Banner ads are the digital equivalent of 8x10 flyers stuck beneath windshield wipers. Much effort, nil impact. Our brains are conditioned to ignore them, which is why advertisers indidiously scurry them across body copy like lava swallowing hillside villages. A recent visit to the
NY Times' site presented a nostalgic exception. Just above the masthead was an image (
left) as indelible to my childhood as my first baseball glove (Willie Stargell Rawlings), car (1976 Mercury Bobcat V6), or girlfriend (Tina Trezza).
The ad promoted an upcoming November reissue of
Bruce Springsteen's 1978 masterpiece in a massive box-set called
The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story (
below).
The 'Deluxe Package' of the set will include a documentary of Bruce and the E Street Band circa '76-78, over 4 hours of concert footage (including a much-bootlegged Houston concert near the end of the 'Darkness' tour and a recent performance of the album in its entirety at the
Paramount Theater in
Asbury Park), and 21 previously unreleased songs from the
Darkness recording sessions.
'Previously unreleased'. A term only a record company executive could apply to the 1976-78 stuudio recordings of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band -- recordings that have resonated with fans for decades and helped me cement a friendship that long ago crossed over to brotherhood.
I am a child of NJ. Grew up in quiet, Caucasian suburbs crisscrossed by interstates. Played little league baseball and high school basketball. Decorated the walls of my wood-paneled room with Rangers, Yankees, Giants, Knicks, girls in bikinis and an evolving roster of musicians and bands. Shared with my brother a drumkit that our dad mysteriously dragged home from Leo's Tavern one night. Underachieved in school. Wore bad haircuts and zipper shirts bought from Just Shirts at the
Willowbrook Mall. Went into the City for trouble. And passed through every stage of adolescence listening to the music of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
One afternoon in 1977 or '78 neighbor and friend Vin Fiorito came by with a copy of
Born to Run and put it on my turntable. I held the gatefolded album while '
Thunder Road' played and instantly had to know more about the scruffy guitarist and monstrous sax player pictured on its front and back.
The Beatles,
Pink Floyd and
Boston (yes, Boston) dominated my tastes at the time, but Springsteen's appeal was visceral, like the smell of hot grease in an auto repair shop. At the conclusion of 8th grade a friend named Frank Alfieri invited me and a few others to his family's shore house in
Seaside Park for a junior high school graduation weekend. One of Frank's sisters supplied buckets of beer but I vividly recall a boardwalk awash with Springsteen, Led Zep and Jim Morrisson t-shirts. Bruce's world domination via the
Born In the USA juggernaut was several years away but in Seaside Park in the summer of 1980 he was the undisputed Boss.
Junior high also featured a one-and-only exposure to Springsteen lyrics as learning material. A petite, peroxide-blonde English teacher named Ms O'Neill handed out Xerox'd copies of the lyric sheet inserted inside the
Darkness on the Edge of Town album and led a class discussion. Whether she examined the blue collar heroism of Springsteen's characters or the preponderance of cars in his songs I have not a clue. I only remember floating near the ceiling until the class bell rang.
The River was my freshman-year companion in the back of buses traveling to and from away basketball games. This was pre-iPod ... pre-Walkman, too. I carried a battered boom box and cheap cassette copies of 'The River' or listened to it in my bedroom via cheap, puffy headphones. Like manilla paper markers in an old library card catalog, each subsequent Springsteen album sonically delineated periods in my life.
Unlike the glut of multi-media materials available in our digital age, the early '80s were a dry time for Springsteen fans. Bruce was a notorious perfectionist in the studio and was loyal to organic album themes -- even if it meant jettisoning songs with commercial appeal like '
Because the Night' and '
Fire' (which were turned into hits by
Patti Smith and the
Pointer Sisters, respectively). He was also involved in a protracted lawsuit with manager
Mike Appel over song rights and was unable to release new music, a struggle that resulted in lyrics like this from 'The Promise':
Well I built that Challenger by myself
But I needed money and so I sold it.
I lived a secret I should have kept to myself
But I got drunk one night and I told it.
Bootlegs filled the long gaps between official releases. And this, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to a young man named Jeff Stefanick.
Whether it be at the
Englishtown flea market or a vinyl record shop off the Morristown Green owned by a chain-smoking divorcee named Mal, nobody had a nose for finding studio outtakes like Jeff. They were the prize. Alternate takes of released songs with different lyrics, instrumentals with familiar passages and 'new' songs left off official releases.
We laughed at the musings of
Backstreets magazine founder Charlie Cross as he pleaded with Springsteen to release 'Roulette' and studied the back of Dave Marsh's
Born To Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story for the origins of unreleased songs.
Live bootlegs were common, especially after Springsteen performed radio-simulcasted concerts in 1975 at the Bottom Line (released on bootleg as 'The Great White Boss' an allusion to the first bootleg ever, 'The Great White Hope' of early Dylan demos) and two concerts in 1978 -- one at the legendary
Capitol Theater in Passaic released on bootleg as 'Piece de Resistance' (
above), the other at Winterland in San Francisco bootlegged as 'Live in the Promised Land' (
right).
My first vinyl bootleg was one of many to use 'The Jersey Devil' as its title, forgettable but for clean live versions of The Drifters' 'Up on the Roof' and Chuck Berry's 'You Never Can Tell'. That was the nature of early boots -- there were no online reviews to consult or labels that guaranteed quality, as would arise with the advent of bootleg CDs. We were in thrall to the thrill of discovering a studio outtakes boot offering something --
anything -- we hadn't heard before.
Truth be told, there was more to '76-78 studio outtakes than the lure of the chase. A disaffected Springsteen sang songs like 'Outside Looking In', 'Candy's Boy' and 'Spanish Eyes' with the tired desperation of a hostage reading a manifesto written by his captors 'Outside Looking In', with its Buddy Holly beat and Byrds jangling 12-string guitars, at first sounded like a rough one-off with the band but on subsequent listens revealed a pain never heard before on a Springsteen record:
My life's the same story
Beginning to end
Beginning to end
I'm on the outside .... lookin' in.
Even a jarring background vocal by Clarence Clemons couldn't dilute the power of a song this heartfelt and raw, which was the nature of outtakes of this period. They were non-mastered mana for Jeff and I as we drove the state and county roadways of Morris County in a variety of crap cars, stopping for post-midnight Whoppers at Burger Kings along Rt 46, dumping tales of romantic angst on each other, wondering where the literal and figurative roads of our lives were taking us.
This photo of Jeff and I (
below) was taken in Albany, NY, where a dozen or so of us traveled to see Bruce and the E Street Band during their
reunion tour in November 1999. Over the years he and I saw more shows together up and down the East Coast than I could possibly remember.
We'd often be in the same building if not in adjoining seats, and if I was at a show that he wasn't I'd wonder what he'd think of that night's setlist or special guest. Still, there was something pure about the nights spent driving aimlessly together, listening to 'Darkness' era outtakes, a couple of tortured souls lucky to have crossed paths in 7th grade science class. Nearly 30 years down switchbacks and straightaways neither one of us ever saw coming and the only downside to
The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story being released this November is that I won't be able to listen to it with Jeff beside me, a full tank of gas to burn, and miles and miles of stories to share.
Returning to Fiji late tonight to attend the funeral of Pandit Atma Ram Sharma (above). Aradhna's grandfather. My saasuma's (mother-in-law's) dad. Father of 16 sons and daughters who are spread out around the world. Legend on the island of Viti Levu. A source of wisdom, strength and inspiration to all who heard him speak, who met his family, who played soccer against him in his youth, who drew a game of snooker against him at the Sigatoka club. Nana was a living rebuke to the Fijian policy of indigenous 'land rights', a policy that barred him from owning the land he and his family have worked for over 50 years. In a country with an atrocious health care system he remained vital well into his 80s. He battled a variety of after-effects of a stroke several weeks ago and finally succumbed early Friday morning at a hospital in Lautoka. His funeral near Sigatoka and on the farm in Korokoro will draw men, women and children from all around Viti Levu. Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians, Hindus and Muslims. Greatness is rare in Fiji. Nana was an exceptional exception.
