Bruce Springsteen: Thunder Road

The screen door slams. Mary’s dress waves. Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays Roy Orbison singing for the lonely. Hey, that’s me and I want you only. Don’t turn me home again, I just can’t face myself alone again. Don’t run back inside, darling, you know just what I’m here for. So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young any more. Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night. You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re all right. Oh, and that’s all right with me.

You can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain, waste your summer praying in vain for a saviour to rise from these streets. Well now, I ain’t no hero, that’s understood. All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood with a chance to make it good somehow. Hey, what else can we do now? Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair. Well, the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere. We got one last chance to make it real, to trade in these wings on some wheels. Climb in back, heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.

Oh, oh, come take my hand, we’re riding out tonight to case the Promised Land. Oh, oh, oh, oh, Thunder Road, oh, Thunder Road, oh, Thunder Road. Lying out there like a killer in the sun, hey, I know it’s late, we can make it if we run. Oh, oh, oh, oh, Thunder Road.

Sit tight, take hold, Thunder Road!

Well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk. And my car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk from your front porch to my front seat. The door’s open but the ride it ain’t free. And I know you’re lonely for words that I ain’t spoken but tonight we’ll be free, all the promises’ll be broken.

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away. They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets. They scream your name at night in the street, your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet. And in the lonely cool before dawn you hear their engines roaring on, but when you get to the porch, they’re gone, on the wind. So Mary, climb in. It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win!

– Bruce Springsteen

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Bob Dylan: The Death of Emmett Till

‘Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago, when a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door. This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well, the colour of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till.

Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up. They said they had a reason, but I disremember what. They tortured him and did some evil things, too evil to repeat. There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street

Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain and they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain. The reason that they killed him there, and I’m sure it ain’t no lie, was just for the fun of killin’ him and to watch him slowly die.

And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial, two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till. But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime, and so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind.

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see the smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs. For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free, while Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea.

If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust, your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust. Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow, for you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!

This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man that this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan. But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give, we could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.- Bob Dylan.

See also:

• Race in America
• Jim Crow
• The black brute stereotype

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The Verve: Bittersweet Symphony

“Bittersweet Symphony” by the British rock band The Verve came out in 1997. You cannot dance to it like the Macarena, but it is easily one of the best songs of the 1990s. Even ten years later it still sounds wonderful.

The video is also a masterpiece: Richard Ashcroft, the lead singer, is waiting at an ordinary street corner in North London (Hoxton and Falkirk). He is dressed in black, so we are expecting to hear a rock song: drums to set the beat and then electric guitars. But we do not. Instead we hear violins. They sound like they are far away, like maybe from heaven.

Then the drums start and Ashcroft begins to walk. The drums play a slow, heavy beat. After Ashcroft crosses the street and heads up the block, he begins to sing. His singing matches the drums: slow, flat, low.

The colour of the video matches the mood: blacks, blues and greys.

So do the words: Ashcroft says this life is a bittersweet symphony, you are a slave to money and then you die. He is here in his mould, he cannot change, no, no, no, no, no. The only road he has ever been down is the one that takes you to the places where all the veins meet. Who knows his pain?

As he walks north on Hoxton Street he does not change his course to avoid knocking into people, even old ladies. He knocks over one woman and does not even seem to notice. When he crosses one street he jumps onto the car and walks on it instead of going round. The driver gets out and gets into his face, calling him names, pushing him. He takes no notice of her either but keeps on walking, his eyes always looking into the distance, looking for something.

A woman in a blue sweater walks down the street towards him, but she is there and then she is gone.

The song seems like it is about heroin: “the places where all the veins meet” and so on.

Maybe so. But the way I took it, and the reason I like it, apart from just being a plain good song, is the way it is a song of both despair and hope. It sounds like a sad song yet somehow it leaves you filled with hope.

Despite the drums, despite the dark colours, despite the pain and despair of his words, he keeps looking in the distance for something. He tells us he has never prayed before but tonight he is down on his knees. The music sets him free, it cleans him. And up above him, above the streets of London, the violins are playing from heaven.

Those violins, by the way, come from an old Rolling Stones song. But that is another (very sad) story – about a rich man and a shoemaker.

– Abagond, 2007.

See also:

• Bittersweet Symphony lyrics
• The corner in London Ashcroft started at on Google Maps. The latitude and longitude: 51.5308, -0.08016
• Amy Macdonald

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Amy Macdonald

Amy Macdonald (1987- ) is a singer and songwriter from Glasgow, Scotland. As I write this in August 2007 her song “Mr Rock ‘n’ Roll” is number 25 in Britain. It is from her first record, “This is the Life”, which came out in Britain at the end of July.

I heard her for the first time on Monday (August 20th) when I heard “Mr Rock ‘n’ Roll” on Virgin Radio from London (over the Internet). I found the song on YouTube and played it over and over again. I could not get enough of it.

It was like the first time I heard Alicia Keys or Norah Jones: a young, beautiful woman with an old soul singing a song that was new and yet sounded timeless.

The three songs of hers I like best so far:

• Mr Rock n Roll
• Run
• Footballer’s Wife

Because she is from Scotland most people will compare her to KT Tunstall. I do not: I hate Tunstall but love Macdonald. Macdonald is darker than Tunstall, not that that would take much.

She most reminds me of U2: in love with the world like the young yet knowing it has a dark side like the old.

She sees herself as continuing the music of the once and wonderful Libertines (check out their “Don’t Look Back at the Sun”). She gets her ideas about music from their lead man Pete Doherty and from Travis. She also has a bit of Johnny Cash, Jack White and Razorlight in her. She grew up on Oasis, The Verve and others.

The Guardian thinks she has no substance, the BBC thinks she has promise while Channel 4 and Radio 2 seem to love her.

She loved Jake Gyllenhaal in the film “Donnie Darko”. Her song “LA” is about him.

When Macdonald was 12 – which was just seven years ago – her grandmother gave her ten pounds (three crowns) to spend on holiday. She bought “The Man Who” by Travis. It changed her life. It gave her a burning desire to write and play songs like them.

So she took her father’s old guitar and taught herself how to play from the Internet. First she played songs she heard on the radio. Later she began to write and play her own songs.

She started singing at Starbucks, her own songs and others’. People liked her so she made home recordings of her songs and sent copies to anyone who might help her get a record deal. In time she landed one with Vertigo, the part of Mercury Records that has also signed up The Killers and Razorlight, two bands she likes.

She has a thick Scottish accent: it is hard for me to understand her when she talks, but not when she sings. She sings live with a Scottish accent, but not on her record.

She wrote songs to be sung to an acoustic guitar – that is how they got their start. But these days she has a band.

“Poison Prince”, about Pete Doherty, was her first song to be played on the radio. It did not do well. “Mr Rock ‘n’ Roll” has done much better.

See also:

• Songs on YouTube:
  • Amy Macdonald:
    • Mr Rock ‘n’ Roll
    • Run (live acoustic)
    • Footballer’s wife
    • Poison Prince
  • The Libertines:
    • Don’t Look Back into the Sun
• The Verve: Bittersweet Symphony
• YouTube

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