Guest Listener - Tracey Thorn
Who’s Tracey Thorn when she’s at home?
Singer, songwriter. Have also written two books, Bedsit Disco Queen and Naked at the Albert Hall. Write a column in the New Statesman.
Tracey’s Top 3 albums ever?
As everyone says, this is impossible, so here are 3 I love
Stevie Wonder - Innervisions
The Smiths - The Smiths
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
What great album has she never heard before?
Greetings from Asbury Park by Bruce Springsteen
Released in 1973
Before we get to Tracey, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
“I didn’t grow up in a community of ideas - I’m more a product of popular culture” - Bruce Springsteen.
In 1957 Bruce Springsteen saw Elvis perform on The Ed Sullivan show and, obviously, thought it was the best thing he’d ever seen.
The next day he convinced his parents to rent a guitar and he stood in front of the mirror for hours - trying it on for size and aping the moves he’d seen the night before.
Bless him, he was just 6 years old.
But that was that. The guitar was massive and he was tiny. He couldn’t even begin to play it, so they took it back to the shop and he got on with his life - one of relative poverty in New Jersey, of not doing what he was told at school, and of avoiding a pressure cooker father who spent most of the time sitting in the kitchen being angry.
Fast forward 7 years.
He’s still poor, he still hates school, and his dad is still mostly sitting in the kitchen being angry.
It’s all a bit depressing if we’re honest. Something needs to happen.
So, in 1964 Bruce Springsteen saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and, obviously, thought it was the best thing he’d ever seen.
And this time it was different.
The guitar he tried on afterwards was a perfect fit, he could now get his fingers around the fret board, and he was on his way. He said in later years that he felt a power as soon as he held it. It’s the mid ‘60s too - the definitive “what a time to be alive”.
The Stones, Motown and Phil Spector - all these bands, all these sounds erupted around him, and the young Springsteen absorbed it all. He hears The Animals and, for a short while, they’re his favourite band. He loves the fact that none of them are good looking and they’re actually called The Animals - a great name for a bunch of rough looking fellas from the north east of England who look like animals. On top of that they have a song called We Gotta Get Out of this Place which the young Springsteen takes to heart - its allusions to taking flight, to escaping “this dirty old part of the city, where the sun refused to shine”. He played it over and over, charmed and excited by its sentiment.
He then hears Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone whilst in the car with his mum and his head fell off. All those words, fitting so snug, and suddenly he has a new favourite. And then he hears Van Morrison too. And it starts again. The list is endless. Every time he turns on the radio there’s something different, something to excite a teenager with nothing else to do but listen.
He eventually finishes school, leaving behind a memory of a loner kid that just wanted to play guitar all the time - one who didn’t even show up for his own graduation ceremony.
After school he joins a series of bands, with no other aim than to become a cool rhythm guitarist - somewhere stage left or right, strumming away and parading his wares. But he soon realises that his ambition, although limited at this point, sets him apart from other musicians and he moves to centre stage - first with The Castiles, as lead singer and guitarist, then with a power trio called Earth, and eventually with Steel Mill - literally the worst name for a band ever. About as exciting as calling your band Coal Mine. They were a bit rubbish too, sort of proggy, sort of Creamish - lots of hair and too many interludes.
No wonder they didn’t make it.
However, this period of band hopping enables him to meet and acquire a network of musicians in the Jersey shore area, including future E Street band members Steve Van Zandt, Danny Federici, and Vini Lopez. Along the way he also refines his own song-writing craft in a variety of different styles, pulling on a wide range of influences. Because the thing about this period in his career, like most things Springsteen, is that it goes on for bloody ages - seven years to be precise. A protracted musical education that sees him achieve nothing but a big fish status in the small New Jersey pond and a CV of failed bands with rubbish names.
Still, it was his education.
It’s also notable that, during this time, Springsteen shows no appetite for the emerging drug culture of the late '60s. He doesn’t even smoke any weed. I’m not criticising him for that of course - I’m just saying that, when you think about it, it makes total sense. At no point does Springsteen ever come across as a man who has been totally off his head and wondered whether his own face was about to collapse. At no point do you hear drugs in his songs.
Likewise, he also manages to avoid that other late '60s nightmare - Vietnam. When he was drafted in 1968 he failed his medical on account of being a “physical wreck”. I know, it’s hard to believe. If Bruce Springsteen was a physical wreck, how strong were the men that passed? And how strong were the North Vietnamese? Their concerts must go forever.
Without a drug habit and jungle warfare to stop
him, he ploughs on as a working musician and aspiring songwriter. Around this
time his parents also moved to California - leaving Springsteen free from their
expectations and overbearing opinions on what he should be doing with his life.
He could also spend more time in the kitchen.
He’s now fully committed, uninhibited, and cooking his own meals.
In November 1971, he arranges a meeting with a successful producer called Mike Appel and plays him a couple of songs. Appel is simultaneously impressed with his intensity but unimpressed with the content. He sees something there, but not enough, and tells him “you’ll have to do better than that if you want an album contract”.
Springsteen tells him he’s going to visit his parents in California for Christmas - but that he’ll be back with a new set of songs.
Often in these stories, there’s a pivot from which everything revolves - a moment that comes from nowhere and shapes the future. In the case of Springsteen’s career, that moment is the Christmas visit to his parents in 1971. Whatever happened, however it happened, it was there that he found the formula that he’d been missing for all these years.
In February of 1972 he comes back to the East Coast, through Appels open door, and plays him a new selection of songs.
And the one that does it is It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City.
Springsteen plays that opening line - “I had skin like leather and the diamond hard look of a cobra” and Appel asks him to start again. Springsteen stops, delivers the opening line again, and Appel says “I thought that’s what you said”.
He then gets through the rest of the song and Appel is left in a state of shock. He realises he now has an entirely different proposition on his hands than the one he saw a couple of months ago. Shortly after, he arranges a meeting with John Hammond - the legendary A & R man at Columbia who had signed Dylan a decade before.
Springsteen plays him the same song, It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City, and Hammond jumps on board straightaway. He records a series of demos and sends them to Clive Davis, Head of Coumbia Records, with the following message -
“Here is a copy of a couple of reels of Bruce Springsteen, a very talented kid who recorded these 12 songs in a period of around 2 hours last Wednesday. I think we better act quickly”
Clive Davis’s response came the next day -
“I love Bruce Springsteen!”
Of course he does.
He’d done it. At 23 years old he signed with Columbia and started work on his first album - Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ.
But before I tell you how much I love this album, let me quickly tell you this.
A consequence of coming of age in the '80s meant that, for years, I didn’t entirely understand the appeal of Springsteen. As is always the case, the timing of entry is crucial, and he seemed so incongruous to a teenager listening to The Smiths, Husker Du, and Madonna. I was a product of popular culture myself and all those songs about endless journeys, all that fist pumping and bandanas, just weren’t doing anything for me.
I liked staying in. I liked watching test cricket. He was just so exhausting and he wore too much denim - sometimes without sleeves.
He never seemed cool enough, or even weird enough, to warrant an exploration into a back catalogue that was never name checked by my heroes. Maybe if The Jesus and Mary Chain had cited hearing Born to Run on a council estate in East Kilbride as THE defining moment that made them form a band it would have been different. But they didn’t, they were too busy taking the piss and telling me to listen to The Velvet Underground.
So all the ingredients for Springsteen fandom were spectacularly missing, falling on deaf and prejudiced teenage ears. I didn’t even drive. I didn’t even have the luxury of fancying him and his bloody gorgeous arms.
I was missing out.
Then I listened to Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ.
And it was this album that made me get it - the utter charm and exuberance as he spews out all these words with a band that tries its best to keep up. This isn’t the widescreen Springsteen of his later years, all sparse and anxious. This is him foaming at the mouth, telling stories of trashcan characters on the boardwalk at weekends - in a way that was snug, that was fitting. It was cool, it was weird. Everyone was funny and everyone was pretty, and everyone was coming towards the centre of the city.
Even when someone dies in Lost in the Flood, the narrator remarks how his body falls with a “beautiful thud”. It’s a small detail, but it matters and I love it. It’s Springsteen at his most warm and positive, at his most playful, doing that weird Dylan thing of using nouns as adjectives all over the place - Gasoline boys and Princess cards and Barroom eyes.
And what he leaves out, because they haven’t happened on his journey yet, is all that stuff about thwarted ambition, the deindustrialisation of working life, and America’s place in the world. All that stuff that meant nothing to me as a teenager growing up in South East London in the '80s.
Yet within the characters and the stories, the escape is still there. That perpetual Springsteen narrative of travelling and hitting the road - trying to recreate the final credits of a film in song. But here it’s different. Here he’s undertaking the journey with enthusiasm, here he’s looking forward to the destination rather than fleeing the scene with anxiety. It’s an escape full of possibility. You’re excited for him, you want to go along for the ride. It’s the final scene of The Graduate.
Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ is the magic of a first date, an album that would have made loads of sense to me as a teenager - as much as it does now.
But more than that, it’s the one that left me wanting more. It’s the one that taught me that, on some journeys, it really is best to start at the beginning.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ.
Rolling Stone ranked it the 379th greatest album of all time and the 37th best debut ever.
So, over to you Tracey. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
Greetings from Asbury Park came out in 1973 when I was 11, and at that point I wasn’t buying records at all. I had a brother who was 10 years older than me, and through him I heard people like David Bowie and early Rod Stewart, but I don’t think he was a Springsteen fan. I started buying records myself in 1977, mostly punk singles. By 1979 I had lots of 45s, but only a handful of albums. I liked the romantic end of punk, energetic love songs more than slogans, so I had the first Undertones album, Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True, The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys and Buzzcocks Another Music in a Different Kitchen. Along with these, and perhaps slightly out of place, sat Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, which I had bought when it came out in 1978, and I was 16 years old.
How did I come to buy that record? Possibly because he’d co-written Patti Smith’s Because the Night, and she was my heroine. But also possibly because on the cover was a photo of him wearing a leather jacket, looking just punk enough, and very much like a young Al Pacino. On the whole British punks didn’t look like Al Pacino. And I know I’ve given the impression that I spent all day listening to the Raincoats and doing my homework inside the wardrobe, but that was only half the time. The other half, in truth, I spent gazing at the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town, in a way that I never gazed at the cover of My Aim is True.
I also really liked the record inside, despite its exotic otherness. On the surface his songs were all about cars and badlands and mean streets and stuff I knew nothing about, but underneath they were all about desperate yearning and thwarted desire, and at 16 I was full of both of those. I listened to Darkness on the Edge of Town again the other day and remembered why I liked it. He sounded like he’d listened to Lou Reed, and Spector, and the Shangri-las’ tumultuous street ballads. And above all he fitted into my instinctive love for the romantic underdog. Emotional lyrics about heroic losers. Songs that reached straight for your heart. In the cerebral climate of post-punk I clung to that, somewhat guiltily.
So basically, I fell a little bit in love with Springsteen back then as a teenager. I wondered why you never seemed to meet a Real Boy who looked like that or who’d write passionate songs about you. And maybe even have a car.
Later, I bought other records by him, and went back and listened to earlier stuff too, so why have I never got round to listening to this, his first album? Sheer laziness. I’m not a collector or a completist, and I’m happy to own a few records by artists I like, but not seek out everything else.
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
I’ve listened three times - the first time out walking with headphones on, the second at home sitting down, and then again out walking. It sounds better when you’re out walking.
The first thing that strikes me is the relative smallness and intimacy of the sound. It’s a tight little combo record - small 70’s drums, guitar, piano, sax - quite loose, slightly scrappy in places, none of the epic stuff that came later. And the energy and enthusiasm just leaps out at you - that eagerness, it’s really infectious.
But what also hits me straight away is the sound of someone still in thrall to his heroes. Much of it is VERY Van Morrison - not just in the songwriting, but even some of the singing, like he’s going for something of Van’s reediness or nasal tone. And the lyrics are VERY post-Dylan, all wordy and shopping-listy, with that stream-of-consciousness thing going on, a lot of them just sounding like second-hand nonsense. At worst they descend into truly awful poetry - “Well, I’m just a lonely acrobat, the live wire is my trade/ I’ve been a shine boy for your acid brat and a wharf rat of your state” - “Nuns run bald through Vatican halls, pregnant, pleadin’ immaculate conception” etc etc. There’s loads of this stuff. Also the songs are packed full of “characters”, the kind songwriters use for colour. The album includes all of the following - “nuns, sailors, gypsies, circuses, cripples, pimps, gamblers, gasoline boys”. You get the picture.
I’m much more a fan of the moments when he simplifies it all, like in Growin’ Up, which has some nice romanticised stuff about teenage years, combing his hair in the mirror sort of thing. For You is a love song with a basic metaphor about love being like an illness (“crawl into my ambulance, your pulse is getting weak!” oh if you insist). And there’s a great bit at the end of Mary Queen of Arkansas where he suddenly breaks out with a line that sounds like the real Bruce Springsteen - “But I know a place where we can go, Mary / Where I can get a good job and start out all over again”. This is what he’d prove to be really good at - straightforward songs about ordinary people. For me the whole point of Springsteen is his sincerity, he’s at his best when he succumbs to that.
On the plus side, his voice is gorgeous on much of the record. That ragged husky baritone always seems to come straight from his chest, his heart basically. The album as a whole is much less dark than Darkness on the Edge of Town, which is where I first discovered him, and there’s none of the desperate weariness of The River. It’s definitely a younger man’s album, more carefree. In live footage of this era Springsteen always looks like an eager crowd-pleasing puppy of a performer. He smiles all the time on stage, not just smiles, GRINS. He loves it all, he loves playing, he loves us. It’s adorable. And you can hear all that on this album. So it’s a really great debut - you’d know there was something there if this was the first thing you heard by him. It’s bursting with promise.
Would you listen to it again?
I might well listen again, or I might just make a Springsteen Playlist to listen to when I’m on my power walks. I would put Blinded by the Light, Growin’ Up, and For You on it, along with Born to Run and Badlands and Thunder Road in order to get get a good work-out from all the extra air-punching
A mark out of 10?
8
RAM Rating – 9
Guest Rating – 8
Overall – 8.5
So that was Week 49 and that was Tracey Thorn. Turns out she’d never listened to Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ before because she was spending too much time looking at the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town and living in a wardrobe. So we made her listen to it and she really liked it, especially when walking. So, if on your travels you happen to see someone speed past you with an unerring determination, dressed from head to toe in denim whilst punching the air, then you’ll know exactly how that situation came to pass.
Next week, our last edition of the year. Samuel West listens to something from 1965 for the very first time.
Until then, have a great week and here’s It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City
Enjoy
Ruth and Martin
xx