Category: Bruuuuuuuuce!!

Springsteen joins New Orleans jazz fest
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – The Boss is heading to New Orleans.
A performance by Bruce Springsteen is one of 35 added to the lineup for this year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, scheduled over two weekends – April 28-30 and May 5-7. He’s slated to close out the first weekend, festival producer Quint Davis said Wednesday.
Springsteen will perform with the Seeger Sessions Band, the musicians who backed him on an upcoming album inspired by folk singer Pete Seeger. It’s scheduled for release April 25. Davis said part of the album’s title, We Shall Overcome, is a fitting theme for the spirit of the storm-battered city.
It features Springsteen’s interpretations of 13 traditional folk songs that have been associated for decades with Seeger.
Etta James, Herbie Hancock, Dave Bartholomew and Warren Haynes were among the acts announced Wednesday.
Dr. John, Bob Dylan and Cowboy Mouth will be performing on opening day, April 28. Galactic, the Dave Matthews Band and Clarence (Frogman) Henry will perform April 29, and joining Springsteen on April 30 will be the Meters, Yolanda Adams and Allen Toussaint.
Kicking off the second weekend on May 5: Doug Kershaw, Keith Urban, Little Feat, Marcia Ball and Koko Taylor and Her Blues Machine. Jimmy Buffet, the Radiators, Buckwheat Zydeco and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band perform on May 6, and Fats Domino, Paul Simon, Lionel Richie, Irma Thomas and Pete Fountain close out the festival on May 7.
As usual, Jazz Fest will be held at the New Orleans Fair Grounds. The horse racing track was flooded and had wind damage from Hurricane Katrina, but work crews have been repairing and upgrading damaged areas, Davis said.
As with Mardi Gras, it’s hard to say what kind of attendance this year’s festival will draw. It usually brings in roughly 500,000 music lovers over the course of the two weekends.

Springsteen Honors Spirit of Pete Seeger
LOS ANGELES – Pete Seeger will have an extra gift when he celebrates his birthday this spring, a new album by rock superstar Bruce Springsteen that was inspired by and named for the folk music legend.
“We Shall Overcome The Seeger Sessions” is scheduled for release April 25, Columbia Records announced Thursday. Seeger, the dean of American folk singers, turns 87 on May 3.
The album will feature Springsteen’s interpretations of 13 traditional folk songs that have been associated for decades with Seeger. Among them are “Jessie James,” “John Henry,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Shenandoah” and the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”
The “Born to Run” rocker said it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he chose folk music for his first album of cover songs. Much of his own writing, he said, “comes straight out of the folk tradition.”
“Making this album was creatively liberating because I have a love of all those different roots sounds,” Springsteen said. “They can conjure up a world with just a few notes and a few words.”
Columbia said Springsteen plans a short U.S. and European tour to accompany the album’s release. Dates will be announced later.

Vintage Springsteen Show Headed To CD
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Nov. 18, 1975, show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon will be released as a two-disc set Feb. 28 via Columbia. The show first appeared on DVD last fall as part of the label’s 30th anniversary edition of Springsteen’s “Born To Run” album.
Touted as the first complete E Street Band concert to be released on CD, “Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75” is highlighted by exuberant runs through tracks like “She’s the One,” “Rosalita” and “It’s Hard To Be a Saint in the City.” The show was Springsteen and company’s first on English soil and came just ahead of the release of “Born To Run.”
“This was a young band that just finished a new album. ‘Born To Run’ is not an anthem yet — it’s in the middle of the set,” director Thom Zimny said of the show in November. And while the 24-track audiotapes of the show had long been known to exist, Zimny spent months synching them up with unlabeled cans of silent film to complete the DVD.
Having completed his solo touring in support of his 2005 studio album, “Devils & Dust,” Springsteen will next be seen on stage at an event honoring 2006 MusiCares Person of the Year James Taylor, which will be held Feb. 6 in Los Angeles.
Here is the track list for “Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75”:
Disc One:
“Thunder Road”
“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”
“Spirit in the Night”
“Lost in the Flood”
“She’s the One”
“Born To Run”
“The E Street Shuffle”
“It’s Hard To Be a Saint in the City”
“Backstreets”
Disc Two:
“Kitty’s Back”
“Jungleland”
“Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)”
“4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy)”
“Detroit Medley”
“For You”
“Quarter to Three”

The Boss in all his glory days
Bruce Springsteen fans will have a tough time deciding what to do first with the Born to Run 30th Anniversary Edition box set: Play the remastered CD or slip in one of the set’s two revealing DVDs.
The three-disc set out today (Sony, $40) is a treasure-trove about the 1975 classic album that vaulted Springsteen and the E Street Band into superstardom:
ï The set has a booklet with a written introduction by Springsteen and dozens of photos unpublished until now.
√Ø Then-and-now studio footage of Springsteen appears in Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run, a 90-minute documentary that features interviews with current and past E Street Band members. Also included are three songs recorded live in Los Angeles in 1973, Spirit in the Night, Wild Billy’s Circus Story and Thundercrack.
√Ø The set’s crowning jewel is a Nov. 18, 1975, performance at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. The two-hour, 10-minute performance, restored and remixed in surround sound, is the only full-length concert film released from the band’s first 25 years.

Springsteen Reflects on ‘Born to Run’
NEW YORK – In the summer of 1975, Bruce Springsteen was nobody’s Boss.
His nascent career was crumbling, just another over-hyped “new Dylan” about to get dumped by his label. Two of his band members had recently quit. The bearded bard of the boardwalk was wrestling with his third (and last?) album, obsessively rewriting the lyrics and rearranging the music, spending an outrageous six months on a single song.
Yet Springsteen remained sustained by a lonely but ambitious vision, convinced he could recreate the little symphonies echoing through his head for an audience of millions around the world.
He was right.
“Born to Run” was released in August 1975, a rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece that assumed near mythic proportion. Thirty years later, as a special anniversary edition of the album was readied for release come Tuesday, Springsteen recalled how making the record consumed his young life.
“Everything I knew and dreamed about was packed into those songs,” Springsteen told The Associated Press. “I had the desire to be great, to do something passionate, to capture something about living that I was yearning for myself.
“I wanted the whole thing.”
He got it, from the opening notes of “Thunder Road” to the album-closing epic “Jungleland.” But little came easy as he chased an elusive sound that was part Roy Orbison, part Phil Spector, and all Bruce Springsteen.
For Clarence Clemons, sax player for Springsteen’s E Street Band, that meant 16 straight hours creating the magnificent solo that anchors “Jungleland.” For “Born To Run,” the single that announced the album’s arrival, sessions stretched out over half a year.
“I was 25 years old, with no place to go and nothing to do √≥ that helped,” Springsteen said of his slavish musical devotion. “We worked, and worked, and worked. It was very frustrating. But in the end, luckily, all of everything we did ended up in there.”
In a documentary DVD accompanying the remastered “Born to Run,” band members offer their recollections of the often fruitless recording sessions.
“Everyone remembers the experience quite truly,” Springsteen said with a laugh. “And everyone was centered around this thing, that we suffered. No one forgot that. Everyone had that in common.”
They all shared another thought: Springsteen, child of the Jersey shore arcade, was going for the brass ring this time.
“I knew, because I knew the songs, that this album was going to be phenomenal,” said “Born to Run” co-producer Jon Landau, who eventually became Springsteen’s manager. “I knew Bruce Springsteen’s determination. I knew there was no way it was going to miss in achieving its musical goals.”
Even if, in Springsteen’s mind, those goals often remained unreachable despite hundreds of hours in the studio.
“My obsessive/compulsive nature, which crippled me through much of the rest of my life, does come in handy once in a while,” said a chuckling Springsteen. “And it came in handy at that moment. I wanted something unique that you couldn’t hear in the live show.”
The process produced some laughs, too. The “Wings for Wheels” DVD offers a full recitation of how Springsteen pal Little Steven Van Zandt, dressed like a New Jersey gangster in a zoot suit and fedora, walked into the studio and sang all the horn parts on “Tenth Avenue Freezeout” to acclaimed session musicians Randy and Michael Brecker.
Album engineer Jimmy Iovine recalled not even knowing who Van Zandt was, but thinking that Steven “was dressed like a guy” who knew about horn players.
The anniversary package also includes extraordinary rare footage of live shows by Springsteen and the band: a full gig from London’s Hammersmith Odeon show in 1975, and three songs done live in 1973 by an early incarnation of the band in Los Angeles.
After “Born To Run,” Springsteen wound up in a protracted legal battle with his first manager; his follow-up album, “Darkness On the Edge of Town,” didn’t appear until three years later. By then, the sprawl and bombast of “Born to Run” was in Springsteen’s rearview mirror, never to return on record.
Springsteen, in fact, confessed that he hadn’t listened to the album in two decades until earlier this year. When he finally did hear it again, the setting was perfect: driving in his car, at night, through the New Jersey landscape immortalized on the record.
“I thought I knew exactly how it would sound, but it surprised me,” Springsteen said. “It was a nice moment driving back from the city, and it caught me by surprise again. There’s no other record (of mine) quite like it … I never made another one.”

BORN AGAIN
‘The album became a monster. It just ate up everyone’s life.”
That’s Bruce Springsteen talking about “Born to Run,” which 30 years ago catapulted him from a cult artist with a small but rabid East Coast following into a superstar.
Looking back on the eve of the release of the “Born to Run” 30th anniversary box set, which The New York Post got an exclusive sneak peek at this week, it’s easy to say that “Born to Run” is a watershed moment – a record with unstoppable force and charisma that established Bruce as the premiere musical icon of his generation.
But in the summer of 1975, it was turning into something of a nightmare.
Bruce wasn’t an unknown at the time – a local legend on the Jersey Shore and a journeyman working the Eastern Seaboard club circuit, he’d made two records for Columbia, “Greetings From Asbury Park” and “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.” Wordy, Dylan-influenced and freewheeling, they’d helped expand his following, but they hadn’t exactly set the world on fire. When he went to make his third record, the writing was on the wall.
“If this record didn’t make it, it seemed obvious to us that this was going to be the end,” says E Street Band guitarist “Miami Steve” Van Zandt, in “Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run,” a documentary on the making of the record that’s included in the anniversary box, along with a 1975 show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. The set hits stores Tuesday.
Live, Bruce was a force of nature, who dependably slayed audiences and won rabid converts. But that energy wasn’t translating to the records, and everyone knew it.
“The record company was confused,” Bruce later said. “The kids in the audience were going nuts, but the record wasn’t selling. It got obvious that we needed a rock ‘n’ roll record.”
CBS wanted him to record with session musicians, but he insisted on working with the E Street Band, fellow Jerseyites who’d cut their teeth in clubs along the shore. Constant gigging had turned the band into a high-performance machine, and Bruce had come up some magnificent songs. But the recording sessions were stumbling, and things were getting desperate.
Begun in the winter of 1974-75, and derailed initially by technical problems, the sessions were still going when summertime came, as Bruce, a near-pathological perfectionist who knew the unfolding record’s potential, endlessly tweaked arrangements, rewrote lyrics and re-recorded tracks.
“The thing about Bruce is that he has a very hard time letting go of things, and that’s especially true of things he knows are good, because if it’s good it can get better,” says Dave Marsh, the veteran rock journalist and Springsteen biographer. “I would hear the tracks and my reaction was basically, ‘It don’t get no better,’ and Bruce’s reaction was, ‘I think I can do this better.'”
Meanwhile, a single version of the title song had been sent out to radio stations and was creating heavy-duty buzz around the upcoming record, even as Bruce and company were pulling their hair out trying to finish it, working until dawn every morning at the Record Plant on West 53rd Street.
“The record was legendary before it was even finished,” Marsh says.
Right up until the end, making the record was like pulling a molar with pliers – when it came time to master the disc, a process that involves taking the recorded tapes and turning them into an actual record, Bruce rejected one attempt after another. At one point he even decided to scrap the whole thing and release a live record instead.
Hearing this, Jon Landau, now Bruce’s manager but then a co-producer, went ballistic. After he read Bruce the riot act, Springsteen relented and the release date was set for October 1975. To generate some pre-release buzz, Columbia had Springsteen do a five-night stand, two shows a night, at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, and flew in journalists and tastemakers from around the country. It was a publicity masterstroke – Bruce killed, and the buzz grew into a deafening roar.
“Everybody who saw those shows had a sense that history was being made,” says Allan Pepper, the Bottom Line’s co-owner. “For weeks afterward, every artist who played the club – and I’m talking about some formidable artists – paled in comparison to that guy. It was in the walls of the club. It hung in the air for weeks and weeks afterward.”
When “Born to Run” was released two months later, the verdict was unanimous: Springsteen had delivered a classic.
“Born to Run” “shuts down every claim that has ever been made for him,” wrote Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone, likening it to “a ’57 Chevy running on melted-down Crystals records.”
Other rave reviews, platinum sales, expanding crowds and the famous (or infamous) twin cover stories in Time and Newsweek followed. The Boss was born, and the rest, as they say, is history.

‘Born’ DVDs Capture Exuberant E Street Band
When Bruce Springsteen handed over a wealth of unlabeled concert film footage from a 1975 show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon to editor Thom Zimny in 2004, neither party knew for sure what was inside. But after a year of painstaking restoration, the full show will be seen for the first time on Columbia’s 30th anniversary edition of Springsteen’s classic album “Born To Run,” due Nov. 15.
“Slowly but surely, we pieced it together song by song,” Zimny said of the footage last night (Nov. 2) during a screening in New York. Zimny spent months synching up silent film from a four-camera shoot with the 24-track audiotapes from the concert, the E Street Band’s first on English soil.
“This was a young band that just finished a new album,” Zimny said. “The energy comes across in the film. ‘Born To Run’ is not an anthem yet — it’s in the middle of the set.” Indeed, dressed in colorful suits and hats, Springsteen and company are beyond exuberant on stage, storming through favorites like “Rosalita,” “It’s Hard To Be a Saint in the City” and “She’s the One.”
Although footage from several other notable shows during this era (including a stint at New York’s Bottom Line) has circulated in bootleg form for years, Zimny says the Hammersmith film “is the best representation of 1975” that exists. The DVD also includes three songs from a 1973 show in Los Angeles, the original film of which was in such bad shape that it required frame-by-frame retouching in Photoshop.
Described by Springsteen as an album intended to capture the feeling of “one endless summer night,” “Born To Run” also features a revealing documentary about its genesis, including newly shot footage of Springsteen explaining the songs at the piano interspersed with recollections from current and former E Street Band members.
“The whole score is made up of outtakes and demos,” Zimny said. “Even the DVD menus have outtakes of them talking in the studio.”
Present-day Springsteen is shown listening in wonder to the basic instrumental track that was recorded of “Born To Run,” as well as other aborted versions of the song that included a string section and multi-tracked backing vocals.
Noting that the band spent six months hemming and hawing over a final take of the tune, guitarist Steven Van Zandt observes with a laugh, “A song should take three hours, not six months!”
In related news, having already been bumped once due to after-effects from Hurricane Wilma, Springsteen’s planned Sunrise, Fla., concert has been moved to Nov. 19 in Hollywood, Fla. The show was originally scheduled for tonight (Nov. 3) at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, then postponed to Sunday, but that plan has been scotched by the city, citing public safety concerns.
Tickets can be exchanged for the newly scheduled show at the point of purchase beginning tomorrow and through 3 p.m. Tuesday (Nov. 8). All remaining tickets will go on sale Tuesday at 5 p.m. through Ticketmaster and the venue box office.

ALL BRUCE, ALL THE TIME
Sirius Satellite Radio launching E Street Radio, a channel devoted entirely to the music of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, on Nov. 1.

Springsteen Celebrates ‘Born to Run’ Album
NEW YORK – Bruce Springsteen is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the “Born to Run” album, which landed him simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek, with a special box set this fall.
The “Born to Run 30th Anniversary Edition” will include a DVD of Springsteen and the E Street Band’s 1975 performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, a 16-song set that featured much of the album.
A second DVD, “Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run,” is a 90-minute documentary about the album that features fresh interviews from Springsteen, band members and others involved. It also features footage of Springsteen performing some of the songs solo with guitar or piano.
The package features a newly-remastered “Born to Run” disc. There’s no additional music √≥ outtakes or the like √≥ that are often featured in box sets.
Columbia Records will put the package on sale November 15th.

Keys Nearly Had Bruce, Keef For ‘Unplugged’
Alicia Keys’ “Unplugged” CD/DVD (due Oct. 11 via J) has no shortage of special guests, including Common, Mos Def, Damian Marley and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine. But the project nearly got a major lift from rock legends Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards, who had to back out at the last minute.
“I was going to cry,” Keys tells Billboard.com with a laugh. “Bruce and I were going to do ‘New York City Serenade’ but the schedule just conflicted. And with Keith, the day the show taped was the day the Stones started rehearsal for their tour. But it was really lovely to reach out to people I admire and for them to be so down to do it.”
“Unplugged” premieres tonight (Sept. 23) on MTV. On the show, Keys uses the opportunity to premiere a new song, “Unbreakable,” which was originally intended to appear on her 2003 studio album, “The Diary of Alicia Keys.” It is the top debut at No. 61 this week on the Billboard Hot 100.
“We set the crowd up and the vibe was just perfect, and then I walked over to my piano and I asked them if they wanted to hear something new, and they just went crazy,” Keys enthuses. “It was so great to perform that song there for the first time.”
Although she concedes she may “do a couple of spontaneous, small, ‘Unplugged’-style things” in the near future, she has no plans to tour for a while. Instead, Keys will move directly into working on her first feature film, “Smoking Aces,” which begins shooting Nov. 3 and will wrap Dec. 20.
She is also still planning to star in a biopic about biracial child piano prodigy Philippa Schuyler, which she says is “still in development. That one we should have the script for by the holidays and we’ll take it from there.”
By early next year, Keys says she’ll be ready to get serious on her third studio album. Asked if she was already working on any new material, she replies, “Oh, there’s been a lot of things springing forth from me. I have this new direction I’m feeling I will go in for the next album. I’ve been playing around, experimenting and vibing on different styles. I have about four or five songs I’ve been working with but I’m constantly writing all the time.”