Two years ago I quietly began writing the Basement Songs posts on my blog, Thunderbolt. At the time I didn’t know who my audience was, as I honestly believed that ten, maybe twenty readers were checking out Thunderbolt on a weekly basis. Inspired by some of the finer music blogs I’d come across, I thought that Basement Songs would be an interesting alternative to the daily confessionals I was posting. At least it could be fun. As I’ve written before, the early months of 2007 were tough. I believe that the 2005 death of my friend, Matt, and a laundry list of regrets and unresolved issues finally caught up with me. Coupled with the ongoing stress of worrying about my son, I sunk into a deep funk (and not the kind of funk that involves the groove of Duck Dunn). Despite those dark months, I found great pleasure in writing the Basement Songs. A friend used the term “therapeutic communication” once, and I believe that’s a sound way of describing what I was doing. Again, I had no idea who was reading; I just needed to get some things off of my chest, and I wanted to share my love of certain music.
One person who was reading happened to be Jeff Giles, whose Jefitoblog was one of the best written and enjoyable sites I visited daily. Jeff and I became friends thanks to a comment he made about Springsteen and my response. This led to the exchange of some choice bootlegs, an Idiot’s Guide to Journey, and then one of the kindest gestures I’ve experienced this decade: Bloggers for a Cure, in which Jeff and some other fine bloggers (most of whom write for this site) joined together to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Jeff was also a strong supporter of the Basement Songs and would link each new post in his weekly “Friday Linkfest.” (more…)
On last month’s Popdose Podcast, I endorsed The Light in Darkness, an oral history about Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town album and its subsequent tour as told by Springsteen fans. In full disclosure, its editor, Lawrence Kirsch, is a friend and I contributed an essay to the book (as did Popdose’s Farkate Film Flashback columnist, “Outlaw” Pete Chianca). But even though I’ve had my copy for about a month, it took a while for me to finally get through it. The reason isn’t (entirely) due to my laziness, but rather that I wanted to savor every word.
You see, compiling fan stories about a favorite artist, as Lawrence did in 2007 with For You, can be difficult. There’s the potential for repetition, and that possibility increases when you decide to narrow the scope of the book to one year in the artist’s life. So when you read it, you don’t want the stories bleeding into each other. You just take it in about ten pages at a time. (more…)
Wow! You like us! You really like us! The numbers for Episode 1 of The Popdose Podcast were so high that we knew we had to come back for a second episode. (In all honesty, we were coming back regardless. We had too much fun last time, and none of us know how to take a hint anyway.)
With Halloween just a week away at the time of this recording, we decided to ask ourselves: what scared the crap out of us as children? Although our therapy bills this week have definitely skyrocketed, we hope you’ll find our confessions entertaining — and if not, you can count on plenty — plenty! — of digressions into other topics on the way.
So listen away! You can download here, or subscribe in iTunes (link below). Please leave us your thoughts in the comments, and if you like the show, please leave a review on iTunes. Enjoy!
The Popdose Podcast, Episode 2: Dixie Carter’s Laundry (1:01:36, 56.5 MB), featuring Jeff Giles, Jason Hare, and Dave Lifton. Download from You can also subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.
Show Notes
0:00 Intro, including an unfortunate digression into having sex with soup.
Theme: Things That Scared the Crap Out of Us as Children (more…)
There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: those who feel that rock and roll deserves a permanent place to showcase the important effect it’s has had on popular culture, and those who believe that the intention of rock music was rebellion against the mainstream; that a stuffy old shrine goes against everything the music stands for, and screw you if you don’t agree with them. I belong to the former group, partly because I’m from Cleveland, Ohio and got caught up in the hysteria of bringing the Rock Hall to the north coast, and also because I feel that there needs to be a place where people can look at rock and roll as an art and examine its history. I’ve been to the museum, and could have stayed for days marveling at Hendrix’s guitar and fragments of Keith Moon’s drum kit.
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and there’s a star-studded concert in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the occasion. In conjunction with the anniversary, Time-Life has released a nine-DVD collection called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live. It includes eight discs of Hall of Fame inductions and a DVD featuring some of the performances from the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert that took place in Cleveland. Since the very first induction back in 1986, we’ve seen and heard about the induction ceremonies (usually in New York) that are a gathering of music legends. They get up on stage and perform their biggest hits; give speeches that are sometimes emotional, sometimes raucous, sometimes spiteful, and at the end of the night all of the inductees and presenters come together for one kick assjam session. With this DVD collection, it appeared as if music aficionados — you know, you and I, the people who made these rock stars legends — were finally going to be included in these events, and not just through the chopped-up versions we’ve seen on VH1.
E Street Band saxophone player Clarence Clemons, known the world over as the “Big Man,” has written a new book with his friend Don Reo. As the subtitle, “Real Life & Tall Tales,” suggests, the book is a wildly entertaining blend of autobiography and a substantial amount of myth. You can read Pete Chianca’s review for Popdose here. The mythmaking comes via tall tales that Clarence calls “Legends.” Whether he’s riding big waves with Oprah, playing pool in Havana with Fidel Castro, or hanging out with Bruce Springsteen in a remote area of Hawaii, it’s clear that Clarence Clemons has led an extraordinary life. I had a chance to speak with him on the telephone last week.
Hi, Clarence. Are you there?
I’m here. I didn’t do it. I’m innocent. (laughs)
Are you on the road today?
I’m in Philadelphia. We have two more shows here, then I’ll go back to New York. (more…)
One thing you learn pretty early on in Springsteen saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ memoir Big Man(Grand Central Publishing, 400 pages, $26.99, Oct. 21) is that you’re not going to be reading any of the real juicy stuff.
“Maybe I’ll write a book that has all the sex-and-drugs stories from the early years and publish it after all of us are dead,” Clemons writes. “Nah, I can’t do that either, ’cause now all of us have kids and grandkids.”
But beyond the fact that you know a lot got left out of Big Man — a nickname Clemons says came not from Springsteen but from a little old lady in Bloomingdale’s — there’s another complicating factor: A lot of the stuff in it never even happened. Clemons and his writing partner Don Reo label a good number of the chapters “Legends,” and promise that those sections include “some fact and a lot of fiction.” It’s unorthodox, but just think of the trouble James Frey could have saved himself if he’d included the same warning.
Still, you’ve got to read between a lot of lines to get the complete picture of Clarence Clemons from Big Man, since the way it’s written relies less on historical fact and more on the personality of its subject. Fortunately, Clemons has plenty of that to spare. (more…)
I led a semi-sheltered suburban life in my high school years, so it wasn’t until MTV made its debut on my cable system a year after it launched in 1981 that I really started getting exposure to music that wasn’t AC/DC or Rush. But that’s not all MTV was able to do. Because the channel only had so many videos to play in a 24 hour programming schedule, it meant that they were open to artists who had videos ready to go — ’cause, you know, they were starving for content. I had no idea what was going on in the bowels of MTV programming back then, but what I did find that I was able to hear and see artists I really didn’t know much about. Of course if you look at this list you’re thinking “Yeah, it’s classic ’80s…so what?” But before they were classics, they were new songs that were untried in the music marketplace. But MTV being what it was back in the day, meant the programmers were able to give many of these song/videos extremely high rotations. So much so, that one couldn’t help like (or love) what they were hearing or seeing. MTV affected radio playlists in ways program directors never thought it could. Kids seeing the video for something like “Rockit” on MTV would call their local stations and request the song. As the requests piled up, the songs eventually made their way to radio. Not all were breakaway hits, but if it wasn’t for MTV they certainly wouldn’t have been played on the radio all that much. (more…)
I’m writing to you as a longtime fan. I’ve been to about 60 shows, going back over 35 years. I can’t begin to tell you how important your music has been to me. As a proud son of New Jersey, I’m grateful for the respect you’ve brought to our state for your art, and for the way you’ve lived your life.
For a number of those years, I’ve been bothered by the dramatic announcements by your advisers that the latest on-sale has sold out in “five seconds” or whatever, when the fact is that those shows are not sold out at all. There are thousands of tickets being held back. The effect of this, for the less savvy or inexperienced concertgoer, is to drive people into the arms of scalpers in the near term, because they’re afraid that if they don’t pay the exorbitant prices they’ll miss out. The fact is that if they would wait, they would find that thousands of tickets suddenly appear out of nowhere shortly before the show from official sources, not to mention the additional thousands that are offered on eBay, or various message boards, at face value, or less. (more…)
Why You Remember Them: You cannot imagine how often, in the research of this column, one comes across the phrase “lumped into the hair metal category,” as though being a cornball Southern-rock outfit with a wacky-eyed lead singer and a schlong obsession is better. Jackyl formed in 1990 as a hair meta … ahem, Southern-rock boogie band, but if you’ve read this far you’re probably going, “The jags with the chainsaw, right?” Right.
Total Sales: Jackyl moved 1.35 million units in 1992, making me sad for 1992.
OK, But I’m Pretty Sure Those Are Dogs on the Cover of This Album: Right, you tell the chainsaw-wielding redneck he’s got his canids misidentified.
GET THE EFF OUT OF HERE, BRENDAN O’BRIEN?: Before resorting to producing hillbilly crap by “Bruce Springsteen” and “Pearl Jam,” O’Brien ran with the big dogs. I am desperately hoping these are people who still keep in touch.
Jesse: “Brendan, it’s Jesse, listen, I have a great idea for a new track that…”
Brendan: “(interrupting) Does it have a chainsaw?”
Jesse: “Yes.”
Brendan: “Christ.” (click)
Two years ago, when I was working on this column’s debut, I wrote about Bruce Springsteen’s “Book of Dreams” and what the song means to Julie and me. During the first month of our courtship I created my first mixtape for her, entitled HEY, HEY, JULIE! On that tape was the Springsteen song, one that’s grown to have profound meaning in our relationship.
We began dating in August of 1992, and soon thereafter, I threw this tape together in a flurry of inspiration, wanting to give Julie something that came from my heart. I don’t recall the actual minutes spent in my parents’ basement picking the songs or laying them down on a Maxell cassette (my brand of choice), but looking back on the list of songs, I’m happy to see they still add up to 90 quailty minutes of music.
Before Nick Hornby wonderfully wrote about what makes a good mixtape in High Fidelity, I assembled exactly the right combination of hip, well known and somewhat obscure songs from my small music collection. Combining big hits like “Learning to Fly,” “What I Am,” and “All This Time” with lesser-known songs by popular artists such as “Until the End of the World,” “Shining Star,” and “Getting to Know You,” while tossing in some hard to find (at the time) songs like “Baby Mine” and “Wild Night” made this tape eclectic, but still enjoyable to listen to and quite accessible. (more…)
There seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: those who feel that rock and roll deserves a permanent place to showcase the important effect it’s has had on popular culture, and those who believe that the intention of rock music was rebellion against the mainstream; that a stuffy old shrine goes against everything the music stands for, and screw you if you don’t agree with them. I belong to the former group, partly because I’m from Cleveland, Ohio and got caught up in the hysteria of bringing the Rock Hall to the north coast, and also because I feel that there needs to be a place where people can look at rock and roll as an art and examine its history. I’ve been to the museum, and could have stayed for days marveling at Hendrix’s guitar and fragments of Keith Moon’s drum kit.
One thing you learn pretty early on in Springsteen saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ memoir 
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JACKYL
Two years ago, when I was working on this column’s debut, I wrote about Bruce Springsteen’s 