"The Ties That Bind" ("The River" Reimagined)

The second in a series begun by my online friend Larry, where double albums are winnowed down to one strong, two-sided album.

October 1980 - Berkeley, California

Upon entering UC Berkeley as a transfer student in September 1980, I thought I was doing a noble thing by leaving my stereo and record collection at home.  It took me about two weeks to realize what a bad decision that was, and when my parents and brothers visited in early October they brought the stereo as well as a couple of dozen records to tide me over until Winter Break.  Even then, my entire collection would have been a little too big for the dorm room - Rob, Han Song and I were in a "triple," with a bunk bed, a regular bed, three desks, a couple of dressers of drawers, and a closet.  Tight quarters, and if memory serves the stereo ended up in part of the closet.  

At that time I was a Bruce fan, but had never seen him live.  As fate would have it, he was scheduled to perform two shows in late October at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.  As fate would further have it, Rob was a huge Springsteen fan, and along with some of his friends who drove up from Southern California, was planning to sleep overnight in the Arena parking lot in order to buy tickets.  That's how it was done in those days, unless one was willing to shell out the big bucks to a scalper.  And because Rob was a great and very cool guy (as an aside, he would go on to become an Assistant Deputy Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs), he was happy to score two tickets for me without me actually having to stay up all night for them.

Over the years, I would end up seeing Bruce 10 times.  It would be next to impossible for me to choose my favorite among those ten concerts.  The Tunnel of Love tour show I saw in 1988 at Shoreline Ampitheatre is widely considered to be the best of that tour.  The October 1999 Reunion Tour show at the [new and mostly improved] arena in Oakland was amazing, if for no other reason that it was far from certain whether we'd ever have the chance to see Bruce play with the E Street Band again.  Seeing the final leg of that tour at Madison Square Garden the following June...Bruce at MSG?!?  You've got to be kidding me.  And taking my parents to see him at the late (and sometimes lamented) Arco Arena in Sacramento (the Magic tour) was also a highlight.

"The River" 

My introduction to "The River" was not to hear the song, but to read about it - in Greil Marcus' review of No Nukes, the documentary about the 1979 concerts organized by MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy).  Marcus, to put it mildly, did not care for the film: "As a film, it's second-rate.  As music and politics, it's a study in puerility."  Springsteen was a late addition to those shows, and it seems possible (if not likely) that he was invited to ensure that the shows would sell out.  

So what did Greil think about Bruce's portion of the show?  Not much:

"Which leaves, as far as No Nukes in concerned, one overriding question: what about Bruce?  It's Springsteen's picture in the ads that's bringing the crowds into the theaters, and it's his performance - or his mere appearance - that has the fans cheering.  Well, he's all right.  He sings "The River," the title tune from his soon-to-come album; it's a well meant tale of working-class defeat, but "Up Shit Creek" might better describe both the fate of the song's characters and the song itself.  He performs "Thunder Road" messily and closes with a spirited "Quarter to Three," which is sabotaged by atrocious sound.  He was far more exciting tossing out a bit of "Rosalita" in last year's TV special Heroes of Rock 'n Roll - but that was a far more exciting film."

It's clearly an important song to Bruce - over the course of his career, he's played only 15 songs more often.  Surprisingly (at least to me), played "The River" more often than "Jungleland," "Growin' Up," "Spirit in the Night," "Backstreets," "She's the One," "Cadillac Ranch," and "No Surrender."  But is it a great song?  On the plus side, the E Street Band sounds magnificent on it.  And musically, it's beautiful.  Unfortunately, and it took me a long time to get there, Marcus' opinion is more right than wrong.  It's difficult to articulate, but forty years on, it comes across as "Springsteen-lite."  There's little in the song to suggest the depth of emotions and the exploration of the human condition that jumps out of the grooves of later songs such as "Nebraska," "Mansion on the Hill," "Born in the USA," "The Ghost of Tom Joad," or even "The Rising."

So the most difficult question in this reimagining was answered: "The River" would not be a part of the "new" album.

"The Ties That Bind" - 1979 Version

As originally recounted in Dave Marsh's 1981 update of his first Springsteen biography and confirmed decades later when the original album was included as part of "The River" box set (which was called "The Ties That Bind"), Bruce had an album set for release in 1979, hot on the heels of his incendiary 1978 tour.  To be titled "The Ties That Bind," the album would include five songs that would show up on "The River" - The Ties That Bind, Hungry Heart, The River, The Price You Pay, and I Wanna Marry You.  The album would have included alternate versions of Stolen Car (a good, but not approaching the greatness of the version that ended up on The River), You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch) done up rockabilly style (tough call on which version is better), and three songs that would never appear on any album outside of compilations - Cindy (no great loss), Be True (great song, was the B-side of Fade Away), and Loose Ends (a real shame this version never ended up anywhere, but the mix is definitely superior to the version that ended up on "Tracks" in 1998).

As an aside, another song whose success has always mystified me is "Hungry Heart" - it just never worked for me, so it does not end up on my reimagined version.  And because I wanted to stay as true to the original as possible, none of the alternate versions or "substitute songs" make it on either.  Which brings us to...

"The Ties That Bind" - 2023 Version

Side One

The Ties That Bind            3:33

Out in the Street                4:17

You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)        2:35

Jackson Cage                      3:03

Stolen Car                            3:52

Whatever you call the album you put it on, "The Ties That Bind" is the perfect opener.  "Out in the Street" and "You Can Look" continue the generally upbeat vibe, until "Jackson Cage" and especially "Stolen Car" give us a hint that Bruce's thinking is taking a darker turn.

Side Two

Point Blank                        6:06

I Wanna Marry You            3:26

Two Hearts                          2:42

Cadillac Ranch                    3:03

The Price You Pay                5:26

The second side begins with another song that is frankly somewhat terrifying; I can still remember being transfixed the first time I heard it (on a live radio broadcast of one of his legendary Winterland shows in December 1978).  We begin to ascend from the darkness with "I Wanna Marry You" and "Two Hearts" (are better than one, after all), and bring the album to a close with one of Bruce's greatest rockers and what has always felt to me like a vastly under-appreciated gem.

There you have it, only four months after I began working on this.  You might say I overthought it.  But I'm also OK with where it ended up.

The Double Album Challenge #1: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John

Prelude - 1992

Remember the early days of the Internet?  I can't pinpoint the exact day when the Internet became a reality for me, but it would have been sometime in early 1992, when I was working for the California State University's Office of Governmental Affairs.  Because the main CSU Chancellor's Office was in Long Beach and our office was in Sacramento (across from the State Capitol), we were always the last to get the new technology.  When I began working for CSU in June 1991, the office was in the dark ages of computer technology, outfitted with a Wang computer system (does that company even exist today?).  For the first few months, I didn't even have a desktop computer, because the office had been told that fancy Apple computers were on the way.  So whenever I needed to write something (which was fairly often, since writing was a pretty big part of my job), I had to use the terminal in the kitchen.  This led to a lot of jokes when visitors from Long Beach were in town ("So Jeff, I guess you're still on probation?"), but it also taught me something which was worth its weight in gold - the ability to focus on the task at hand, while tuning everything else out.

When the blessed day arrived, our IT person hooked me up first - which I think was my reward for having suffered for so long.  I even remember his name - Dan DuBois.  And when Dan set up my new system, he told me about this really cool thing called the World Wide Web.  My initial reaction was probably along the lines of "yeah, ok, can you just get this set up so I can start writing these bill letters?"  Little did I know that the biggest challenge to my focus was about to enter my life.  This was long before anyone had ever talked about toxic social media, and the need to shelter children from it.  Long before the days of computer viruses, long before Facebook, long before Twitter, long before guys like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk became household names.  No, back in those days, the Internet was fun.  Want to read the latest edition of Blue and Gold Illustrated for the latest analysis of Notre Dame football?  Check.  Want to read special versions of Peter King's football columns?  Check.  Stuff about movies?  Check.  Internet only music publications like Addicted to Noise?  Just about every kind of weird stuff you can possibly imagine, arcane but entertaining?  Check.  You could even access Playboy, including the centerfolds (but I only read it for the articles, I promise).

But for me, the most fun part about the early days of the Internet were the connections you could make.  You could find people with like interests from all over the country (or beyond).  You could find someone like Sheila O'Malley, who on her blog wrote brilliantly (and still does today) about film and acting, about Elvis (some of the best Elvis essays this side of Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh and Peter Guralnick), about James Joyce, about her "dead boyfriend" Alexander Hamilton, about family and many other things.  You could find someone like the late David Mills, who wrote for great TV shows like NYPD Blue, ER, and Treme (I once recommended a record store in New Orleans to David).  You could find someone from Berkeley, who like yourself loved Bruce Springsteen, and then actually run into that person at a Bruce concert and introduce yourself (that would be Steven Rubio).  And you could engage in online conversations with them, at least some of the time wondering why they would even give you the time of day.  It was pretty damn cool.  After a few years of reading blogs by others and commenting on their posts, in 2006 I started this blog, which for a while was very active.  Not so much today.  Why?  Let's just say that life has a way of taking one down some interesting and unexpected paths.  

I have to admit I don't remember exactly how and when I connected with Larry Aydlette.  I'm guessing it was probably through comments on Sheila's blog or Facebook page?  But no matter.  We've never met in person, but if and when we do, I think we'd have a pretty good conversation.  We have similar tastes on a lot of different fronts, and even though we live on opposite sides of the country, I suspect we might share similar views on a lot of "topics of the day," shall we say.  Like me, Larry is a big music fan, and on that front we also share similar (but not identical) tastes.

On his Substack, Larry came up with the idea of exploring double albums (a concept which probably makes sense only to persons of a certain age), and the question of whether all of them would be better as a single album.  And for nearly all of them, the answer is probably "yes."  Off the top of my head, I can think of three albums where I'd argue to the death that removing even a single song would be blasphemy: The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., London Calling by The Clash, and Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan.  The rest, even the ones I love (e.g. Bruce Springsteen's The River), are fair game.

Larry's first choice was Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.  In this post, I take up the challenge.  But before we get there, let's take one more journey into the WayBack Machine.

First Listen - Summer of '74

In 1974, Elton John was my musical hero.  My music listening habits to that point had been honed by a steady diet of AM Top 40 Radio, which at the time was exhilarating and exasperating in equal measure.  At any given moment, you could hear one of the greatest songs ever written, followed by a song that made you feel embarrassed for everyone involved in its creation.  

Elton was a hit machine in those days, and that May his 1972 album Honky Chateau was the first album that I bought with my own money.  Goodbye Yellow Brick Road had been released the previous fall, and of course I'd heard the hits (the title track, and almost 50 years later I'm still pissed that the execrable "Top of the World" kept it from hitting #1; and the still amazing "Bennie and the Jets," which did hit #1), but I'd always loved "Rocket Man," and being a single album it was less expensive.

I remember exactly when I heard GYBR for the first time in its entirety - it was at Jeff Bickford's 14th birthday party, about a week after 8th Grade promotion.  I even remember everyone who was at the party - Craig Kreeger, Thomas Schroeder, and the late Mike Gowen on the male side; and Karen Koch, Laura O'Donnell, Alisa Craft, Lori Asbury, and Ellen [last name escapes me] on the female side.  It was the first party I'd ever been to where both boys and girls were invited.  And yes, we played Spin the Bottle; I was pretty good at the bottle spinning part of the game.  When Jeff B. put the album on the stereo, I can even remember saying, upon the first notes of "Funeral For a Friend," something along the lines of "wow, this sounds like something you'd hear at a funeral."  Smart kid, my 14-year old self was.

I knew right away that I had to get the album, right away.  Probably mowed a few additional lawns that week to pay for it.  And I loved it.  I still love it but concede that, as with all Elton albums from that golden period, there are a handful of tracks that are...let's just say dispensable.

With all that background history out of the way, let's dive in.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Aydlette version)

I would encourage everyone to read Larry's great write-up on his Substack.  But for those without the time, here is his version:

Bennie and the Jets

Grey Seal

Jamaica Jerk-Off

The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-34)

All the Girls Love Alice

Your Sister Can't Twist (But She Can Rock 'N Roll)

Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

Roy Rogers

Social Disease

Candle in the Wind

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Harmony

Total Time: 48 minutes

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Vaca version)

My approach was a bit different than Larry's.  What he appears to have done is to pare the original album down to roughly standard CD length.  I decided to pare it down even further, with the goal of ending up with a 40-minute album, while being mindful of having two sides of roughly the same length.  Having created mixtapes, "mix-CDs," and now Playlists for more than four decades now, pacing and flow are important to me.  You can have two great songs that don't necessarily sound good back-to-back.  So every transition was tested, and I think it works.  Lastly, I tried to cast off and anchor each side (i.e. first and last cuts) with very strong songs.

Here we go:

Side One

Bennie and the Jets.  Larry had more or less announced from the get-go that this was going to be his opening track, and at first I was determined not to use it.  But there really is no other choice.  As Todd Rundgren wrote in his liner notes for Something/Anything, he put "I Saw the Light" first because it was the obvious hit.  So he did exactly what Motown used to do on their albums, which was to put the hit first.  That is very much the case here.  No question that it's an oddball song, but it's also an all-time classic.  And yes, much like Larry, I and my friends would frequently make "electric boobs" jokes.  As an aside, one of my aforementioned friends was convinced that drummer Nigel Olsson was a woman, and I was sure to remind him of that at one of our high school reunions.  I can be nasty that way.

Harmony.  A little bit of a down-shift after the opening track.  Both Elton and Larry used this as the album closer, but I like it here.  

Roy Rogers.  This may be the best ear-worm on the entire album.  I've lost track of the times that apropos of nothing, it suddenly appeared in my brain, which naturally means that it has to be sung out loud.  I'd love to hear a version of this by Jason Isbell, with Amanda Shires singing harmony.  If anyone out there knows Jason, please let him know.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.  Admittedly, this is an odd place for the title track, but as Larry noted, it's got to be on the album somewhere.  I do like the song, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as top-tier Elton.  My parents liked it when it was on heavy radio rotation, which was a good thing because my dad had a quick trigger-finger on the car radio if a song came on that he didn't like.  Trust me, there were many songs falling into that category.

All the Girls Love Alice.  So let's end Side One with a banger, which I promise is not something I'd ever say in real conversation.  In his piece, Larry does an excellent job of laying out the problematic nature of the lyrics.  He wonders aloud whether Bernie Taupin may have been "trying to depict the horror of self-absorbed, monied-class abusers," but I have to wonder whether that could have been done just as effectively (not to mention more accurately) in a song called "All the Rich Men Love Alice."  But there's no denying the musical chops of the song, and as Larry also notes, at least it's not as bad as "Dirty Little Girl."

While we're on the topic, the misogynist nature of much of 70s rock is something that I think about fairly often.  Once Elton cooled off (which is putting it mildly) in 1976 with the horrible Blue Moves, the band that moved into the slot of being my favorite rock artist was the Stones.  Let's face it, and it is all well documented, the Stones during their tours of 1969, 1972, 1975 and 1978 engaged in a lot of very bad behavior, including towards women.  I admit it, it all sounded pretty cool to my 15-17 year old self.  One of my favorite rock books is "On the Road With the Rolling Stones" by the late Chet Flippo, who covered the '75 and '78 Stones tours for Rolling Stone magazine.  It's all in there, and when I read it now, I  cringe from time to time.  But Exile on Main St. is still my favorite album, and Some Girls is one of the Stones' very best (if you're not familiar with the song, read the lyrics of the title track sometime). Should I feel guilty about that?  Honestly I don't, but it is something that I think about.

Side Two

Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting.  This may be Elton's finest rocker.  I'm not really sure there's anything else to say.  It's the perfect song to lead off Side Two.

The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-34).  Fully agree with Larry on this one - this is one of Elton's best songs, and some of Bernie's best lyrics.  It's also a great showcase for Elton's piano playing, and for once Gus Dudgeon's production is perfect, and not overwrought.  Nor really a "rocker" per se, but it keeps the momentum going from the previous track.

Jamaica Jerk-Off.  I hated this song for a really long time.  And it's still dumb.  But it is very catchy, and fits in with the flow of Side Two.

Grey Seal.  Another great showcase for Elton at the keyboards, and a chance for the entire band to shine.  Davey, Dee and Nigel would come and go on a number of occasions during the course of Elton's career, but they really were a great band.  

Candle in the Wind.  After this many years of being overplayed, and especially after the post-Diana tragedy rewrite, everyone must have an opinion about this song.  In that regard, it's got to be right up there with songs like "Stairway to Heaven" and "Free Bird."  For me, this is essential Elton.  It's a beautiful song, and it's the perfect song to close out the album.

Total Time: 40:49

So there you have it.  I was sorry to have to leave "I've Seen That Movie Too" off the album, because I do think it's one of Elton's best ballads.  I'd like to think that this version of the album would have gotten at least an A- from Christgau.  

Future Choices?

Will Larry and I turn this into a regular gig?  Only time will tell.  In his piece he mentions The Beatles (White Album) as a possible candidate, and there are several others that come to my mind:

Bruce Springsteen - The River

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti

Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life

Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

Prince - Sign 'O the Times

Todd Rundgren - Something/Anything

The Clash - Sandintista! (OK, that's a triple album, but certainly one that could use some trimming)

Stay tuned!