My Back Pages, Vol. 12: The Wallflowers - Bringing Down the Horse

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

After our last feature, where we discussed the legendary Mr. Bob Dylan, we couldn't help but move onto Dylan's significantly less famous son. That led us to Jakob Dylan and the Wallflowers, a roots rock band that broke out in the mid-1990s, scored some hits, won some Grammys, jammed with Bruce Springsteen, and then rapidly receded back into the underground. The band is still making great records to this day - albeit, with a slightly different line-up - but their best work remains the album that endeared them to millions of radio listeners back in 1996 and 1997: Bringing Down the Horse. For both of us, this album and its flagship single, the unforgettable "One Headlight," represented big musical awakenings, and I think you will find that we both explored a bit more personal territory in our write-ups this week. We hope you will enjoy reading and listening along to one of the last true "classic rock" records with us.

Craig Manning: Next to the surge of harmonica and the slamming screen door that kick starts Born to Run, the atmospheric guitar echo at the top of “One Headlight” – the 1990s smash hit from the Wallflowers and the opening track of Bringing Down the Horse, their 1996 sophomore album – is my favorite opening of any record. That may seem strange to some people, since “One Headlight” doesn’t have anywhere near the legendary status in rock history that “Thunder Road” does. Indeed, in the eyes and ears of mainstream pop radio listeners, Bringing Down the Horse was a record that made the Wallflowers little more than one-album wonders. For a brief moment in 1996 and 1997, the Wallflowers were legitimate hit makers. “6th Avenue Heartache,” “One Headlight,” and “The Difference” were all top 40 singles (“Headlight” almost got to the top of the charts, stalling out at number 2), while “Three Marlenas” was a minor single that generated a small amount of radio play. It speaks to the brevity of the 1990s alt-folk resurgence that most people have no idea the Wallflowers even exist beyond this album.

But if you are going to build your legacy on a single disc, Bringing Down the Horse is a very good one to do it with. Released on May 21, 1996 – when I was only five and a half years old, for those who are counting – Bringing Down the Horse became my first favorite album, “One Headlight” my first favorite song, and the Wallflowers my first favorite band. The better part of two decades later, I’d still consider Horse to be among my top 10 albums of all time, one of the ultimate essential summer nighttime albums. But the real game-changer was “One Headlight,” which, if I had to boil down the most important songs in my personal music evolution, would be at the top of the list. That’s where my big, sprawling obsession with music really started, and if it hadn’t been for that song, I can more or less guarantee that I wouldn’t be writing for this website right now. At very least, I’m sure my tastes would be markedly different, not so attached to folk, roots rock, alt-country, and all of the similar styles that so dominated my top albums of 2013 list.

Sure, you could argue that “One Headlight” was merely a “right place, right time” song for me and that it played a role that could have just as easily been substituted with a different song. But I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. I’d connected with other music on a more casual level before that radiant guitar echo pounded on my door and forced me to pay attention. I didn’t have a CD player and I had no way to really access music in any capacity, but my brother had a boom box and a burgeoning CD collection. I’d have him make copies of my favorite albums for me to listen to on my shitty old cassette player – Morning Glory by Oasis, Third Eye Blind’s self-titled record, Green Day’s Dookie – but Bringing Down the Horse was by far the one I’d listen to most. I’d drum along to it on a makeshift set-up made of beat up old metal popcorn buckets and pieces of plastic, or turn it into a soundtrack for the battles between my action figures. One time, I even cranked up the volume, put my tape player on my window ledge, and blared the music out into the street on a summer evening so I could listen while bike riding and shooting hoops in the driveway. It was my first life soundtrack record back before I had much of a life to soundtrack.

“One Headlight” was the one I listened to most. I found that cassette tape a few years ago when I was cleaning up my room, and that song was utterly wrecked and grainy from all the times I had rewound the tape to re-capture every moment of the tune. Though I first started listening probably in 1997, after “One Headlight” became a hit, it remained my go-to favorite song for years after the fact. When the rest of my classmates in third and fourth grade were all about the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and god knows what else, I was still hung up on “One Headlight.” In a pop music landscape that was becoming increasingly defined by plasticity and deposability, here was this dark, beguiling, and mystifying song about death. Jakob Dylan said that the song was about “the death of ideas,” written as a pissed-off, tapped-out diss to a record label that wouldn’t give the band the respect, the appreciation, or the support that they felt met the terms of their contract or even the codes and mantras of human decency. In that sense, it’s their “Dancing in the Dark,” a song that achieved massive mainstream pop success despite the fact that it was penned with anger and contempt for everything the mainstream pop world stood for. Jakob may have been Bob Dylan’s son, but he took infinitely more from Springsteen on this record, and particularly with this song. I’ve frequently seen “Headlight” described as either “the best Bruce Springsteen song of the 1990s” or “the best song Bruce Springsteen never wrote,” and those are both rather apt descriptions. (Sidenote, if you’re either a Springsteen fan or a Wallflowers fan and you haven’t read this, you haven’t lived. Scroll down to the second to last question to learn why.)

Personally, I always took the meaning of “Headlight” to be a lot more literal than Dylan actually intended. The song fades in on a funeral (with the untouchable opening lines of “So long ago I don’t remember when, that’s when they say I lost my only friend/They said she died easy of a broken-heart disease, as I listened through the cemetery trees”), and explores the world through the eyes of a guy who is striving not to give up, even though a good friend of his did just that and chose to end her life. It’s a sobering tune about what makes life worth living and what impetuses conspire to make people throw up their hands and surrender. When the screws come loose and the narrator starts to despair toward the end of the song (“Somewhere here in between the city walls and dyin’ dreams/I think her death it must be killing me”) it’s a powerful moment, and one that has kept the tune and its questions of life, death, friendship, love, loneliness, resilience, and surrender alive for me, 18 years after the fact. I can’t think of another pop song since that has so elegantly captured the human condition. Or maybe it’s a song about a woman with one giant breast, as Jon Lovitz theorized. Who knows?

Chris Collum: There are a lot of different things I could say about Bringing Down the Horse. I could go on about Jakob Dylan’s pitch-perfect pop sensibilities and moody vocal delivery. I could talk about how Dylan and keyboardist Rami Jaffee masterfully update the sound that Dylan’s father dabbled in with The Band decades prior to this album’s recording. Or I could discuss the all-star cast of collaborators who were involved in the making of this record, essentially a “who’s who” of roots rock. Those names include T. Bone Burnett, the album’s producer; the legendary Mr. Sam Phillips; Adam Duritz of Counting Crows; Gary Louris of The Jayhawks; Gillian Welch collaborator David Rawlings; pedal steel master Leo LeBlanc and others. But I’m not going to focus on any of that. In fact I’m only going to talk about one song on the album.

“One Headlight” is one of the very first songs by someone other than Springsteen that I remember becoming truly enamored with as a child. I don’t know if it was the first time I heard the song on the radio or simply the first time I remember hearing it, but I have a pretty vivid memory from when I was around six or seven of being struck by the song one foggy winter morning. That day was going to be the first time I’d ever attended a funeral. The deceased was an elderly woman from our church that I barely knew, but being the only Catholic church in a tiny Mississippi county it was a pretty tightly knit community so we were going anyway.

Riding around our small town in the car with my dad that morning, the haunting tone of “One Headlight” - as well as obviously the references to a funeral and death in the lyrics - made a pretty big impression on me. The song kind of scared me in a way, not least of all because Jakob Dylan delivered each line with a laidback nonchalant drawl that made him seem so detached from what he was singing about. That is until the chorus came along and with a glorious swell, both of Dylan’s voice and of Rami Jaffee’s organ, all attention was directed heavenwards.

I remember hearing the song many more times in the next few years; not surprising given the level of radio saturation it achieved. I eventually acquired Bringing Down the Horse in full many years later, but that was at a time when I was starting to think that any music that wasn’t all power chords, distortion and palm-muting in double-time was kind of lame, so I didn’t really connect with it until toward the end of high school. When I listen to the record now, without fail “One Headlight” sends a little chill down my spine. I’m usually so floored I listen to that song twice before going on to the rest of the record. It’s basically just a song about beat-up people riding a beat-up vehicle through a beat-up town, but something about the way Dylan strings together images like “the sun up ahead at the county line bridge” and “smells like cheap wine, cigarettes / This place was always such a mess” is incredibly evocative.

So yes, I do like all of Bringing Down the Horse. And when I really got into the record several years ago there was a good period of time when “One Headlight” wasn’t even my favorite song on the record. It is now though, and more importantly that song is very special to me because it was one of the first songs that made me realize just how powerful of an atmosphere a rock song can conjure out of thin air. But I didn’t quite realize all of that when I heard it that morning as a kid, I just knew that the song made me feel a little strange and uneasy on a morning when I was already nervous about spending most of the morning in the same room as a dead person.

I don’t remember anything about the actual funeral except that—appropriately enough—as soon as the service began the sky ripped open and a hard rain began to fall.

Craig Manning: As Chris so eloquently put, “One Headlight” is the obvious highlight and anchor track to Bringing Down the Horse, but there’s so much more to this album than its biggest and most memorable hit. The other singles, for instance, are all fantastic, from the delicate slide-guitar grandeur of “6th Avenue Heartache” (complete with glowing harmonies from Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz) to the pounding, youthful summertime atmosphere of “The Difference.” Other cuts didn’t catch me until later, like “Invisible City,” where the narrator fights through metaphorical crash sites and illusions of choices to retain the same resilience he found on “One Headlight,” or “Josephine,” Jakob Dylan’s twist on his father’s “Just Like a Woman” and a most elegant slow dance about a girl who tastes “just like sugar and tangerines.”

These are great, great songs, forming the backbone to an album that I think deserves classic status as much as any record Chris and I have written about in this feature. The fact that Bringing Down the Horse doesn’t get that kind of recognition probably has more to do with when it was released than anything else though. As I said before, the Wallflowers dropped this disc at a precarious time for rock and roll music. Grunge was fading. What we’ve come to know today as “classic rock” was little more than a memory. Bruce Springsteen and U2, two of the most dependable rock acts from the previous decade, were in the midst of career slumps. Bob Dylan was a year away from the album that would kick him into his late-career master streak. By all accounts, the Wallflowers were the last of a dying breed, and it therefore makes perfect sense that their time in the mainstream limelight was fleeting.

The banishment from the radio hasn’t hurt the Wallflowers, though. On the contrary, since Bringing Down the Horse, this band has – despite line-up changes and numerous lengthy hiatuses – released a string of terrific albums. 2000’s Breach came too late to take advantage of the momentum that “One Headlight” afforded, but the band hit a near-high water mark when they teamed up with Brendan O’Brien for 2006’s Rebel, Sweetheart, a lush, anthemic, and poetic work that nearly matched Bringing Down the Horse in terms of sheer song-for-song consistency. 2012’s Glad All Over, on the other hand saw the band in turns embracing their alt-country roots, pursuing harder rock textures (thanks to Clash guitarist Mick Jones, who guested on a few tracks), hitting modern E Street levels of self-assuredness, and easily fitting back into the modern folk revival that has been going on for the past few years. Finally, the band’s other post-millennial record, 2002’s Red Letter Days, overcame a bloated runtime with a few of the most aching ballads anyone has written since Clinton left office. Put simply, this band’s discography deserves a second look.

Still, despite all of that great music – and despite two wonderful solo records from Jakob Dylan – Bringing Down the Horse remains the Wallflowers’ greatest accomplishment. Wonderfully and organically produced by T. Bone Burnett (who also helmed August and Everything After, the other alt-folk masterpiece of the 1990s), aided and abetted by a laundry list of terrific session musicians, and sensitively written throughout by Jakob Dylan, this record is a masterpiece of mood and feeling. From the rollicking rock tracks (infectiously fun songs like “Laughing Out Loud” and “God Don’t Make Lonely Girls”) to the mid-tempo jams (“Angel on My Bike,” a road-trip essential), I adore everything about this record. Many of the hallmarks here (the ringing surge of Rami Jaffee’s B3 organ, the wistful whine of Leo LeBlanc’s pedal steel guitar on songs like “I Wish I Felt Nothing”) are sounds that, when replicated elsewhere, on other records or by other bands, instantly win me over. It may not be remembered as a classic in many circles, but for me, for how important this album was to my personal listening evolution and for how much it continues to blow me away to this day, it’s an all-time, top-five, desert island essential. There’s a reason I still pull it out for late night drives every summer.

My Back Pages, Vol. 11: Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

Today, we're finally reaching the artist whose song gave our feature its name: Mr. Bob Dylan. How it took us 11 volumes to get to one of the greatest singer/songwriters of all time is a bit baffling, to be sure, but suffice to say that it hasn't been due to any lack of love for his work. Chris and I could have chosen any number of Dylan records to discuss this week, from 1965's revolutionary Highway 61 Revisited to the late-career masterstrokes of Time out of Mind and Love and Theft. Instead, we went for the record that might be Dylan's barest and most introspective: 1975's Blood on the Tracks. Written and recorded in the wake of Mr. Dylan's divorce from his wife Sara, Blood on the Tracks catapulted Dylan back into the spotlight after an otherwise lukewarm run of records in the 1970s. Over time, Chris and I have both come to consider it as Dylan's finest album. So head to the replies, hit play on the Rdio playlist, read along with our thoughts, and share your own opinions and stories about this brilliant masterpiece of a record.

Chris Collum: Bob Dylan has written scores of fantastic and very important songs over the course of his legendary career – now in its sixth decade – but the one for which he will remain most famous is inevitably "Like a Rolling Stone." That song was truly revolutionary for a number of reasons. In his 1988 speech honoring Dylan for his induction into the Rock 'N Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen described the beginning of "Like a Rolling Stone" as "that snare shot that sounded like somebody [had] kicked open the door to your mind," and Springsteen wasn't the only person whose mind was blown open by the song. It was a long song – over six minutes, unheard of for a rock 'n roll song at the time, especially one intended to be a single. And yet New York City radio stations began demanding full, unedited copies of it after a discarded acetate snatched from a dumpster was worn out after being played on repeat all night at a trendy nightclub in the city. Furthermore, the song's subject matter was not normal at all. In contrast to the songs about love and/or love lost that by and large dominated popular music at the time, "Like a Rolling Stone" expects more from its audience. Dylan offers no answer to the repeated refrain of "how does it feel?" even as he asks the question with more and more vitriol as the song progresses.

But we're not here to talk about "Like a Rolling Stone," or Highway 61 Revisited, the masterful record that it opens. I began by talking about that song in order to draw a contrast between the revolutionary work Dylan did on his trio of masterpiece albums in the late sixties –Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde – and the masterpiece that is Blood on the Tracks, for Blood on the Tracks does not shy away from songs about love and losing love. Rather, it tackles such themes head-on.

Following the release of Blonde on Blonde in 1966 and the subsequent tour, Dylan's prolific stream of great music began to slowly taper off. He was recovering from a motorcycle accident, reportedly battling an amphetamine addiction, and the stress of being on tour constantly was starting to wear him thin. As that decade waned and the seventies began, Dylan quit touring altogether, although he still continued to release records. Just not ones that were nearly as good as his previous work: 1970's double LP Self Portrait to this day remains one of his most lowly records. That was the record that prompted Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus to famously ask "What is this shit?" upon first listening to the album. In 1974, however, Dylan returned to touring with The Band in tow. Later that year he and his wife Sarah separated in what turned out to be a bitter and very public battle.

Following this, Dylan filled a little red notebook up with lyrics that would become the ten songs that are Blood on the Tracks. He recorded the entire record in an almost totally solo manner in New York City in a very short amount of time, but later re-cut some of the songs in Minneapolis at the advice of his brother who thought that some of the record's longer numbers could benefit from an arrangement that was less stark and bleak. The final version of the album contains cuts from both sessions. For example, "Simple Twist of Fate" and "Buckets of Rain" are both from the New York sessions while "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" are the re-recorded Minneapolis versions.

If "Like a Rolling Stone" kicks down the door to your mind, "Tangled Up in Blue," the opening track on Blood on the Tracks gently eases you into the world of the record. The first thing one notices is the stunningly lush production work, particularly for a record of this era as the mid-seventies were notorious for spawning some of the most "dead-sounding" albums in rock 'n roll history. But none of the life is squashed out of the songs on these records. Lyrically I have personally always considered "Tangled" to be Dylan's finest work; he once described it as a song that "took ten years to live and another two to write." He's said in interviews that the narrative of the song is anything but linear, rather past, present and future coexist in the song's seven verses and meld and swirl seamlessly to form a true epic. The song deals largely with a long-term romantic relationship that went sour, and the narrator – presumably Dylan – reflects back on the last decade of his life, wondering how things wound up the way they did and whether there was anything he could have done to change them. Although Dylan insists to this day that the record is not autobiographical, given the circumstances he was in at the time it's impossible to think that his experiences weren't at least influential in his writing for the album. Furthermore, his son Jakob Dylan (of The Wallflowers) doesn't seem to buy his father's line; the younger Dylan has said in interviews that for him, listening to Blood on the Tracks he hears "my parents talking to each other."

"Tangled Up in Blue" is one of the long songs on the record that could be said to form the heart of the album's narrative. Another of these two is "Idiot Wind," presumably the song from which the record gets its name as Dylan references "blood" and "tracks" in subsequent verses. In contrast to much of the bleak and forlorn writing that surrounds it, the opening verse of "Idiot Wind" is one of the wriest Dylan had written since "On the Road Again" from Bringing It All Back Home. He sings that "They say I shot a many named Grey / And took his wife to Italy," and then as the plot thickens when the wife inherits a fortune and then dies, you can almost see Dylan shrugging ands grinning as he sings, "I can't help it / That I'm lucky." The song then twists and turns through a narrative about another relationship gone awry with Dylan concluding "We're idiots babe / It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves."

The third long-form song on the record is "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," a crime epic and murder ballad told partially by means of a card game allegory. The players include Big Jim, the owner of the town's diamond mine; Lily and Rosemary, who are his mistress and wife respectively; and the Jack of Hearts, a bank robber for whom Lily falls. It appears that Rosemary murders Big Jim after a night of hard drinking while the Jack of Hearts and his crew make off with a small fortune next door and Lily is trapped in the middle, but the genius of the song is that you could listen to it a hundred thousand times and still not necessarily come away with a clear linear picture of the story. It ties into the greater themes of betrayal and love gone bad found elsewhere on Blood on the Tracks in a very abstract way and in that sense is largely unique on the record.

Craig Manning: Chris already did a great job of placing Blood on the Tracks in the context of Dylan’s career, but let me venture back for one more moment before moving forward. For a long time, it was difficult for me to see how anyone could list an album other than Highway 61 Revisited as their favorite Bob Dylan disc. The unbeatable combination of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row” still stands as the greatest opener/closer pairing that isn’t “Thunder Road” and “Jungleland,” and the intermediary tracks – particularly the dim and biting “Ballad of a Thin Man” – still sound as fresh today as I imagine they did in 1965. How could an album with so many perfect songs be anything but its creator’s magnum opus?

Of course, that was before I started spending a lot of time with Blood on the Tracks. Released a decade after Highway 61, in the creative dry spell that was Dylan’s 1970s, Blood on the Tracks was a different kind of record than the ones that had made Bob Dylan an icon earlier in his career. Misguided – and in many ways, legitimately bad – albums like Self-Portrait and Dylan had people wondering whether or not the prolific singer/songwriter would ever again reach the heights of his 1960s material. At very least, it seemed that Dylan’s days as “voice of a generation” were long past over. Dylan could hardly have cared less about respecting his folk music roots; he certainly wasn’t going to govern his thematic conversations based on the whims of a fanbase who couldn’t keep up. Disappointed, fans and record labels alike began looking for a “new Dylan.” (Enter Bruce Springsteen.)

But then something happened: Bob Dylan got his heart broken.

The dissolution of a personal relationship has a way of bringing out the honesty in a songwriter like virtually nothing else can. From Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, from Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot out the Lights to Peter Gabriel’s Us, from Beck’s Sea Change to Adele’s 21 (not to mention pretty much every album by every artist from this scene), thousands of records filled with countless songs have purged the subject of a broken heart. Of course, they’ve all done it in slightly different ways, some with downtrodden depression, some with self-deprecating wit, some with bitter and hateful spite, and some with wistful reflection. Regardless of the mood, though, these types of albums and songs resonate because they bring us as the audience closer to the artist in question. There’s something incredibly engrossing and cathartic about listening to an artist as they stitch up their scars and find meaning in their relational wreckages. Or maybe we listen because all just horrible, sadistic, masochistic people. I don’t know. To paraphrase High Fidelity, do we listen to pop music because we’re miserable or are we miserable because we listen to pop music?

The point is this: there’s not much in music that’s more timeless than a break-up album, and Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks may well be THE break-up record. Sure, Tunnel of Love is more heartbreaking, Rumours is catchier, and Sea Change more accurately recreates the fall-out of a break-up (by making you want to give up on life and sit inside with the blinds drawn, of course). But as arguably the most lyrical songwriter in the history of rock and roll, Dylan hit upon things with these songs that other songwriters were never able to capture in their own songs.

Case in point, as Chris already noted, is “Tangled up in Blue,” the album’s opening track and mission statement. It’s funny: you’d never think of Dylan as sounding broken. His voice on record, from the heartfelt political entreaties of “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the embrace of impending death on “Not Dark Yet,” always gives off this mischievous air, like he knows something we don’t. The same is still true on most of the Blood on the Tracks songs, but pay attention to the lyrics of “Tangled up in Blue,” and it’s a parade of devastating moments. Right there in the first verse we get “Early one morning the sun was shining, I was laying in bed/Wondering if she'd changed at all, if her hair was still red,” a quiet moment of reflection for the woman that the narrator just can’t seem to let go. In the second verse, the two members of the relationship are abandoning their love, a metaphorical broken-down car, on a dark and lonely highway. In the last verse, Dylan sings, “All the people we used to know/They’re an illusion to me now,” recalling that moment after the death of a relationship where one party or the other deliberately loses touch with mutual friends because doing so is easier than seeing their old flame on a regular basis. And yet, even with all of this emotional weightiness flying around, Dylan still manages to end the song with a wry twist of sarcasm: “We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view.”

Chris spent most of his write-up discussing Blood on the Tracks through the prism of its long-form tracks, vut while Dylan is largely known for his longwinded album centerpieces, I’d actually argue that the finest songs on this record are the tauter, more concise moments. My favorite song on the album (and one of my favorite Dylan songs, period) is “Simple Twist of Fate,” one of the most gorgeously melodic tracks the songwriter has ever penned, but Blood on the Tracks doesn’t lack for other shorter-form triumphs. Were I to recommend an album for a first-time Dylan listener to check out, it would undoubtedly be this one, which sparks with immediacy and accessibility throughout. From the mournful dirge of “You’re a Big Girl Now” to the heart shattering wistfulness of “If You See Her Say Hello,” from the rollicking harmonica bursts of "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" to the slow-burn blues of "Meet Me in the Morning," and from the lovelorn fondness of “Shelter from the Storm” to the pleasant folk patter of album closer, “Buckets of Rain,” the shiniest nuggets of gold on Blood on the Tracks are simplistic, gingerly melodic, beautifully rendered acoustic songs.

It’s hard to compete with the sheer audacity of Dylan’s electric records, but as a return to the more gentle strains of his earlier work – albeit, with much better production – Blood on the Tracks marks itself as the most listenable, enjoyable, consistent, and cohesive record in Dylan’s collection. It might not have the immediacy of the “the snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind,” and Dylan himself may well not even like the record (“A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album,” he said once in a radio interview. “It's hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying that type of pain, you know?”), but as both album and break-up album, Blood on the Tracks is unquestionably one of the greatest and most powerful collections of songs ever put on vinyl. Dylan made a lot of music before 1975 and has written a lot of music since, but none of his records stop me in my tracks (bad pun intended) quite like this one.

My Back Pages, Vol. 10: The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

Today we take a look at the seminal debut from The Velvet Underground. Whether you know it for its iconic Andy Warhol-designed cover, its revolutionarily dark lyricism, or its astonishingly ahead-of-its-time protopunk sound, The Velvet Underground & Nico is a veritable classic in every sense of the word. This piece also functions as a tribute to Mr. Lou Reed, ringleader of The Velvet Underground for four albums before embarking on a decades-long solo career. Reed died a little over a month ago. Listen along with our Rdio playlist, and please jump in and share your thoughts on this fantastic record.

Chris: On October 27th of this year Lou Reed passed away peacefully in his home on Long Island at the age of 71. The official cause of death was liver failure.

It was a Sunday morning.

Lou Reed made countless contributions to the legacy of popular music—as well as not-so-popular music—but he will be immortalized largely for the work he did on The Velvet Underground & Nico, the group's debut album. Recorded in 1966 and released in 1967, the record is the definition of "ahead of its time." Those two years were certainly incredibly fertile ones for rock 'n roll, but The Velvet Underground were going in a completely different direction than their innovative peers. VU started recording their debut the same month The Beach Boys wrapped up the sessions for Pet Sounds out in California, and a solid eight months before The Beatles went into the studio in London to begin recording Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

But unlike the sunny and intricately crafted psychedelic pop those two groups came up with, The Velvet Underground & Nico is a harsh, dark, bleak head trip of a record. And listen up kids of AbsolutePunk.net, because it is truly the first stone in the foundation of punk rock. Ten years before the likes of the Sex Pistols, The Clash and the Ramones would make a splash on both sides of the Atlantic, Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground made a record that stripped rock 'n roll down to its leanest and meanest components and presented a menacing, sneering countenance that was quite the foil to the acid-wrought "we are all one" sentiments being peddled by the mainstream greats of rock 'n roll at the time. Sound familiar? It should.

I discovered The Velvet Underground in a most unusual fashion. In the liner notes for the Ramones compilation Loud Fast Ramones: Their Toughest Hits, which someone gave me as a fifteenth birthday present, it mentions that back in 1976 some boneheaded music critic referred to the Ramones as potentially "the greatest singles band since The Velvet Underground," which obviously is a really, really dumb thing to write as pretty much every single released by VU was a total commercial flop. But the statement caught my attention and I got my hands on a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico. I didn't really understand the album then, and I don't really claim to now, but I have come to fall in love with its bizarre breed of magic, and in the wake of Reed's passing it's slowly gaining a new meaning for me.

The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of those records about which absolutely everything worth saying has already been said approximately forty-seven times, but bear with me momentarily while I gush. Reed said that his goal when he began writing songs was to write the "Great American Novel" in the form of an album and that's not too far off from what he did with VU's debut. I've never spent more than six hours in New York City and I certainly have no idea what it was like it all its unsanitized glory in the mid-60s, but the characters Reed depicts or inhabits on this album are so vivid and riveting that I feel like I have some understanding of the gritty city that birthed the record.

We've all heard it before but it bears repeating: lyrically what Reed did on this album was totally fucking revolutionary. I'm sorry to keep going back to the comparisons to The Beatles, but while John Lennon was writing couplets like "Picture yourself in a boat on a river / With tangerine trees and marmalade skies," Lou Reed was writing stuff like this: "Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man / When I put a spike into my vein / And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same / When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' son." His straight-faced depictions of drug use, addiction, sexual deviancy and everything in between are arresting and haunting in the most perfect way, and backed with squalls of feedback such as on "Heroin" it sounds like something from the most captivating nightmare you've never had.

But the most haunting and visceral song on the record interestingly enough is also the most reserved. "Sunday Morning," the album's opening song, is quite simply the most beautiful ode to the painful "morning after" ever recorded. And lines like "Early dawning, sunday morning / It's just the wasted years so close behind" particularly send a chill down my spine in wake of Reed's death. I can't get over the fact that he actually passed away on a cold and somber Sunday morning just like the song. It just seems too perfect, like it was always fated to end that way.

Lou Reed gave us something truly special with The Velvet Underground & Nico, and while it may seem unfair for me to not have mentioned John Cale or Nico at all in this piece, Reed is the one who cast the longest shadow onto the history books of rock 'n roll. Even if he had never recorded another note after VU's debut his influence would still be immense. As Brian Eno said about the record, it may not have sold very well when it was initially released, but it seems like everyone who bought a copy of the album started a band. One doesn't have to venture too far into any sector of the rock 'n roll world since 1967 to verify the veracity of that statement: The Velvet Underground didn't start something with this album so much as they started everything.

Craig: When Rolling Stone ranked The Velvet Underground & Nico as the thirteenth greatest record of all time in 2003, the publication called it "the most prophetic rock album ever made." Say what you want about the publication (I certainly have), but I’ve always loved that description. Very often when people talk about this record, they (like Chris) bring up Reed’s gritty lyrics, decadent and depraved novellas of drug abuse ("Heroin"), prostitution ("Femme Fatale"), and sadomasochism ("Venus in Furs”) inspired by the equally hard-hitting poetry of Allen Ginsberg and other literary figures whom Reed admired during his time as an English major. For me, though, this album has always been more remarkable for its seemingly limitless ability to distill the trends of the past 50 years of rock 'n roll into 50 minutes of music.

Today, an album coming out and capturing the last 50 years of music would be remarkable in and of itself, simply considering just how many genres and sounds have risen and fallen in that time. For an album that came out in 1967 to still sound this vital and current and retroactively referential—even of sounds that hadn’t been invented on the rock music landscape when it was released—well...that shouldn’t be possible, right? And yet, orchestrator John Cale, singer/songwriter Lou Reed, German vocalist Nico, and the rest of the Velvet Underground team, they somehow did it on their first fucking record.

Indeed, if one were to listen to The Velvet Underground & Nico with no reference point, no knowledge of the band, and no idea who Lou Reed or John Cale or Nico even were or are, I would imagine they would have a difficult time placing it in a musical context. Sure, there are some clear 1960s sounds here—Reed and Cale sound like they are directly referencing Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited on bluesier numbers like "I’m Waiting For My Man" or "Run Run Run," while Nico’s feminine vocals and the way they lilt on psychedelic pop offerings like "All Tomorrow’s Parties" absolutely sound like something out of the Woodstock age. There’s also "There She Goes," which was very likely built from the template of the catchiest numbers from the first Beatles record, from "I Saw Her Standing There" to "Twist and Shout."

But there’s so much else going on here, too. The dirty (and dirt cheap) production style and the spontaneous nature of the orchestrations—the jarring tempo shifts and thrilling crescendos of the album’s definitive track, "Heroin," or the seemingly improvised electric guitar work of "All Tomorrow’s Parties"—feel like forebears of a 1980s punk sound; Nico’s "Femme Fatale" sounds like the androgynous glam-pop or goth rock of the 1980s. "Heroin" could also be seen as an early prototype for math rock, while the cacophony of album closer, "European Son," gave plenty of bands the license they needed to employ noise and scuzz for an entirely different form of expression. Cue grunge, noise rock, punk (again), avante garde guitar styles, and probably every other genre where musicians realized they didn’t have to make pleasant, harmonious sounds in order to gain respect. Elsewhere, Reed’s jangly guitar sounds and cryptic lyrics presaged the ingredients that R.E.M. would use to single-handedly found indie rock a decade and a half later (on similarly timeless albums like Murmur and Reckoning), while some of R.E.M.’s later, darker material can even be traced back to the horror film thrum of "Venus in Furs."

Put simply, there’s an awful lot to digest here, and in the wake of Lou Reed’s passing, I’ve found myself returning to this record with renewed vigor and attention to detail. This album has been in my collection for years, and I’ve always respected it. The music is so dynamic and ferocious and fascinating; the Warhol cover is an all-time favorite; when my brother has played this record on vinyl, it’s made me want to be a die-hard Velvet Underground fan. Until recently though, I don’t think I quite had the palette to appreciate the vast number of sounds going on here. That’s a shame, considering the fact that I’m now part of a camp that has only really come to appreciate Lou Reed posthumously. But judging from how many artists who have so obviously built their own art from Reed’s template—so perfectly realized on his first time at-bat—it’s safe to say that the man’s legacy will never fade from the rock 'n roll tapestry.

My Back Pages, Vol. 9: Counting Crows - August and Everything After

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

Today, we're resurrecting the feature after a five month hiatus. Chris disappeared off to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico, to the point where we at AbsolutePunk weren't sure whether or not he'd taken up work with Walter White. But now that he's back, we're hoping to get this going regularly once more. Today, we're glancing back at August and Everything After, the debut album from Counting Crows and a record that turned 20 years old this month. Listen along with our Rdio playlist, and please, jump in and share your thoughts on this album that I now feel completely justified in calling a classic.

Craig Manning: “Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white,” Adam Duritz sings at the outset of the Counting Crows’ legendary debut album August and Everything After. In the pantheon of all-time great opening lines, I don’t think there’s ever been one quite like that one from “Round Here,” still the Crows’ greatest contribution to the American songbook. The entire first verse—the entire song, to a certain extent—burns like this all-encompassing run-on sentence, like a string of thoughts and emotions and profound imagery that is never going to come to an end. In Counting Crows live shows, that’s not a bad description for what happens: this song, frequently the opener of the set, goes on for ten minutes or more, featuring long improvisation sections in the middle where frontman Adam Duritz interpolates lyrics from other songs or from his own tortured mind. But “Round Here” is at its finest in studio format. It’s best with 12 seconds of silence preceding the introductory hit of the song’s signature chiming guitar line; it’s best with Duritz left isolated and alone for the first verse and chorus, just that guitar and an ambient organ behind him; and it’s best with the vibrant emotional climax that comes with the “I can’t see nothing around here” line 90 percent of the way through the song.

Legend has it that the studio recording of “Round Here” was the first and only time the band played the song in that arrangement. Because of that singularity, we get Duritz at his rawest and most emotional, a performance with the kind of uncomfortable intimacy that is only rarely heard on record. Duritz’s vocal alone makes “Round Here” the undisputed highlight of the disc, but a similar level of explosive passion persists throughout August and Everything After, as if every individual song is the last one Duritz will ever get to perform. His fervor pays off: next to U2’s The Joshua Tree and Jeff Buckley’s Grace, I consider August to be the most well-sung album in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s also my favorite album of the 1990s. Released on September 14, 1993, August and Everything After preceded my childhood musical awakening by a bit (I was still two months shy of my third birthday, after all), but it is still one of the first records I ever remember hearing and is still in my all-time top ten. I’ve been a huge fan of this band all my life: along with the Wallflowers, they ignited my love for music as a child, and when their greatest hits dropped in 2003, they re-ignited that love after years spent ignoring the album format and only listening to what the radio threw my way. Each Crows album took the band’s sound in a different direction, from the rage-fueled rock ‘n’ roll of 1996’s Recovering the Satellites to the bright summer pop of 2002’s Hard Candy, but while I adore both of those albums, nothing quite compares to the gloomy, autumnal folk of August and Everything After.

This album somehow sold 7 million copies back in the day, a feat that seems especially significant now considering the wreckage of the music industry and the inability of any folk band that isn’t Mumford & Sons to even approach similar levels of ubiquity. A big part of that success can be attributed to the flagship first single, “Mr. Jones,” a jangly folk-rock tune that namedropped Bob Dylan and pondered what it would be like to be famous. Ironically, the song made Duritz and his band into huge stars and sent radio listeners flocking to record stores (remember those?) to pick up August and Everything After. But while there are certainly accessible numbers here like “Mr. Jones” and “Rain King,” songs with these big, Americana-laced hooks, I can imagine there were also things going on with this record that many of those buyers weren’t quite prepared for.

Case in point: last week, when Grantland’s Steven Hyden compared August and Everything After’s legacyto that of Nirvana’s In Utero (which released just a day prior to August in 1993), he wrote that, where In Utero made moments of heartbreak and disconnection “seem noble,” “listening to August and Everything After makes loneliness seem like what it really is: a small and pitiful feeling drenched in a disgusting cocktail of tears and snot.” To a certain extent, that’s true: Kurt Cobain was an icon who spoke for a generation, while Adam Duritz was the guy expressing feelings that everyone had but no one wanted to talk about. If you need proof of that statement, just listen to the lyrics. “Perfect Blue Buildings” is an escapist anthem gone wrong, a depressing-as-hell dirge about what happens when you’re hopeless and alone and have taken to locking yourself in your apartment for days at a time rather than living your life. “Anna Begins” is about falling in love with your best friend only to see that person—and the close friendship you shared together—fade away when it all goes to hell. The guy in “Sullivan Street” knows his relationship is coming to an end, but still tries to hold it together by driving hundreds of miles for seemingly momentary moments with his lover. And the sparse piano balladry of “Raining in Baltimore” calls to mind that moment when you’re three-thousand-five-hundred miles away from the one person on Earth you care about, and you have no fucking idea how to make them happy.

It’s not all desolation, of course. No sad album can truly be complete without a counterbalancing force, and this album has plenty of them. Album closer “A Murder of One,” for example, sparks with hopeful resilience, while the narrator of “Time and Time Again” ardently vows to “set fire to this city” and ride out into the desert in search of a new beginning. But throughout the past 20 years, the loneliness and desperation of these songs are the qualities that have kept me coming back again and again. Hearing this record when I was old enough to understand it, that was one of the first times that I fully realized just how much visceral power music could have, and even after hundreds of plays, there are moments here that still stop me in my tracks. I have to listen to “Round Here” at least twice before moving on to the rest of the record; “Sullivan Street” remains one of my go-to night driving songs; and if “Raining in Baltimore” isn’t my favorite thing to play on acoustic guitar to spill my emotions to, then it’s damn close. In Utero might be getting the lion’s share of anniversary coverage this month, but for me August and Everything After will always be 1993’s definitive masterpiece.

Chris Collum: Craig nailed it when he said that “Round Here” is the Crows’ greatest contribution to the American songbook. More than that even, it serves not only as an introduction to August and Everything After, but it is the crux of the album as well. Everything Duritz expresses on the next ten songs is distilled into five minutes with “Round Here.” Craig said that the “I can’t see nothing around here / Catch me when I’m falling” bit at the end of “Round Here” is the emotional climax of the song, and while that may be true, in my eyes the defining moment comes a little bit sooner. After a seeming out-of-left-field funky bridge, everything drops out again except that omnipresent guitar line and Duritz’s vocals as he almost-whispers: “She says it’s only in my head.”

August and Everything After is an album about loneliness to be certain, but there are thousands of rock records about that and most of them aren’t that good. What sets August apart is the way in which Duritz expresses his loneliness. He doesn’t just feel isolated from the world around him, he feels a complete disconnect with it. Duritz suffers from what he calls “a dissociative disorder, which makes the world seem like it's not real.” So yes, it literally is all in his head—but that’s what makes August so special. The way that he uses words to paint pictures that are in one sense very abstract but in another sense incredibly visceral is a rare talent. The opening lines of the album that Craig references are a perfect example of this.

My first experience with August and Everything After (apart from radio smash hit “Mr. Jones” naturally) was when I was 15, riding around the hills of northern New Mexico with my cross-country team. I’d end up calling those hills home for three consecutive summers a few years later, but that’s aside from the point. The van that our cross-country coach drove us in from Indiana all the way to New Mexico only had a tape player, and my coach only had one tape: August and Everything After. It was playing in the background at a low volume for most of the trip, but he’d turn it up to sing along occasionally—the man had a gloriously tuneless voice, and we’d all snicker quietly from the back seats.

Like many who have fallen in love with August, the first thing that struck me about it was Duritz’s voice. His vocals are simultaneously world-weary and incredibly full of passion, and without even paying any attention to the words that he’s saying it’s not difficult to tell what kind of emotions Duritz is trying to invoke. August is a sad record in a sense, but it’s a tender one at times as well, such as when he croons “I need a phone call / I need a raincoat” in “Raining in Baltimore.” And at its’ core, despite all the loneliness and depression, August is truly a hopeful record. The album ends with Duritz chanting “change, change, change” repeatedly because “you don’t wanna waste your life now baby.”

August was produced by T. Bone Burnett, a true legend of Americana. He adds a tangible warmth to the mix that accents the Crows’ poppy brand of roots rock well, particularly on songs like “Omaha.” That song also serves as another example of the universal appeal of Duritz’s lyrics. You don’t need to have ever been to Omaha or even know where it is on a map to understand the loneliness that can come from being by yourself in a strange town “somewhere in the middle of America.”

A lot of discussion about this record inevitably ends up focusing on how different it is from absolutely every other rock record released in 1993. That’s obviously true, but it isn’t all that relevant in my opinion. August is a record birthed in another time and place than the grunge movement and owes its debts to the likes of Dylan, Morrison and Springsteen rather than the likes of Pixies, Replacements and Sonic Youth. That the Counting Crows were able to make as much of a splash as they did in 1993 with such a different-sounding record is certainly remarkable, however. Furthermore, if 90s alt-rock had chosen the Crows as a blueprint for the rest of the decade as opposed to the worst parts of grunge, a few bands might have actually made listenable mainstream rock records post-1994.

But that was not the case obviously. Instead August stands alone as somewhat of a curiosity in the rock ‘n roll canon: its influences are obvious but it is not truly of the era in which it came out. It’s a very unique record, and sadly the Crows haven’t come anywhere close to making one as good since. But that’s alright. Nothing that has happened since 1993 would have eclipsed the glory of August anyway. Duritz got his well-deserved one shining moment. He got exactly what the protagonist of “Mr. Jones” wanted when he said that “When I look at the television I wanna see me / Staring right back at me.”

Big, big stars indeed.

My Back Pages, Vol. 8: Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, The Innocent, The E Street Shuffle

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

This week we have a double feature on deck for you, and yes we're talking about Springsteen--if you know anything about either of us you knew it was coming eventually. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Springsteen's first two albums, which both came out in 1973, yesterday we discussed Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, his debut, and today we're taking on The Wild, the Innocent, the E Street Shuffle. As always, there's a full Rdio stream of the record below, as well as a link to check it out on Spotify. Enjoy!

Craig Manning: I graduate from college tomorrow. I finished classes yesterday afternoon and started packing up my room last night. And on Sunday, I’ll move out of my apartment, drive away from this town, and close up this chapter of my life for good. As a guy who constantly finds new ways to soundtrack his life, there are a lot of albums that are going to be a part of that. The new Jimmy Eat World, for one, is connecting in all the right ways at the perfect time; Japandroids’ Celebration Rock, too, because there’s nothing like screaming along to “The House That Heaven Built” as the world begins to shift around you. But when I leave this town in my rearview on Sunday afternoon, my buddy Bruce is probably going to be my most significant companion. One of the reasons for that, obviously, is Born to Run, my favorite album of all time and a record that’s been there for a lot of major changes in my life over the past few years. Hell, that’s the album that was playing as I drove to my high school graduation four years ago. But the other is the album we’re talking about today, and you can rest assured there’s a reason Bruce came up this week: I wanted to write about this record at this moment in my life, and I’m gracious to get the opportunity.

One of my best friends on the forums, the other Chris (cshadows, raise your hand, I know you’re reading) wrote a pretty remarkable blurb about this particular Springsteen record a few years ago, when he and a bunch of us in the General Forum put together a list of albums that needed to be heard, and I’m going to quote that now because I think it perfectly captures what The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle, as an album,is all about:

“The Boss hit his first stroke of genius on this jazz-infused, street-poet block party of a record,” Chris wrote. “The joy and danger every teenager hopes awaits them each Saturday night have never been better captured than in Springsteen’s portraits of small-town Jersey, just before the darkness appeared on the edge of town. The characters love, fight, joke and live like they have only that one night, and the listener gets a front-row seat. The closing three-song suite is perfection, with especially “Incident on 57th Street” being as much cinematic (i.e. West Side Story) as musical.”

What Chris didn’t include in that lovely paragraph, though, is the bit that he mentioned to me in one of our first Springsteen conversations, the bit that has stuck with me through every listen I’ve given this record since. For a long time, I had some trouble getting into this one, in the same way that I struggle to hold Greetings in the high esteem that I hold the rest of Bruce’s heyday work. As I noted in yesterday’s write-up, the production here is already a massive step up from where it was just eight months prior (Greetings dropped in January of 1973, while Wild released in September), and the E Street sound has exhibited remarkable evolution as well. But for a guy like me, a guy who built his Springsteen love on the anthemic pillars of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge, Wild felt almost alien on first listen. The song structures are longer, more meandering, and far more freewheeling than anything Springsteen did on his debut or anything he’s done since. Just listen to late-record shape-shifters like “New York City Serenade” or “Incident on 57th Street,” and you’ll see that Bruce was writing songs here in a way that, beyond a few exceptions, he never would again. But then I met Chris (cshadows, not Collum; I can already see how this is going to be confusing), and he told me that The Wild, The Innocent was one of his five favorite albums of all time and that it was tied with Born to Run at the top of Springsteen’s oeuvre, and I was probably shaking my head at my computer screen until he delivered the key words that changed my perception of the album forever.

“Dude, it’s the perfect record to inaugurate summer.”

Well hot damn, he was right. And just like that, the album clicked. I saw these songs in a new light. I heard the groovy synth beeps at the top of “The E Street Shuffle” and saw a thousand booze-fueled barbeques; I heard the line “Hey little heroes, summer’s hot but I guess it ain’t very sweet around here anymore” on “Incident” and it sounded like gospel; and when I finally listened to “Sandy” on a sweltering, muggy summer night...well, I don’t think I have to explain that one. Of course, when Chris actually told me this, it already was summer, and I had already inaugurated the season (memorably, I might add, with Jack’s Mannequin’s Everything in Transit), but blaring songs like “Rosalita” as I drove around my hometown was still nothing short of transcendent. In fact, I probably would have gotten noise complaints for how loud I played this record in my car on late night drives back to my house, but of course, I was driving much too fast for anyone to pin me down. Born to Run may have nailed the redemptive escapism of youth, but this is a record for the moment before that escapism feels necessary; it’s for that time in your life when nothing sounds better than bumming around with your friends on the same old beachside streets you grew up on, or courting that girl from high school who you missed your chance with the first time around. And since I was in that exact moment during the summer in question, this album became my Bible.

Every year since then, the first day the sun breaks through and the temperatures go above 50 (which, since I live in Michigan, might never happen again), I roll down my car windows and take this thing for a ride. And in that moment, it feels like nothing has ever sounded better. Springsteen fans may consider Born to Run as the quantum leap forward, but I think the jump had already happened here. Just listen to Greetings and Wild back to back: where most of Greetings sounds like a demo tape, Wild is crisp, clean, and explosive; where the first record couldn’t quite capture the electricity of a Springsteen live show, the second one does arguably the best job of any entry in Springsteen’s catalog at doing just that. Born to Run sounds grander, but it was really a piece of studio audio art. We’ve all heard the tales of all the overdubs that went into “Born to Run,” or of how Clarence would work meticulously on the “Jungleland” solo for hours on end—sometimes straight through the night. But on songs like “"The E Street Shuffle” or “Kitty’s Back,” it sounds like the band could be improvising their parts right on the other side of the stereo. And if “Born to Run” is Springsteen’s most potent anthem, then “Rosalita” is his most spontaneous, a rock ‘n’ roll rave-up that builds to a loose and irresistible climax section. If you’re not shouting along by the end of that song, you might not have a pulse.

The other big thing about The Wild, The Innocent is that, where Greetings sounded like an artist who didn’t quite know who he wanted to be (or, as I mentioned yesterday, one who’s label wasn’t quite on the right page yet), this one is about as distinctive and directional as sophomore albums come. The fact that this set of songs even exists blows my mind, because today, if an act sold as poorly their first time out the gate as Springsteen did with Greetings (that album peaked at 60 on the Billboard 200), they would be lucky to even still be on the major label circuit, let alone making the most adventurous album of their career. But the last three songs of this record—which may constitute the single greatest side of any record ever pressed on vinyl—display just how much faith label president Clive Davis and manager Mike Appel had in Bruce. Not only do all three songs stretch on for more than seven minutes (“Rosalita,” the album’s only prayer at landing anything on the radio waves, was the shortest at 7:04), they also largely eschew the standard verse-chorus dynamic. Again, “Rosalita” is the closest, with its shout-along chorus and romantic sweep. “I'm coming to liberate you, to confiscate you, I want to be your man!” Springsteen bellows to the title character, telling her to forget about her disapproving parents and just escape with him: for the night, maybe even forever. And the thing is, it's impossible to imagine her saying no. One listen to the song’s blistering, climactic breakdown and it’s not hard to see why this was the de-facto Springsteen show closer for a long, long time.

“Incident on 57th Street” has, over time, wormed its way into my top five Bruce songs (seeing it live last spring certainly didn’t hurt). Chris mentioned yesterday that the characters on Greetings weren’t yet fully formed, but in this song, they spring from the texture like operatic heroes. On both “Incident” and grand finale “New York City Serenade,” Springsteen dabbles in the realms of extended track lengths and fully-formed story worlds that he first visited on “Spirit in the Night” and “Lost in the Flood.” “Serenade” isn’t even a cohesive narrative—Springsteen pieced it together from shards of earlier songs—but it still works as a collision of lovely vignettes. And when set against a backdrop of glorious strings and Clarence’s virtuosic sax (not to mention the song’s near-baroque intro, courtesy of pianist David Sancious), it becomes staggering: equal parts “Jungleland” and “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Bruce would perfect the epic story song with Born to Run—“Jungleland,” in essence, was the realization of everything the E Street Band tried to achieve across their first three records—but he hasn’t really gone back to that style of songwriting since. We’ve gotten long songs (“Drive All Night”) and plenty of story songs (pretty much everything on the three acoustic records), but the one time Bruce seemed to really attempt a return to this form—on Working on a Dream’s “Outlaw Pete”—it came across almost like self-parody, like his heart wasn’t in it. I don’t need him to get back to that either, since I’d rank Wrecking Ball in my top five Springsteen albums and since The Rising and Magic are both unqualified successes in my book, but you have to wonder what happened within the arc of The Wild, The Innocent, Born to Run, and Darkness on the Edge of Town that completely changed the way he wrote songs.

In our first installment of this feature, we discussed Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, and I concluded that part of the reason for the album’s classic status was its ability to construct a complete world around its listeners. The Wild, The Innocent does the same, building a luminous environment of innocence, love, and riotous nights out on the town, a world where summer lasts forever and outfits like the E Street Band play at boardwalk bars for a two buck cover charge. When I get in my car on Sunday and hit the highway, college will be just a memory. I’ll be driving away from the last bastion of my youth and into the great unknown. But albums like this one, they endure. They’re comfortable reminders of where we came from and of what life can look like on those summer evenings when you’re young and in love and you’ve got the whole night ahead of you and it feels like anything could happen. And albums like that, they keep you young, no matter where you go in life.

Chris Collum: Much like Craig, despite being a lifelong Springsteen fan, I too am a latecomer to this record. In fact, I don’t believe I heard the thing all the way through until four or five years ago, although I’ve been familiar with most of the songs on it for ages. And when I first heard The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle I must admit that it didn’t really blow me away. Sure songs like “Sandy,” “Rosalita” and “Incident” are all top-notch, but most of the songs on here were far too long for my tastes, and some of them didn’t really do much for me at all.

I expressed these misgivings about the album in a Springsteen thread on this site a few years ago, and mentioned that it’s probably my least favorite of his first eight records and well…”other” Chris went off, I backed down, and we went our separate ways. One of my chief complaints about this album was the closer, “New York City Serenade,” which I said dragged on and on and on and was actually kind of boring.

I regret that now, and I stand before you today a changed man. “Serenade” is perfect; it’s a marvelous way to end this record. It’s a masterful study in gradual build-up, release and catharsis, and it needs all of the nine minutes and fifty-five seconds that it gets to do that. It also is the final farewell for jazz-trained pianist David Sancious, who would leave the E Street family after this record.

In fact, the last three songs on this album (the B side in other words) comprise twenty-five of the best minutes in popular music history. From “Incident” through “Rosalita” on to “Serenade,” this is, in my opinion, the beginning of Bruce Springsteen the master storyteller. And oh my how he tells these stories. The imagery is unparalleled: “Spanish Johnny drove in from the underworld last night / With bruised arms and broken rhythm / In a beat-up old Buick / But dressed just like dynamite,” or “Well my tires were slashed and I almost crashed but the Lord had mercy / My machine she’s a dud, she’s stuck out in the mud / Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.” One of my beefs with Greetings was that the songwriting was not quite on the same level as Bruce’s later work; on the last three songs of this record, that could not be farther from the truth.

The record sounds great as well, not only due to a higher production quality but also because--appropriately enough, given the album’s title—this is the first true E Street record. And they bring down the house, all the way through. Also, this features some incredible lead guitar work from Bruce—I’m not a big fan of “Kitty’s Back” (I’ll get to that soon), but the solo that starts that song is absolutely blistering. Same goes for his lead work on “Incident,” and finally, I’ve been playing guitar for fourteen years but I have no idea how somebody puts so much into and gets so much emotion out of the instrument like Bruce does in the acoustic bit that starts about a minute and a half into “Serenade.”

The E Street Band is remarkable for their musical skill certainly, but they also were remarkable in 1973 for another reason. Rock ‘n roll was becoming an increasingly segregated world in the early 70s, but the band that Bruce assembled on this record included two African-Americans (and actually would later include three for a brief period when Ernest “Boom” Carter replaced Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez). We don’t even think about a musician’s race today, but back in the 70s, race was a very real factor in the music industry, and I’m sure Springsteen pissed some very important white people off at Columbia with the band he assembled. God bless him.

You might notice that so far I have really only talked about the last three songs on this album. There’s a reason for that, and it’s why this album will forever remain somewhere in the middle of Bruce’s discography in terms of quality, at least in my mind: the A side is not that remarkable. The bustling title track kicks the record off well enough, but in my opinion, the version of “Sandy” that’s on this album feels neutered and lifeless compared with the way Bruce has performed it live in the forty years since. That being said, it is a fantastic song even if the performance isn’t my favorite.

However, next after “Sandy” are my least-favorite twelve minutes of music on any Bruce album up through Tunnel of Love. “Kitty’s Back” drags on and never catches my attention, and “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” calls to mind The Beatles’ “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” in the worst of ways. Sure it’s well worth it to sit through these songs just to get to the pure bliss that is the B side, but much like with my criticisms of Greetings, I expect more from Bruce.

With time I have grown to love the good parts of this record more and more, and while I initially viewed it simply as a primer for what was to come in 1975, I now think the B side stands out in its own right as some of the finest music Bruce has ever recorded. As Craig alluded to in his piece, it is simply not fair nor accurate to regard Born to Run as the quantum leap forward. With Greetings we got our first glimpse into the world of Bruce Springsteen, but with the latter half of The Wild Bruce truly came into his own, and made us fall headfirst into his world and never want to leave, even more so a few years later when a certain screen door slammed and a dress swayed to the tune of Roy Orbison singing for the lonely…

PS--Craig, you're wrong. "Outlaw Pete" rules.

My Back Pages, Vol. 7: Bruce Springsteen - Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

This week we have a double feature on deck for you, and yes we're talking about Springsteen--if you know anything about either of us you knew it was coming eventually. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Springsteen's first two albums, which both came out in 1973, today we will be discussing Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, his debut, and check back tomorrow for The Wild, the Innocent, the E-Street Shuffle. As always, there's a full Rdio stream of the record below, as well as a link to check it out on Spotify. Enjoy!

Chris Collum: It’s hard to imagine now, forty years, seventeen studio albums and thousands upon thousands of shows into his career, but once upon a time Bruce Springsteen was nothing more than another wayward musician in his mid-20s, a Jersey shore beach bum bouncing from band to band and club to club hoping to hit it big with the right group of musicians—or at least sell enough tickets to buy lunch. In 1972, he finally got his first break, a record deal with Columbia. After his manager Mike Appel had badgered Columbia so much the label literally could no longer say no, in May of that year Springsteen auditioned with John Hammond, the famed talent scout who “discovered” Bob Dylan. Hammond was impressed, Appel and Springsteen booked studio time for later that year, and Columbia began a PR campaign heralding Bruce as the second coming of Dylan.

However, despite some obvious similarities (verbosely poetic lyrical style, white boy fro, etc.), Springsteen was not the new Dylan. While he auditioned as a solo artist, performing on acoustic guitar or piano, when it came time to record his debut album, Springsteen showed up at 914 Sound Studios with a band of fellow Jersey shore drifter musicians in tow. After a lot of back-and-forth with Appel and Hammond about whether the songs that were being recorded sounded better as solo or full-band numbers, a compromise was reached in the end and so Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ has two solo songs (“Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “The Angel”) and seven full-band ones.

Springsteen was right. These songs sound better with a full band. Those two aforementioned songs are easily the two least-memorable songs on the album, and feel strangely out of place alongside the lush instrumentation of songs like “Blinded by the Light.”

Given the rushed nature of the recording (all of the songs were recorded in a week), the fact that not all of the musicians who sat in for the record had played with one another before, the behind-the-scenes dispute about how the record should be made, and the fact that Springsteen was absolutely still finding his feet as an artist, this is a fantastic album. However, if you ignore all of these extra-musical factors, it is undeniable that while this is a great, great record and would be the highlight of many lesser artists’ careers, it is not of the same caliber as Springsteen’s later work. The songs by-and-large do not pack the same carefully executed emotional punch that he is so good at exacting, and the characters that inhabit said songs do not spring to life from the pages of the lyric booklet the way that the Magic Rat, Spanish Johnny and the couples who inhabit the world of “Racing in the Street” and “The River” do.

Perhaps the reason why the characters in these songs are not as lifelike as the ones in his later ones is because this record is the beginning of the story—where the characters first start to take shape. You certainly can see flashes of what was to come in the likes of Hazy Davey in “Spirit in the Night” or Jimmy the Saint in “Lost in the Flood.” Springsteen introduces us to the street empire that he would immortalize with his next two records, and comes tantalizingly close to fully fleshing out the songs, but there’s something intangible missing from almost all of them. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but if you’ve heard Bruce’s later stuff you know that there’s something that’s missing.

Furthermore, while the band sounds very good, you will find nothing more than basic rock ‘n roll backing tracks. Clarence’s saxophone is used mainly for color and not allowed the spotlight it deserves. Likewise, David Sancious is not allowed to cut loose and show off his jazz chops in the way he is on the other Springsteen record on which he is featured (The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle). The production on this record is certainly pretty good by 1972 standards, but it certainly could be a whole lot better—it was recorded in very cheap studio in one week. By way of comparison, Shuffle was recorded less than a year later and sounds much, much fuller than this album does.

Okay enough that about does it for the things that are “wrong” with this record, and I put that word in quotations because like I said, one can only find issues with Greetings if it is judged side-by-side with Springsteen’s later work. There are plenty of things to love here.

First of all, this was the world’s introduction to Springsteen as a lyricist, and while I know some fans aren’t that huge on his incredibly wordy style on this album, I think it’s fantastic. “And the sages of the subway sit just like the living dead / As the tracks clack out the rhythm their eyes fixed straight ahead/ They ride the line of balance and hold on by just a thread / But it's too hot in these tunnels you can get hit up by the,” he sputters on “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” in a rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness yet still quite soulful style. Additionally, “Growin’ Up” has some of my favorite lyrics he’s ever written—“I swear I found the key to the universe / In the engine of an old parked car” is just the greatest line. Finally, the internal rhyming and giddy wordplay of “Blinded,” the opening song, never fails to bring a smile to my face—it’s an incredibly fun song (and one that was horribly neutered by Manfred Mann).

Springsteen’s voice and vocal delivery sound pretty great here too, especially for someone with no training at the beginning of their career. As I’ve mentioned, the rapid-fire style that he utilizes so often on this record works very well for these songs in my opinion. This style, which certainly calls to mind Dylan, also was a pretty obviously huge influence on Craig Finn of The Hold Steady (arguably the master of the “talk-singing” style) and I adore The Hold Steady so I’m grateful this record exists if only for that reason. Beyond that unique style though, there are also some great vocal melodies—the chorus of “For You,” for example, is incredibly catchy, and something about that “hey bus driver” bit that begins “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” giddily infectious.

Greetings is memorable simply by merit of the name that graces the cover certainly, but there’s plenty to love here even if Bruce had never made another record. The gritty street characters portrayed here and the Jersey shore fusion of R&B and rock ‘n roll that is the soundtrack to their lives grabbed the attention of the few people who initially heard this record. It’s not a perfect record and it’s not on par with his later work, but it is a very, very good album and the world’s first glimpse into the creative mind of Bruce Springsteen.

Craig Manning: Greetings is my step dad's favorite Bruce album. I’ve met a lot Bruce fans over the years, and I think he’s the only one of them who’s ever given that answer. It means one thing though, and that’s that, even though Born to Run was the first Springsteen album I fell in love with, Greetings might be the one I remember hearing first. I have vivid memories of him listening to this record when I was a kid, of the jazzy strains of “Spirit in the Night” floating out of my parents’ bedroom while he was getting ready for dates with my mom, or of the ringing piano chords of “Growin’ Up” blasting from our home stereo system while he was cooking dinner. So while, for me, Greetings would probably land in seventh place out of Bruce’s near-flawless seventies and eighties run (Nebraska would be last; I know, blasphemy), to say this album has a near and dear place in my heart is probably an understatement.

There are two primary criticisms levied against Greetings, and probably the loudest is that, as an album, it’s not quite cohesive. There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that Bruce didn’t know who he wanted to be as an artist yet; the second is that he actually did know, but his label wasn’t quite ready to let him be that artist yet. I tend to lean toward the latter option, especially after an enlightening read through the latest Springsteen biography this past winter. (The book, penned by Peter Ames Carlin, is simply called Bruce.) As Chris discussed above, this album is often regarded as Bruce’s “trying to be Dylan” album, but I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment. Sure, if you’re reading through the lyrical flurry of “Blinded by the Light” in the album’s liner notes, the comparison is an easy one. But actually play the song (preferably at full volume) and the parallel doesn’t fit so well. And it never really would fit well, either, even though Bruce’s label, as well as manager/producer Mike Appel, wanted so desperately for Bruce to be the next Dylan.

Part of the reason for the inequity is the loose, spontaneous blast of the E Street sound, which was already beginning to take form on the album’s best songs. Bruce liked the full band texture he was cultivating on songs like “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street” and “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City,” but the higher-ups—Appel and John Hammond, a producer and talent scout at Columbia Records who had actually signed Dylan—liked his more stripped-down singer/songwriter stuff. And so the three came up with a compromise: the record would be ten songs: half full-band, half acoustic solo material.

But as we all know, the record actually ended up only having nine songs, and the division didn’t quite work out the way it had been planned. I’ll be the first person to defend the two acoustic songs that actually survived the record’s last minute revisions—“Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “The Angel” are often derided as weak points, but I think that both, especially the former, are haunting, hypnotic, and gorgeous gems that hint at what Bruce would do on his later, stripped-down records—but it would be hard to argue with how the rest of the sessions worked out. When the record reached the desk of Columbia Records president Clive Davis, it had three additional solo songs—“Arabian Nights,” “Jazz Musician,” and “Visitation at Camp Horn”—but, as Davis noted, it also didn’t have a single.

So Springsteen went back to the drawing board, trying to scramble his band back together for a quick recording session. Bassist Garry Tallent and keyboardist David Sancious, both of whom had played on the five previously recorded full band songs, were unavailable, so Bruce went in a different direction to fill out the sound. And that direction changed everything. Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez stuck around on the drums, sessions man Harold Wheeler added some piano on “Blinded by the Light,” and Springsteen even strapped on an electric bass for good measure, but the major addition, of course, was Clarence. Any Springsteen fan worth his or her salt has heard the mythical story of how the Boss and the Big Man met, but for the uninitiated, it’s worth relaying the images here. The tale is one of hurricane gales and buckets of rain, of rattling Jersey boardwalks and trees bending at the force of the tempest. It’s a tale of a small, dimly-lit club, where Bruce and a few of his band members were weathering the storm and making some noise in the name of rock ‘n’ roll. And it’s a tale where, suddenly, the door tears open, lifts off its hinges, and goes barreling down the street, leaving a massive silhouette framed in that doorway instead, a man who seemed to stroll out of Springsteen’s dreams and into that noisy room. And it’s a tale of the big, booming voice that cut through the din and changed the E Street legacy forever.

“I want to play with you,” Clarence said.

He got his first chance, at least in the studio, on the two new songs the band cut at Davis’s suggestion. And while my loyalties will probably always fall with “Growin’ Up” and its poignant, powerful lyrical imagery as the album’s definitive track, it’s impossible to imagine Greetings without highlights like “Blinded by the Light” or “Spirit in the Night.” The former is the album’s liveliest cut, a rough-hewn folk-rock tour-de-force that did end up being the single Davis wanted, just not for Springsteen. British prog-rock band Manfred Mann would hit number one on the charts with the song five years later (even though it sounded like they were singing “douche” instead of “deuce” during the chorus), a feat that, to this day, remains Springsteen’s only number one single on the Billboard Hot 100. The latter, meanwhile, is one of Springsteen’s jazziest numbers, with a Van Morrison-esque groove that sounds as good today as I’m sure it did 40 years ago.

In fact, “Spirit” and “Blinded” are probably the two songs on here that don’t really sound at all dated, and that brings me to the second primary criticism of this record. Chris mentioned that the sound here is kind of thin, and there’s really no better way to describe it. I truly love this album, and I think Springsteen was already in top form as a songwriter, but damn, I wonder what would have happened if these songs had gotten the production value Born to Run had—or, for that matter, the production that The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle displayed only half a year later. Listen to a song like “Lost in the Flood”: here, it sounds like a demo. It’s lyrically resplendent, and Bruce’s narrative gifts have rarely been better, but the song doesn’t have the level of punch or polish that it should. In comparison, listen to the song in a modern live setting. When the E Street Band played through the whole record in 2009 to celebrate the end of the Working on a Dream tour—and the final show Clarence would ever play with the group—“Lost in the Flood” sounded remarkable, building to the kind of visceral, incendiary guitar solo it deserves. The arc on record is fine, but with better production, the song could have been one of Bruce’s best.

Still though, for a debut album, Greetings serves as a solid mission statement for the rest of Bruce’s career. He’d reach much greater heights only a few months later (more on that tomorrow), and it would be just a couple years before he entered the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll legends (and, in my opinion, made the greatest album of all time), but at the beginning of 1973, Greetings displayed an artist who knew where he wanted to go and had all the tools to get there. His band might not have officially had their name yet, but at its best moments, Greetings From Asbury Park is E Street splendor (almost) all the way through.

My Back Pages, Vol. 6: R.E.M. - Automatic for the People

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

This week we are revisiting a lifelong favorite of both of ours: R.E.M.'s 1992 classic Automatic for the People. So check the replies for our thoughts and full Rdio and Spotify streams of the record, and feel free to jump in with any comments, anecdotes, or discussion questions you may have.

Craig Manning: Sometimes, bands stick around for so long that we begin to take them for granted. Once a group of musicians spends 20 or 30 years in each other’s company, we start assuming that they’re just always going to be there, that they’ll tour through a city near us every few years, drop a couple new albums each decade, and repackage their greatest hits once every ten years to keep the classics on the radio. So when R.E.M. finally fractured, called it quits, and walked away in September 2011, the news left me trying to pick my jaw up off the floor. For a very long time, they were a band I admired more than one that I adored. But I was probably the only fan on the planet who loved Around the Sun, and my unexplained gravitation to that much-maligned 2004 release energized my exploration through the rest of their catalog.

There’s something unique about R.E.M. in that, among fans, there really isn’t a “consensus” pick for the best album from their discography. Ask the older crowd, the ones who were there when R.E.M. broke through and basically invented indie rock ‘n’ roll three decades ago, and you’ll hear short, snappy titles like Murmur or Reckoning as favorites. Others, the types that don’t want to be seen as “following the leader,” might go for deeper discs like Lifes Rich Pageant or New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Hell, the guy who ranked all the R.E.M. albums over at Stereogum notched 1987’s Document—the one that launched songbook staples like “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” and “The One I Love” to the radio—as the greatest of their classics.

But for those of us who were growing up in the nineties, there’s little doubt which album comes to mind first when we think of Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry, and that’s this one: the gorgeously mournful Automatic for the People. Released in the autumn of 1992, Automatic found R.E.M. eight albums and nearly ten years into their career, years removed from their departure from I.R.S., the beloved indie label that had helped to launch them into the stratosphere, and coming off an album that had seemed like an identity crisis. That record, 1991’s Out of Time, contained both a soul-searching rumination on fame (“Losing My Religion,” still the band’s biggest U.S. hit) and a soul-shatteringly awful play for pop stardom (“Shiny Happy People,” enough said). Listening to it now, Out of Time is a solid record with a few throwaways, but its biggest grievance is that it sounds unfocused. Fans could have been forgiven for calling the band “sell-outs” after hearing “Shiny Happy People”—or, for that matter, the equally egregious rap-rock of “Radio Song”—but the biggest problem was that the album they came from only reached greatness a few times. And for a band that had released wall-to-wall classics in their time at I.R.S., inconsistency shouldn’t even have been in the lexicon.

Luckily, R.E.M. came back with Automatic for the People, arguably their most cohesive and consistent album, a mere year and a half later. Heavy on mandolin and acoustic guitar—as well as on string arrangements from Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones—Automatic for the People is the darkest album that R.E.M. ever made. It’s also the best-sounding one, thanks to swelling, layered, and full-bodied production from Scott Litt. And while the more contemplative sound would probably take the band nowhere if the album were released today, Automatic for the People did pretty damn well for itself when it dropped in the middle of grunge phenomenon. Landing at number two on the Billboard 200 and spawning six different singles between 1992 and 1993 (that’s precisely half the album, if you’re keeping track). And we all know the biggest hits: the ominous crawl of opening track and lead single “Drive,” buoyed by the most shadowy acoustic guitar line you’ve ever heard; or “Man on the Moon,” with its anthemic, sing along chorus and Stipe’s momentary Elvis impersonation; or especially “Everybody Hurts,” perhaps the ultimate break-up ballad and a song that, despite borderline punchline status now (I’ve seen more than a few ironic TV and film sequences that use the song’s earnest longing as a backdrop) is still an immensely well-crafted dirge.

But my love for Automatic for the People—which still seems to grow every time I listen to it—really revolves around two different songs. The first is “Sweetness Follows,” the stunning finale to the record’s first side. Acoustic guitar chords are joined by organ swells and explosions of emotive electric guitar feedback (some of Peter Buck’s finest work), creating one of the most striking sonic palettes I’ve ever heard on record. The lyrics are simple, but unique: lost parents and ponderings on mortality build the setting, but the prominent theme is a deeper rumination on the grudges and arguments that can tear families apart. In a single verse (“Listen here my sister and my brother/What would you care if you lost the other?/I always wondered why did we bother?/Distanced from one, deaf to the other”), Stipe paints a portrait of children grown, uniting to put their parents in the ground, but still divided by their differences, by petty arguments that can be neither forgotten nor forgiven. The organ bursts are the funeral procession, but the meat of the song is the duel between acoustic and electric guitar, between one sibling and the other, while Stipe’s reverential vocal delivery holds strong at the eye of the storm. The song, quite simply, is a master-class of tension, and it’s one of my all time favorites for that reason.

And then there’s “Nightswimming,” arguably among the most gorgeous and timeless songs ever written. Back in 2007 and 2008, blogger Matthew Perpetua charted the entire R.E.M. timeline, writing about each and every one of their songs in separate blog spots. And while there’s a lot to praise about “Nightswimming,” Perpetua probably hit upon its single most definitive element first: Mike Mills’ piano line. “It is a piece of music that seems so natural and pure that it’s hard to imagine that there was actually a time when the song did not exist,” Perpetua wrote, and he’s right. The piano line shimmers and rotates around you as Michael Stipe delivers some of his finest poetry, and the melody instantly feels like an old friend. The song is yearning, nostalgic, evocative, beautiful, unforgettable, perfect. From first note to last, it sounds like a summer night, like youth fading away, like the moon and stars and water and sand glowing with the radiance of a dying season. And every time I hear it, each moment, each lyrical image, each elegiac piano chord, brings me back to a moment from my past. “Every streetlight a reminder,” as Stipe sings in the song’s final minutes. On Automatic for The People, “Nightswimming” functions as the penultimate track, flowing perfectly into the almost equally lovely “Find The River,” and together, they constitute one of the greatest finales to one of the greatest records ever made.

Chris Collum: I have been listening to this record for literally my entire life—my mother has told me numerous times that it and Bruce Springsteen’s Lucky Town were the two CDs she and my father had with them in the hospital when I was born (although I did just check the release date was a solid three-and-a-half months after I was born, so maybe that particular piece of family trivia isn't entirely factual. Point still stands though, and they definitely had the Bruce record.) Years and years before I could really understand what they meant, I knew every word to “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite,” “Man on the Moon,” and “Nightswimming.” Which isn’t to say I necessarily understand them even now; Michael Stipe’s lyrics are notoriously cryptic: “Baby, instant soup doesn't really grab me, / Today I need something more sub, sub, sub, substantial / A can of beans or black-eyed peas, / Some Nescafe on ice / A candy bar, a falling star, or a reading from Dr. Seuss,” he sings on “Sidewinder” before chuckling to himself as he goes into the chorus that on first and fortieth listen sounds like nonsensical babbling—speaking in tongues, perhaps.

The key part of that, though, is the chuckle. Apart from being notoriously cryptic and self-conscious about his lyrics, Stipe was also known for his seriousness throughout the 80s as his band invented and then proceeded to dominate the college rock scene.
But never before Automatic for the People had Stipe sounded so full of life, so vital—even when he’s singing about how he needs “someone to fly over my grave at night,” as in “Breathe.” This is made even more interesting by the fact that while the band was recording the record there were rumors swirling that Stipe was in fact dying of AIDS. Whereas for years Stipe was infamous for his “mumbling” and imprecise vocal style—perhaps buoyed by the smash success of the single “Losing My Religion” the previous year—on this record he embraces his inner rock star more than ever. And he sounds great.

The whole record sounds great, actually, as Craig said. Scott Litt is certainly at his finest here, as the drums, bass, guitars, keys and vocals all leap out of your speakers in a way that only the finest and most precise production work can make them do., even twenty years later. Listen to this album and then listen to some others released in the same time period. While many records released in the late 80s/early 90s, especially more commercial releases such as this one, sound very thin and trebly, Automatic for the People sounds very thick and spacious. In essence, has that “huge” sound that many rock ‘n roll classics do. This is quite a contrast with the claustrophobic, often monochromatic sounds of grunge that dominated the rock mainstream at the time. It was 1992, I think you know what I mean.

As I alluded to in my opening paragraph, Stipe takes us to some fascinating places lyrically as well. The record is by and large a very bleak one, a work of self-reflection that seems to look backwards much more than it does forwards. My personal favorite lyrically is probably “Monty Got a Raw Deal,” which seems to be about/directed to Montgomery Clift, the Pulitzer Prize-winning actor famous for his work in the 1950s. He was also a closeted bisexual according to those who knew him well, and died in 1966 at the age of 45. Lines such as “So I went walking in the street / Saw you strung up from a tree / A woman knelt there, said to me, / Said, “Hold your tongue ma, hold your tongue” cast a shiver down my spine. I’m sure that in the midst of the AIDS hysteria in the early 90s the song was especially significant, but even today it sounds painfully familiar. Elsewhere, on “Star Me Kitten,” Stipe gets kinky in the creepiest (and catchiest) of ways. He sings in a laconic drawl, declaring “You are wild and I’m in your possession, / Nothing’s free so fuck me kitten.” The song also purportedly influenced Kurt Cobain’s lyrics for “Heart Shaped Box,” but that may not be more than a musical myth.

But, as Craig said, the obvious highlight here (and in my opinion in R.E.M.’s catalog) is “Nightswimming.” Whether the ballad is a wistful ode to the early days of college rock, the days before the AIDS crisis emerged and gay men began being vilified publicly, or simply a chronicle of the character in the song (assumed to be Stipe) looking back on his youth, or some cocktail of the three, it is one of the hardest-hitting songs emotionally that I have ever heard. “The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago, / Turned around backwards so the windshield shows / Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse,” he sings, then winding back to “You I thought I knew you, / You I cannot judge,” then finally to “You I thought you knew me.” The song is beautiful, poetic, cryptic, simple, uplifting and utterly devastating all at once.

Automatic for the People is a wonderful album, and it’s the sort that takes years and years to take a deep root in your mind and your soul. As I said, it has been with me for all twenty years of my life and even returning to it today to write this piece, like Craig mentioned in his bit I am extracting new meaning and emotion from the record. And that truly is the sign of great work of art.