Word: springsteen
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LAST NEW YEAR'S EVE, the sagging economy claimed another victim. Max's Kansas City, one of Manhattan's best known and most innovative rock clubs closed its doors for good, symbolically ending an era of popular music. At Max's, Bruce Springsteen once opened for Bob Marley, the New York Dolls got their start, and a plethora of unknowns enjoyed brief moments of fame, But above all, the Village hangout will be remembered by veterans of the 60s as the birthplace of Lou Reed's Velvet Underground, perhaps the most influential group to ever emerge form New York City...
...debates tend to sound like audi tions for a road company of 7776. Arguments are nearly always flotsam-packed and comically eclectic, skittering from Burger King to Rousseau, from Bruce Springsteen to the Sudetenland. Says Gilbert: "You can't really prepare, so everything becomes important: something your mother once said, a tidbit from sociology class...
Bands like REO manage to outsell Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, the Who by swapping individuality for corporate style: heavy guitar chords and sappy strings, music by rote, lyrics by reflex. Says one major record executive: "In the 1960s, commercialism and the heart of rock were pretty much the same. In 1982 the commercial center and the soul of the music are different. It's no accident that these bland, faceless groups with no defined image, no personality, no boldness have the largest-selling albums. They're the easiest to sell...
...intent. With some crossover exceptions like Michael Jackson and the Commodores, the place to hear black music on American radio now is either soul or oldies stations. And they play even less white music on black radio. Says Jon Landau, the onetime rock critic who now manages Bruce Springsteen: "The cross-fertilization between black music and white music that created rock has greatly diminished." But, argues Atlantic Records Chairman Ahmet Ertegun, "radio doesn't play according to what its prejudices are. Radio plays according to results...
...best possible tool for insulting your parents or establishing the fact that you are a free person. Kids are too cool for that now." Certainly the music is cool, not in Wexler's hipster sense, but in mean degrees. A go-for-broke performer-someone who, like Springsteen or Pete Townshend, has the temerity to believe that rock not only matters, but matters deeply-is working out of a hot center that no longer exists. Such an attitude even a decade ago would have been a way to reach for the listeners. Now, if it does not turn them...