AN AUDIENCE WITH LARRY FLYNT

Towards the close of 1996 I was in Los Angeles at the end of a long trip which had started with a Bruce Springsteen show and interview in Philadelphia. Towards the end I spent one of the most surreal days of my life - breakfast with Iggy Pop at the Chateau Marmont, lunch with Neil Diamond at his studio, back to the hotel for a chat with Jeff Buckley, then a drive up the Hollywood Hills to spend a few hours with Brian Wilson at his house. Could it get any crazier? Sure could. The day before I flew back to Australia I had an audience with Larry Flynt, the infamous and legendary publisher of Hustler magazine. The piece originally appeared (in an edited version) in the JJJ Magazine early in 1977. This is the original version.

"Hustler is purely an entertainment magazine," says Larry Flynt of his most famous publication, the 'mens' magazine that's almost as well known around the globe as Playboy and Penthouse. And in terms of content, well, whilst Playboy is tame, and Penthouse reasonably raunchy, Hustler is far and beyond the most over-the-top sex magazine openly on sale in newsagents, with an Australian edition first appearing late last year.

"Hustler deals very little with lifestyles," Flynt continues. "We have a law in this country which says that if you publish something it must have socially redeeming value. I feel that sex within itself is socially redeeming. As far as pornography goes one man's art is another man's pornography so I try and dispel the stereotypes that exist with this business and proceed in a manner that looks to entertain and educate people about human sexuality."

Flynt tells me this as I sit in his palatial (and I mean p-a-l-a-t-i-a-l) office on the top floor of the 10 story office building on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverley Hills. Amidst the oil paintings, antiques and an astonishing collection of Tiffany lamps the only slight indication that this is the office out of which comes  more than 30 magazines, many of the sexual variety, is a sculpted replica of a man and a woman having sex placed behind Flynt's desk.

Aside from Hustler, Flynt Publications produces Hustler Fantasies, Hustler Barely Legal, Chic - along with magazines devoted to knives (Fighting Knives), memorabilia (Trading Cards), boating (Ski Boat), computers (Ultimate Gamer, Video Fames Presents: Tips And Tricks, Hard Drive, and PC Laptop), tattoo's (Skin & Ink) and music (Rage and Rappages).

As the result of an assassination attempt outside a Georgia courthouse in 1978 during a famous court case over charges of obscenity levelled at his magazine Flynt sits in an 18 carrot gold wheelchair, although his desk is built high enough that the chair isn't visible to anyone else in the office. Flynt speaks in a mute tone, another legacy of the bullet wound which went through his throat and severed his spinal column.

It wasn't until I arrived in America in December of last year that I realised just how famous Flynt was. Sure, I knew what Hustler was all about but I had no idea who published it. In conversation after conversation I mumbled to friends about being asked to try and interview Hustler's publisher. The responses were universal. The jaws dropped, followed by "You're going to meet Larry Flynt." 

Yes, this man is a legend, such so that Oliver Stone's next film will be based on Flynt's life with Woody Harrelson apparently playing the publisher, whilst Courtney Love is cast as his late wife Althea.    

By way of background Lawrence Claxton Flynt was born and raised  in eastern Kentucky's Maggofin County, the Appalachian area ranked lowest in per-capita income by the 1964 report of President Lyndon Johnson's Appalachian Regional Commission. 

Being born into a family with an annual income of $US600, he seemed destined to a life of poverty. But rather than become a product of his environment, 13-year-old Flynt ran away from home. Using a false birth certificate, he enlisted in the Army when he was 14, and by the age of 19 he had served in both the Army and Navy. At age 21 he had been divorced twice and had gone bankrupt once.

Working as a dishwasher and factory worker, Flynt saved enough money to buy his first bar, in Dayton, Ohio. Investing all he had saved, he turned the establishment into a moneymaker and later sold it at a profit. Over the next few years he continued his success as a young entrepreneur by purchasing money-loosing nightclubs, building up their business and selling at a high profit.

In 1968, having accumulated enough money to build the nightclub of his dreams, Flynt opened his first Hustler club, in Dayton. By 1972 he owned eight Hustler Clubs throughout the state of Ohio.

It was at this time that Flynt decided to publish a newsletter for his clubs' patrons, which he appropriately titled Hustler. Consisting mainly of club news and profiles of the women employees, the newsletter also tackled many social issues. It was from this humble beginning that the fledgling Hustler  Magazine emerged.

In July 1974, with a staff of three and a contract with a national distributor, Flynt published the first issue of Hustler. It quickly established a reputation for being outrageous and iconoclastic, and became the world's fastest-growing men's magazine. By 1976 it ranked as the third largest selling magazine of its type on the market.

Part of Hustler's success can be attributed to Flynt's willingness to gamble, to publish features that no other men's magazine would dare to run. These features including exposing female genitalia in a far more explicit fashion than his high profile competitors; the first nude photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis ever published in the U.S.; a controversial article on the violence of war as obscenity which contained graphic photos of mutilated victims in the Vietnam War; the first life-size Scratch'n'Sniff centrefolds; and a series of investigative reports probing and exposing the questionable government investigations of the murders of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy and black leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

With its anti-establishment stance Hustler, and particularly Flynt, became a target for many elements of American society. This led to seemingly never-ending legal manoeuvres designed to prevent Flynt from exercising his Constitutional rights under the guarantees of the First Amendment.

In February 1977 a Cincinatti, Ohio jury found Flynt guilty of pandering obscenity and engaging in organised crime - the latter charge resulting from his participation in the publishing of Hustler - and sentenced him to a prison term of from seven to 25 years. Flynt appealed the verdict, and in April 1979 the conviction was reversed by Ohio's Court Of Appelate District.

In a separate Ohio case Flynt was charged with disseminating material harmful to juveniles. The action was a result of his mailing to Hamilton County residents the pamphlet "The Real Obscenity War" (a reprint of an article published in Hustler). This article was an attempt to impress upon Hamilton County's citizens the need to establish unbiased priorities for the purpose of deciding what constitutes obscenity. If found guilty, Flynt could be sentenced to up to six years in prison and/or fined $US12,000.

In Atlanta, Georgia, Fulton County Solicitor General Hinson McAuliffe attempted to place a prior restraint on the distribution of what he deemed obscene sexually orientated magazines. Flynt responded to what he saw as yet another overzealous prosecutor's attack on the Constitutional rights of citizens by personally selling copies of Hustler in Atlanta. This resulted in charges of 11 misdemeanour counts of sale and distribution of obscene material. In March 1979 Flynt was brought to trial on these charges. Attempts by his attorneys to introduce evidence establishing Hustler's acceptability to local citizens were denied, and Flynt was convicted on all counts. 

It was soon after a 1978 court case that the attempted assassination of Flynt occurred. Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist currently serving life sentences for four racially motivated killings in Utah and Wisconsin, has been linked to Flynt's shooting but has not been brought to trial because officials are troubled by inconsistencies in the evidence.

"I've had three obscenity prosecutions and many more libel litigation's," Flynt says. "On one of the obscenity cases I was given a 25 year prison sentence. That was later overturned by the appeals court but it's been a rough and rocky road and we've come a long way. You can see on cable television today what you saw in Hustler when it started 20 years ago."

Despite continuing harassment from law enforcement officials, Flynt continued to expand his publishing empire, launching numerous magazines and distributing others as well as starting a mail-order operation selling novelty items and sex/marital aids which quickly reached annual sales of $US10 million.

In September 1977 Flynt travelled to Washington to offer then President Jimmy Carter $US1 million to be used for the study of pornography.  That same month he testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime and offered to donate his entire profits from Hustler to form a governmental commission to study the overall effects of sexual repression on society, with particular emphasise on its links with child abuse. Both these offers were met with governmental indifference.

Long sceptical of the Warren Commission's report on the assassination of JFK Flynt offered a $US1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the person or persons responsible. He also founded Americans For A Free Press which holds community-support rallies when First Amendment guarantees are threatened.

Flynt is also is renown for his charitable donations which range from money for an Ohio man who badly needed open-heart surgery to the donation of several hundred Christmas dinners to poor Cincinnati families. He has contributed heavily to the Anti-Defamation League, the American Civil Liberties Union and various other groups.

Not only was there the assassination attempt but further tragedy struck for Flynt in 1987 when his fourth wife, Althea (who Flynt says is the only woman he's ever loved) drowned in their bathtub after doctors diagnosed her condition as AIDS-related complex, probably resulting from IV-drug use. She was 33 years old.

By Flynt's own admission, he and Anthea became drug addicts during his recovery from the shooting. "You'd better believe that a lot of drugs have flown through this body," he says. "I was detoxed three times."

These days he spends much of his time in his eight-bedroom Mediterranean mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and remains as ferocious an anti-censorship fighter as he has ever been.

"There's many problems - I feel that as long as sexual repression exists these problems will exist," he says. 
"The church has had their hand on our crotch for two thousand years and the government is always trying to manoeuvre into the same position because if they can control your pleasure centre they can control you and they know this. Church and State both have their idea of what should be socially accepted and that's not necessarily considering what the minority wants. That's a basic premise for any democracy - individual rights - and any erosion of that is an erosion of the whole system."

Hustler continues to push the barriers of what is acceptable for mass consumption and what isn't.  I asked Flynt what, in the States,  differentiates a magazine that can be openly sold on newsstands and one that is only available through sex shops.

"That's an interesting question and most people don't understand the answer to that," he says. "The only censorship that I've ever done has been for the marketplace, never for the censors because I fight them tooth and nail.

"But no matter what kind of magazine I produce, if I can't get it out to the public it doesn't do anyone any good, so when you see the more sexually explicit material only being available in a sex shop or an adult book store that's because many of the mainstream retailers that carry magazines won't carry them because they don't want to deal with complaints, boycotts and things like that.

Certainly the more recently issues of Hustler draw a very thin line between implied and real penetration, something that Flynt doesn't dispute. In Australia any publication that shows sexual penetration is automatically restricted to Sex Shop sale only.

"It's pretty close to that in this country but it's not law," Flynt explains. "Our Supreme Court has identified a test that a work of art must meet before it can be considered obscene and it's a very confusing law. It has not been effective. There was the way in 1973 when the court left it up to the individual community to set their own standards but that's impossible because you have someone in the South trying to second guess what reading habits are in San Francisco and New York. It just doesn't work.

"Now we have a political climate in this country that is moving more and more to the right with a tremendous amount of support from a group known as the Christian Coalition which is very powerful in Republican politics. We could very well loose many of the individual freedoms we've gained over the years, because as a nation traditionally we only respond to a crisis. There's never any preventative work done. . . there is a group in this society that, if they have their way, will advocate censorship. And for those who say 'well, maybe a little censorship would be good' who's going to go and be God? When Hitler started he didn't start with the classics, he started with the so-called garbage that no-one wanted to read and then moved on to Shakespeare."

And in the light of that there's not the slightest chance that Flynt will do anything but keep pushing against the same censorship boundaries that have always obsessed him.

"Things are changing and we have to be at the forefront of that change," he says. "We'll continue responding to our readership - not for what we think they are but for who they are. So many people have a preconceived idea of the person who wants to read their magazines. We tend to listen a bit more to who they are."

And if we're to accept Flynt's observations exactly who makes up Hustler's readership is more than a little interesting. The traditional assumption is that magazines predominantly featuring explicit photographs of women in poses of shall we say, abandon, are almost exclusively read by, well, blokes who like looking at photos of women. Flynt isn't so sure that's completely the case.

"That's hard to say," he says when asked if he thinks Hustler has many women readers. "We don't have any solid figures on what percentage of our readership is female but there are an awful lot of women who buy the magazine for their husband and you've got a lot of women who aren't bothered a lot if their husband is reading Hustler, and there's the other side of the coin where it can create a lot of problems in a relationship.

"If I had to guess I would say around 20 to 25 percent of our readership was female. Many of them may look at their husband or boyfriend's magazine and not necessarily be going to the newsstand and buying it."

Just before I was about to have my audience with Flynt into the Hustler office came  an extremely attractive woman who I'd guess to be in her early Twenties. She arrived in the office wearing a white dress that was as short as it could possibly be without making her knickers obvious. She was surrounded by three guys who looked like my stereotypical image of LA photographers (hey, they look pretty much the same the world over). Suddenly Flynt's staff started emerging from offices and behind desks and started congratulating her. There was at least five minutes of "well done' and 'great' and 'you must be so pleased'.

Bemused by this I asked someone what all the fuss is about. "Oh honey, she's this month's Beaver Hunt winner," I was told like I've just arrived from Mars. One of the guys walked over to me and asked who I was. I explained that I was a journalist from Australia who was about to interview Mr Flynt.

"That figures, you look a bit different from the White Trash that usually hangs around here," he said with a smile before sauntering back to the body in what could loosely be described as a dress.

Ms Whateverhernameis has been selected from the presumably hundreds of women who send explicit polaroids of themselves to the magazine each month for the Beaver Hunt pages of Hustler. It's a good lurk for the magazine - four or five  pages of photos each issues, ranging from the good, the bad to the truly pathetic, that cost them not one cent. The best 'beaver' wins $US5000, a Hustler travel bag (gee!) and the opportunity to do a real 'spread' for the magazine.

"She'll be in the magazine," Flynt says later. "There's a bonus of $US5000 which is in addition to her original fee for posing. My competitors, they pay almost 20 times that. I think they do that with the theory in mind that the more you pay the better models you're going to get. I don't find it's that's way with us. It's a question of supply and demand. We always have attractive models available.

"The thing is that I don't push my own preferences in the magazine. With Mr Hefner who publishes Playboy it's obvious that he likes blondes with big boobs. Whether they're blonde, red head, whether they've got small boobs, medium boobs or large boobs or whether they're tall or short . . . I really like petite brunettes myself but I always go out of my way to keep my own preferences out of the magazine."

Welcome to Larry Flynt's world.

MR TIM'S WONDROUS VISION

In the early 1980s I was lucky enough to hang out at Martin Sharp's house and interview Tiny Tim for RAM magazine. This is the piece, exactly as it appeared at the time. Debbie Baer and I did the interview, I wrote it up and editor Anthony O'Grady added his touches later. 

(Photos by Wendy Adnam)

"I knew Jimmy Morrison and Lenny Bruce very closely. In fact Mr. Morrison, before he became a star was working at the Scene. So many young girls were lined up to see an unknown. He was one of the few unknowns that came from California to make it big in New York at the Scene. He came up to me one day and he said 'I have a song for you to do.' It was called People Are Strange and a week later Light My Fire hit the charts and he was a star already." 

That's Mr. Tiny Tim reminiscing about rock 'n' roll performers he'd encountered during his erratic career. Mr. Tim has now just left Australia after a protracted stay which included performances in most states, a movie, and a successful world continuous singing record attempt of two and a quarter hours. The tour was organised by Martin Sharp, well known Australian artist and possibly holder of Award For The World's Most Obssessional Devotion to Tiny Tim. On the face of it, Sharp's dedication (he owns and plays almost continuously, for instance, cassettes of every show Tiny did in Oz) may seem a waste of time. Tiny Tim, in the general media today, is often treated as The Oddity Who Survived. With the almost an air of surprise that this permanent adult child who scored international fame as the flower power manchild of the hippie sixties is still around today after bombing out near totally through most of the seventies. 

Sharp though sees Tiny's present status as a genuine talent emerging again after years of popularity neglect. Sharp says Tiny is the link between all forms of music both past and present. That his talent encompasses and links the musical eras of our great grandparents unto the tastes of small children today. 

And certainly the man who shrieked his version of Tip Toe Through The Tulips, The Good Ship Lollipop and Great Balls of Fire has more to offer than oddity interest. His career has spanned the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, and he's survived when most others haven't. 

Mr. Tim says that his age is closer to fifty than forty but he'll always be sixteen. He claims that meeting youth is what keeps him youthful in attitude and outlook. Consequently the thought that RAM WAS interested in interviewing him was terribly exciting to him because "it's youth again". These days he's grossly overweight but extraordinarily clear skined and talkative. During two hours at Mr. Sharp's he ranged over morals, his career, his ex-wife Miss Vicki (they were married in front of an estimated 40 million teev viewers on The Johnny Carson Show in the U.S., and divorced in private soon afterwards), Olivia Newton-John, Australia, and rock 'n' roll. Miss Debbie and Mr. Stuart just sat and listened. It took him forty five minutes to complete his reply to Standard Question I: "Tell us about your career." 

During the forties Mr. Tim performed under various names like Judith K. Foxglove and Larry Love. The peculiar high pitched voice resulted from a frustration because "in the late forties I had a normal singing voice and couldn't get nowhere. People like it. Friends liked it but when it came to sing I sounded just like anybody else. By the early fifties I couldn't get nowhere." The 'high type of feeling of the voice' came into his soul after he'd fallen to his knees in despair one night and prayed to Jesus Christ. 

"It didn't matter if people laughed as long as they listened and that's what they did. The dangerous part was the daytime — just like any vampire. I lived in a middle class area in New York and when I walked the streets in '55 they all said 'wow, what's happening to this world?" "In 1964, I started having a following. I went to the first party for Mick Jagger in 1964 at Bob Crew's house .. . who did Walk Like A Man, Big Girls Don't Cry. . . and I sang Time Is On My Side in the high voice." At this point Tiny demonstrates in a broken high voice. (Singing for two and a half hours the night before at Luna Park had wrought temporary havoc on his vocal chords.) 

The point around which Tiny Tim's publicity (masterminded by Jeff Wald who now masterminds Helen Reddy and Chicago) resolved, was whether the singer was soooooo good 'cos he was soooooo bad, or whether he had genuine magic. Were the audience laughing because T. T. was delightful, or were they laughing at a freak, it didn't matter while the Big Bucks were coming in. Sadly precious few of them seemed to end up in Tiny's pocket. His present day supporters like Martin Sharp hold there is no question as to his musical importance, but certainly in his first days of fame he was most famous for being the homely, long haired. cosmetic wearing, bath-five-times-a-day freak the superstars liked to meet. For instance there's the saga of Tiny Tim's summit meeting with Bob Dylan.

As Tiny tells it "he invited me to Woodstock. He thought I was a scholar because, as I said, I had the underground following for years. They took me to Albert Grossman's house and then Albert Grossman put me in another car at night and took me to his place. Camouflage almost. I met him at eleven o'clock at night in February of '67. He said 'Hello Mr. Tim' and I said 'Hello Mr. Dylan'. I came inside with my cosmetics and got a room for the night. 

"Then I told him that he was to the teenagers in the folk field what Rudy Vallee was in 1929. He said 'Mr. Tim tell me about Mr. Vallee'. I took my ukelele out and I started doing a few of Mr. Vallee's numbers."

Tiny explained that after the world record attempt the previous night his voice isn't up to scratch but he tried anyway to recreate his singing on that night. First off it was Mr. Vallee's "For I'm just a vagabond lover/In search of a sweetheart it seems". Then another tune of Rudy's. "And then said, 'Mr. Dylan. supposing he was right here in your time how would he be like singing Like A Rolling Stone?' and I started doing "How does it feel to be on your own/ A complete unknown/ Like a Rolling Stone." Now Mr. Dylan heard that voice of Vallee into the period of the sixties and his eyes opened up. And then I said, 'suppose we were living in Mr. Vallee's time here's how I feel you'd be doing his theme song.' He then imitated the legendary Dylan 'cow caught in a barbed wire fence' moan perfectly singing "Your time is my time/we just seem to syncronise, and sympathise, we're harmonised ....

"All Mr. Dylan had to say was "would you like a banana before I go to bed?" Next up was the story of Mr. Tim's meeting with Mr. Harrison ... George that is if you're not up on this Mr. business. The personal meeting with Mr. Harrison was in '68 and he called Tiny to his apartment in Manhattan. Tiny "knocked on the door and four people came out of the closet. I thought it was the Beatles but it was three of his friends. He was there with Jane Asher (hmmm is this Beatle scandal? Wasn't Mr. Harrison supposedly enstrangled with Miss Boyd?). As soon as I walked in I got a little tight because it's different when you meet a person than when you think about it. I was realising that I was shaking hands with the whole industry of rock at that moment.

Then I told him, 'Mr. Harrison, back in '66 when I was with the underground in California I sang Nowhere Man to a Miss Jill who I was crazy over at the time. She was 18 years old." In the high voice he tears into "He's a real nowhere man, living in a nowhereland, making all his nowhere plans for nobody." 

"Then Mr. Harrison took out the tape recorder. He said 'I want you to say Merry Christmas To The Beatles 1968 and go right into that song' which I did. That record went out to all his Beatle fans. Millions of Beatle fans. The private Beatle record of that year, that's worth at least 75 dollars and up today." 

Whilst in Sydney Tiny had recorded an extended version of the Bee Gees' Staying Alive with a bunch of EMI session musicians which Mr. Sharp has plans for releasing. He seemed relatively confident that it would bring him to the attention of a youth audience once again. Ultimately you have to admire Tiny Tim. For thirty years he's been entertaining and it hasn't made any difference to what he dos whether the reaction has been indulgent laughter, sincere appreciation, mockery or ridicule. He's kept on doing it with the same child-like whole-heartedness that shows he wants to entertain, that he wants to be ill the public eye, that he is driven by a love for old songs and a belief in their apropriatness today. 

(Album Tiny signed for my Mother)

In doing what he wants to do, regardless of the consequences, this diminuitive, polite, overweight man measures up as one of the great surviving musical outlaws. 

At the same time, you can't help feeling a strange compassion for him. There's an air of sadness about him, an ageing manchild whose dreams bravely fly in the face of harsher realities.

The entertainment business has this uncanny knack of normalising rebels and freaks, even if the process is as obvious as turning them into wealthy people who buy all the things rich people are supposed to own, and jet set with similarly wealthy cliques. 

But Tiny Tim has never quite been assimilated. He's accepted because he's weird and you know he's always going to be that way. He lives physically in this world but his conceptions of reality are very different from yours and mine. 

But still there are times the different worlds collide. When you can agree with Martin Sharp that Tiny Tim is the most remarkable performer in the world today. Simply because he refuses to give up his dreams. 

By: Mr. Coupe, Ms Baer & Mr. Anthony 

1981 - IT WAS A PRETTY GOOD YEAR.

For all of the 1980s I wrote a weekly music column for the Sun Herald, then the biggest selling newspaper in the country. They gave me crazy freedom to write about whatever I liked. This was my first column for 1982 and a summation of the previous year. It reflects newspaper journalism of the time - short pars that were usually just one sentence. I've left it the way it originally appeared and on reflection I'm pretty happy with my opinions - although I was probably a tad too nice to The Mighty Guys and a bit harsh on The Stray Cats!

Although 1981 wasn't an outstanding year for rock 'n roll, there were enough memorable records and live shows to convince me that my love affair with the music isn't over yet. This week's Rock Beat, the first for the new year, is a random reflection of the highlights of the past 12 months.

The bands I enjoyed most live were Sunny Boys, Church, Riptides, Machinations, Sardine, Laughing Clowns, Tactics, New Race and, recently, The Reels. 

Super K, a composite band which only played about six shows, was a delight to see each night with its snappy versions of old bubblegum classics from people like The Archies, 1910 Fruitgum Company, and The Lemon Pipers.

Consistently magnificent was the soulful Flaming Hands which is easily the best band in Sydney not signed to a major record company. It reinforces my feelings about large record companies when I see so many mediocre and dreadful bands being signed and one like Flaming Hands being ignored.

Hunters and Collectors was the most impressive new band to emerge from Melbourne during the year.

Besides this group I spent numerous nights watching Paul Kelly and The Dots, and Broderick Smith's Big Combo, lamenting the fact that both bands don't live in Sydney.

The quality of Australian bands becomes even more obvious when compared with the overseas visitors in 1981. There were very few concerts that I felt worth the $12 - $15 ticket price.

The Supremes, Ian Dury and The Blockheads and Smokey Robinson were about the only ones I enjoyed all night and wanted to go back and see again.

It was $12 to see The Stray Cats at The Capitol Theatre. They played for around 75 minutes. Last week I spent the night watching The Mighty Guys at The All Nations Club in Kings Cross. It was free. The band played 70 songs between 9 pm and 1.30 a.m

In one song The Mighty Guys ate The Stray Cats alive in terms of rockabilly spirit, authenticity, sense of history and an ability to bring a smile and dancing feet to everyone in the pub.

Just to make you envious, the finest concerts I saw overseas were Bruce Springsteen, Mink DeVille, James Brown, Ronnie Spector, The Q Tips, Delbert McClinton, and The Searchers.

On the vinyl front, the singles that spent most time on my turntable or caused me to turn up the radio volume were Kim Carnes' Bette Davis Eyes, Icehouse's Love In Motion, Pete Shelly's Homosapian and I Don't Know What It Is, and The Church's Double EP.

My overall favourite was Soft Cell's 12in single that combines Tainted Love and Where Did Our Love Go which all my neighbours heard at least 1,000 times! 

As with every year there were dozens of albums I treasured. The magnificent debut from The Sunny Boys stands out as the most enjoyable Australian album release.

I also spent lots of time listening to Broderick Smith's Big Combo's debut, The Sports Play Dylan and Donovan, The Saints' Monkey Puzzle, Paul Kelly and The Dots' Talk, the Church's Of Skin and Heart, and Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons' 10in album.

From overseas I delighted in Elvis Costello's Blue, Mink DeVille's Coup De Grace, and Smokey Robinson's Being With You.

The new English albums I played most were U2's Boy, Teardrop Explodes Kilimanjaro, and the Au Pairs magnificent Playing With A Different Sex, the first time a band has successfully come to terms with sexuality and rock 'n' roll.

Then there was John Cale's Honi Soit, Tom Verlaine's Dreamtime, The Rolling Stones' Tattoo You, Radio Birdman's Living Eyes, Midnight Oil's Place Without A Postcard and stacks more.

There were no good  rock 'n' roll movies shown in Australia although The Clash's effort had its moments. In America I saw D.O.A. (Dead On Arrival), a depressing, perceptive look at the rise of punk and the Sex Pistols tour of America.

Glenn A. Baker deserves a pat on the back for the dozens of compilation albums he put together during the year. He covered everything from Little Patti to Australian punk rock in the sixties and Marc Bolan.

In the print area there were a number of fine rock 're roll books. The most enlightening was Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning Of Style, an analysis of the punk and reggae movements in England.

Clinton Walker's Inner City Sound is an indispensible look at new Australian music over the past five years — from The Saints to The Sunny Boys and everyone in between.

Former New Musical Express writer Tony Parsons gave us Platinum Logic, a cheap trashy blockbuster about the music industry. An excellent read.

KEEPING OUT OF TROUBLE IN WASHINGTON WITH GEORGE PELECANOS

In the early part of 2001 I took the bus from New York City to Washington to talk with George Pelecanos. This piece subsequently appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. Even though Pelecanos has written maybe a dozen books since then and played a major role working on TV shows like The Wire and Treme I've Ieft this as I originally wrote it. A snapshot in time and place.

"Washington is the major  character in all the books and I'm pretty obsessive about making it real and making sure all the locations are correct because I consider it to be a record — I hope the books are still in the libraries in 100 years from now and somebody can pick them up and see what it was exactly like here in 1999 or whatever year I'm writing about," says George Pelecanos. 

He is sitting in the bar of Washington's Henley Park Hotel. It's a classy joint but he's quick to remind me that if I "walk three blocks down the road you'll find yourself in a pretty heavy part of town. This is one city you don't want to be walking around by yourself if you don't know exactly where you're going".

  Pelecanos is the author of nine crime novels, although the most recent, Right as Rain, was reviewed in the New York Times as a "stand-alone" novel, with the reviewer concluding that his novels were thrillers, but also "compassionate urban reportage". 

Pelecanos was born in Washington DC in 1957 and graduated from the University of Maryland. For many years, he managed Circle Films, an independent production company responsible for such films as the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink. These days he writes full-time — half a year spent on a novel, the remainder on screenplays. 

His novels such as The Sweet Forever, The Big Blowdown, Shame the Devil, Down by the River Where The Dead Men Go, King Suckerrnan and A Firing Offence have amassed a significant following that has gone beyond a cult audience. Pelecanos writes beautifully, crafts memorable characters and tells you more about the real Washington DC than any travel guide could hope to. Another strong attraction for some readers is Pelecanos love of popular music and its continued presence as a backdrop for his narratives. Over the course of the novels there are hundreds of references to the music of the likes of John Coltrane, Barry White, Blondie, Johnny Cash, Charlie Parker, the Sex Pistols, Tracy Chapman, Wayne Newton, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, and even Australia's Hoodoo Gurus and the Church. 

Both in his hooks and in person Pelecanos is a mixture of unashamed nostalgia for the music of the past and remarkably up-to-date The latter he puts down largely to observing what his children (10 and seven-year-old sons and a four-year-old daughter) listen to. "My oldest son is listening to a lot of hip hop right now which is good. I like that. Because music's always playing in my house they have an ear for it. The other day I was listening to the Black Crowes album, the one that Jimmy Page played on, and even though it isn't (Robert) Plant singing my son heard it and said 'Is this Led Zeppelin?' He didn't know the songs but he knew the sound." 

Pelecanos vividly remembers growing up in Washington in the '60s and the extremely divergent music to be heard on the radio. "Top 40 was where you got your education. You'd turn on the Top 40 and you could hear funk, pop music, rock'n'roll, soul — it was all mixed in together. There isn't any of that anymore, except for the oldies stations. Now when you turn the radio on it's the same in this city as everywhere else — it's pre-programmed, it's corporate and it's segregated by colour." 

Racism is the dominant theme in Right As Rain and Pelecanos believes there's no better American city in which to set a novel about that subject. "Washington is majority black," Pelecanos explains. "It's about 70 to 80 per cent black. There's a very small pocket of whites who live upon Ward 3, which is up on the high ground, but the rest of the city is black and working class. The other unique thing is that we pay taxes but we can't vote. We don't have a senator or congressman because we're not a state. We're in the Federal City, it's the Capitol but it's not the capital of the state, it's unto itself. They don't give the people living here voting rights so you couple those things together and you've got a minority city—minority meaning black or Hispanic — who traditionally have very little power in this country and now they can't even vote," he says.

"The race issue is in your face here everyday. There's no other place in the country where its more obvious — but it's one of the reasons! like living here. It's very honest . . it's the honesty and the fact that it's always boiling over here is I think a good thing because the closer you are to that the closer you are to resolution and I like it, man." 

Right As Rain takes that in-your-face racism as its main theme and focuses on a major issue in Washington, which is cops shooting other cops. 

"In a three-year period there were three cop-on-cop shootings here and in all three cases the victims were out of uniform and the shooters were in uniform, and in all three cases the victims were black and the shooters were white. In other words these cops would roll up on the scene of something and mistake a black guy for a criminal and they'd kill him. In each case, it turned out that this criminal was a cop. In the paper this week there was an instance of this black cop out of Washington in DC who got beat up by 15 officers. They mistook him for a car jacker and he was trying to tell him he was a cop and they beat the shit out of him anyway so it's a real thing. 

"Is this city violent? Very. The murder rate has gone down but violent crime is up. For example rape is up something like 400 per cent. Put it this way, it's not safe. You shouldn't go anywhere without someone who knows the city like I do." 

And make no mistake, Pelecanos' novels are violent. They're deliberately graphic and confrontational, chiefly because the author wants his readers to realise that violence is never pleasant. On the other hand, he despises the almost salacious, semi-pornographic violence component in many books and movies, particularly those dealing with serial killers. 

"I don't get that," he says. "I'm not even going to see Hannibal because I think it's ridiculous. He's the hero of that book and, you think about it, man, if someone like that did something to your children or your wife. . . people are making this guy part of folklore and I just don't understand it — and I'm not going to support it either." 

Having said that, Pelecanos does confess that he finds writing the violent scenes in his books both extremely hard to do but also "exhilarating". "I'd be a hypocrite to say I didn't get a visceral kick out of it the same way I do when I watch the climax of The Wild Bunch or a John Woo movie. If I can get people into it on an emotional level and then also make 'em sick a little bit then I think I've achieved what I'm trying to do." 

Pelecanos is good friends with Dennis Lehane, the American crime writer currently breaking through to a mainstream audience and also one of the most exciting contemporary talents in crime fiction. Pelecanos has, for a long time, championed Lehane. 

"I'm always looking for younger writers to come up and do something different with this genre," Pelecanos says. "I believe they will. You can see it in a writer like Dennis Lehane. He's around 10 years younger than I am and that's where I think genre fiction will be going because his stuff is a marriage of rock'n'roll and movies and literature." 

After five superb novels it's Lehane's new book, Mystic Rain, that's attracting all the attention in the US. Pelecanos understands that this has a lot to do with decisions made by publishing companies as to which handful of comparatively unknown writers they're going to get behind each year and attempt to break into a mass audience. 

"The publishers throw a bunch of money behind them," he-says matter-of-factly. "What people don't realise is that even more than straight advertising what's more important is buying position in the major chain stores and making sure the books are in the windows and they're up front and capping the aisles. That's all paid for by the publisher. They made a conscious decision to get behind this (Lehane's) book. Now, having said that, I don't want to sell him short because you've got to write a good book for it to work. They can artificially make a bestseller out of a piece of shit too if it works as a straight thriller. His book is just a good book." 

Pelecanos is likely to be better known following the making this year of a film based on his novel King Suckerman. He wrote the script with Michael Imperioli, better known as Christopher from the Sopranos. Pelecanos says that he's not worried about what happens to his book when it's translated for the big screen. 

"First of all, I'll never complain about it. You're getting a shitload of money and where else in your job could you complain about being paid so much? It's not fair, and I think when the public reads something like that they must think, 'What an arsehole, what's he complaining about'. The other thing I don't like is when writers say, 'Look what they did to my book'. They didn't do anything to your book, man. Your book's still on the shelves, your name's still on it. Having said that, you hope for the best and fight for as much as you can and try and control as much as you can. The other advantage is that no matter how the movie comes out it's only going to introduce more people to your books so I'm hoping for the best." 

Pelecanos drives me to the subway station. As he drops me off he cautions me for the third time in two hours. "Make sure you get on the Orange Line that's going to Clarendon. If you get the train going the other way I don't really want to think about what sort of trouble you'll get yourself in." 

HANGING WITH HARRY DEAN STANTON

Back in 1990 I was the co-promoter of Harry Dean Stanton's only Australian tour. This is a piece I wrote for Follow Me magazine in September of that year. I haven't attempted to update or change it as on a re-reading I think it stands up as a capsule of that time.

"There were no people around. Just us and the dinosaurs." Harry Dean Stanton is standing in his room at Sydney's Victoria Towers, his residence on and off for the two weeks of his Australian tour in May, drinking a luke-warm cup of coffee and flicking through Sam Shepard's Motel Chronicles, a collection of poems, short fiction and monologues that were the inspiration for the script of Paris, Texas, the film that made Harry Dean an international cult figure.

Dinosaurs appeal to Harry Dean. The night before he'd been at a barbecue thrown for him and his band, The Repo Men. It was towards the end of his first-ever full-scale tour as a musician and he was admiring the collection of plastic dinosaurs lined up along the arm of his chair by the daughter of one of the hosts. "Kids are really into dinosaurs aren't they," he drawls slowly to no one in particular. "It's good, they're better than guns. I guess they're going back to their roots," he says returning to his plate of barbecued prawns which he likes because "they don't taste fishy". 

During the 16 days Harry Dean was in Australia I had the chance to get to know the supposed 'coolest man on the planet' pretty well. I was, after all, one of the two promoters of his tour, and the person who'd convinced him, after months of weekly phone calls to his home in Los Angeles, to make the trip. Harry Dean had been worried about the weather and if it'd be too cold. He'd been worried about whether people would come and see him play. He'd been worried about whether his band was together or not. One night he rang me at 4 am in the morning, his time, to tell me that he'd finally found a drummer that suited the band's style. 

Of course people turned out to see him play. Some loved it, others were disappointed but above all, and possibly unfortunately, they paid their money not to see Harry Dean Stanton, the musician, but to be in the presence of Harry Dean Stanton, the cult figure extraordinaire. Most came because they'd seen Paris, Texas and Repo Man, and some of the younger brigade because they knew him as the father figure with Molly Ringwood in Pretty In Pink. One person even waited outside the first show to get him to sign an Alien book. 

"We're trying to work out what part Harry Dean played in Alien," Clive Robertson says during his introduction of Harry Dean. 

"We've decided he must have been the alien, the blob that emerged from Sigourney Weaver's chest. Can you imagine emerging from Sigourney Weaver's chest?" 

Harry Dean thinks that's amusing. After all, except for Paris, Texas, he's usually been the character in films that you remember seeing but can't remember who or what he was. The audiences who turned out to see Harry Dean in Australia weren't film buffs though. They were hip pop culture buffs —and Harry Dean is about as hip as pop culture gets these days. 

They were there to take a look at this living legend, "The Dean Of Cool', as one paper described him. Scenes at the shows were like minor Beatlemania. Chants of 'Harry, Harry, Harry' throughout the shows and hordes of people clambering for autographs afterwards. 

Michael Hutchence paid, introduced himself backstage and suggested Harry Dean join his group of friends later in the night at the Freezer nightclub. Nicole Kidman turned up for a show by Harry Dean's guitarist, Jimmy Intveld, at a small inner-city pub in Sydney, and fashion figure Jenny Kee did everything she could to get Harry Dean to visit her place in the Blue Mountains. The world's resident hipster just attracts those sorts of people.

Harry Dean (he also answers to Harry) turns 64 in the middle of the year ("but tell everyone I'm 39") and has been acting for more than three decades. Halliwell's Film Companion selectively lists his credits as: Dragon Wells Massacre (1957), How The West Was Won (1962), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Cisco Pike (1972), Dillinger (1973), Cockfighter (1971), Farewell My Lovely (1975), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Alien (1979), The Rose (1979), Wise Blood (1980), Private Benjamin (1980), One From The Heart (1982), Christine (1983), Fool For Love (1986), etc. 

There are two movies completed but as yet unreleased in Australia. 

"If it's intelligent and has something to say and is nourishing to people in general," is about all he'll say about his reasons for accepting a film role. In fact, getting Harry Dean to talk about his film career is just marginally more difficult than getting him to talk about music — or anything else for that matter except philosophy. He's far from what you'd describe as an expansive interview subject. It's only from passing observations that you gain any insight into the cinematic side of his life. 

Being interviewed by Clive Robertson (who he described as the best interviewer he'd encountered in his entire career) Harry Dean admits to having only watched Paris, Texas three or four times, always with tears in his eyes, explaining that for him the film was very autobiographical. 

Harry Dean doesn't have much time for most scripts he reads these days. He vows that he's never going to work with any first time directors again and finds himself re-writing or ad-libbing his way through most scripts, "except Sam's (Shepard) words, you don't mess with them." 

In person Harry Dean is a quiet, unassuming figure. He's shorter than I expected and was so unobtrusive upon his arrival in Sydney that initially I didn't recognise him. 

Very much a night person, Harry Dean rarely goes to sleep before sunrise. "If I get five hours tonight that'll do me for the next three days," said the man who retired to dance clubs and late night bars virtually every night of the tour. 

And for a man who has apparently spent much of his life in bars and has described them as more religious places than churches, Harry Dean doesn't appear to drink a lot. 

"Give me one of those beers that makes me cry," he smiles one night in the hotel bar. It's his roundabout way of asking for a Victoria Bitter. Otherwise there's the occasional shot of tequila. Only one one night did he appear to over indulge. That was after the second to last show when, driving back to the hotel, he was leaning out of the van window yeah-hawing at the early morning hordes in the Cross. Regardless, he unpacked his guitar, headed off to the Site nightclub, acquired a group of new found best friends, went to a party, and ended up staying awake till daybreak. 

"You don't deal with the problem, you deal with the source," he tells me one night whilst explaining his ideas about religion, war, and the state of the universe. 

"It's like alcoholism. They call alcohol a disease. That's bullshit. It's what makes you drink that's the problem. Why do you want to drink, that's the problem. That's the source. The fact is that they're making millions and billions of dollars on liquor. I don't want to outlaw it. I think it's great in moderation but (laughs) how many moderates do you have? Most people are moderate drinkers, fortunately. 

"I'm not a total cynic. I'm not bitter, or a voice of doom. It's all part of the natural flow of the big bang." 

So is there any hope. for civilisation? "Who knows, it doesn't matter," he says. 

This is Harry Dean the Zen Buddhist and Taoist follower speaking. He's deeply involved with the philosophies of the American Zen Buddhist Allan Watts, along with Krishnamurti, a number of Chinese thinkers, and the writings of Wilheim Reich. 

"It just makes a lot more sense, and it's a lot more of a life-positive religion than the western world religions, and the middle Eastern religions," he explains. 

Harry Dean, who travels with a large dictionary in his suitcase, is also currently enarmoured with the politics and ideas of Gorbachev and was reading his book Perestroika whilst on tour. "He's challenging the whole planet," he says. "The guy is the first world leader. He states very clearly that he wants to stop the nuclear arms race, to stop war and save the planet. The guy's either a liar. . . but his actions speak louder than words."

 A few minutes after expounding these thoughts Harry Dean is sitting on an armchair with five-year-old Coby, the owner of the dinosaurs, tuning her pint-sized guitar and strumming a few chords for her. Then she's on his back as he piggie-backs her around the living room. It's the same man who spends a few hours on the morning of his arrival wandering around Kings Cross in the rain trying-to find a hat that doesn't have Sydney or Australia emblazoned on the front. For the majority of his tour Harry Dean went unrecognised walking the streets, or at bars, the theory being that because every second person in the Cross has that down and out, weathered Harry Dean look he didn't stand out. 

However at shows it was a different story. On a Good Morning Australia inter-view Kern-Ann Kennerley had asked him about his sex appeal. 

"Well, I guess I've got a certain animal magnetism," Harry Dean laughs. 

"Well you obviously didn't bring it with you," she replies, hopefully, giving the benefit of the doubt, attempting to be amusing. Animal magnetism it certainly was after dark and after shows, with women well under half his age falling all over him both backstage and at clubs. 

"Why have you never been married," Mike Gibson asks him during an interview in the hotel bar. "Oh, just lucky I guess," replies a smiling Harry Dean. 

During that interview he reveals that there he is the father of a child, born out of wedlock and appears to have an affinity with young kids. Asked to sign a photo for a two-month-old boy whose father has named him, you guessed it, Harry Dean, he seems genuinely touched before scribbling, 'Don't join anything' on a poster for Harry Dean Carter. "That'll probably screw up his whole life," he chuckles. 

Essentially it's hard to work Harry Dean out. He's absent minded, pre-occupied with being a musician, and maybe just a little bit out there, existing on some other cerebral planet. "Harry, you weren't born in 1990," I tell him when I notice that's the year of birth he's put down on his departure form at the airport. 

"Who knows," he laughs as he changes it to 1926. 

Certainly Harry Dean has that mythical presence, both on and off stage. But at the same time he's so frightfully ordinary and into being a musician that it's hard to reconcile the man worried about what time the sound check is, whether his guitar is in the van, and the chords to a particular song with the image on the screen in so many memorable movie appearances. 

Probably my favourite memory of the whole tour came at the barbecue. As Harry Dean's departing he turns to Coby and say's "I love you Coby." 

"I love you too Harry Dean," replies a young voice. • 

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - PARIS 1981.

In March this year my label Laughing Outlaw Records released a 22 track double CD of artists on the label covering Bruce Springsteen songs. The package came with an almost 9,000 word piece I wrote about seeing and interviewing Springsteen in Paris in 1981. This is it. Hope you like it.

Bruce Springsteen has been central to my life since I first heard Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. in 1973. Over the years I've interviewed him a number of times and seen countless shows in Sydney, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Austin, Washington D.C.,Los Angeles - and New Jersey. When I first proposed the idea of a Bruce covers album to the Laughing Outlaw family of artists, well, I knew there were obsessives like me on the label, but I didn't realise how deeply a love for his music ran through the whole roster. The result of that magnificent obsession is what you're holding. This essay was published in Roadrunner Magazine in 1981 and I want to thank Donald Robertson for permission to reprint it. It's all about seeing and interviewing Bruce for the first time in Paris in 1981 - and what it means to be a rock'n'roll fan. I hope you enjoy it.

Stuart Coupe  2013

Stuart Coupe  1981

“When I hear a Springsteen record 1 don’t just hear Springsteen and the E Street Band, 1 hear the Drifters singing ‘Under The Boardwalk’, I hear Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jimmy Jones and a hundred other black men out of the 50’s we all owe more than a little debt to. I hear ALL those Roy Orbison records, not just ‘Only The Lonely’, I hear Jerry Lee and Buddy, I hear Otis, Wilson, and a little bit of Muddy. I hear Ben E King singing ‘1 (Who Have Nothing)’ and Jackie Wilson screaming ‘Lonely Teardrops’. It’s Elvis meets The Ronettes meets Chuck Berry. I hear Jerry Butler with and without the Impressions, and Dion with and without the Belmonts. I hear the Righteous Brothers and Van the Man. I hear the Rolling Stones and the Animals. I hear the Byrds and the Yardbirds, and Bobby Day singing ‘Rockin Robin’. I hear Smokey Robinson and every other artist who ever recorded for Berry Gordy and Motown, from Jnr Walker to Martha and the Vandellas. I even hear Dylan and Johnny Rivers. I hear the Band. I hear Creedence. l hear Gary U.S Bonds. I hear Sam and Dave shouting ‘Hold On (I’m Coming)’. I could go on and on, because I hear a little bit of every rock ‘n’ roller who ever laid a track on vinyl. Yet the Springsteen/E Street sound is unique. It wasn’t stolen from what preceded it. ‘Rosalita’, ‘Born To Run’, ‘Thunder Road’, ‘Badlands’, and almost all the rest are the result of twenty-five years of evolution". 

LOU COHAN – THUNDER ROAD MAGAZINE 

STUART COUPE: "Who me? I just love rock ‘n’ roll". 

Being a rock ‘n’ roll fan equals obsession. I’m one of those people. For as long as I can remember I’ve listened to rock ‘n’ roll, been inspired by it, sung it’s best choruses in my mind, and seen my own life reflected, and clarified in it. I grew up listening to a small transistor radio at home. The first time I had enough money to buy a single that’s exactly what I did. It was The Easybeats’ Friday On My Mind. I cried when my parents said they didn’t like it. I never set out with the intention of having rock ‘n’ roll separate me from them but it happened. I loved it and I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t too. But I’m not restricted to parents these days either. It’s simply those that love and those that don’t.  It’s the ones that do who become my friends.

When it comes to being a rock ‘n’ roll fan I’m a fan of Bruce Springsteen above everyone else. I love stacks of people — hundreds of them, but Springsteen stands head and shoulders above them.

Springsteen’s music is about struggle, determination, loving, travel, dependency and independency. The history and spirit of rock ‘n’ roll pervades every line, every note, that he plays. And above all he’s a fan, just like me.

Since I’ve been writing about rock ‘n’ roll I’ve written very little about Springsteen. In fact this is the first lengthy piece I’ve written about him. And it’s also the hardest. How do you do justice to him and his music? This will probably be the longest story ROADRUNNER will ever run but l’m stuck with the problem not of filling up the space but what to leave out.

But if it comes out vaguely coherent and adds something to your appreciation of Springsteen and rock ‘n’ roll then it’s worth it.

It’s written for Margaret in Melbourne who reckons she’s my biggest fan because I like Bruce Springsteen best of all and she thinks Born To Run is the greatest song ever recorded. She could be right, you know. 

To my mind Bruce Springsteen is the only rock ‘n’ roll performer to emerge in the Seventies who has any real claim to rank with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles.

There’s a depth to his vision of contemporary life, and a spirit in his music that simply dwarfs those who would be King.

Greetings From Asbury Park, Springsteen’s first album, was released in 1972. I remember vividly the first time I heard a track from it. I was living in Launceston and conditioned to religiously taping Chris Winters ‘Room To Move’ program on the ABC. One night he played the staggering Half Past France from John Cale’s Paris 1919 album and Mary Queen Of Arkansas from this guy called Springsteen. I played those two songs over and over till the tape almost broke.

Then a friend brought a copy of the album back from England. Springsteen wrote in a rush of Dylanesque images, long lines crammed with images, and song titles like it’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City, Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street, and Spirit In The Night.

In these songs I met Crazy Janey, Wild Billy, Hazy Davy, the Angel, Jimmy The Saint. Kids who lived on the streets. Kids, like Springsteen, who were growing up: 

I stood stone-like at midnight suspended in my masquerade

combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigade

I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch

I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and came out with my soul untouched

I hid in the crowded wrath of the crowd but when they said ‘Sit down,’ I stood up

Ooh...growin’ up  

The flag of piracy flew from my mast, my sails were set wing to wing

I had a jukebox graduate for first mate, she couldn’t sail but she sure could sing

… And I swear I found the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car.

 Springsteen grew up in New Jersey, raised as a Catholic in the small town of Freehold. One of the most legendary stories about his Catholic schooling concerns a school assignment where Springsteen’s class were asked to draw their impression of Christ on the cross.

Young Bruce handed up his drawing — Christ crucified on an electric guitar.

Prior to the Bruce Springsteen Band days Bruce had numerous bands like The Castiles, and Steel Mill (a dreadful heavy metal outfit) who worked around the bars of New Jersey, especially the resort community of Asbury Park. Yes Virginia, there really is an Asbury Park, and the boardwalk is still there.  Maybe Sandy really did walk under it one night. 

In some ways Asbury Park was probably like Liverpool in the early Sixties. Hundreds of bands coming and going, changing members and playing to each other and their fans. Eventually one of them makes it big — in Liverpool it was The Beatles, in Asbury Park, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band. In this context Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes filled the role of The Searchers, to Asbury Park’s Beatles.  

Back to the saga of the boy next door and his guitar.  A year after Greetings From Asbury Park, The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle is released. It’s less frantic than the first.  More relaxed and sensuous, with the sound of cars sliding along wet streets and girls walking along the boardwalk on hot summer nights.

There’s a whole host of new characters — Diamond Jackie, Spanish Johnny, Kitty, Jack Knife, Weak Knee Willie, and Big Bone Billy.

Through all the songs there’s a sense of moving. Wild Billy, who works at the circus, is always on the move, the guy who loves Rosie gets a record contract and wants to shift from New Jersey to Southern California, and in Fourth Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) Springsteen sings of leaving his youthful innocence behind: 

Sandy, the waitress I was seein’ lost her desire for me, I spoke with her last night, she said she won’t set herself on fire for me anymore,

She worked the joint under the boardwalk, she was always the girl you saw boppin’ down the beach with the radio, Kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of those cheap little seaside bars and saw her parked with her loverboy out on the Kokomo, 

Did you hear, the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do.

For me, this boardwalk life’s through, you ought to quit this scene too.

         The Wild, The Innocent … made it pretty obvious that Bruce Springsteen had a lot to say and was going to be around awhile saying it. As Dave Marsh writes: "There are a few precious moments in rock when you hear a musician overcoming both his own limits and the restrictions of the form. At those times, the music flows into something as awesome that it’s force is undeniable. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Eric Clapton’s Layla, Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, Phil Spector’s Da Doo Ron Ron, Roy Orbison’s Running Scared perhaps Neil Young on Helpless and Tonight’s The Night, certainly the entire first Jimi Hendrix Experience LP and The Who’s My Generation and Substitute are moments such as that. For Springsteen, the watershed came on his second album.  If he has already written greater music, explored the possibilities of his ideas more completely, made better recordings, none of it can ever sound quite this fresh. Neither he, nor we, will ever again be quite so astonished by the dimensions of his talent.”

It was three years before Springsteen made another record.  Problems with manager Mike Appel, and the resulting law-suits kept The Boss from releasing any new material.

During this period critic Jon Landau wrote a story reflecting on his life as a rock ‘n’ roll fan, and the importance of Springsteen to renewing his faith in the music. The piece was about growing up listening to The Righteous Brothers, The Four Tops, The Rolling Stones and Motown. The last four paragraphs sealed Springsteen’s fate — Landau, at this stage, was the most influential critic in America. He wrote: “But tonight there is someone I can write of the way I used to write, without reservations of any kind. Last Thursday at Harvard Square Theatre, I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the first time."

Landau’s quote became the most famous line ever written about a rock ‘n’ roll performer "I Saw Rock and Roll Future and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

Springsteen has lived with that tag ever since. He hates it. During his first English tour he physically ripped down and disfigured billboard posters bearing the slogan. 

Late in 1975 Born To Run was released, one of the truly great rock ‘n’ roll records. Springsteen had refined his songwriting. Prose poems were still poems but they translated to rock ‘n’ roll songs perfectly. 

More songs about cars, movement, escape from mundane lives and nostalgia for the innocence of youth.  Here was Springsteen’s most famous song, Born To Run: 

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes

On the last chance power drive

Everybody’s out on the run tonight

But there’s no place left to hide

Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness

I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul

Someday girl, I don’t know when,

We’re gonna get to that place

Where we really want to go

And we’ll walk in the sun

But then tramps like us Baby we were born to run.

These were the same kids that inhabited the first two albums. But they’re getting older, a little wiser. They’re looking for a way out — driving cars, crime, hiding in the backstreets, street gang camaraderie.

With its searing Spectoresque sound Born To Run was worth every minute we’d been waiting for its release. The only question was, how long can he keep recording rock ‘n’ roll classics, each one better than those before? Two years later there was no sign of him slowing down. Darkness On The Edge Of Town turned out to be one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll records in the history of the music.

On it Springsteen’s politics were more explicit and defined. The innocence of the earlier albums was completely gone and instead his characters were facing the grim reality of life. They struggled to break out but they were caught every time.  It didn’t stop them trying.

Darkness … was received by critics and the public as a depressing, defeated album. This upset Springsteen who saw the songs as being about positive struggle against the odds.  In Promised Land he sings: 

There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor

packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down

That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground

Blow away the dreams that tear you apart

Blow away the dreams that break your heart 

Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted

The dogs on main street howl 

‘cause they understand

If I could take one moment into my hands

Mister, I ain’t no boy, no, I’m a man,

And I believe in a promised land.

As Dave Marsh wrote: “You could say that this music is about survival, but not the easy kind that pop musicians and consciousness cults like to talk about. This sort of survival isn’t about being ‘happy’ or having ‘fun’, or resolving the dilemmas of being sensually satiated.  In this context, the kind of ‘survival’ — in which demons are neither conquered nor conquering: but simply ignored — is far more meaningless than death itself could ever be. For Springsteen, survival is a matter of facing up to everything that saps psychic and physical strength: it means taking life on its own terms, and never giving in.  “When Bruce Springsteen sings on his new album, that’s not about ‘fun’, said Pete Townshend, “That’s fucking triumph, man.”

Besides containing Springsteen’s most fully realised songs, Darkness … highlighted the musicianship of The E Street Band. Springsteen’s guitar playing opened up new possibilities for the use of the instrument and the performances by the band left no doubt that they were the tightest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.

       The River, a double set, was released late in 1980.  It sounded as though Springsteen was reacting against the supposed depressing feeling of Darkness. This time there was a stack of up tempo rock ‘n ‘roll songs.

But the classic ballads were still there. Three in particular, Independence Day, Point Blank, and Wreck On The Highway rank with the finest stuff Springsteen has recorded. And for the first time this album contained first person love songs. In the past all Springsteen’s overt love songs had been given to other people to record. Not now.

The car was still the dominant symbol in Springsteen’s songs. All but three songs on The River are reliant on automobile metaphors.

The River is also a much more mature album. Springsteen’s characters have got older with their creator and as Ken Viola, publisher of the Springsteen/Jukes fanzine Thunder Road, told me in New York: “The River represents, at least to me, what a 30 year old guy who grew up relatively middle-class thinks about and experiences, and its a very urban, kind of city thing. The songs seem to be directed at older people — 30 year olds. That isn’t bad necessarily but it doesn’t have the youthful vitality that some of his earlier records did".

The River is the work of a maturing man but it still contained more rock ‘n’ roll spirit than just about anything else recorded last year. But enough of the skimpy history.  Let’s get to the point of this whole story. It is about time isn’t it?

PAUL RUSSELL: "You wanna go to Europe and see Bruce Springsteen play?" 

Springsteen has never played live in Australia. It’s hard enough to get him out of America, let alone to Australia.  Nevertheless, there’s been almost as many rumours of an impending tour as there are for a Rolling Stones or Who tour. He’ll definitely be here next month they’re always saying. He never is.

For a person with such a huge reputation Springsteen doesn’t sell a lot of records, here or overseas. Hungry Heart, the first single from The River, hovered around the lower regions of the Top 40 before disappearing and The River sold well but not spectacularly.

It’s the same in America. “We’ve really got to break him with this album.” Julian Shapiro from CBS International in New York tells me.  “I mean Springsteen isn’t really a big seller. The River’s his best selling album but it’s only done 1.8 million copies. Compare that with a guy like Billy Joel who regularly does 4 million units.”

“The way we look at it The River has seven or eight potential singles on it and we’ve really got to get him away this time. I mean we may not get another album from him for two years.”

The closest comparison with Springsteen was the late Bob Marley, a guy who didn’t have gigantic sales figures but had a real reputation for putting on an amazing live show that made the records seem almost insignificant.

“But wait till you see him live” has always been the classic Springsteen fans’ response to people who remain unconvinced after hearing the records.

As far as Australia is concerned that’s where the Catch 22 comes in. Rumour has it Springsteen wants around a million dollars to tour Australia – he travels with 46 people, his own sound system, staging and lighting.

A million dollars is a lot for a promoter to risk on the reputation of a guy who isn’t an established superstar (read McCartney, Stewart, Joel, Police) in this country.

It’s worse when he says he won’t play outdoors on principle.

And then he says he won’t come till record sales increase. Whereas tours are the traditional way to increase record sales.

“We think we need someone to go to Europe and tell people in Australia what Springsteen is like live," Paul Russell, the managing director of CBS Records, Australia, tells me one night at a Charlie Daniels party cum record presentation: “Do you think you could find the time to go over?”

Could I find the time? What a joke. I’d walk over broken glass to see a Springsteen show. Wasn’t I the person who wrote in my book that my greatest desire was to see Bruce Springsteen in concert?????????   (Book “The New Music")

Initially I have tickets for three of the five sold out shows at Wembley Stadium in London. Then comes the announcement Springsteen has collapsed and the English dates have been postponed till after his European concerts.

“I’m not so sure he really did collapse,” Julian Shapiro says. “Between you and me I think he was tired after a really long American tour but it’s more that he doesn’t want to go to Europe and realises that when he does go he’s stuck there for six weeks.”

So Paris it is. A few days into the tour Springsteen and the E Street Band are playing two nights at the Palais des Sports, a sporting venue that holds around 5,000 people. This will be the first time Springsteen has appeared in France.

“No football, no football,” mutters the French cabbie who can’t figure out why I want the Palais des Sports. I show him my ticket. “Aaaah, muzic consert.” He’s sussed it out.

It’s bitterly cold. People are huddling around hot food caravans. I’m handed a postcard for Rose Tattoo announcing their European dates.

Around Paris the posters for Rose Tattoo outnumber those for French election candidates by two to one. The Tatts are, like The Saints, much more popular in Europe than they’re ever likely to be in Australia.

The show starts at 9 o’clock. There’s no support act. I’m with John Peters from 3XY who’s also been flown over for the concerts. Our tickets are about 15 rows from the front, just to the side of centre. Not bad at all.

We’re both pretty tired. John arrived from Australia only a few hours earlier and I flew in from New York that morning, devastated after three weeks of constant activity in that city.

It’s a strange sensation. After dreaming of this moment for so many years it’s hard to believe it’s real. Am I really sitting in the Palais des Sports in Paris about to see the finest rock ‘n’ roll performer to appear in the past ten years?

Could he possibly be as good as my expectations?????? What happens if he’s dreadful? Less than great?

Christ, CBS has just spent over $5,000 on me seeing this show. Sure, they get a few other interviews but this is IT. The purpose of the whole exercise. Now, I make a big thing about having a reputation as a critic who says ONLY what he thinks, what happens if I get back to Australia and have to tell CBS and the world that this guy just doesn’t cut it???? Great records but all this ‘you’ve gotta see him in concert’ stuff is a load of crap. He’s OK but so are The Boomtown Rats. Gulp. This is getting worrying.

The lights go down. Oh well, we’re on the way. It’s just after 9. The French are really into the flickering light routine. The moment the house lights go down hundreds of matches and cigarette lighters flicker in the darkness. It really is quite moving... honest.

I’m expecting the big blast as the E Streeters and Bruce slam into Badlands or another rock ‘n’ roller. Not so. Springsteen walks out. He’s like a shadow. Just a faint light illuminating his face. The crowd cheers and then goes silent. Slowly, oh so slowly. Springsteen starts singing Factory, just a slight guitar sound in the background.

Early in the morning factory whistle blows,

Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes,

Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light,

It’s the working, the working, just the working life.

He’s stunning. Chilling. Then the lights flash. Max Weinberg thrashes the drums and it’s Prove It All Night. The E Street band are on two tiers. Across the back there’s keyboards player Danny Federici, opposite him is pianist Roy Bittan and in the middle is Mighty Max sitting behind the most basic drum kit I’ve ever seen. But does he hammer those four or five drums? You betcha.

Down front Clarence Clemons is on the left, then Bruce, and bassist Gary Tallent, next to Mr Cool himself, Miami Steve in a black suit, and black hat.

All the band stand out as individual characters. Federici plays the whole show with this ‘don’t fuck with me’ snarl on his face. He’s a large man who treats his organ like a toy. You see it shaking on its legs, expecting that at any moment they’ll break. Weinberg looks like a would be high school librarian. Glasses. Frail build. Only difference is that he drums with the power of Keith Moon. Bittan sits sedately at the piano. He’s balding, has a beard and looks as though he’d be just as happy tinkering away in a piano bar. Doesn’t even blink an eyelid or look up when Springsteen leaps onto his piano, sings a few verses and then propels himself back onto the stage. Clarence is fabbo. Blowing sax, hitting a tambourine. Dressed in great suits, real leather hats. etc. The whole bit. Then there’s Tallent, a pretty sexy bass player. One of those guys whose body moves like the bass notes. They kinda slink around the stage in slow, rhythmic motions.

As for Bruce. Well, he’s short and looks like all the zillions of photos you’ve seen except that he’s grown these long Elvis Presley-like sideburns. And is he active? The only time he stands still during the show is when he’s playing guitar and singing, hence he can’t drag the mike with him.

          Prove It All Night leads into Out in The Street. Miami snarling the choruses with Bruce. “When I’m out in the street I walk the way / wanna walk. I talk the way I wanna talk.” or something like that. Then Ties That Bind, and Darkness On The Edge Of Town, in which Bruce changes “I lost my wife” to “1 lost my girl”, the only time he changes a lyric during both shows.

Take my word for it. This is pretty fuckin’ exciting. By this stage I’m registering about one chill up the spine every 30 seconds. Every word, every line, every solo seems so much more impassioned, and felt in a concert situation. It’s sorta like hearing the records but everything is highlighted and more immediate. This is one concert where you’re NOT better off saving money and staying home listening to the records.

Independence Day is followed by Springsteen’s version of John Fogerty’s Who’ll Stop The Rain, a song he apparently added to the set after Lennon was shot. Two Hearts, and Promised Land are next.

Story time and Springsteen tells a version of the story about going past Elvis’ place after a concert. It was close to the version Dave Marsh quotes in Born To Run. Miami Steve and Bruce hop into a cab after a show in Memphis; “We told the cab driver, take us somewhere quiet.” He said, “Are you guys celebrities?” ‘Yeah’. So he said he’d take us out along the highway, by Elvis’ house. I said, “You gotta take me to Elvis’ house”. He says, “Okay. Do you mind if I call the dispatcher and tell him where we’re going?” So he calls the guy, says. “We got some celebrities here. We got.....” and he shoves the mike in my face, so I say, ‘Bruce Springsteen’. They didn’t know who I was, but they were pretendin to, y`know? He told the dispatcher we were going to Elvis’ house; he was crackin’ up because the dispatcher thought we were going to drink coffee with Elvis.

When we got to the gate, I looked through. It was 3am but all the lights in the house were on. I said, “I gotta see if he’s home.” So I climbed over and started up the driveway; it’s a long walk ‘cause the house is set way back. And I was almost at the front door, just getting ready to knock, when I see this guy looking at me from the trees. He says, “Hey, come here a minute.” I said, “Is Elvis here?” He said, no, he was in Lake Tahoe or something.

“Well, now I’m pullin’ out all the cheap shots I can think – you know, I was on Time, I play guitar, Elvis is my hero, all the things I never say to anybody. Because I figure I’ve got to get a message through. But he just said, ‘Yeah, sure. Why don’t you let me walk you down to the gate. You gotta get out of here.’ He thought I was just another crazy fan — which I was”

In Paris the only alteration to that story was Springsteen pondering what he’d actually have said if The King had been there and they’d met. Springsteen also talked about the Presley songs that impressed him most — How Great Thou Art and The American Trilogy. “And I rate this song with those,” he said, introducing a very straight, folky reading of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, complete with harmonica solo.

Then The River, Badlands and Thunder Road. The French audiences were singing along with all the songs off The River and Darkness but they didn’t have the faintest idea of Thunder Road.

As the lights dim after Thunder Road the band stagger to the front of the stage. It’s 10.20. “Don’t go away,” Springsteen says. “We’ll have a short break and we’ll be back to play another whole set for yas.”

Twenty minutes later they’re back. This is easily the greatest rock ‘n’ roll show I’ve ever seen and it’s only half over.

OK, this time there’s Cadillac Ranch, Sherry Darling (complete with a young girl dancing onstage with The Boss), Fire, Look But Better Not Touch, Wreck On The Highway, Racing in The Streets, Candy’s Room, Ramrod and Rosalita. By the end of Rosalita the place is going beserk. Bruce introduces the band and off they go. Everyone’s standing up. Seats are getting smashed and thrown out of the way.

Five minutes of roaring applause and they’re back on. And in five minutes Springsteen devastates everything else in the concert. A slow, unaccompanied version of Presley’s I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You. Boy, and if you ever thought rock ‘n’ roll couldn’t put tears in your eyes and a lump in your throat.

Three more killer punches end it all — Born To Run, The Detroit Medley and a version of the John Fogerty song Status Quo made money from Rockin’ All Over The World.

Zoweeeeeeee. It IS the greatest rock ‘n’ roll concert l’ve ever seen. Springsteen and the E Streeters are THE best. And you betta believe it. 

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: "Hi, I hear you’re from Australia. My name’s Bruce too." 

It’s well after 1am when we leave the venue. The Boss and co. played for over three hours and afterwards it seems like 3 minutes.

Outside into the freezing, and I mean freezing, Paris night and off to the post gig party at this ritzy nightclub cum disco called Captain Video that CBS have taken over for the night. 

It’s like a normal disco, a bit classier than most. On the video screen I see clips of Rose Tattoo and some live footage of The Angels.

And the big question? Will THEY turn up? Sure enough, about 3am Miami Steve arrives. Then Gary Tallent, Springsteen and eventually everyone except Clarence.

Stay where you are, Bruce is coming over in a minute. Celia from the French CBS office tells John and I. A few minutes later Springsteen comes over to the table, looking tired and dressed in jeans and a lumber jacket. He can hardly talk. His voice is a husky rasp. "I hear you’re from Australia." he says. "Sorry I can’t talk but why don’t you come backstage after the show tomorrow night.” 

He’s led off to meet some more people. I start talking with Dave Marsh who’s flown from New York to see most of the European shows. His wife, Barbara Carr, is Springsteen’s publicist and they’ve bought their kids along. Just like family affair. “Daddy, have you got 20 francs,” the 10 year old asks Marsh.

For a long time Marsh has been my favourite American rock ‘n’ roll writer. His Springsteen biography was magnificent and he’s been the most perceptive and, dare I say caring, of the Rolling Stone brigade over the years. He looks like your average American college kid only a few years older. I ask him how good the show I’d just seen was compared to others. “I’ll tell you how good it was,” Marsh says. “I had tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. When he came out and sang those early songs like Factory I saw my whole life flash past me. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen him give.”

Marsh explained that the shows had been cut down in length for Europe and how Springsteen had worked out how to put it all across in around three hours. “In California he was doing four and four and a half hour shows but he was wearing the band, the kids and everyone except himself out.”

Then to the show’s highlight, I Can’t Help Falling ... I’ve never heard him do that song. He’s never done it before. Who is he when he sings that song? Elvis wouldn’t sing it that way.  Neither would Dylan. 

“Sometimes he’s Elvis, other times it’s Dylan, and other times he’s crazy enough to be Little Richard.

Maybe John Lydon is right — there is nothing new in rock ‘n’ roll.  But does it matter? That’s a good question.”

Marsh was surprised and pleased that Springsteen’s first appearances in Europe had gone so well. “There was a time when we didn’t think Americans would understand what the guy was all about, let alone Parisians, He was a little nervous tonight but after he got going, it was great.

He was certainly better than The Stones or The Who.  Sometimes The Who were as good but not so consistently.”

Later on in the evening Marsh is discussing the crowd’s response that night with some French rock journalists who think that only about 15% of the audience could understand English. “Maybe Bruce attracts a more literate audience,” Marsh says. “But then the whole point, for me, is like the story he used to tell before Independence Day about the records he used to hear on the radio and how he was moved by the sound, not the words. The important thing was the way he sang.”

Garry Tallent looks pretty approachable so I start chatting with him about records. He and Southside Johnny share the same record collection which they keep at Garry’s place. “Southside needs to get down near the beach again,” he says. “He’s like a fish out of water where he’s living now.” He tells me that most of what they collect is do wop, rockabilly, and Roy Orbison. This is the guy who is reported to have been enlisted into the E Street band on the strength of telling Bruce he broke down and cried the first time he heard Running Scared on the radio. He speaks in awe about a recent show in the stage where Orbison came along to see them play and came backstage afterwards to say how much he enjoyed it. Hey, these guys are first and foremost rock ‘n’ roll fans — that’s what makes them so special.

Flitting around is Miami Steve. “Australia? Don’t they speak another language down there?” he asks.

Throughout all this manager Jon Landau keeps a watchful eye over his flock. He comes across as being as tough as Jake Riviera except he smiles more. People who don’t like Landau say that at the same time as he saw the future of rock ‘n’ roll he saw the future of his own bank account. But certainly he’s a fan as well. During the concerts he’s there clapping as hard as the most enthusiastic audience member.

The party fades about 5am. The E Streeters drift off to the hotel. Me likewise.

Sunday. It’s Easter in Paris. Off to the art galleries in search of the Mona Lisa.

Concert number 2. We travel out with Amos, a rock ‘n’ roll journalist from Israel who’s just been to America on the CBS account and seen God in the form of Styx. Is it possible that he could also be a Springsteen fan? "If you’re a fan of rock ‘n’ roll it’s hard not to be a fan of Springsteen," he replies.

The concert starts right on time. Tonight there’s no seats. It’s first in first served and already people are being squashed at the front. 

Again, it’s a slow start. Springsteen shrouded in darkness singing a song called Follow That Dream, a curious mixture of words by Presley and Roy Orbison, along with some of his own. It spells out the Springsteen philosophy:

The heart is restless

So tired and weary

And you can’t go on in the distance a dream is calling you 

Well there’s just one thing that you can do

Well you’ve got to follow that dream

Wherever that dream may lead you

Now baby I walk in dreams

And I talk in dreams

I need someone with a love I can trust

And together well search for the things that come to us in dreams

I’m gonna follow that dream wherever that dream may lead me

Now every man has a right to live

The right for a chance to give what he has to give

The right to struggle for the things he believes

For the things that come to him in dreams, baby in dreams, in dreams.

All is silent. Lights flicker. Then BANG. Cascades of red, green and blue lights spotlight the players. “Lights out tonight / Trouble in the heartland. Got a head on collision / Smashin’ in my guts, man”  Badlands, and the hall is dancing. I’m exhilarated. The contrast is so magnificent.

Ties That Bind is next, before 10th Avenue Freezout, which Springsteen begins standing on Bitten’s piano, then, taking a mighty leap onto Weinberg’s drum rostrum, and finishing up singing the last verses on the next stage level.

After Darkness On The Edge Of Town it’s time for another story, one of his best: 

“I grew up in this house where there was never many books or, I guess, anything that was considered art or anything and I remember when I was at school — at the time the things they were trying to teach me and the things that later on, when I got older, I missed not knowing, but when I was 15 or 16 either it was the way they were trying to teach it or I just wasn’t interested, but in my family when I got older I looked back and saw that my father — he quit high school and went into the army and he got married really young and picked up jobs where he could working in the factory and driving a truck. And I look back on my grandfather and he worked in a rug mill in the town that I grew up in and it seemed that we all had one thing in common — that we didn’t know enough. We didn’t know enough about what was happening to us.

“I’m 31 now and I just started to read the history of the United States (cheers) and the thing is that I started to learn about how things got to be the way they are today, how you end up a victim without even knowing it and how people get old and just die after not having hardly a day’s satisfaction or peace of mind in their lives … but I was lucky too because I met this guy when I was in my middle twenties who said you should watch this, you should read this.  Most people from where I come from never had someone to try and help them in that way. So all I’m saying is try and learn about, learn about yourselves and about who you are (cheers) and try and make it better for who’s going to be coming (cheers) because the real future of rock ‘n’ roll is only about nine years old today … anyway …  Well, papa go to bed …”

A beautiful version of Independence Day.

Tonight’s set contains a large number of the same songs as the night before but they’re placed in different order and there’s a fair stack of different inclusions - Because The Night replaces Fire. Point Blank is in instead of Wreck On The Highway. I Can’t Help Falling In Love is still there but we also get Highschool Hop thrown in with The Detroit Medley and a romping rendition of Sweet Soul Music, a song that’d been played through the PA during intermission the previous night.

The highlights are numerous. A poignant version of Racing In The Street during which I became very conscious of the total stillness in the hall. Hardly a movement except flickering flames from lighters and matches. During Ramrod Clarence and Bruce walking across the stage on their knees, and during Rosalita moving closer and closer and closer together until they’re facing each other. Quickly they kiss each other on the lips before spinning round and round till Springsteen reaches his microphone to sing the next verse. Because The Night is greeted with raised fists rising in time with the music. And for This Land Is Your Land Springsteen talks about how this song was originally written as an angry answer to God Bless America. Was this land made for you and me? That’s a question people should ask themselves about where they live.

Again the guy, and the rest of the E Streeters, don’t stop moving. They’re tireless, and what’s more, they look like they’re enjoying every fuckin minute of being up there. “They know every rock song there is,” a friend of the band tells me. “At practice Bruce can just call for a song, any song and they all know it.” 

Even the stage and road crew are reacting like the audience. You can see them sitting along the sides of the stage clapping and singing along with all the songs.

One thing that strikes me throughout both concerts, and is a little worrying, is the constant suggestion and presence of Presley in Springsteen’s show.

Besides the Presley songs, and all the references in stories he really does LOOK like Presley. When he takes off his guitar and stands side on, crooning a ballad with those sideburns, the black hair, and some of the clothes he was wearing he looks just like The King.

Near the conclusion of both shows it becomes even more obvious. He falls into the classic Presley movements from the Fifties of throwing his head, shoulders and arms back in time with a drum beat. Hmmmmm.

In his article, The Man Who Would Save Rock And Roll, Greil Marcus has looked at the similarities between the two. After detailing all the failures of rock ‘n’ roll today writes: “A concert by Bruce Springsteen offers many thrills, and one is that he performs as if none of the above is true. The implicit promise of a Bruce Springsteen concert is that This Is What It’s All About - This is The Rock. Whether the promise is more than a night’s happy illusion is, at the time, less important than whether Springsteen can live up to it.

“As songwriter, singer, guitarist and bandleader, he appears at once as the anointed successor to Elvis Presley and as an imposter who expects to be asked for his stage pass; his show is, among other things, an argument about the nature of rock ‘n’ roll after 25 years. The argument is that rock ‘n’ roll is a means to fun that can acknowledge the most bitter defeats, that it was a coherent tradition which, when performed, will reveal possibilities of rock ‘n’ roll the tradition did not previously contain.”

I guess the big question is whether Springsteen can keep Presley as an inspiration and not become a clone. Unfortunately, during the Paris concerts there were moments when he skirted a little too close to the latter. But back to the saga of An Australian in Paris watching A Bruce Springsteen Concert. 

 “Hey I’m in Paris and I’m just about to interview the future of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Sunday night, the second concert over, there’s about 30 people wearing backstage passes and waiting for an audience with The Boss.

“Don’t expect anything to happen for about an hour,” Celia from the French CBS office says. “Bruce has a rub down after every show. It doesn’t matter if his parents are waiting - he has a rub down before he sees them...”

Gradually the band appears - Clarence, Max, Gary and Miami Steve who’s drawn into a discussion about the Gary US Bonds album he and Springsteen produced. 

Somehow a long haired, sandal wearing guy has got through the security cordon. He walks up to Miami Steve and asks him to autograph his forehead. Miami Steve turns on him, a mean sneer on his face. “Where I come from, you know what we call people like you - he taunts, pushing the guy’s chest with his finger. Hippies! Fuckin’ hippies, now get out of here hippie, fuckin’ hippie.”  The abuse continues till the hapless individual is safely out the door. 

I recall Ken Viola telling me, “Miami Steve is the key to the whole band, he knows everything, remembers every face, and every conversation.”

Around 2.30 in the morning the band, and most of the touring party leave in a bus for their hotel. Only Landau and a few others are hanging around inside. There’s still about 80 fans shivering outside waiting to see Springsteen. Amos, by this time, is just about asleep standing up against the wall.  “If I was about to meet Bruce Springsteen for the first time I wouldn’t be falling asleep” Celia laughs. 

Three o’clock and we’re ushered in. The dressing room reeks of linament, just like a football team change rooms. There’s towels everywhere. Springsteen looks tired. He’s short - shorter than he appears onstage even, dressed again in jeans and an old coat. His skin bears the marks of adolescent pimples and his jaw juts out.  In the flesh he’s far from the spunk that people imagine him to be. He looks much better in 98% of the photos than the real thing!! 

But he’s friendly. Questions start. How about training to keep in shape for such mammoth concerts? “I usually go into the gym a week before a tour begins to do a few light workouts” Springsteen says, “It’s more what I don’t do than what I do. I don’t do drugs or booze and I need sleep. If I don’t get eight hours sleep a night it really affects the show the next night.

“I don’t go out much these days. I don’t stay out all night but I do stay up all night.”

Springsteen says that when it comes to Australian music he’s heard records by The Angels and Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons. I mention Friday On My Mind. “That song … Forget it,… its one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll records ever... and one of the hardest to play. I never could get the chords right to that one.   I used to try real hard but they’d never be exactly right.”

Surprise is expressed that the band is finishing the shows with Rockin’ All Over The World which, although written by John Fogerty is known mostly in Australia and Europe as a Status Quo song. “I didn’t know it’d been a hit for Status Quo,” Springsteen laughs. “I just think of it as a John Fogerty song. But when I suggested we do it the band slapped me on the back. They said ‘Boss, how’d you think of that? How’d you know it’d been a hit for Status Quo? It’ll go down really well here.  

“It was lust luck on my part. I didn’t look so good when they found out.  

“There’s just that one line that says it all … like it. I like it. I like it.”

Springsteen says he’s heard that the name ‘Bruce’ is really common in Australia and that people make a big thing about it. I explain that Brooocccceeee is used in the same way that non-New Jersey residents say Joooiiisssy when referring to New Jersey. Pretty much a term of derision and mockery. Springsteen talks about the isolation in New Jersey.  “My sister hadn’t been to New York till a few years back and then she and her husband couldn’t find Fifth Avenue so they came back.”  

Fifth Avenue is the main street in New York!! 

Can Springsteen remember seeing any great bands in the Sixties? “I didn’t see too many bands till I turned twenty and became more mobile” he says. “When I was fifteen saw Herman’s Hermits head lining over The Who and The Blue Magoos” 

The range of rock ‘n’ roll classics that Springsteen and the E Street band have, at times, covered is quite awesome, I prompt Springsteen about one of my favourites, The Animals song, It’s My Life and he launches into his feelings about radio in the Sixties.

“The main thing I notice about the difference between radio then and now is that songs back then seemed so much more socially conscious. 

“Things like The Animals It’s My Life and We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, and I just love Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On... I always have a copy of that with me. 

“And then there’s The Temptations Papa Was A Rolling Stone and Cloud Nine, and all those great Impressions tracks with Curtis Mayfield. 

“I really haven’t heard anything good on the radio since 1974.” 

I’d assume that exceptions to that last statement would be Thunder Road, Hungry Heart, Born To Run and other Springsteen songs that stood out like beacons amongst the other dross. 

Both shows in Paris were different. Does he and the band alter the sets every night? "We try and make every night different" says Springsteen. “We’ve never done Factory like we did it last night. We always change it because it keeps us on our toes, and it’s important when we’re playing more than one show in the same place.”

His reaction to French audiences? “They know all the songs from The River and seem to know more from Darkness than Born To Run” Springsteen says. “They’re not too good on Thunder Road but they know Backstreets which we’ve been doing a bit on this tour.”

John’s interested in whether Springsteen saw the movie Badlands before he wrote the song. “I saw that after making the record but I’d read Carol which is the story of the girl recounting the story of what happened from jail - the part Sissy Spacek played.

“The song really doesn’t have a lot to do with the movie.” 

On a bootleg recorded during the 1978 American tour Springsteen makes a reference to a book called Born On The Fourth Of July by a Vietnam Veteran, Ron Kovic. Springsteen dedicates Darkness On The Edge Of Town to Kovic who is in the audience. 

Born On The Fourth Of July is all about Kovic’s experiences before, during and after the Vietnam War. At 21 he was paralysed from the waist down. The result of a life dreaming of being an American hero like Elvis Presley and John Wayne and going to fight for his country. 

After the war Kovic became increasingly politicised, eventually joined a Veterans Association and demonstrating at political conventions and touring the country speaking out against America’s involvements overseas. 

“I read that book after recording Darkness On The Edge Of Town and it just really affected me” Springsteen says. “The guy really knows how to get it all down.

“They say that Dispatches is supposed to be the definitive book about Vietnam but Ron’s is much more human and powerful.

“It was strange. I was taking a few days off at this hotel in California and there was this guy in a wheelchair there. I kept nodding hello each day and we just smiled whenever we saw each other.  You know how it is when you see the same person every day. Anyway, one day he came up and said ‘Hi, my name’s Ron Kovic.’ It didn’t register for a moment and then I realised who he was. He’s a really inspiring guy. And the way he gets it all down about wanting to be an American hero and tieing it up with John Wayne and Elvis, its an amazing book. We’re talking about doing some shows together when I get back for the War veterans organisation.”

 And the BIG question - what’s the possibility of an Australian tour? "Well we finish up touring Europe, then we go back to America for some more shows. We should be in Australia in The Fall, at least before Christmas. We want to go everywhere this time!!! 

Hey ho, that’s what I wanted to hear. It’s getting on for 4am and Springsteen wants to eat. Plus there’s a stack of other people waiting to see him. He signs a few autographs for people in Australia. Mine says “To Stuart. It was nice to meet you. See ya in Australia. Bruce Springsteen.” 

And that’s a promise!