Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader
For more than three decades, Bruce Springsteen’s ability to express in words and music the deepest hopes, fears, loves, and sorrows of average Americans has made him a hero to his millions of devoted fans. Racing in the Street is the first comprehensive collection of writings about Springsteen, featuring the most insightful, revealing, famous, and infamous articles, interviews, reviews, and other writings. This nostalgic journey through the career of a rock-’n’-roll legend chronicles every...
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For more than three decades, Bruce Springsteen's ability to express in words and music the deepest hopes, fears, loves, and sorrows of average Americans has made him a hero to his millions of devoted fans. Racing in the Street is the first comprehensive collection of writings about Springsteen, featuring the most insightful, revealing, famous, and infamous articles, interviews, reviews, and other writings. This nostalgic journey through the career of a rock-'n'-roll legend chronicles every album and each stage of Springsteen's career. It's all here—Dave Marsh's Rolling Stone review of Springsteen's ten sold-out Bottom Line shows in 1975 in New York City, Jay Cocks's and Maureen Orth's dueling Time and Newsweek cover stories, George Will's gross misinterpretation of Springsteen's message on his Born in the USA tour, and Will Percy's 1999 interview for Double Take, plus much, much more. Publishers Weekly Thirty years after Springsteen's first album, numerous books have been published about his rise from Bob Dylan-style acoustic folkie to the raging rocker of Born in the U.S.A. and the working-class hero of The Ghost of Tom Joad. But hardcore Springsteen fans-this volume's clear target audience-can't seem to read enough about their hero, and this collection's many fascinating observations should deeply satisfy them. Sawyers (Celtic Music: A Complete Guide) collects a wide range of articles about Springsteen from all stages of his career to show "his enormous facility for growth." Some of the best of these are groundbreaking essays from the 1970s by Peter Knobler of Crawdaddy and the late Lester Bangs of Creem, as well as Time and Newsweek's simultaneous 1975 cover stories after the release of Springsteen's Born to Run. What these articles offer are specific musical descriptions of Springsteen's ability, as noted by Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone, to encapsulate "20 years of rock & roll tradition." However, the bulk of the essays are solely concerned with Springsteen's progression in his lyrics from early descriptions of characters of the "street and boardwalk subcultures" in his native New Jersey to later looks at those characters' lost hopes and dreams. As Sawyers notes in her engaging introduction, Springsteen undertakes "an ongoing exploration, via popular song, of the very heart of the American psyche." (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Racing in the Street The Springsteen Musical Family Tree Foreword by Martin Scorcese Acknowledgments A Note on Selections Chronology\ "Newark by the Sea" by Gene Lazo Maps Introduction\ PART ONE: GROWIN' UP\ Peter Knobler, with Greg Mitchell\ Who Is Bruce Springsteen and Why Are We Saying All These Wonderful Things About Him? (Crawdaddy!) Paul Williams\ Lost in the Flood John Rockwell\ Springsteen's Rock Poetry at Its Best (New York Times) Dave Marsh\ Bruce Springsteen: A Rock "Star Is Born" (Rolling Stone) Maureen Orth, Janet Huck, and Peter S. Greenberg\ Making of a Rock Star (Newsweek) Jay Cocks\ Rock's New Sensation: The Backstreet Phantom of Rock (Time) Lester Bangs\ Hot Rod Rumble in the Promised Land (CREEM) Ariel Swartley\ The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (from Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island) Dave Marsh\ Thunder Road (from Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story)\ PART TWO: GLORY DAYS\ Robert Hilburn\ Out in the Streets (Los Angeles Times) Don McLeese\ Abdicating the Rock 'n' Roll Pedestal: Bruce Springsteen Gets Down (Chicago Reader) Greil Marcus\ The Next President of the United States (New West) George F. Will\ Bruuuuuce T. Coraghessan Boyle\ Greasy Lake (from Greasy Lake & Other Stories) Bobbie Ann Mason\ from In Country James Wolcott\ The Hagiography of Bruce Springsteen (Vanity Fair) Simon Frith\ The Real Thing - Bruce Springsteen (from Music for Pleasure) Kevin Major\ from Dear Bruce Springsteen Jefferson Morley\ Darkness on the Edge of the Shining City: Bruce Springsteen and the End of Reaganism (New Republic) Jack Ridl\ Video Mama Andrew M. Greeley\ The Catholic Imagination of Bruce Springsteen Robert Santelli\ Twenty Years Burning Down the Road: The Complete History of Jersey Shore Rock 'n' Roll (from Backstreets: Springsteen - The Man and His Music) Charles R. Cross\ The Promise (Backstreets) Dave Barry\ Glory Days (Miami Herald) Elizabeth Wurtzel\ from Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America Neil Strauss\ Springsteen Looks Back But Keeps Walking On (New York Times) Hope Edelman\ Bruce Springsteen and the Story of Us (Iowa Review) Judy Wieder\ Bruce Springsteen: The Advocate Interview (The Advocate) Bryan K. Garman\ The Ghost of History: Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, and the Hurt Song (Popular Music and Society) Jim Cullen\ Tom Joad's Children The Bars of Graceland (from Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition) Tom Perrotta\ from The Wishbones Nicholas Dawidoff\ The Pop Populist (New York Times Magazine) Mikal Gilmore\ Bruce Springsteen's America (from Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll) R. C. Ringer\ Asbury Park (from Shore Stories: An Anthology of the Jersey Shore) Sheri Tabachnik, Joseph Sapia, and Kelly Jane Cotter\ Father of Bruce Springsteen Dies at 73 (Asbury Park Press)\ PART THREE: REBIRTH\ Pellegrino d'Acierno\ Roll Over, Rossini: Italian American Rock 'n' Roll After the Long Good-bye: From Frank Zappa to Bruce Springsteen and Madonna (from The Italian American Heritage) Will Percy\ Rock and Read: Will Percy Interviews Bruce Springsteen (DoubleTake) Nadine Epstein\ Asbury Park, My Hometown (Christian Science Monitor) Frederick Reiken\ from The Lost Legends of New Jersey Samuele F. S. Pardini\ Bruce Springsteen's "American Skin" (Artvoice) Bob Crane\ from A Place to Stand: A Guide to Bruce Springsteen's Sense of Place Nick Hornby\ Thunder Road (from Songbook) Colleen Sheehy\ Springsteen: Troubadour of the Highway Alan Light\ The Missing (The New Yorker) A. O. Scott\ The Poet Laureate of 9/11: Apocalypse and Salvation on Springsteen's New Album (Slate) Kevin Coyne\ His Hometown (New Jersey Monthly) Eric Alterman\ from It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen Christopher Phillips\ The Real World\ Afterword by Robert Santelli Web Sites Credits Bibliography
\ Publishers WeeklyThirty years after Springsteen's first album, numerous books have been published about his rise from Bob Dylan-style acoustic folkie to the raging rocker of Born in the U.S.A. and the working-class hero of The Ghost of Tom Joad. But hardcore Springsteen fans-this volume's clear target audience-can't seem to read enough about their hero, and this collection's many fascinating observations should deeply satisfy them. Sawyers (Celtic Music: A Complete Guide) collects a wide range of articles about Springsteen from all stages of his career to show "his enormous facility for growth." Some of the best of these are groundbreaking essays from the 1970s by Peter Knobler of Crawdaddy and the late Lester Bangs of Creem, as well as Time and Newsweek's simultaneous 1975 cover stories after the release of Springsteen's Born to Run. What these articles offer are specific musical descriptions of Springsteen's ability, as noted by Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone, to encapsulate "20 years of rock & roll tradition." However, the bulk of the essays are solely concerned with Springsteen's progression in his lyrics from early descriptions of characters of the "street and boardwalk subcultures" in his native New Jersey to later looks at those characters' lost hopes and dreams. As Sawyers notes in her engaging introduction, Springsteen undertakes "an ongoing exploration, via popular song, of the very heart of the American psyche." (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalThe recent Bruce Springsteen renaissance has resulted in a spate of books. Among the best is this collection of essays, poems, interviews, reviews, short stories, novel excerpts, poetry, and academic articles written about "the Boss"-from the first major piece in Crawdaddy! magazine in 1973 through articles from 2003. Writer and editor Sawyers (The Greenwich Village Reader) secured writings from the likes of Dave Marsh, Jay Cocks, Lester Bangs, T.C. Boyle, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Nick Hornby. Unfortunately, she couldn't get permission to include the most famous piece of all: a concert review by Springsteen's future manager, Jon Landau, in which he declared that he saw the future of rock'n'roll. However, chunks of it are excerpted enough elsewhere so that its presence is hardly missed. As a bonus, Sawyers includes a time line and extensive lists of Boss-related recordings, films, videos, web sites, and literary influences. The broad scope of this reader underscores how widely Springsteen has influenced our society and culture. Highly recommended as a complement to Dave Marsh's Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts; The Definitive Biography, 1973-2003.-Lloyd Jansen, Stockton-San Joaquin Cty. P.L., CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.\ \
