bruce springsteen :: Blog
Friday, December 30: 9 a.m.
Patti Smith
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Born on December 30, 1946, Patti Smith grew to become a bohemian New York poet and punk rock artiste whose 1975 debut album, Horses, stood in daring, unapologetic contrast to the slick, arena-rock ready production and pretension of the era. Smith's street poetry and her group's garage-band aesthetic formed the foundation on which the later punk rock explosion was predicated. Smith was raised in southern New Jersey, employed in a factory and studied to be a teacher before making the paradigm shift to the art of writing and rock and roll.
When she arrived in New York in 1967, she connected with fellow art-boho misfits, including photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, playwright Sam Sheppard and music scribe Lenny Kaye. She and Kaye brought music and poetry together, giving Smith's poignant perspective a soundscape to build upon. It was the seed for the Patti Smith Group, which formalized their union of poetry and rock with a nearly two-month house gig at CBGB in early 1974. Early on, Smith turned to American record producer and music industry executive Clive Davis.
"When I came to Clive, I was really awkward, arrogant, couldn't really sing. I had pretty clumsy movements," said Smith ...
Tuesday, November 29: 3 p.m.
Axl Rose and Bruce Springsteen perform the Beatles' "Come Together" at the '94 Rock Hall Inductions
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On November 29, 1969, the Beatles were at the top of Billboard's Hot 100, earning their first two-sided Number One single with "Come Together/Something." It became the Fab Four's 18th Number One single – one more than Elvis Presley's 17, which he reached on November 1 that year with "Suspicious Minds." On the week of November 29, Billboard changed the way it calculated its charts, ranking both sides of double-sided singles in the same position rather than separately. This was key to the Beatles' Number One climb, as the previous week saw "Come Together" fall to Number Seven and "Something" hold strong at Number 3.
"Come Together" and "Something" appeared on Abbey Road, the Beatles' 11th studio album, released in the United States on October 1, 1969. George Harrison's "Something" was the first of his musical compositions to be released as an A-side to a Beatles' single. In Harrison's partial autobiography, I, Me, Mine, he explained of "Something": "This I suppose is my most successful song with over 150 cover versions. My favorite cover version is the one by James Brown – that was excellent." Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, Shirley Bassey, and Booker T. and the ...
Sunday, November 6: 3:30 p.m.
Sharing the spotlight: Bruce Springsteen performs with Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers
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Recently, a few members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum board drove to Pittsburgh with me for what is now near the top of my list of rock and roll experiences. Local legends Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers hosted a special benefit show for the Greater Pittsburg Community Food Bank with special guest Bruce Springsteen. The concert was held in the 2,000-seat Soldiers and Sailors Hall near the Pitt campus. The venue is more than 100 years old and houses a museum with remarkable collection of artifacts from the Civil War to the present. The hall is stunning, with a balcony on three sides, a very low stage and the entire text of the Gettysburg Address – with 12-inch letters – etched in a formidable block of stone above the stage.
Springsteen took the stage first, noting that he was going to “warm up for Joe.” He led off solo acoustic with an early classic from Greetings, "I Came for You,”which sent a jolt of excitement coursing through the mixed-age crowd. He stayed solo for a few more numbers, including “Land of Hope and Dreams” and an incredibly tender version of “I’ll Work for Your ...
Thursday, September 1: 12 p.m.
Pete Townshend at June, 7, 1993 groundbreaking ceremony.
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In September 1995, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened its doors in Cleveland. It was a dream more than a decade in the making and one that continues to grow as the Hall prepares to open its Library and Archives in 2012, advancing its mission to educate visitors, fans and scholars from around the world about the history and continuing significance of rock and roll music.
The Hall of Fame and Museum was the brainchild of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, the nonprofit organization launched in 1983 and led by Atlantic Records Founder and Chairman Ahmet Ertegun, along with Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner, attorney Allen Grubman, manager Jon Landau, record executives Seymour Stein and Bob Krasnow, and attorney Suzan Evans. The group sought to establish an organization that recognized "the people who have created this music which has become the most popular music of our time.”
Officials from Cleveland and the State of Ohio approached the Foundation in 1985 and suggested the construction of a major museum. For more than a year, the Foundation considered Cleveland and numerous other cities, including New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, Memphis and Chicago ...
Monday, June 20: 7:45 a.m.
Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen.
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The music world lost one of its finest artists over the weekend. Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons died on Saturday at a hospital in Palm Beach, Florida. His death was caused by complications from a stroke he had suffered on June 12th at his home in Florida. Best-known as the saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Clemons was a great musician and a dramatic stage performer. In addition to being a member of the E Street Band, Clemons played with numerous other artists, including Aretha Franklin, Ringo Starr, Jackson Browne and, most recently, Lady Gaga.
Clemons was born on January 11, 1942, in Norfolk, Virginia. He began playing sax as a child, after his father gave him an alto saxophone for Christmas. His father made him practice in a room at his fish store, annoying Clarence, who wanted to be out playing with the other kids. Then, when he was a teenager, he got turned onto the music of King Curtis and other R&B musicians and he switched to tenor sax. He got a music and football scholarship to Maryland State College. In the mid-Sixties, he was going to try out for the Cleveland Browns, but an ...
Monday, February 28: 4:24 p.m.
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On the last day of the Rock Hall's From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen exhibit run, Bruce himself paid a surprise visit to the Museum to see the exhibit in its final hours and meet and greet with fans on February 27, 2011.
Click the slideshow below for this behind-the-scenes tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum with Bruce Springsteen!
Thursday, January 20: 5:51 p.m.
Lauren Onkey interviews Thom Zimny at the Rock Hall on Friday, January 14, 2011.
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Last Friday we hosted a special screening of Darkness on the Edge of Town, a film by Emmy and Grammy-award winning filmmaker Thom Zimny. The Darkness on the Edge of Town film is part of Bruce Springsteen's remarkable new box set, 'The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story released this past November. It includes a remastered version of the album, two cds of outtakes, a documentary about the making of the album, a full concert from 1978, and the film we screened. In Zimny’s film, Springsteen and The E Street Band perform their 1978 album in sequence at the Paramount Theater in Asbury Park, but with no audience present. The result is a stark and intense interpretation of the album.
The film brilliantly creates a sense of an album, not just a set of songs: there is no spoken introduction, no interviews, no content for the album itself. It begins with some haunting black-and-white footage of the amusement park buildings in Asbury Park shot in the late 70s, followed by a few shots of the band arriving at the theater. Then the band launches into “Badlands,” and it never lets up. In between songs, the ...
Thursday, January 28: 12 p.m.
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Guest blogger Caryn Rose shares her thoughts with us about her visit to see the Rock Hall’s special exhibit From Asbury Park to the Promised Land and her first tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
It’s a funny thing to have watched Bruce Springsteen sitting at the Kennedy Center, with his rainbow ribbon award around his neck, and find yourself standing in front of that very award just a few weeks later, in his exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s even odder that that ribbon is in a room along with the legendary Esquire, and that you can get close enough to the guitar (inside its case, of course!) that you can see that the legend is true, that there’s more glue than wood in some places. It’s in a room with the very jeans that adorned the very ass that graced the cover of Born In The USA, the original handwritten lyrics to “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” (with the “freeze out” written in wriggly letters I assume was meant to convey ice), the very flannel shirt that was on the cover of The River (the cuffs so ...
