As a young teenager my music taste was never what you would call cutting edge. I didn’t follow any of the cool bands. I loved David Cassidy and The Partridge Family and I have just spent a nostalgic half hour or so watching videos on YouTube. Of course their claim to fame from our point of view is that Mike Appel co-wrote a couple of songs for them. Here is one of them - not my favourite track but David still looks cute. I just loved the hair.
Bruce has mentioned many times during the build up to The Promise how skinny they were back in the day. David was skinny too as you can see. I think it must have been fashionable for guys to look emaciated in those days.
This Rolling Stone cover was very controversial at the time.
David was supposed to be Keith Partridge - a wholesome 17 year old but he was 22 at the time and didn't like the image. By the way he has been arrested for drink driving this week so... still in the news for the wrong reasons.I had a bit of a thing for The Osmonds, especially Donny, for a while and later The Bay City Rollers. If I was a teenager today I would definitely be glued to The X Factor and rooting for One Direction rather than Matt Cardle.
My only nod towards musical respectability was The Faces and Rod Stewart. Pre ‘Do You Think I’m Sexy’ Rod was loved by the music critics but after the release of this disco classic he was accused of selling out and has never really regained his good reputation.
I also tried David Bowie for a couple of albums and I bought ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ but, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t love either Bowie or Elton.
I loved Tamla and Soul and had a phase when I listened to a lot of Northern Soul much of which is early and obscure Motown.
As I mentioned way back in my first or second post my music taste changed when I met Mike. He had no particular love of soul music his background was towards the rock genre. Had we been around during the mid sixties he would have been a rocker and I would’ve been a mod. Nowadays I aspire to being a rock chick - even at my age!
I popped into HMV the other day. They don’t sell CDs any more. Well I exaggerate - they do - but the proportion of the shop given over to music is slowly being squeezed out by DVDs. The specialist sections, including country music, are now very limited which means I couldn’t find a copy of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s latest album.
‘Thunder Road’ was playing when I walked in so, although they didn’t have what I wanted, I hung around waiting for the track to finish - well I couldn’t walk out on Bruce could I? ‘Badlands’ came next followed by ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ - they were obviously playing Greatest Hits. I couldn’t hang around all day - It was my lunch hour - so I left during ‘Hungry Heart’.
I must say I was surprised to hear Bruce. I might not be very popular for saying this but here in the UK I'm not sure that Bruce is considered cool. I don’t think it’s because of his age. A large part of HMV now sells clothes. They have T shirts featuring among other aging (and indeed dead) rockers The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Guns N Roses, The Beatles, Johnny Cash and Elvis.
No Bruce although I have checked on line and they do have one design.
Mike’s boss lives with someone who works for HMV. At his last seminar the goody bag he was given included a 'Born in the USA' T shirt. I assume they didn’t think they could sell these any more.
Mike now has the T shirt - presumably his boss’s partner couldn’t bring himself to wear it!
I pass a shop on my way to the bus stop - On the Wall - which as the name suggests sells stuff you put on the wall. A quick look in the window the other night revealed The Rolling Stones, Elvis, The Beatles, The Who, The Ramones but no Bruce.
I thought he might become cool during Glastonbury. Even then there was no influx of T shirts or posters on the Leeds’ streets. I’m not sure why - even Rolf Harris was cool for heavens sake when he appeared! I think in the UK people see Bruce as an all American guy who only sings about the USA - a sort of musical Rambo. They dislike him for it - but then rather oddly complained because he didn’t sing 'Born in the USA' at Glastonbury.
So 35 or so years on I still don't follow a cool band but I have wondered whether the tide is turning this last week. The UK premier of The Promise saw Bruce on TV and in the press almost constantly over last weekend. The celebrity fans came out in support as well as the public although compared to Rome I think our Red Carpet Event was rather low key.
Perhaps all this publicity will make Bruce cool again. Now he just need to get out on the road to keep the momentum going.
In the mean time check out Neil McCormick's article about NME's cool list. If you are wondering about Neil's credentials as a music critic, he had this to say about Bruce in another article :-
I’m not sure Bruce Springsteen would have the same effect if you couldn’t understand the lyrics or the musical context. Tune into him as the leader of an afrobeat band on some third world radio station, you’d put him down as a gruff shouter, always in tune but missing a lot of notes in the scale. If he even tried a falsetto, all you would get is silence. Yet when I watched him play last weekend, I was amongst tens of thousands of people held spellbound by his performance. He sings with an emotional truth that resonates through his very being, and is squeezed out in the potent, careful lyrics of his songs, so that his melancholic, introspective version of Racing In The Street reduced a massive Hyde Park crowd to a state of hushed awe. Rock has a very different tradition to soul music, where the expression of inner truth is more important than the purity of the notes, and Springsteen, for all his vocal limitations, is one of the greatest rock singers of all time.
He's not right about the falsetto though
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