ compositions, sounds as if it could have been written at any time in the last 100 years, we hear about the river’s more prosperous era, when a huge cotton crop came floating past, and when the paddle-steamers – ‘the Mississippi Queen and the Alabama Pearl’ – were floating dancehalls that rang with the sound of gamblers and Dixieland jazz as they made their way down to the Gulf of Mexico. After a lovely chorded ragtime guitar solo, reminiscent of John Fahey at his best, we learn about how the river flooded ‘in the spring of ’65’, becoming ‘ten miles wide’ and how those on the banks should have seen it coming because, after all, ‘a woman’s gonna make a fuss if no one pays her any mind’. 

The songs ends where it began, with Welch serenading her river in spite of everything, ‘the blue old girl travelling past’, urging this neighbour of hers that she loves so much on its watery way. A delightful sense of affection towards her river just about prevents the whole piece from descending into a well of sadness.

Rivers have inspired countless songwriters over the ages, and in some respects Welch and Rawlings’ ‘Riverboat Song’ is a grandchild of ‘Ol’ Man River’, from the 1927 musical Showboat, sung most famously and with unfathomable warmth by the great bass singer and political activist Paul Robeson. While some songs use a river as a metaphor for overcoming hardship (‘Many Rivers To Cross’ by Jimmy Cliff or ‘The River’ by Bruce Springsteen) and others dwell on things that happen alongside them (‘Take Me To The River’ by Talking Heads and ‘Down By The River’ by Neil Young) or even celebrate their power (‘Grand Coulee Dam’ by Woody Guthrie and ‘Proud Mary’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival), ‘Ol’ Man River’ and ‘Riverboat Song’ are simply celebrations of the wonders of a river as nothing more, and nothing less, than a creation of nature.

Talking of unchained power, my favourite Led Zeppelin track is river related: ‘When The Levee Breaks’, from their fourth album, originally recorded in 1927 by Memphis Minnie and Kansas John McCoy, and written about the Great Mississippi Flood that destroyed homes and crops that year. There’s a hint of this song in Welch and Rawlings’ verse about when their river flooded, and also in the ragtime bluesy feel of the original. Of course, Page & Co take the song by the scruff of the neck and shake it like a chorus girl, but there’s genuine old-time authenticity in Plant’s shrill harmonica when it arrives over Bonham’s relentless drum pattern, and Page’s slide guitar is unfussy, strident and similarly relentless, suggesting a warning call and the very real feeling of impending doom felt by those who live by a river during a particularly bad rainstorm.

The insistent feel of this Zep track is in some ways shared by Creedence’s surging ‘Proud Mary’, bringing to mind the reality that a river never stops moving, not even a tidal one like the Thames which, when the flow changes from upstream to down, seems to swirl around like a whirlpool, re-arranging itself for the next phase but still stirring, still in motion. So it’s no wonder that rivers, in themselves or as a metaphor, inspire songwriters; be it the contrast between Paul Simon’s troubled water and the stately progress of Art Garfunkel’s complementary vocal, or Dylan brooding on his luck as he watches the river flow, or Springsteen drawing a parallel between a river that has dried up and died and the broken dreams of Mary and her man.

You can hear Gillian Welch singing ‘Riverboat Song’ on YouTube, both the version on Boots No 1, and a different take that features a bluesier acoustic guitar and an accordion in the solo. Here’s the links:

Boots version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co_yxrv9KYw

Alt version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI9lgjIdvq8