My Bruce Journey - Part 2

"I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies"

Originally posted on 17th January 2010

So who knew that, today, 26 years burning down the road, I would be looking back thinking that buying ‘Born in the USA’ was a pivotal moment in my life.

The electronica of the 80s did nothing for me. Mike’s taste was more American rock music - Bob Seger, The Eagles, Don Henley. Springsteen was a natural choice for him. I was starting to reject the stuff I had always listened to and needed to find some new music to get me interested again.

I had actually fallen out with the pop charts in the late 70s. I had always listened to the radio and like most people of my generation watched TOTP every week. I was still steeped in disco and soul when punk hit the main stream charts and I turned instead to Northern Soul which I still love today. Northern Soul is often obscure, usually not top twenty material so the charts became a no no for me and I got out of the habit of following the latest music trends.


I still listened to Radio 1 in the morning. I woke up with Noel Edmonds for years, then DLT (Dave Lee Travis) and Mike Read. Mike and I were seduced by Breakfast TV for a while and by the time we came back to radio we had become old gits so Terry Wogan was perfect. I am now a radio 2 listener through and through.


Getting back to the matter at hand our BITUSA was a cassette so if ownership is important it belonged to Mike. If I had been buying it for myself I would’ve bought vinyl. I am guessing we bought the album after hearing ‘Dancing in the Dark’.


I love the mystery of buying albums. The fact that I only know one track and the other 10 or 11 are going to be completely new to me is what it’s all about. There has been many a time when I have bought a LP/CD because of one track and hated all the rest. That’s a risk I am happy to take because sometimes I come across something I will love forever. BITUSA - love? or hate? You decide!


I can only recall four other albums we bought that year - Tina Turner’s Private Dancer: Barbara Streisand Emotion: The soundtrack to Mack and Mable (because I had loved ’I won’t Send Roses’ since seeing Torville and Dean do an exhibition dance after the Winter Olympics in 1984)  and Jane Fonda's Workout.

Jane was the exercise guru of the time. I went to a Jane Fonda Workout class at the local gym and this record described the same exercises. Later when we rented a video recorder from Radio Rentals I bought a tape which was much easier to follow.

This was the first of a long line of tried and failed exercise routines. I had a Jane Fonda step in the early nineties.  A friend suggested ’Great Bums and Thighs’.

I had a great bum and thighs then and still do:- celebrated?, distinguished?, eminent?, exalted?, excellent? No:- big, bulky, colossal, enormous, extensive.

A contraption to help us do sit ups didn’t last long and a cross trainer has been languishing unused and unloved in our friends’ garage for over a year.

Now I have a Wii Fit which told me last week that it was 376 days since I had last visited and I am now a bit of a porker.  Needless to  say I didn't reach the weight loss target I set for myself - presumably over 376 days ago.

All this springs to mind because I did much of my Jane Fonda workout whilst listening to BITUSA. and I got quite a good routine going. I have to say jogging on the spot in time to ‘Working on the Highway‘ was hard work… It still is - I‘ve just tried it!

We practically wore this tape out we played it so much. The CD we have now has hardly been played. Have I become a bit of a Bruce snob poo pooing it because it was so popular with the hoi polloi? I think so. It’s playing as I write this and it really is very good.

Did we rush out and buy the back catalogue? - no: but a friend taped Nebraska and The River for us and that will be my story for next week…

Random fact - one of my favourite tracks on BITUSA is ‘I’m Goin’ Down’ and this is the only track I have not heard live.

Updated: I finally heard this live in Paris on 5th July.

When you visit my Blog please post a comment and tell me your favourite BITUSA track.

My Bruce Journey - Part 1

"If dreams came true oh wouldn't that be nice"

Originally posted on 10th January 2010
 
I first came across Bruce Springsteen in 1984. 

Mike(my husband) came to me with a dog eared copy of ‘Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits’, every album Donna Summer had released (including a very obscure one only released in Europe) and a cassette which he had recorded himself of his favourite songs.

Ahhhh cassettes - do you remember those. I was never really taken with the pre recorded cassette. I loved my LPs. I loved everything about them the size of them, the feel, the look but the great thing about cassettes was that you could buy them blank to record on yourself. Nearly everyone of my age from the UK will remember setting up the cassette with an external microphone propped up near the radio on a Sunday afternoon taping that week’s charts. You hardly dare breathe because the mic picked up every little noise: and all that stopping and starting so you didn’t get any talking in between records. Oh and how irritating when Tom Browne (who remembers him ? - I looked it up on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Browne_(broadcaster_and_actor) talked over the intro or outro of the one record you really wanted that week. The advent of the music centre made all this much easier but that story is for another time.

Anyway back to my tale.

I had fallen hopelessly in love with Mike so his favourites became the soundtrack to my life for a while. Music has always been important to me and knowing Mike’s taste was a way of getting to know him better. He later admitted they weren’t his favourites at all apart from one or two tracks!. The rest were just included to fill up the tape.

My record collection was a little more extensive - some Rod Stewart a couple of early David Bowie and lots of Motown. My music taste was moulded by the disco and pop of the seventies and yes I was a teeny bopper. A bit of a flighty soul though as I liked both David Cassidy and Donny Osmond - you were supposed to go for one or the other.

In my poverty stricken days of my late teens I sold a load of LPs to a second hand record dealer on Louth market. He didn’t give me much for them as I recall. David Cassidy, Donny Osmond,   The Bay City Rollers etc. went but I held on to a few faves including The Monkees which was the first album I ever owned - Davy Jones was a practice run for David and Donny. My brother bought the LP for me one Christmas or birthday and that makes it special. It hasn’t been played for years but I will never part with it.

So…1984 ‘Born in the USA’ … to be continued next week.