Month: November 2018

Faith will be rewarded: Bruce Springsteen – Madison Square Garden, New York 2000

/ Tony / 10 Comments

“The floor was a mass of smiles and swaying bodies, and as I watched, I thought ‘I can do this. I can bring this, this happiness, these smiles.’ I went home and called the E Street Band.”

Back when the music press was writing it up and even when I bought the live album that documented it – Live in New York City – I didn’t really understand just how big a deal Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Reunion Tour was.  I’d only really been listening Bruce for a few years at that point and was by no means a decades-long fan.

I was actually one of the generation of fans that made Bruce realise it was time to get the band back together again after a “two young kids” introduced themselves to him outside a pizza joint and expressed their dismay at having never seen the E Street Band live “I started realizing there was a sea of young people out there who never saw the greatest thing I did: PLAY LIVE… with the E Street Band”.

Here we are in 2018 – with a number of studio albums completed with E Street Band tours and shows further on and it’s clear how important that Reunion Tour was. For the decade leading up to it had been filled with two tours from Bruce. One with ‘The Other Band’ in support of Human Touch/Lucky Town and what became known as the ‘Shut The Fuck Up’ Tour for Ghost of Tom Joad. So when Bruce took to the stage with a full E Street Band in 1999 many, including the band themselves, weren’t sure how long it would last.

It had been 11 long years since the end of the Tunnel of Love tour and Steven Van Zandt hadn’t toured with the band since 1981. Questions abounded: was it a one-off? Was it just a nostalgia tour? Was there anything left in the tank? Would this be the start of a new chapter?

By the time the Reunion Tour reached New York in June 2000 for it’s grand finale – a ten-night, sold-out stand at Madison Square Garden – all of those questions had been answered. The E Street Band was firing on all cylinders, tighter than a duck’s arse and clearly a force to be reckoned with now and into the future. The set contained a healthy mix of classic ‘Jersey greaseball’ and ‘Mega’ Bruce along with a selection of Tracks‘ most euphoric moments and new songs to boot.

Songs from June 29th and July 1st would be chopped up and spliced into the ‘live’ album Live in New York City. Back in my Least to Most on Bruce I mentioned how this album suffered from “strange sequencing and fading out”. I stand by that. Until recently a real document of that tour and its closing stand has not been available. But, as Bruce and others, continue to use that weird old ‘Nugs’ service and release more individual shows to the public, I’ve added (thanks to Black Friday the best $4 I’ve spent) Madison Square Garden, New York City, July 1, 2000 to my collection and, let me tell you now: it’s fucking awesome.

Hearing the show from start to end, in full and uninterrupted is a new experience that highlights just how vital and powerful a performance it was. It would be a few tours before Bruce started abandoning setlists and taking requests so those core songs that it revolved around – ‘My Love Will Not Let You Down’, ‘Two Hearts’, ‘The Promised Land’, the fiery recasting of ‘Youngstown’ leading into ‘Murder Incorporated’ are all here as per Live in NYC but still fantastic and exuberant in their performance.

In fact I’d go so far as to say that now, with the benefit of understanding the band’s history, hearing the Van Zandt spotlighting ‘Two Hearts’ is even more rewarding.

There’s a stunning take on ‘Lost in the Flood’ which – it turns out – was the first time this one had been tackled since the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. Tracks favourite ‘The Promise’ is met with a near-orgasmic reaction from the crowd after every verse and chorus and the guaranteed crowd pleasers ‘Badlands’, ‘Backstreets’ both ‘Born’s – though the USA in a heavily stripped-back slide-blues version closer to the take on Tracks delight as they always do. Given that Bruce almost cut all the classics from the set, wanted to stick more closely to Tracks material, makes you more grateful for Landau’s sage wisdom in guiding him toward doing what he does best. There’s also the introduction of Bruce as ‘rock and roll televangelist’ as he promises salvation though the power of rock and roll. Yes, it’s rehearsed and probably didn’t change night to night, but the band and the performances are so tight you can’t help but get caught up in it.

The sound of the band had changed too as this tour marked the point at which the guitars became more dominant. With both Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren in the mix now alongside Springsteen’s own teak-like tone and Patti Scialfa adding an extra rhythm the band shifted to a four-guitar attack which, when coupled with the power of Max Weinberg, makes this era sound so much heavier and more powerful than takes on previous live recordings. It fucking kicks.

But it’s the stuff that, for some bizarre reason, was left off that record that really shines a new light on these concerts. Springsteen chose to open this show with a new song – the Joe Grushecky co-penned ‘Code of Silence’  and dropped a pre-The Rising version of ‘Further On Up The Road’ later into the set. Of course, two other new songs were featured on Live in New York City and also feature here but there placing in the setlist is more natural. Tour anthem and ‘theme’ song ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ is the penultimate song while ‘American Skin (41 Shots)’ came earlier on in the night than that album would lead you to believe. It’s one of Bruce’s finest and made for performing live -which is probably why it’s never been done justice in the studio – because it’s the reaction, the silence as attention is given then the cheers that greet this song and it’s meaning are always worth listening to:

‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ , with it’s message of inclusion and moving forward as one, had been played every night of the tour, usually the set closer. As he introduces the song here, Bruce says that he was “hoping that our tour would be the rebirth and the renewal of our band and of our commitment to serve you. I hope we’ve done that well this year and we´ll continue to try and do so…”

This show does’t end with ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ though. Bruce saved the best for last. For the first time, the band would play ‘Blood Brothers.’ It’s a powerful and moving rendition and Bruce adds a new verse for the occasion and you can hear his voice break with tears. Unrehearsed and impromptu, he calls the band to stand with him and join hands as he sings these new words, in the video that was taken you can see Clarence wasn’t paying attention – he’s caught up in the emotion – and needs to be beckoned, It’s the perfect closer to the tour.

After a twenty-eight song set, packed with much crowd banter and preaching the band leave with a simple “we’ll be seeing ya”. They would be, even if that wasn’t 100% at that point, and would drop many a classic show propelled by great, stadium-ready new songs, but the sheer rediscovery of their power as a band, the promise of that which could lay ahead and the celebration of what they had accomplished make Madison Square Garden, New York City, July 1, 2000 an essential live album for fans and one that I know will be in frequent rotation for a while to come.

 

You don’t know Jack…

/ Tony / 3 Comments

So there’s this thing that I’m sure can’t be unique to me and I really hope that someone reading this will confirm but: you know how you can initially be pretty into an artist / group only to lose interest completely then, years later, rediscover and wonder why the hell you dropped out?

One of those artists that fit in this category for me is Jack Johnson. Some time back in 2003/4 someone recommended I check out this dude who plays some pretty chill, cool stuff. Which I did and I quite enjoyed the two albums that Jack had then put out: Brushfire Fairytales and On and On. They had a nice laid back feel and some good acoustic guitar playing pushing some catchy lyrics and nice ideas. Felt like there was a promise of something better to come..

Come album  three, though, everybody and their radio playlist programming brother seemed to catch the Jack Johnson wave and you couldn’t turn the radio dial without hearing “I hope this old train break downs”. Then he went and made a soundtrack album for some film about a cartoon monkey and with my tastes at the time moving toward the heavier… I tuned out.

Cut to later… a decade-plus later in fact, and it turns out that cartoon monkey is a Curious one called George and my young son loves the film and keeps singing the songs from the soundtrack. So, being who I am I download the thing so we can listen to it in the car (it makes a nice change from The Muppets soundtrack ad naseum) and, what do you know, it actually floats my boat too. So I figure it’s time to see what else Jack had been up to since I tuned out. And, bugger; I find a lot that I dig in his last few albums. So much so, in fact, that they’re on quite a bit these days.

There’s no new ground being broken by Mr Johnson; he’s a retired-competitive surfer (he was the youngest surfer invited to the Pipe Masters but a pretty harsh accident a week later split his head open and ko’d his surf career) who still lives in Hawaii so he’s not about to bust out an OK Computer. Something of a renaissance man and very much active in environmentalism especially, appropriately enough, with a focus on the oceans. Jack Johnson delivers predominantly acoustic based tunes though increasingly embellished with electric guitars and organ with what Rolling Stone have summarised as a ‘Zen-master delivery and swaying-palm-tree melodic sense.’

Once upon a time.. yeah: that was not where my tastes were at. Now as I get older and mellower… well I’m digging it. The fact that my son now sings along to the tunes with me too, well that’s just the icing.

Oddly enough, during my recent rediscovery of Mr Johnson I found that I shared this awakening to his music with none other than Mr Vedder: “There was a point about two or three years ago when I was with Ben Harper. I said, ‘Okay, Ben, how about you and me chip in and get Jack a distortion pedal?’ And we had a little bit of a laugh, you know? But I thought about that a lot, and that was my fault that I wasn’t getting it. What he’s doing is real. As opposed to him getting a distortion box or opposed to him trying to be something else, it’s real. There are so many positive things that you get from listening to his records or seeing him live. I didn’t get it for a long time, but now I get it.”

I haven’t met Ben Harper, let alone chatted Mr Johnson with him. But I did talk to the same friend who’d initially recommended him to me and he had a more succinct response to my having tuned out so much enjoyable music for so long: “you bloody knob”.

So, to stop being a knob, here’s Five From Jack Johnson that I’ve been enjoying of late:

F-Stop Blues

Taylor

Constellations

The original of this is pretty strong but I wouldn’t be a Pearl Jam fan if I didn’t prefer this version.

To The Sea

I guess somebody did by him a distortion pedal.

Ones and Zeros

 

Current spins

/ Tony / 11 Comments

With the Pearl Jam series complete, it feels like as good a time as any to take a look at what else has been going into the old ears of late because, having spent so long on a Pearl Jam bent, I’ve been listening to a shit load of different stuff these last weeks…

Crowded House – Private Universe

It took a while before I got round to it but I’ve been spending a lot of time with the first four Crowded House albums lately and enjoying every track thus far. Their album Together Alone is the standout for me and this song has had a fair few repeats.

Chastity Belt – Different Now

A recent purchase, Chastity Belt’s I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone is a great album that manages to feel like some lost 90’s gem while still sounding fresh and new.

Kurt Vile – Bassackwards

Because it’s one of the two long tracks that new album Bottle It In revolves around and those powder-blue discs have been getting a lot of spins since arriving on my shelves. This – and most of KV’s work – has got such a laid back vibe that you just kinda close your eyes and drift along to. Perfect music to get small to.

Bill Mallonee & The Vigilantes of Love – Resplendent 

This took me a while to get hold of. I heard this on one of those CDs that came free with a magazine some… 18 years ago. I don’t know much about Mr Mallonee but he’s not much about on the likes of Spotify etc so I had to track down a second hand copy of Audible Sigh the album this is from. I’m not usually one for this alt-country but I love a good ‘story’ song and the lyric “’til what you were meets what you’ve now become, grins and says “hey, haven’t we met”

Kate Bush- And Dream of Sheep

Back before she went completely off her rocker and long before she started spouting off about how wonderful that deranged fucktard Theresa May is… Kate Bush made some perfect music. One such example – Hounds of Love: one half the perfect pop album, the other, from which this is, a gorgeous concept suite about a person drifting alone in the sea at night.

And, finally…..

Bruce Springsteen – Racing in the Street ’78 

OK, so I’ve got a BIG BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN POST or 2, or maybe 3 in the making at the moment and so the Boss has been back on heavy spin and this song… this version… fuck but it’s good.

Least to Most: Pearl Jam – Let the Records Play

/ Tony / 10 Comments

Here we are at the end of another (my third to date) Least to Most series.

What’s been learned:

That when I tackle this series on an album by album basis this is a pretty consuming mission when combined with that other thing called ‘life’. And yet I already find myself looking at my shelves and wondering who’s next (it’s not Bob Dylan, that’s for sure).

Pearl Jam are fucking awesome. But then that shouldn’t be a lesson to anyone.

For my money, these blokes were at their finest between 1993-1998.

I still think they have at least one great album in them despite recent evidence.

For those playing along at home, the Least to Most favourite list broke down like this:

10. Backspacer
9. Binaural
8. Lightning Bolt
7. Riot Act
6. Pearl Jam
5. Ten
4. Yield
3. No Code
2. Vs.
1. Vitalogy

That’s today. Well, that’s how I eventually settled the list (after five drafts). Ask me again in a few months that might change. Ask me again when the next studio album eventually drops and it may be all change again.

For my money, if you want a good single, cover-all bases Pearl Jam album you’ll struggle with just one disc but if you get your hands on the Vs. & Vitalogy re-release box you’ll get two of their best and Live at the Orhpeum Theatre which is a fierce, powerful live disc that captured the band live between the two albums and is packed with cuts from Ten and a few rarities too.

Still, for more of what I’d recommend, and as a tip of the hat to Jim over at Music Enthusiast whose playlists are the stuff of curator envy, here’s my Pearl Jam ‘essentials’ playlist wherein I try and cherry pick the best of the band’s ten studio (and one rarities) albums and still end up with sixty tunes. Play in order or play in random but, hopefully, enjoy:

Least to Most: Pearl Jam – Vitalogy

/ Tony / 8 Comments

“This song is about… uh… people who don’t have taste but they like us anyway. It’s called ‘Not For You'”

If Vs. was the sound of Pearl Jam taking control, Vitalogy, released just a year later, is the sound of the band giving a big middle finger to anyone who hand’t got the message yet. Rougher, rawer and more eclectic than anything they’d either released to date or since with songs born out of jam sessions as the communication between band members started to falter, with “eighty percent of the songs were written 20 minutes before they were recorded” according to Stone Gossard. It’s stripped down, it’s lean and uncompromising and marks the first time Pearl Jam would really start to experiment. It’s rife with hostility and tension aimed both outward and inward as, three albums in, cracks began to show within relationships to the point that, while Gossard thought of quitting, drummer Dave Abbruzzese would actually be let go as sessions wound down.

Again – it shouldn’t be good. It shouldn’t be cohesive but it’s not only good: it’s their finest album yet – in my opinion and this is my Least to Most after all. As 1993 tumbled into 1994, Pearl Jam were hitting their songwriting peak and the songs on Vitalogy bristle with an energy that wouldn’t be matched again for a while and certainly not with the level of consistency found here.

The songs here form the template for all Pearl Jam songs to come – there’s the balls-out angry and heavy, there’s the flexing of creative / experimental muscle, the achingly poignant and the perfect mid-tempo. All summised in one rough-hewn gem of an album.

So – you want the balls-out angry and fast? Take that opening volley of songs:’Last Exit’, ‘Spin the Black Circle’ and ‘Not For You’:

As middle fingers to the label go, Pearl Jam chose ‘Spin the Black Circle’, much to Epic’s dismay, as the first single from Vitalogy. “See this needle, Oh see my hand, Drop, drop, dropping it down, oh so gently, here it comes, touch the flame, turn me up, won’t turn you away” is an homage to vinyl and was supposed to sound completely different – it’s a Stone Gossard riff that Vedder first heard at the wrong pitch: “I had come up with something in my truck with the tape player in my hand, but then I realized it was playing at a superhigh pitch. I turned it down, and it was really slow. I was like ‘Oh, fuck.”

‘Not for You’, meanwhile is as openly blunt and angry about the co-opting of the alternative scene as the band would be – save for the time Jeff Ament spotted Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui (who had released a ‘grunge’ line of clothes) and “I went down and did a fake fashion twirl and went ‘Hey Marc, what do you think of this for the next line?’ ” It’s hard to comprehend now in a way but I guess when Ricky Martin is cast on General Hospital as a clone of you – you’re gonna get pissed off. It also burns through ‘Corduroy’ (perfect mid-tempo) with it’s line “they can buy but can’t put on my clothes”:

Both ‘Not for You’ and ‘Corduroy’ are sole Vedder compositions. Vitalogy – dipping back to those inner band tensions mentioned – marked the first Pearl Jam album where Vedder’s songs would by far outweigh those of the other members. Half of the songs here (you can’t really count ‘Aye Davanita’ or ‘Hey Foxymophandlemama, That’s Me’ as songs) are marked as Vedder / Vedder on the lyrics / music front.

Vedder’s “it wasn’t a hostile takeover” caused issues in the group. Stone Gossard was said to have considered leaving as he was no longer the guy who made the final decisions on tunes and vacated his role as mediator within the group (something which Dave Abbruzzese has credited to his departure). With hindsight Jeff Ament has stated that it was simply a case that Vedder was working harder at writing songs than the rest of the band – McCready would enter rehab to receive treatment for alcohol and cocaine abuse during sessions too. “I still don’t know if he was consciously exerting wanting to take over the band or take the reins or the the power. I think it was more like, ‘Hey, man, I’ve got seven complete songs here. What do you guys have?’ and we only had little riffs or two-parter things.”

Of those Vedder / Vedder songs are the achingly poignant Immortality and, of course, one of the band’s most well known:

I’ve probably heard this song live on the numerous shows I have in my iTunes. These days when it’s played live it’s not really the same song but the original is still an out and out classic especially considering its troubled and lengthy gestation as a Pearl Jam studio song. Vedder, fearing it was too raw and direct in terms of emotion, was never happy with how it had been recorded (the band had first tried getting it on tape for Vs.) and, at one point, came close to giving it to Chrissie Hynde to record instead. As it is he changed the final mix for ‘Betterman’ right at the last.

The creative: perhaps too wary of releasing quite so many obviously strong and high-pedigree songs on one album, Pearl Jam used Vitalogy to drop some of their, frankly, weirdest shit to date too. So, following up the beautiful Ament / Vedder collab, ‘Nothingman’…

… is ‘Pry To’

While what could have been a one-two-punch knockout of ‘Betterman’ and ‘Immortality’ is softened by the slotting of ‘Aye Davanita’ between them – it’s “just screwing around” with chanted non-lyrics that O’Brien looped. Then again, there’s something charming about ‘Bugs’ which Vedder, suffering from poison at the time, plays an off-tune accordion.

Then again, perhaps I’m overthinking it. Maybe they really just did like those interludes. But let’s look at it this way: if Vitalogy had been stripped of those and released as a ten track album comprising of songs like ‘Corduroy’, ‘Betterman’, ‘Nothingman’, ‘Last Exit’, ‘Spin the Black Circle’ etc… even with the lean produciton behind them, there’d have been no real way for them to get away from it or say no so easily.

As it is, glorious rough-hewn warts and all, Vitalogy is my favourite Pearl Jam album.