Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ79EfXQ9LE[/embedyt]
Rock and roll still makes me cry. Sometimes I laugh, and sometimes I dance, and sometimes I write my little jokes. But sometimes I cry, and that’s the point.
If rock and roll don’t put its dick in your heart, then it don’t mean anything.
There’s a bunch of versions floating around, but you want this one – the one from C.W. Post College that became a classic by accident.
The one where Santa brings Clarence a new saxophone.
“My sweet babies and little princes and princesses and foxes and all you naughty doggies: we welcome you…to ROCK AND ROLL!”
Bobby hits a heroic chord on his guitar, which–granted–would have been more awesome had the rest of the band joined in, or at least not openly heckled him. It was still pretty cool, though.
“I need to hear you, my sweet babies. Listen to Bobby and listen to his awesome hair about loooooove. Ahhh, yes, mother-and-fatherfuckers. You gotta turn your love on, turn your light on, gotta keep it on, as the man used to say. Gotta let love open the door, like the other man used to say. You can’t put it in my butt, like the girl last night said.
“Raise those hands in the air, babies. And wave ’em. But: care, dammit.”
At this point, Garcia is only being kept on the stage and away from his dressing room by Parish dressed in hockey goalie gear.
“Y’gotta get in the Van of Faith, my sweet babies! Get in that van and drive down that Highway of Excellence, stop at the Diner of Freedom, order some Eggs of Creativity and Bacon of Politeness.
(Bobby had been to the Springsteen show a few nights previous.)
“So. I gotta hear it. I gotta HEAR it, babies. Lemme hear you say ‘love’ real loud. Lemme hear it. Yeah! One more time!
“You’re saying ‘love,’ right? I’m hearing ‘glove.’ One more time, really enunciate.
“I’m still hearing ‘glove.’ How weird is this? Cuz I figure you’re all saying ‘love,’ but–shit. Garcia? Parish, how’d Garcia get by you?”
“Went through the five-hole, Bob.”
“Dammit. End of first set.”
I wrote about Bruce and the Dead and how different they are, even though if you think about it, they’re both overstaffed rock bands playing Chuck Berry songs in hockey arenas for white people. When you look at it that way and think about how exclusive a club that is, then yes there might be a resemblance.
But the moment of greatest divergence comes when Bruce Introduces The Band. Bruce once introduced the band for 35 minutes. If you were an acquaintance of Bruce’s and ran into him while he was with someone to whom you had not been introduced, just keep walking, man; Bruce will take a quarter-hour to say the person’s name, but it’ll be the greatest 15 minutes you ever spent. It is show-biz at its cheesiest, and therefore most authentic, best. He makes up little stories and cute pet names and shares wacky Jersey anecdotes and then you realize it’s been 12 minutes since he started this and he’s only at Roy Bittan. For a while, after Bruce rebuilt the Twin Towers and he became soulful and about family and settled into his latter-years role as “That guy from the AA meeting who calls everyone ‘brother’,” he turned the Band Intro into a song, an honest to god song about how much they all love each other even though they’re getting older and Bruce intros people, and EVERYBODY SINGS A WHOLE VERSE. It takes hooooooooooours.
The Dead did not do the show-biz introduction thing; it would not have gone well. Bobby would have to do it, of course. He had been pretending not to want to do it, but he REALLY, REALLY wanted to, so he kept dropping hints with everybody and no one knew what the fuck Bobby was talking about, so one night while Garcia was tuning and Phil was slapping a roadie, hard and in the face, Bobby just launches into–
“All right, people, lemme hear you! On the drums, stage left, Mr. Mickey–”
THWOCK a drumstick hits him in the back of the head, followed by a drum.
“That’s not cool! Over here on bass, from Palo Alto–”
“YOU KNOW YOUR PLACE, BOY!”
“Sorry, Phil. Ah, fuck, Garcia snuck into the bathroom. End of first set.”
I was raised in New Jersey, so if you say bad things about Bruce Springsteen, I have to impregnate your cousin. No, not that cousin, the other one, the one no one would expect. My family takes our New Jersey rock seriously: my cousin once punched out Jon Bon Jovi. That is an actual true fact.
For graduation, one of my friends gave, as a “graduation gift” (don’t ask, it was a suburban thing), around 10 people the exact same CD, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Not only was it the ballsiest act of record snobbery in the books, but it was the most successful: all of those recipients still listen to the record regularly. Because it’s The Wild and the Innocent, man, But it was also telling for the fact that in New Jersey in the 90’s, everyone was simply assumed to be into Bruce.
So, what do Bruce and the Dead have in common? Quite a bit, but not very much at all.
They both made their bones as live performers, got ripped off by shady idiots, and became beloved by white people everywhere. The Dead built a Wall of Sound, Bruce ripped off the wall of sound. But the analogy quickly falls apart.
Both favored the approach of putting as many people on the payroll as possible, but Bruce hired employees, and then yelled at them a lot. Which shouldn’t be held against him: it’s how most bandleaders have always treated their musicians. James Brown used to fine people for missing notes. Gene Krupa only played the drums for the permission it gave him to scream at sax players. If E Street bassist Garry W. Tallent had ever tried any of Phil’s multi-octave meanderings, Bruce would’ve just outright beat him to death in front of the rest of the band as a warning.
Bruce and the Dead never met, seemingly. They certainly never jammed together. Neither Mickey nor Phil would have taken well to being counted off in such a commanding tone; it would have ended poorly.
Yes, both favored 8-minute long songs, but in Bruce’s case, 5 of those minutes were the band vamping while he told a story about his father. Or, possibly, about the Highway of Hope or the River of Faith or the Off-Ramp of False Equivalence or whatever the fuck he’s been yammering about for the past 15 years ago or so.
(Plus, Bruce’s accent has now lapsed into either speech impediment or elaborate put-on. Growing up, I had a friend whose mom had gone to high school with Bruce, because everyone in New Jersey is required to have some connection, however tenuous, to Bruce under penalty of someone going, “What the fuck, you don’t have a tenuous connection to Bruce? What the fuck over here?” Do I need to mention that this woman who grew up not two miles from Springsteen’s house at the exact same time had not one hint of grizzled twang to her voice? At the beginning of his career, Bruce sounded like a sweathog, but now he’s Johnny 99% and he wants to Occupy It (All Night Long.))
Although, I certainly would have enjoyed hearing Garcia try to do one of Bruce’s raps:
“So, see, my dad, who was very much kind of his own avatar? If you can grok me on that, y’know? So, he was very much a man of his times–ooh, wait, I heard this cool thing about watches…
“GIVE ME YOUR LIVERS!”
“Someone take away Phil’s mic, please.”
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