Autumn Souvenir

Minutemen The Punch Line Mott The Hoople Live Rick Danko Rick Danko Waylon Jennings Waylon Live Bruce Springsteen Save My Love 7" Okkervil River Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See M. Ward Post-War Elvis Costello This Year's Model

Although about 90% of the content on this blog is about music, I rarely give straight-up record reviews. This is primarily because records take me a long time to process, usually about a year. I really don't know how music critics have the ability to listen a few times and deliver their take. I can do so with movies and books, but music takes almost endless listens. And more often than not, the truly great records take a long, long time. The best ones are never fully absorbed. It's little surprise that the Darkness box set had me giddy, and bordering on manic. Okay, manic. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, Darkness on the Edge of Town is much more than a record for me. I can say with absolute certainty that it played a large part in shaping my views, outlook, understanding, and morals. Growing up short on mentors, it was this record, in my early twenties, that taught me the lessons I needed and longed for. It was the characters, the landscape, the emotion and the lives.

When I transferred schools in 1993 and moved a few states north, my lack of knowledge and understanding of the world bordered on embarrassing. If you asked me about the Bay of Pigs, I probably would've directed you to a distant corner of the Bronx Zoo. A few months later the Civil Rights Movement would jar my life perspective, but had you inquired about the NAACP in early 1993 I probably would've referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Chicken Parm. I often wonder how I even got into college. Outside of college basketball and the Yanks, my brain was basically wide open. After a crappy first semester, I enrolled in a class called "Inequality in America." It was around this time that I graduated beyond the basics of rock n' roll and discovered Uncle Tupelo, The Bottle Rockets, dug deep into Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town and began to recognize common themes running through the songs. The guys in Uncle Tupelo were looking for a w

I'm guessing it was 1995 or so. I clearly recall that we were still listening to cassette tapes in the car. It was a seemingly forgettable rainy Saturday morning, when my brother and I awoke and were hit with the inspiration to hop onto the Parkway and head down to the towns where Springsteen was raised. We made it to Freehold, Asbury Park and a few others. As the rain picked up, we searched for the places in the songs, but the few points we marked to visit were either closed or gone: The Stone Pony, some guitar shop we imagined was once the home of Bruce's first Japanese guitar, a few boardwalk items mentioned on some early records. We really didn't see much, but we listened and searched. We made it through to The Wild, The Innocent, Darkness and Greetings . As we were about to head back to the Parkway, feeling somewhat deflated as we'd failed to immerse ourselves in Springsteen, on came "Something in the Night." We turned onto a stretch of road and right as

From now until the release of the Darkness box set, this blog will cover nothing but Springsteen. That's eleven days of Bruce. We'll be posting videos, stories, lyrics, lists, the occasional racy nude and anything else that comes to mind. To kick things off, the video from the title track to the fantastic film The Wrestler .