The Sound Of The 70s
There was one exception. Leave any prejudice here and take a moment to listen to a story from a 20 year-old London boy and his soul baptism 42 years ago.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had played their first ever gig outside of the USA, in London on 18 November 1975 and I never got a ticket. CBS had absolutely overkilled on the PR and everyone in the music biz occupied the first twenty rows of the stalls. Springsteen was at once livid and very uneasy about the coming performance. (earlier in the day, he had furiously run through Hammersmith pulling down promo posters and removing publicity flyers from each of the seats proclaiming "Finally London is ready for Bruce Springsteen"). All of the UK music press, top artists and anyone else who knew jack about what was coming was there as well and subsequent to the performance agreed that it was seminal. This was to become one of the band's 'legendary' performances". I was gutted. I had missed out.
For the next seven days, every time I saw, or heard a review about that first gig it hurt like a knife, Then Nicky Horne on Capital Radio announced on his radio show that there would be an extra gig played at the end of the tour, back here in London (he was a huge fan, playing whole sides from Bruce's first two albums, almost every night back then.
I felt my memory validated when I read that Bruce himself called the return gig at the end of the European tour on 24 November, (the one we were lucky enough to find tickets for) "a blaze of a show" in comparison to his earlier gig. In his autobiography, Born to Run, he reveals that during and after the earlier first UK concert he experienced an angst-ridden sense of doubt as to performing in general, and his performance that evening in particular. You need to know that at that point he was not the megastar he is today, he had probably sold 50,000 albums at that point, not a lot in those days especially considering how much money CBS has spent on promotion of his new album "Born To Run". I didn't realise it then but he was at the moment of full realisation, in the centre of his song Thunder Road, and he was "... pulling out of here to win".
I am always the one that wants to leave a gig before the end. I don't like crowds much,
but that night, I, and a couple of thousand other pilgrims were transported back to a hot night on the Jersey Shore. 'Magic in the air' is an over-used phrase, but that night, it was real, it was palpable and nobody wanted to go home. The encores were not expected but they were stellar, somehow he saved the best until last and played nine encores, even though he had played practically every song he'd ever written, including most of the then newly released "Born To Run" he astonished with a truly beautiful version of Pretty Flamingo with a verbal preamble that went on for probably twenty minutes before, with spine tingling emotion, breaking into the Manfred Mann classic. Truth was, that night, just like us, he didn't want to go home either.
I like to think that by the end of that 10 day mini-tour around Europe, he realised that he did have a performance that translated across to other cultures, that connected to an audience and that he could see developing in his life. Thanks Bruce, I've seen you a few times over the years and in your performance you always give me something to remember about my own life, something to believe in, something to aim for and an idea of some way I can live. Whatever you may think about the fella (and if you were born after 1980, it's likely to be: cliched, corny, cheesy ...) thats's perfectly OK you'll probably never get it, nor should you, you no doubt have your own artists, philosophers and storytellers.
I did see the Sex Pistols by accident a year or so later, (relative unknowns, they hadn't oozed from the boil of public consciousness as yet). They were supporting one of my then favourite bands Eddie & The Hotrods at the Marquee. Acned proto-situationists, hilarious, no matter how dangerous they so wanted to be, musically, the band were brutal (and decent be fair, still, they were not the start of anything more than a fashion), if any of you old/young punks out there are in doubt, it was like all music, an evolution. listen to the New York Dolls and their like circa 1973 and believe. But then for me it was Johnny Rotten all the way, always was and still is, Lydon is at once an supreme comic, an awkward fucker and a national treasure. After that night, I pretty much knocked stand-up gigs on the head, largely because I didn't enjoy standing up, holding a glassful of warm lager on a gob-soaked floor while pre-pubescent scruffy little fuckheads pogo'd right up in my grill. That shit begat 'moshing'... what a gift to mankind. And anyway I had already done for my hearing.
By this time it was mid 1976, I had had an altercation with an undernourished punk (with skin the colour and texture of the surface of the moon) while window shopping in the King's Road. This led to me being taken to Kensington Police Station (with the offensive little spunk-bubble and a few of his mates, in the same flipping van). By the time we got there, back of van swimming in frothy phlegm, we agreed to hate each other but not let that escalate in future. I was 21years old and things were on the change, it was time to grow up, just a bit.
Oi! punks! listen to Dance like a monkey by The New York Dolls on my Spotify: Bad Scooter Balls Out and if you like that playlist, try some of my others by searching: Bad Scooter
Nick Hornby wrote a tribute to the song "Thunder Road" in his book 31 Songs,
Charlie Gillet wrote an important book called: The Sound Of The City: The Rise of Rock and Roll and that's worth a butchers too.
Photo: Bad Scooter in an outtake from the Born To Run Album Cover session.
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