Here is a link to my appearance with John Franck on E Street Radio this past Friday. We played several unreleased Springsteen songs that we think should be on Tracks 2.
Enjoy!
E Street Radio Guest DJ: Ben Lazar & John Franck
About six years ago I was in Tower Records (R.I.P.), browsing for albums, and saw a CD with a woman's face filling the cover, a soulful looking face, obviously a photo from the past. I picked up the CD, titled Candi Staton, and looked through the song titles, most unfamiliar to me, except for a few songs I knew by other artists, such as "In The Ghetto." I was about to put the CD back when the person standing next to me said, "If you like soul music, you need that CD."
I had never heard of Candi Staton before buying that CD. Reading the liner notes, I discovered that she had been signed to FAME Records, Rick Hall's (he of Muscle Shoals fame and producer of many southern soul classics) label through Capitol Records, and had a few R&B hits in the late 60's and early 70's, but had her biggest success in 1976, with "Young Hearts Run Free," a disco hit.
When I put the CD on at home, I liked what I heard, but at least through the first ten songs or so, I wasn't overwhelmed. That changed when "Heart On A String" came on.
"Heart On A String" explodes from it's opening notes, a torrent of sound that seems to epitomize soul before the brain has even had a chance to really process what it's listening to. The piano pounds, the drums swing magnificently, the bass anchors everything while keeping the action moving, the horns blare an intro melody line, and before you know it, in comes Candi's voice, an amalgamation of country and soul, a voice with a tear in it, the sort of tear that oozes both vulnerability and strength, the sort of strength that comes from surviving when survival, emotional or otherwise, is far from assured.
When I first encountered the song, I couldn't really believe it, because I couldn't believe that I had never heard it before. How was this not an enormous hit? I played it again and again, becoming more enraptured every time I heard it. I played it for friends, pretty much all of who asked, "What song IS this?" And five plus years after I first heard it, it's one of those songs that I never cease to be completely lit up by.
The interplay between the instruments is astounding. Each of the players find their own space to emerge within the song - the pianist peeks out with amazing fills in the first verse, and in the second verse, the guitarist finds the room to rip some brief but incredible lead fills in between Candi's vocals. In the first half of the third and final verse, the song breaks down, and the drummer plays an awe-inspiring rim pattern that leads into a final, joyous close to the song.
And as far as the vocals, listening to Candi sing on "Heart On A String" is akin to watching Baryshnikov dance or Lebron streaking down the court - it's the work of a master. Each phrase, pause, swoop and shout is perfect in tone and execution. She is all hurt and sensuality, trapped in loving someone who is oh so wrong, but feels so right.
Songs gain immeasurable power when they are a shared experience - a hit on the radio, a song at a club, something treasured with friends, or in concert. And soul music, having emerged from the African-American church, was designed to be a shared experience - songs about heartbreak, exultation, joy, loneliness and isolation meant to take on a life of their own with an audience relating to and living out every word. So what does one make of "Heart On A String," a great song that barely anyone has heard?
Five years after I first heard it, and almost forty years after it was recorded, "Heart On A String" is, for my money, one of the great soul songs ever. And despite never finding the audience it deserved, its power resonates as strongly as ever, making it in, in my estimation, the greatest unheralded soul song of all time.
Download: Candi Staton - "Heart On A String"
Dear Bruce,
Happy 60th! It’s really hard for me to believe you’re 60, and I’d be willing to bet my copy of Born To Run that you’ll be celebrating with a healthy bit of quiet disbelief. It all goes by so fast, doesn’t it? If it’s any consolation, the way you’re rolling these days, 60 is going to be the new 50. Hell – you could probably make 60 be the new 45.
To get right down to it, I don’t know what I would have done without your music. I look back upon my life and you’ve been so entwined in the fabric of it – my joys and sorrows, my successes and failures, my dreams and disappointments, that it’s impossible to imagine what living would be like without your music. You’ve been a means to some of my deepest friendships, and you’ve been an essential companion in the midst of my darkest solitude. I’ve ecstatically screamed along to “Born To Run” with 70,000 other people shining around me and I’ve sat alone listening to Nebraska, wondering if I’ll ever have what I want for my life.
But through it all, your music has been an anchor for me, in both my personal and professional life. I can pinpoint the exact moment I decided to go into the music business – May 18, 1988 at Madison Square Garden, in the middle of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out.” In the full thrall of the ecstasy you generated, I said to myself, “I have to make music my life.”
That has been an amazing road, and recently, an immensely challenging one, as both I and the music business itself face a crumbling old world and an emerging new one, a new one that looks little like the one that came before. But I remain undaunted and still totally committed to music as a vehicle for inspiration, possibility, love, sex, joy and the confronting of the things that are the hardest for us to deal with. And I won’t give up. Next week, I’ll be heading into a recording studio to produce a great young artist I’m working with – I’m sure I’ll be thinking of you a lot as I get to work.
Most of all, I think your work has been an incredible partner in fighting my own cynicism and resignation. You acknowledge the cruelness that exists in this world without it curdling into cheap nihilism – and then hold out for the possibility of breaking through one’s circumstances. And when I think about what I’m most cynical and resigned about, I realize that most often, it’s myself – and your music has been one of the greatest tools possible for that daily battle.
More than anything though, what your music gave me, especially when I was a boy and so often felt like a misfit and outsider, was a sense of a world out there that I could find my place in. My dad was wonderful in providing that for me too, but listening to The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River and Born To Run made that world feel attainable to me, and it instilled a sense of responsibility within myself to go out there and find it – or create it for myself. I’ve done that, and I don’t think I would have ever done it quite the same way without your music.
So Bruce, even though you haven’t wised up yet and made me your official vaultmaster and producer of a Bootleg Series, I’ll forgive you that because I’m so immensely grateful for what you’ve provided for me and people the world over – joy, fun, ecstasy, soul, passion, poignancy, and an access to the best parts of ourselves. There will never be another one like you.
Thank you, Bruce. Long may you run.
Of all the periods of Michael Jackson's career, the one that may be among the most neglected is the late 70's, post-Jackson 5 and before Off The Wall. After leaving Motown in 1975 and being forced to give up the name "Jackson 5" as part of their settlement to leave, the group, re-named "The Jacksons" began recording for CBS, first for Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International label (which went through CBS) and then Epic.
By 1978's Destiny, the Jackson were producing themselves, and the results included the double platinum single "Shake Your Body" (written by Michael and Randy Jackson). The band was complete with their transformation from bubblegum soul to something edgier - hard r&b and funk that shredded.
This week's Bootleg Friday is the Jacksons at a Destiny tour stop in Amsterdam in February 1979. By the end of the year, Off The Wall would be released, and everything would change.
Download: The Jacksons - 2/1/79, Amsterdam, Netherlands (zip file)
I haven’t paid much attention to Peaches since her debut album, 2000’s The Teaches Of Peaches. I loved “Fuck The Pain Away,” a song from that album that defines the term “underground classic.” But I stopped looking out for her, and we had no chance encounters.
That was until recently, when I got her new album, I Feel Cream. I like the album, but there’s one song, “Talk To Me,” that I’m absolutely, positively floored by. It’s like a cross between Betty Davis and Johnny Rotten, and it’s one of the purest (and most likely, unintentional) fusions of punk and soul that I’ve ever heard, in it’s blend of raw vulnerability and hot-tempered demand.
Instrumentally, the song is obviously based in electro, but the construction of the song is rooted in the blues, and when Peaches sings the lyrics that are a plea for communication from a lover who is hiding out, she is absolutely impossible to ignore – she pierces the air, grabs you by the throat and makes you deal with what she has to say. She manages to convey everything – frustration, lust, anger, desire and pain in a little over three minutes. Most artists don’t do that in three years.
Peaches is the kind of artist that Johnny Rotten wanted to see more of back in the halcyon days of the emergence of punk in England; original characters who invented themselves, unshackled by the past, confrontational, subversive and completely authentic. In that, she’s a true inheritor of punk in ways that most of those awful bands on the Warped tour will never be. And she’s a punk with soul.
Why does Laura Izibor’s debut album, Let The Truth Be Told, irk me so much? Is it the glossy, semi-generic songs and arrangements? Is it Izibor’s vocals, vaguely characterless, an approximation of soulfulness rather than actually being soulful? Or is it that her songs, like “Shine” and “Don’t Stay,” which take on inspiration and love, do it so safely that they end up feeling like a cliche, resulting in a diminishing of love and inspiration themselves?
Perhaps it’s a combination of all of the above. Izibor has a technically powerful voice, but there’s nothing in it that makes it uniquely her own, rather than just an amalgamation of a boatload of soul singers before her. What’s missing in Izibor’s voice is any hint of the blues, that great ingredient that makes a song land as more than just a platitude. Any great soul singer, be they Otis Redding, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, or hell, even Amy Winehouse, sings even their most buoyant material with a bluesiness that comes from living with the existential knowledge of the pain that living brings. Listening to Let The Truth Be Told, it's clear that while she may have taken on singing soul because she genuinely loves it, she doesn’t have it in her bones - and the resulting music ends up dismayingly hollow.
The obvious models for Izibor’s music are Alicia Keys, Joss Stone and John Legend – bland, inoffensive and safe as possible, made for film and TV placements, commercials and marketing departments, lacking any of the risk, originality and emotional rawness that make soul music, you know, soulful. Izibor says of her music that “the foundation starts with soul,” but she’s flattering herself with her conceit. Or maybe she doesn’t know any better.
No, why this irks me is that this is the kind of stuff that fools people who don’t know any better that this is the real thing. It’s so maddeningly competent and nothing more that it lands as pointless. It's very nice music - and real soul is never nice. If Izibor is going to be a soul singer that matters, she's going to have to dig a lot deeper into her own self than is evidenced on Let The Truth Be Told. The truth is never as flimsy as this music is.
I watched the Michael Jackson memorial show on Tuesday and was pleasantly surprised with how well it came off. The tributes were heartfelt and authentic, and the musical performances, for the most part, worked. It did him justice, unlike the disaster that was the B.E.T. Awards the Sunday following his death.
Unsurprisingly, the show ended with some of the schmaltz that Michael loved, namely, “We Are The World,” a song whose ickiness has grown exponentially for me as I’ve encountered it over the years. Whether it’s the trite and solipsistic lyrics (as Jackson Browne said, “That’s the problem with North America – we think we ARE the world”), or the mushy arrangement, the song has always occurred for me like the experience of eating Sweet N’ Low right out of the packet – so sweet I want to wretch.
Most of the singers on the project were at or near their pop pinnacle in the winter of 1985, and many of them – Kim Carnes, Huey Lewis, Al Jarreau, Jeffrey Osbourne, Kenny Rogers and Kenny Loggins – were bland MOR fare at best. Neither the song or the assemblage of talent has worn well over time, even though seeing Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan singing on the same song will always hold a thrill for me.
Contrast that with the best of the 1984-1985 “benefit” songs, Artists United Against Apartheid’s “Sun City,” created by Little Steven Van Zandt, who at the time, had just recently left the E Street Band, just prior to Springsteen and the band embarking on the immensely successful and lucrative phenomenon that was the Born In The U.S.A. tour.
Van Zandt, producer Arthur and journalist Danny Schecter assembled greatest collection of rock, rap and soul artists ever on one single. The Lineup: Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Kool DJ Herc, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Ruben Blades, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock, Ringo Starr, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Run DMC, Peter Gabriel, David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Darlene Love, Bobby Womack, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Jackson Browne, U2, George Clinton, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Bonnie Raitt, Hall & Oates, Jimmy Cliff, Big Youth, Michael Monroe, Peter Garrett, Ron Carter, Ray Barretto, Gil-Scott Heron, Nona Hendryx, Pat Benatar, and Joey Ramone.
It was an incredible lineup then – and in retrospect, it seems even more incredible. Most of the artists, in direct contrast to the ones on "We Are The World," have gained in stature nearly a quarter century after the recording. Back then, as I wasn’t familiar with many of the artists on the record, it didn’t seem like a big deal. But thinking about it now - Lou Reed and Miles Davis and Springsteen and Joey Ramone and Bobby Womack and Melle Mel and David Ruffin on the same single? Jesus!
And to Van Zandt’s eternal credit, he structured the song so that the rappers would have their own indelible contribution to the song. Remember, “Sun City” was recorded and released prior to rap’s explosion to national prominence with Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way,” which was released in the summer of 1986. The rap section that opens the song leads perfectly into the first chorus – in retrospect, the song is perhaps rap-rock’s greatest moment.
The song was tough and defiant – capturing the best of rock's rebellious spirit . It was independent minded, clear in its intent to bring down Apartheid and wasn’t afraid to point fingers at home, namely at President Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy with Pretoria.
Incredible song, eclectic lineup, a powerful and crystal clear message – and relative to “We Are The World” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas” – a commercial dud. “Sun City” peaked at #38 on the Billboard Top 40, as many radio stations wouldn’t play the song due to its explicit criticism of Reagan, its tough minded sound, and most likely, the inclusion of so many rappers, which in 1985, top 40 radio had no use for.
More importantly, “Sun City” raised over a million dollars and significantly raised awareness of the scourge of Apartheid. In 1986, Congress passed sanctions against South Africa, overriding a veto from President Reagan. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and in 1994, he was elected president of South Africa.
"We Are The World" may have been the pop hit, but "Sun City" was by far the better song. Given that the song itself, with Apartheid gone, is now superflous, it's even further testament that the record holds up so wonderfully, in groove, spirit and soul.
