I remember best when I was twenty, after piano lessons, when I applied what I had learned. I put in the effort to master Mozart’s sonata in C, and I played it for Granny and Granddad, and my mother, and Grammy, her mother. It made me cry and it made them cry. Grammy, “Well, if I knew you could play like that!” and then she trailed off; and Granddad, “I wish to hell I could play like that!”

I always wanted to be an artist. I am an artist in a poet’s body, and language and words are always like paint to me. I love music best, but I could never play fast enough or read music very well to feel I could become a virtuoso, even though I thought hard about going to music school. I have a good ear, and a good feel for the moods and emotions of music.

I used to play jazz in my bedroom when I was studying when I was fifteen, but my parents would get mad and take the stereo away from me. I know it’s ok, because I worked in an OR for several months and the surgeons always played music. It calmed them and helped them to concentrate.

So I always play music when I write, even when I read. Playing music got me through the writing of my Master’s final exercise, and I got an A and passed the reviews.

People say my poetry is musical. It’s that, and painterly too. It’s not so much the sounds of the words and vowels and syllables, or even the rhythms, as the intense, brilliant tones.

That’s why the kids I hang out with like me so much. They are musicians, and I can play with them when they play, at shows, and it’s divine and great. I can even write stuff spontaneously, on the spot, at shows, and read it in interludes where I ask them for a break, in the middle of a show, say. And it inspires them and spurs them on, helps them to triumph over their fatigue, with so much exertion.

In other words when I recite my poetry I play music. I am even playing music when I am writing. My poetry is music, which is what all poets and authors, and artists, have always tried to do with their art. So I’m a success, and I have an ego, and I’m glad, because that helps you get through the day as a writer, because no one else is going to give you the credit you give yourself, the fanfare, the music.

The Whitehaus is a three-story mansion near Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, and it’s almost like a college dorm, with the cozy bedrooms for the boys, the living spaces stark and dusty, except for the nights of music, when they come alive. I feel like its diplomat, its Secretary of State, even its Supreme-Court justice. It was the nexus, where I moved from one generation of musicians to the next, and started a good social life.

The first night there, when I crossed the network of streets coming out of Green Street Station, directed by my iPhone map, up Seaverns Ave, was so peaceful, bright, and serene, I felt the summer feeling would never end. Some of the abstract, lower-case musicians I knew from before were playing there, and the shining of the hardwood floors seemed to partake of the music.

The blast of the coming time: triple-deckers in Allston, Smokey the Bear’s Cave, and Gay Gardens. The rough and tumble mess. Sex appeal, intensity, and excitement, the shows lasting sometimes until 4 A.M., me crashing on a couch. Cool-looking kids in trippy, mod mufti, smile when they see me. “Hey Gordon!” “Let me see… How do I know you?” “You wrote a poem about me!”

The girls; enticing, alluring, persuading me to be their friend, affectionate and romantic, usually overwhelmed by me in the beginning; and then, later, charmed, enamored, and endeared. So many.

The online journal where I wrote: the months hanging out with the chap who was to be my editor, as “a chiller”. And then my column, “Inside the Mind”, heavy capsule write-ups on my favorite musicians who were friends, making us feel like superstars.

The fights, the clash of art and business, friends gathering around me to get coverage of their bold efforts, and the reality of the business.

The seductive identification with youth…

The house shows, confrontations with cops, sometimes coming up the drive with six cars, to a peaceful crowd.

The hatred and distrust of the police, the “good rebel/bad rebel” routines; “They’re only concerned about noise and underage drinking.” “I think they’re just picking on the fat kid.”

Lucy, with her fantastic art, kewpie dolls and stuffed animals stuffed together and hanging on the walls like 3-D bearskin rugs. And her Smarty, creative music act, different every time.

And Smokey the Bear’s again, and the abandoned bear cages at Franklin Park Zoo.

Frank Hurricaine, with his heroism, on top of the rock in the cage, singing about “chugging” with an old friend out West; coming back, crossing the country, the surreal stories he had to tell, the holy prophets, the hanging trees in the bayous, the mountains of West Virginia.

And his hip-hop samples. “This stuff is so good… You’ll be high all day; for a year—hell, this stuff will keep you high for six years…”

A mirror reflects what never was. It distorts reality. That’s why I broke mine. It gave me seven years bad luck. I was sick of my own reflection. I wanted to become someone new; and I did. But that was after I walked in front of the black cat.

She nuzzled against my knee. I gave her a cup of cream I had retrieved from the Miles jazz club in Cambridge, one I found in the dish at the center of the table as I took in the sexy piano of beautiful Sachiko.

I could see myself better now. I was someone else. “Picasso is someone else,” the painter said, and so was I. I could put together the set of years behind me, and discover a new reality, a more flexible, truer one, reassembled from past distortions.

The distortions? They began on a warm June evening, when I saw Otto Levant play his mesmerizing harpsichord mantras in a small room at the back of a conservatory in Boston. It appeared like nothing but a haze at first, like a lower-case letter repeated, the letter k, say, a printing press gone mad. Then the visions, as if induced by brandy snifters. There was a shimmering in the room, the stage levitated by audience awe, and the incantations and chants of Otto Levant brought me to Zion.

No one was the same coming out. Their shadows played on my mind as I exited the door, puzzling my eyes, which made the traffic lights and headlights outside on the street a new symphony, for the decade unfolding.

Massimo Edo played at the School for Scientists the next week. He held his koto the way Hendrix held his guitar, always threatening to pick it up and bite the strings. There was much space between the notes, as if an exercise in Zen. The notes themselves were like hard wood.

For the encore, a classic electric guitar careened, pulled and pushed like a team of horses at the bow of a chariot, going into battle, which was fierce, but exhilarating and triumphant. Everybody was sitting down, but you knew they felt like dancing; something Japanese, yes, but Japanese mad, like one of those parties where guys slide across the table with a rum and tonic in their hand, everything under secret containment the next day at the office.

Dave Dozen baffled me at first, in the back room of an urban wooden house. I still can’t remember precisely what he was doing. As I recollect, he had taken apart the pieces of his saxophone, and was rattling them inside a large wooden bowl mixed with silver ball bearings. It put me ill at ease, made me uncomfortably conscious of myself. I walked out afterwards, without introducing myself to any of the then strangers.

Dozen came after me as I twisted the doorknob. I remembered him from the Edo show, when he gave me a notice of his show, which was actually a blank piece of paper. That was when the mirror began to crack, with insufficient substance to reflect. It burst when I saw him play, catching me in a few places in my body, and causing some bleeding. Dave treated the cuts when he greeted me with a little gauze stuffed in the wounds.

The scars stayed like a spider web over my body for the seven years. They became all I would see, like my own circulatory system, like a crown of thorns I refused to wear but the sinners kept putting on my scalp.

After the seven years, I was able to extract the thorns, and use the residual blood as ink to my fountain-pen tips. The language I stained into the page was music, just as I had heard, but transformed, like a new symphony ever renewed by a new conductor each time.

Now, the notes have been changed, and the instruments, sometimes just random electrical household appliances, and pots and pans. This transposition came from Andreas Fleiss, whose brain just transmitted musical signals without even touching an instrument. Together we created poetry out of sound. We still do.

Nothing is constructed in a poem. It is a path under the sun where we seek our place. Philosophy is pure construction, or its blueprint. We build out of the perceptions we accrue from poetry. Music is the environment, the house as part of the landscape or its disintegration and return into the soil, as part of the new environment that will inspire more poetry.

Music makes the house. It is the wood, denatured; motion become matter in a moving world, slivering the spine of the construction and making it part of the one again, the one of motion and of music, which is many, many vibrations pushing us onto new paths of poetry for which we build shelters along the way.

The path should just keep on going, without stopping to build a tent. We should arise out of music, as motion, and become motion likewise. The philosophy makes us stop.

In Being and Event, Alain Badiou conceives this continuum in terms of set theory. Philosophy comes out of institutions, which, compounded, comprise the State. But the one is never one. It is always many, and the many can shift according to set. This gives us identity in the world, going back to Heidegger. We dwell in a world with an awareness of who we are, and that’s what makes us caring beings. But this is only a perception. Uniqueness inheres only in how we see things.

And so we break in the home, and it decays. The decay is another form of music, which we experience, and in the experience it becomes poetry again, and we stop it, gouging out the rot and renovating, building new structures. In the building there is a searching, an exploration of a new environment, opening up with each new component of the new structure.

We look for poetry in philosophy, just as we look for music in poetry. The philosophy coming out of music is the moment of crisis, and the moment of opportunity. This is all where the process eddies, and we long for what came before; and it is these recursions which make up the rhythms of the intellectual life, making the mind a house whose boards split in the woods, becoming the detritus and death of nature out of which we were created, making death a kind of poetry.

Is music mourning, then? It is the pageantry of the passing. It is light from a dead star, itself just another kind of light. It is the shells of clichés drying out like clams on the beach. It is a metaphor taken too far, an oyster crushed for the pearl inside.

Is philosophy thought? Philosophy is the world, which presents the illusion of thought, all that thought is, time turning into music turning into poetry.

And so I picked up the hammer, and banged in the nails…

Nails, extracted from ore, manufactured, which is a whole phenomenological surface that can be reduced to a dried form of culture, the ideas and exploration and discovery of an age compacted to trash out of which we can build an artificial environment, which we do, or pick through like a homeless person for the rags and tags of poetry. Philosophy shows us how to do this, with its substrata of tropes.

In “White Mythology”, Jacques Derrida shows us how these substrata extend through all of writing, of which speech is just another type. The substrata are language itself, which only constitutes a part or an element of how we communicate. In this way language is a part of poetry, not the other way around.

We can break the process down into builder, materials, instruments. This is the creation of the set, all part of the construction. But the instruments are built, and the structure is a tool we apply to our own bodies for a place to dwell, or live.

And the structure is a body, allocating and designating us as sets of functional purposes, orchestrating the tools in our hands into another set, the action of the world, which can be broken down again into the three elements, in another erasure and retracing of the paradigm.

What goes on in this retracing? Again, it is writing itself, that which we can dispose towards music or poetry or philosophy, shedding matter like the stem of a leaf sheds the leaf in fall, something to rake up and burn, or put to another use, enriching the soil at its best.

For it is good soil that puts forth good crops, enlightenment and ethical understanding. These are the aims of life.

Out of music, already a path, on which the mind moves as it negotiates the sound. And the structure, already being raised as the music builds its own image among the chosen paths.

There is no poetry, only poets. Wallace Stevens erred when he said in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” “Poetry is the subject of the poem.” The poet is the subject of the poem, his body as he draws philosophy out of music.

And so the ethics turn like tumbleweeds down the highway, the poet sucking on a cinnamon fireball at eight years old, buying a pack of baseball cards at the Five and Ten. The stats structure his mind. He’s going to bat 300 +. The world divided into statistics, this is philosophy, the mind giving them new meaning, new music, as it achieves its global positioning like a car, with its two headlights for eyes.

“It was like a new knowledge of reality”, Stevens writes in his last published poem, of the bird’s cry at the earliest ending of winter. This is the poem become world, the words disappeared, the fictive glistening of philosophy coating like gossamer the branches of the tree, implicating a whole new world of angels and insects that exist only as the roots and extensions of the language that enabled us to see the tree in its landscape. And so we travel to a new one, already exploding like the spider eggs ready to weave their own webs.

Again, Stevens, it’s the pleasure of merely circulating, but it’s life, and work, and it throws us into new orbits, orbits of nature, seasons pledged to new tasks, stopping us and making us scratch our heads, as if another insect had stung, and our whole brains stung, sorting out the materials of the palace to be built, the materials all of the technology of culture, out of which we can leave nothing to arrive at a truth, but which if we ever could build it, it would obstruct the perception of the very thing it is intended to expose.

In the final analysis it is a matter of leaving things out. Deflecting the motions of the armies of workers always ready to become part of the system devoted to new constructions of knowledge. The building goes on, one hand passes a thing on to another. It is when we impose a rest that the melody builds, a rest of the activity of the mind, which is all that justifies philosophy in the end rather than its constructions, as often as not building follies that Freud equated with delusions.

And poetry, the text, the legend of the furious flow and its swift stop. The breaking back and forth into stop and flow, the marriage of music and philosophy, the mind moving and the mind at rest, poetry the orchestration of the body, apart from the world, into music.

It is said that the ‘60s ended in 1974, with Nixon’s resignation. On the one hand, there was nothing left to believe in. On the other, there was nothing left to protest. Early in the decade, Timothy Leary preached acid politics, thinking that Mao and John F. Kennedy should be sitting in a conference room tripping on LSD, and all the problems of the world would be solved. As it happened, it was Mao and Nixon who finally met, and they just had too much in common. They were stars, beneficiaries of the very liberal rock ethos that promised a life of unbridled freedom for those who opened up freedom for others. It certainly appeared this way when Nixon visited China. A staunch rightwing conservative was appealing to the better instincts of communists. This was a way of appealing to the kids as much as anything else, showing he was on their side—the side of wide-eyed idealism. Meanwhile he was plotting to deny John Lennon American citizenship in New York.

When Dylan went electric at Newport in 1965, he had become aware of the complex embroglios an artist gets himself into when he positions himself to be the spokesman of a generation. Any act of protest is subject to reprisal, and an artist has to decide if it is worth fighting to the death, or whether his own life is more important, so he can go on preaching. Dylan went on preaching, but it became cryptic. This had already started with Bringing it All Back Home, where he realized that to become self-conscious as an artist is the best way to negotiate complex political issues. As much as he created an intense solidarity at Newport, he also created a rift. It is this imbalance that created the greatest explosions of ‘60s rock.

The Byrds understood Dylan even before Dylan did. By mixing their Beatles’ flavored jangling sound with Dylan’s lyrics, They brought a new quality out of Dylan that was implicit in his surrealist-inspired words, but took a marriage with The Beatles’ sound to really start a revolution. The Byrds’ sound alternates between a mellow country, almost muzak-like at times, and an insidious psychedelia that often becomes hardcore. In the end, however intense they get, they always land on their feet again, all the debris of the wild party cleaned up the next morning. Now, the medium was the message. The radical ideas of the time no longer needed the respectable mantle of traditional folk. What’s more, they could be deposited into innocent indulgences of pleasure that, in the long run, are the most revolutionary of all. The Byrds became catalysts of their own catalysts, and although The Beatles’ Revolver was the tocsin for the psychedelic revolution, they planted the seed.

The American psychedelic acts always had this political edge to their work, derived from Dylan’s more openly political early work, that ultimately proved their nemesis. In Europe, the tone of pyschedelia was more philosophical and ironic. American psychedelia was largely stopped by hard drugs and the police around 1968. The European version lasted well into the 1970s. That said, it was always the bold confrontations with conventions stateside that spurred the Europeans ever on, and as a result there is an ultimate oneness to all psychedelia, wherein the later acts complete the story of the earlier. Psychedelia goes back to the old country blues singers, the way they would howl and bend notes on their guitar. It would come to subsume all kinds of unconventional international music, from Indian raga to medieval English songs. In the languid intensities it releases, these histories are implicit, with their own pockets of political reality, microcosms for a new society. Again, after glorious revolution and protest and civil rights in the US, this led to much tragic confrontation; while in Europe, while the music got less attention, it was allowed to grow more organically and evolved into the sounds of the ‘80s and beyond.

With their electric jug blooping all over the place, The 13^th Floor Elevators can be polarizing. Their 1966 debut, The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13^th Floor Elevators, is dark, light, spontaneous and desperate all at once. From Texas, singer and leader Roky Erikson had a tough, frontier-like abandon, while at the same time he sang simply and sweetly. Erikson went on to become a martyr for pleading insanity. Busted for pot, he opted for placement in an institute for the criminally insane and received shock treatment that changed him forever. He would go on producing music into the next century, broken though he was, exemplar and mentor to youngsters seeking the flavor of the ‘60s. Their 1967 follow-up, Easter Everywhere, would step it up a notch, the band riding golden wires of intensity. There is a way to look at Erikson as a call to action, so no one is ever treated that way again. That is indeed part of the message. But the message changes. As we come to explore the conflict through Erikson’s own music, we see the primordial beauty there, and realize that he achieved this, and this was a glory in itself to transcend whatever the future was to bring him.

Faust was a German band organized in 1971 by producer Uwi Nettelbeck. In the atmosphere of anomy while the memory of the holocaust was still fresh, Faust’s music is fragmentary, feature bursts like something out of The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” with shocking onslaughts out of Stockhausen and jazz. “It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl” is simple and typical. The lyrics consist of two lines—“It’s a rainy day, sunshine baby. It’s a rainy day, sunshine girl”—breaking precedent with sense, forgetting the past, discombobulating the present for a better future. Other works were more serious, and got haunting. Faust never made much of a splash in the commercial world, but they have become legends. It would not do to call them pioneers, though in a way they are. Their abrasive style laid down the template for later industrial music, but their greatness lies in their role as transmitters. They were on the outside looking in. First students of the stumbling of their fathers, they could see the complexities of the American political situation, and knew it took some humor and psychic absurdity to set things straight on the global scene.

The psychedelic revolution spread everywhere, from Latin America to Thailand and Japan. Young bands found a fusion, or a continuum, between the uneasiness of their position in the world, embracing yet shedding folk traditions. Psychedelic rock showed a way of crossing these currents with the ones drifting over from the American counterculture. Tropicalia in Brazil was one such movement, bringing together indigenous music with the wildness of Jimi Hendrix. The electric guitar was shocking in such a state, and even the left resisted it at first, seeing it as a sign of American encroachment. The Tropicalia movement, featuring such artists as Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil and Os Mutantes, went on to enrich the hippie atmosphere they brought into their culture with the type of native folk sounds that complemented them artistically, philosophically and politically. Singers embraced direct targets at the establishment and paid the price. Again, we can look at this as a tragedy, or we can see the songs as new seeds planted in the rain forest, upsetting the cash crops and reestablishing a new equilibrium.

Magma was formed in France in 1970 by the mercurial drummer and singer—and radical Coltrane disciple—Christian Vander. Magma’s albums constitute a serial science fiction epic, but in a different Language. Supposed to be from the planet Kobiah, this language, Zeul, was invented by Vander and spoken by everyone in his commune, consisting of the many band members. Magma mixed Bach, Coltrane, hippie musicals like Hair, to achieve a soaring passion the likes of which have rarely been seen before or since. Vander never explains the words. He says that the music should get the message across itself. The hermetic nature of the group and their habits, whether intentionally or not, provided a kind of solution for the danger many groups of the time got into by being so open politically. The group could go on cogitating in Zeul, tackling the most heated issues of the time, as in a code language protected from the State. And indeed, the group has stayed together into the first decades of the current century, inspiring a whole cult movement of international underground bands.

England’s Pretty Things built the very foundation of 1960s rock. Guitarist Dick Taylor and singer Phil May were originally in a group with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. It was Rolling Stones’ original rhythm guitarist Brian Jones who started the world’s longest lasting band, and Taylor lost out in a fight with him as to who would play that role in the new band. And though Pretty Things had a fairly hardscrabble career, they have inspired as much great rock as their former band mates. SF Sorrow came out in 1967, recorded at Abbey Road at the same time as Sgt. Pepper. It is a kind of musical radio drama about the difficult coming of age of an English war child. The music has the same, soaring golden harmonies as The Beatles, and though it is a little rough and tumble, it is a masterpiece and would go on to inspire The Who’s Tommy. Pretty things inspired England with their mutually incompatible gritty, nasty stage presence and their simple, glorious purity. In recent years the band’s reunions have been true spectacles, the musicians playing their early work with mature mastery. Again, as the Stones trot themselves out as if in formaldehyde in our time, Pretty Things are still pumping out a vitality and gathering ever new fans.

The ‘60s are still with us, as they were in the ‘70s. We are left with a kind of unconscious landscape, on which buildings that seemed solid tumble, and structures that seemed unfinished are redeveloped, or even shown to have a beauty in their unfinished state. Behind these are the nascent ideologies of the ‘60s, ever present as the hypostasis of the music. In the ‘60s culture reached the speed of light. We have been going backwards ever since. But reinvesting in the buried dreams, we become spiritual contractors, making the monuments our own and for our time.

Music is an orchestration of pain, and through pain we reestablish our belief systems. All the slipping out of social conventions, the dislocations—these shared experiences of the ‘60s youth generation exposed them to a new social nerve center. In The Gay Science Nietzsche lamented that we no longer build for the ages, as in the age of cathedrals. 90 years later, that was still true, but with a difference. Hippies were taking drugs and experimenting with sex, living in the moment as it were. But this is deceptive. Their goals were still long term, establishing civil rights, ending the Vietnam war, creating a more loving society. The pleasures of the moment, by becoming ends in themselves, at once satisfied the instincts on their road to political idealism, and led to a new understanding of human sexual response, extrapolated into a whole new sense of human relations. Much went wrong in the ‘60s, and that wrong still persists in the form of drugs and crime, but a new understanding of the psyche came with it—or rather the dawning of a new understanding that will take the patience of an age to fulfill. 

Drew Dougherty was a loveable mischief-maker in my eighth grade English class.  He had an older brother who was introducing him to the newest music, so he was hip to us. One day in class he came on in full force, asking the teacher unexpectedly if he could read the lyrics of a Bruce Springsteen song. It was “Jungleland.” Now the teacher was very amenable to this idea, but let me tell you how revolutionary it was. I was already introduced to the idea of rock lyrics as poetry through Pink Floyd’s album Animals, which was a simple political allegory along the lines of Animal Farm. This was something more. Drew took a stand, and in the process he introduced me and the whole class—even the teacher—to a new idea of poetry. I didn’t really know what was going on in the song. Some kind of city street scene with kids at night. That was the power of the song, though. It took you into a fascinating new world that was not entirely comfortable, but because of that it made you think. Somehow we all got the mood and even the whole meaning of the song, even without the music. Now the music itself adds a whole new dimension to the song. As the words can stand without the music, so can the music stand without the words. They interlope each other like parallel universes, adding to and multiplying each other’s meaning.

The music has an eerie perfection throughout. It starts with some bittersweet retro strings, something out of a ‘40s flick. The piano introduces the body of the song, lightly and gently and then Springsteen comes in with a husky voice and a tone wise beyond his years, overlooking the scenes not quite dispassionately, but feeling the pain resignedly and deeply. This is the voice that dominates the song, somehow coaching the spirits of the kids in their romance and street fights in a way that is entirely natural, protective but letting the forces, evil or otherwise, do their thing. Sentimental romanticism clashes with rocking guitars. Themes disappear or dissolve or get rammed into by something hard, but the hard thing gets softer. In the lyrics, “There’s a ballet being fought out in the alley.” Something violent becomes something peaceful. “Kids flash guitars just like switchblades:” something peaceful appears as violent. There is always this shading of one thing into another, in a world where the strong spirit must live as it fights, keeping hearts beating beneath the rubble.

Born to Run will always stay at the center of Springsteen’s work because it is the moment of passionate release. He would go on to produce more advanced work, and it is entirely against the spirit of Springsteen to look at anything in a hierarchy, so it would not do to say it was his best. Rather, it is the work we must look back to as containing the essential elements of joy and rebellion at the heart of all his works, however different the themes he would come to tackle. In many ways it is one long fest of scenery chewing—but with a difference. By shaking up the disturbing dreamlike scenes in his songs, he makes his listeners come to grips with them on their own turns, so they become, in effect, original emotional moments for them. It is we who end up chewing up the scenery, or having the urge to do so, pent up and inspiring us to revolutionary acts of the heart. This is Springsteen: having the courage to burst open the fruits of love, even on the streets with cops and pickpockets. We never know where our wishes will lead us, but we only get to the core of our being by opening them up.

Music isn’t difficult when it’s hard to understand. Music is difficult when it causes pain. Again, in Springsteen’s case this is the pain involved in opening up new pleasures. This is an evangelical procedure, because it is supposed to perpetuate an explosive chain reaction. It operated in Springsteen himself.  By stealing the right due to him of securing all manner of youthful joy, he becomes more conscious. His later works show him undoing the locks in the repressed homes of working people, but it is always a call to the people’s hearts, never a prosaic, vain venting against the powers that be.

“Night” is the third track on Born to Run. It was my first Springsteen favorite, not as powerful as “Jungleland,” but pure and simple. It’s a heavy, rock, guitar-powered drive, but’s soft and gentle too. Springsteen speaks to a young guy after a bad day at work with the boss. The Boss himself tells his kid to go out and have a good time at night. The kid is hopelessly in love with the beautiful woman of his dreams. He drives in his car, “in love with all the wonder it brings.” We don’t know whether the woman is really in his sights, and she probably isn’t. The whole point is that he’s opening up a new dream. Contained in it his whole free life. He will keep getting knocked down by bad bosses but he will pull through the traffic.

 The dynamics of the album are fascinating. “Born to Run” is the first song on the b-side, but it was the first recorded, as a single in 1974. When asked where he put the best tracks on the album, Springsteen said “the four corners”—the beginning and end of each side. These would also include “Backstreets,” and “Thunder Road,” the opening track. Between, aside from “Night,” are the exquisite curio “Meeting Across the River,” the shake-loose jam-out “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and “She’s the one,” full of swagger that the woman he desires will give into her simply because he thinks she’s so beautiful.

“Born to Run” is Springsteen’s recapitulation of Elvis Presley’s Big Bang. This was the real sound of the ‘70s, and not Johnny Rotten’s  “God Save the Queen.” The supreme anthem of rock music—and Jersey’s state song—it moves so fast you think it’s just a song about fun, when in reality it’s about the all-to-real need to run, at full effort and force, as if out of a burning building. But that’s the key: Springsteen is moving as fast as a sports car himself, and showing you that you can do it too. It’s a matter of sharing the joy in the moment, not afraid to bang up against whatever it takes to fulfill it.

Springsteen took Elvis’s ball and ran with it. But he is also a concoction of Bob Dylan and The Beatles, as were many of the best acts leading up to his time since The Byrds. We always think of Springsteen as a grassroots artist who made it big, but he also worked with this top-down approach, of dispensing essences and elements derived from the high rock canon into a mix that somehow leveled the playing field, while at the same time keeping the flame of the rock classics. We have to look at this more abstract dimension of Springsteen, too. He is even a kind of architect, and this is apropos, as he so often delves into the deteriorating architecture of Asbury Park. In the end, Springsteen brings these rock gods down to earth, where they can be the friends and servants of the audience. When he does this we all become gods, but with the self-consciousness that brings responsibility. Aristotle said that the great poet makes the particular the universal. Springsteen does this in “Backstreets.” We’ve all tasted love and nearly had our tongues cut off, all hiding our shared illicit love in backstreets with dilapidated buildings. This track comes in the middle, but it is really the end. Springsteen encounters the endless force of the universe here, the passage through pain to blinding firelight, knowing that keeping warm is inseparable from being burned.

“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,” goes “Badlands” from Darkness at the Edge of Town. Pleasures aren’t sins when we celebrate and are proud of them. It is only when we are ashamed and bury them that they become so. “Adam Raised a Cain” is another key track from “Darkness.” “You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames,” it ends. “Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain,” Springsteen says. Biblical literature has been worked into his canon, but with a twist. It is not his father’s faults that bring a curse down on his head, but the invisible torture and oppression that his working life brings upon him. The biblical significance goes even further. “I believe in a promised land,” Springsteen sings, and “Prove It All Night” may as well be a retelling of the Eden myth, with the lovers behind the dynamo choosing to know “what it means to steal, to cheat, to lie—what it’s like to live and die.” On this land Springsteen explores the deserts and the badlands of the nation, spiritual displacements of his own down-and-out New Jersey, a kind of symbolic ground zero on which to build new dreams.

Like any great artist, Springsteen draws from many sources, and this makes his work open to many interpretations. On the other hand, his work lends itself equally to misinterpretation, or at least taken out of context to serve alternate purposes. Springsteen doesn’t teach, thought. He testifies. The issue of these appropriations is complex. It began originally with the whole perception of Springsteen as a cars-and-girls poet. In the ‘80s Reagan took “Born in the USA” to be an anthem of cockeyed patriotism. And even though Springsteen is a delegate for the working class, there are limits to the militancy some critics would ascribe to him in this field. At the same time the very nature of Springsteen’s art encourages conflicting takes and co-optations. It is the very same quality that gives the work its imaginative appeal in the first place. It provokes a process that encourages heated debate, and this is another thing that makes Springsteen so timely and political. And he always will be so, as his work will continue to serve all, whether friends or foes, who do not see eye to eye.

Springsteen would go on to produce three more great albums: The River, Nebraska, and Born in the USA. These were also concept albums, and in many ways tighter and stronger. They contain a slew of great songs, and show him coming back home to put out the fire he was born in and rescue the folks tied to poverty and dead-end jobs. That said, the exuberant courage of Born to Run is what will always define him. Bruce Springsteen was the Elvis Presley of the 1970s; but, unlike Elvis, he transcended the grips of fame, staying strong and influential. A hero is someone who shows that everyone is equal. Springsteen always pays back his audience with that promise, the one that will turn his fans into heroes too, with true hearts when the time comes and it counts.

The Gondoliers – Eat Your Heart Out

100 % Breakfast (2013)

With their dashing, burly looks, The Gondoliers could easily be the gentlemen guiding you down the Po, on a June evening. They’re tough drivers though, and it may be better to picture them behind the wheel of a ’67 Mustang, beat up enough to travel through tough neighborhoods, but still shiny, to impress the tough guys.

Drummer Brendan Gibson is at the helm, here, turning meters on a dime, with breaks in the rhythm that pull the rug from under guitarist Dan Madri and Singer John Manson, and then throw the pair on a magic carpet, chugging down the hazy city skies.

Madri has good range, with a slew of stinging, strange chords, building and collapsing like decks of cards. There’s always drama in his playing, which contrasts with Manson’s slacker-style nonchalance, cool and devil-may-care as Thurston Moore or Stephen Malkmus of Pavement.

There’s also a techno-quirky feel to much of the music, like you’re in a dark bar with noise and people and suddenly think of a day at the beach as a child with your mother. It can even get grand, and anthemic, but with a taste of spicy irony so it’s always understated. I’ve seen these guys live and they tear down the house. It’s a calmer experience listening to them on CD, but it gives you a good buzz.

Weirdo Records, July 8
Black Creatures

Flash of lights in the streets in the summer rain ambulance blinking reds it’s geometric like Mondrian and the music inside starts before I’m there a blaze of haze a children’s toy and a boom box Don angling for photos he’s part of the music and the blast enlarges the two children giving it an even keel everyone transfixed the sound gives them peace it’s not what I feel I feel edgy it makes me think of artillery and tanks but the voices are out of left field and the tanks are icons on a computer game and the people look so peaceful tall slim gent with beard and Atlanta hat is one with the action typing on his phone the little girls in green and tie-dye shirts engaged in quiet communication the best way to predict the future is to create it in white on a black shirt now the music stabilizes with notes you can count it’s collective creation of a future shots and engines and model T motors bird tweets getting tranqil as the dew flecked branches of an early morning now the sound is strafed getting wacky bounces rebounds ricochets echoes of babyish voices crunches and grinding winding down the rain ends wipers stop and you can hear the steady engine hum and the confabulation of voices again clinical as a hearing test but as comforting random warning signals dying in their own effusion and now the barbaric notes of swamp beasts black creatures

119 Gallery (Lowell), July 5
Space Blanket

This is a space blanket of sound of singing like birds in trees it’s hard to hear hysterical disturbing there’s no relief just bone rattling drums over which Dei sings surreal opera the guitar is a copper spider web Fun has technicolor tones tonight Mike is a mad bulldog as English as Keith Moon

Midway, July 2
lava ice cream

Blast the vocals are hardcore the music is mellow and groovy and the flow is good lava ice cream

Orange spice good beat cracks a whisper lips slips a fin into frankie’s hand