Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected, and stepping out over the line

[gwyn]

My intoabar assignment is amazing! I picked Bucky Barnes as my character who goes into a bar and meets someone from either Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Schitt's Creek, and I got Bucky meets...Rosa Diaz, and I am very excite!!1! about this. You know that Rosa and Bucky could bond over so very many things. I have only a small germ of an idea, though, so if you have some sort of interesting prompt, I'm listening. I can't guarantee that anything is going to be the magic idea, but I'm not super impressed with my own, either. Minimum word count is only 500, though, so it doesn't have to be something super complex.

I caught a little bit of the movie Blinded By the Light on the free HBO weekend last week, and I was a little flummoxed by it because the part that I saw was mostly pretty cute but the new wave guy at their school was criticizing the main character for his Bruce obsession by saying that Springsteen is "dads' music" and "it's 1987." Like, wtf? Born to Run came out in 1975, my dude, and unless all your fathers were siring children at 12 years of age, not hardly. Like, yes, lots of kids their age were into new wave and power pop, but there were plenty who were also into classic style rock & roll, and Springsteen was actually at the height of his popularity in the mid-'80s. Born in the USA was released in '84, and it was a megahit of much greater proportions than any other album he'd done, even his critical darling Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River.

I was in high school when Born to Run came out, and I remember how much of a backlash there was for being a Springsteen fan at the time, because of the Time and Newsweek cover thing. His first albums were very much under the radar, and he just wasn't super well known until Born to Run came out. He started playing large arenas pretty quickly after Born to Run, but when it first was released, I saw him at a very inexpensive concert in a fairly small venue by his later standards. But he didn't become such a household name until the early mid-'80s, so it's very very weird to me that they were saying that in the movie.

And of course, now I've got about three Springsteen songs kind of on permanent earworm rotation in my head.

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

Ooh! That sounds like an awesome character combination!

Huh, I didn't realize Blinded by the Light was originally a Springsteen song - I think I've only heard the Manfred Mann's Earth Band's cover of it. And yeah the "dad's music" line makes no sense for 1987.

[dine]

omg, that crossover sounds like so much fun! have a good time with it; I look forward to reading once it's posted

the characterization of Springsteen as 'dad music' doesn't make sense - as you say, no one in 1987 would have said that - because their fathers would have mostly been of the 1960s music generation (also, that term wasn't in use back then, at least as I recall)

[kore]

Yeah, they didn't get that quite right....

I remember really enjoying Born to Run, Thunder Road, Badlands, Hungry Heart, Atlantic City -- I still think Atlantic City is one of his best songs ever -- when they came on the radio, altho it wasn't quite my style. And then BORN IN THE USA came out, and omfg it was EVERYWHERE. And I knew it wasn't the jingoistic flag-wagging patriotic piece of crap everyone thought it was, but it was still EVERYWHERE, and flags were wagged. And I still actually really liked a lot of the songs -- Cover Me, I'm On Fire, No Surrender, Dancing in the Dark with that iconic video -- but Glory Days was EVERYWHERE too, and the live War cover which I thought was awful (this is when I was near permanently plugged into MTV, lol). And some other songs I just did not like, and I was all, leave me alone with my David Bowie, sucky mainstream culture. I was one of those pretentious people who liked Nebraska better than Born in the USA. (I am still one of those pretentious people who likes Nebraska better.) I remember a Bloom County cartoon in the 80s that showed a pre-teen's dad going out to a concert all BRUUUUUCE! (the punchline is, he mixes Bruce up with Billy Joel). But it wasn't so much "dad music" (which, you're totally right, was not a thing -- Queen and Buffalo Springfield and ELO and whatever was just what you heard on the radio) as "this is now so uncool your dad is into it." ("Dad rock," like "dad jokes," doesn't quite make sense to me anyway.)

I didn't get back into his stuff until The Rising, I think, and then I loved Devils & Dust and Magic and everyone loved the Seeger Sessions. (I still love the Seeger Sessions.) So he had a kind of trajectory of indie but successful --> huge mainstream boom --> sinking down --> more successful but not the same boom. It's weird, I hardly ever hear anything played to death anymore, because I don't listen to radio or commercial TV or go into stores, so that feeling of "if I hear Tunnel of Love ONE MORE TIME -- " is gone now.

[kore]

Yeah, did they do ANY research for 1987? 1987 was like, U2 and INXS and Guns N Roses and Def Leppard. Michael Jackson, George Michael, Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, Jody Watley. Like, 1987 was when Rolling Stone still had "College Music" charts! If you were kinda out there, there was Sinead O'Connor and the Replacements and R.E.M. and the Smiths, but the boomers still had a death grip on the culture. Hell, the GRATEFUL DEAD had a giant hit in 1987.

[sperrywink]

I really loved Blinded by the Light. I took that whole "dad's music" thing to be a British thing. Like, our classic rock is not theirs, so their concept of Bruce is entirely different.

I like your Intoabar!! No ideas though. Still trying to cement mine!

I have my Sebastian Smythe from Glee meeting Ainsley Whitly from Prodigal Son, which is totally crack, ahaha.

[kirbyfest]

Springsteen was about as far from Dad music in 1987 as it was possible to be.

[mackiemesser]

Hmmm...well, from a New Wave/Goth kid in 1987 - which I was - perspective I wouldn't have classified him a "Dad" music but he definitely felt/seemed older than the New Wave bands. Which is kind of strange since a lot of those bands had started in the mid to late 70's as well. And Bruce probably wouldn't have been well known in the UK until "Dancing in the Dark" anyway, so he would have been a relatively new artist there.

(It makes me think of the Elton John interview where they asked him what he thought of Springsteen and he said something along the lines of "I don't know, I don't drive" which is possibly an apocryphal story that I stumbled across but I think might be a Very British Perspective.)

I was going to say that this would be a typical music mistake that a younger director/writer would make but I looked them up and they are Gen X and older, so I can only think this was put in to explain it to younger audiences? Tho why they just didn't go with an "ugh, boring old rock 'n' roll" angle I'm not sure...

[starlady]

I haven't seen the movie, but I wonder if this is a Europe (or UK) versus US cultural divide. I'm a patchy collector of old concert bootlegs/live recordings and he was playing bigger venues in Europe by the late 1970s, since his first few albums did make a bigger impression there.

[st_aurafina]

I got Bucky meets...Rosa Diaz

EEEEE! That's an awesome concept!

[musesfool]

(It makes me think of the Elton John interview where they asked him what he thought of Springsteen and he said something along the lines of "I don't know, I don't drive" which is possibly an apocryphal story that I stumbled across but I think might be a Very British Perspective

I’ve heard that quote attributed to both Elvis Costello and Ray Davies so I think its very much a British view of Springsteen (or at least someone has attributed it to various Brits) and also hilariously apt. (I mean, I don’t drive either but he’s still probably my all-time favorite musical artist. Of course, I’m also American. 😉)

[musesfool]

Bucky + Rosa = awesomeness in Brooklyn. Maybe she knows him from one of her many secretive side projects.

[sineala]

I have not seen Blinded By the Light but I did see the trailer, which I remember very vividly because Lysimache complained about the trailer immediately in the theater, then all the way home from whatever movie we were seeing, and she continues to complain about it occasionally at random intervals, to wit:

I gather based on the trailer that there's a part where the main character goes to New Jersey to visit Bruce Springsteen's hometown or whatever. All well and good. He flies into Newark, NJ. Fine. There's a half-second establishing shot of a plane landing above a sign for Newark Liberty International Airport. NOT FINE. Because in 1987 the airport was absolutely definitely called Newark International Airport and they only added in the "Liberty" in 2002, to honor the victims of 9/11. Basically, they obviously used a modern shot of the airport and they did not know and/or care that it was instantly identifiably modern.

I have been trying to placate Lysimache by telling her that maybe they noticed it was wrong after they made the trailer and fixed it for the movie but if they didn't even get the details about the music right for their movie about music I do not have much hope that they fixed the place names of New Jersey.

[spikedluv]

That sounds like the basis for a very cool crossover!

[mackiemesser]

Ray Davies or Elton John make a little re sense to me than Elvis Costello, but yeah, it's definitely one those quotes that has no origin but is a useful thing for someone to have said.

Springsteen is just quintessentially American. I don't know that another country could have produced him.

[gwyn]

Yeah, at the point Born to Run came out, that was literally the only reason most people knew who he was! Some of us had his earlier albums, but he was still mostly an East Coast thing.

[gwyn]

Yeah, that wasn't even a thing--kids in high school or British equivalent were listening to all sorts of shut, and the term classic rock hadn't even really become a thing. Oldies was a thing, but that was specifically meant for '50s and '60s stuff.

[gwyn]

Dad rock wasn't even really a thing, because "classic rock" as a genre hadn't become a thing yet. There were oldies, which was specific to early pop rock & roll, but the classic rock stuff was, at the time, AOR--album oriented rock. That's what stations like KZOK played, and they didn't become "classic rock" until at least the '90s, to distinguish from mainstream AOR that played current stuff. And it really wasn't until the end of the '90s, anyway, that the evolution away from radio genres started to happen. (I had a DJ friend, and I followed all this as he was bouncing around from station to station.)

I collected bootlegs, followed Springsteen around the West on his tours. Spent every bit of disposable income I had, which wasn't much, as a fan. My friend and I wore our baseball jersey Born to Run shirts till they were threadbare. Bought every book that came out about him. I learned to play the insanely complicated piano part to Jungleland. It was a huge part of my life, and a lot of other people's, and we were very much not dads--and we listened to everything, as did most of the musicians we liked. This weird idea everyone has that Brits weren't into it because it was quintessentially American...bullshit. Music was amazing in the '80s. It contained multitudes.

[gwyn]

Nah, classic rock as a concept didn't really exist at that point! The genre that a lot of that fell into was called album oriented rock (AOR) at the time. That shift didn't happen till much later--your parents might listen to oldies, but that was very much a pop from the '50s and '60s thing, and you didn't really see that till the end of the '80s. Music was way too much in flux. And Bruce was actually pretty popular over there--many of my favorite bootlegs were performances in the UK. I think it's just that the film's writers are young and don't really understand much about anything that came before them. Their radio was structured really differently, but even bands like the Kinks (that their dads really would have listened to) got regular airplay and were still putting out decent-selling hits in the '80s.

Is it my imagination or is the intoabar timeline shorter this year? I feel like I really gotta get going! I'm glad you got a crack assignment, I know you like those!

[kore]

Yeah, I remember "classic rock" stations in NM in even the early nineties were....Duke of Earl, Rockin' Robin, maybe Buddy Holly, but a lot of top 40 mid-sixties stuff. Heavy on the Stones and the Beatles, and the Doors. Maybe some seventies stuff, like Tom Petty, but even that was more mainstream music, not NOT eighties rock.

Don't laugh, but in the very late eighties, in junior high, I was super into HALL & OATES. YES. I think the first records I ever got were Zenyatta Mondatta (Police), Mr Roboto (Styx), Parallel Lines (Blondie), Pyromania (Def Leppard) (YES), Ziggy Stardust....I had Roger Waters's first solo album for some reason, because EVERYONE I knew listened to Pink Floyd. EV. ERY. ONE. You could not escape it. My indie friends in college listened to R.E.M. and Django Reinhardt and Minutemen and Cocteau Twins and so on, but Sting was still pretty fucking big. Kate Bush. Prince. But it was more divided into genres than age.

One of the very first records I ever got (my parents got it for me) was the Star Wars soundtrack album. I think the first tape I bought for myself was the Flashdance soundtrack. It was either that or Footloose.

I collected bootlegs, followed Springsteen around the West on his tours. Spent every bit of disposable income I had, which wasn't much, as a fan. My friend and I wore our baseball jersey Born to Run shirts till they were threadbare. Bought every book that came out about him. I learned to play the insanely complicated piano part to Jungleland. It was a huge part of my life, and a lot of other people's, and we were very much not dads--and we listened to everything, as did most of the musicians we liked.

GDI now I'm going to cry. That's adorable. (I think the only people I knew who did that were the Deadheads.)

[kore]

For me personally I think Springsteen would have been more like "music your parents might get into," as opposed to like Cocteau Twins or the Cure or Depeche or whatever. It was more musically/lyrically similar? (Altho this did not work with my parents, who hated every single form of rock and roll from Chuck Berry onwards. I was the only kid with parents who did not like the Beatles.)

[kore]

Hey I totes had a Nebraska cassette and when people brought up Springsteen, I would be all, "I like NEBRASKA," in the snottiest way.

Somehow, nobody ever punched me.

[gwyn]

Yes, definitely--he was very much at the height of his popularity, which meants everyone was listening, from younger people who'd only heard Dancin' in the Dark and though they liked the poppy stuff, to older people who thought he was some kind of patriotic idiot and the tried to coopt his messages. Such a weird take!

[gwyn]

I mean, you couldn't get more new wave than I was--I went to about a concert a week in the '80s, and most of those bands were from the UK! But I was also an obsessed Bruce fan, and honestly, so were a lot of the musicians that I saw, which is why that line rings so very false with me. A LOT of bands covered Springsteen songs, especially stuff he hadn't recorded yet and only performed live.

I can see younger Costello saying something like that, except for his obsession with American country western music and the kind of folk stuff Bruce performed. Because young Costello was often an asshole. But I can't even imagine Elton saying that, since he'd be a fan of Roy Bittan's piano work, and also was very very into American rock, which is how he got his start.

Many of the best bootlegs I had were from UK performances. I think a lot of people in Thatcher's austerity, grim, ugly Britain at the time saw him as aspirational, a kind of fantasy of getting out of there in a big muscle car and making a different life.

It was just a weird take, and I think people really didn't do their research.

[gwyn]

I explained this more below, but I honestly don't think it was a British take on him--most of the best bootlegs I collected were from UK performances, and the audience adored him. Many bands I saw at the time, too, covered his songs. I just honestly am not buying it, especially since Thatcher's austerity Britain really made a lot of people want to escape into fantasies of that kind of life they thought his songs represented.

[gwyn]

Right--I mean, he was huge by then everywhere, but even in the earlier days, many of the best bootlegs I'd collected were UK performances. I think it's just someone who didn't really understand the nuances of what they've read of the time--there's this story that's hugely popular in my fandom, as an example, where the person obviously did a great deal of homework on the history she writes about, but she's missing all the nuance of living then, and I was so angry at that story and how much everyone loves it and thinks it's the gospel truth, and I'm like, no, you couldn't do that then. It wasn't possible, you've completely missed the little details of life at that time.

[gwyn]

RIGHT? I just wish I could come up with a better idea than what I have.

[gwyn]

I was just rewatching some Rosa-centric episodes and I forgot how many of them there were. I just feel like my ideas are sad and limp, and they could be so dynamic together.

[gwyn]

Oh yeah, I saw that scene! I didn't know about the name thing, but a lot about it felt weird and wrong, including the customs stuff. There's just a very young modern British viewpoint in it that doesn't seem to take into account what adults of that time were seeing, so even the kids' POVs were not quite accurate. It's weird. A charming movie, though, from the parts I saw. Just really irritating period flaws.

[gwyn]

I hope so--I just wish that any idea I had could do it justice, because right now, it kinda doesn't. :-(

[mackiemesser]

I mean, I do think it sounds like the kind of line an asshole kid could say but I think the insult would be more aimed at mainstream than generational. Coz in the 80's parents' music was more like classic "boomer," The Big Chill kind of stuff as I recall. Tho' my parents were slightly older and weren't too fond of late 60's-early 70's music, so I may be off.

Young Costello was definitely an asshole! I think you could come up with good reasons why none of them would have said it and good reasons why each of them would have said it. :D

[mackiemesser]

I don't think too many New Wave kids would look beyond his look and sound to even get to the lyrics unless they were super into music and songwriting. New Wave was as much a fashion aesthetic as it was a type of music, so it would be very easy for a New Wave teen to write Springsteen off as just another rock'n'roller. And rock'n'roll = old.