Bruce springsteen

Today

Cockburn

Can you put on a ‘nonpartisan’ concert in Trump’s Washington?

Cockburn steeled himself Wednesday after a press release from the Trump administration’s “Freedom 250” plopped into his inbox. The missive promised a line-up of “Star-Studded Entertainment” for the Great American State Fair, set to take place on the National Mall for three weeks over the nation’s semiquincentennial. Nine “music icons” would perform for free, including the Commodores, Flo Rida and a smattering of one-hit wonders. Two days later and the schedule is in tatters: eight of the nine acts have withdrawn following fan backlash, with critics branding the event “DC’s very own Fyre Fest.” Only Flo Rida remains.

concert washington

Sunday

Christopher Sandford

Springsteen’s Born to Run turns 50

Bruce Springsteen chuckled when I asked him about the making of Born to Run. “I was just a kid in my 20s trying to keep a record deal together – there was nothing more to it than that,” he told me. One way to see the Springsteen of the summer 1975, just before Born to Run released, is to imagine a wispy-bearded, 25-year-old man hanging around a beachfront New Jersey bar, telling you about his life. He relates slightly improbable tales of having attended a local Catholic high school, where one of the supervising nuns expressed her misgivings about his scholastic performance by stuffing him upside down in a garbage can in the classroom.

Friday

Bill Kauffman

With reference to

"You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come," sang Bruce Springsteen many moments ago. But sometimes it comes and catches you off guard. Perhaps once a decade you are gifted a sentence begging completion or a question inviting the perfect answer, and if you don’t spit out the mot juste you spend the rest of the day cursing on the staircase, pained by a bad case of l’esprit de l’escalier. (And that about exhausts my C-minus college French.) You never know when or wherefrom these pitches are coming. I doubt that even Oscar Wilde could hit much above .500 in this league. I’m probably closer to Cornel Wilde, but I have driven a few into the gaps. Let me explain. Last spring I was toting a garden-shop tray that my wife was filling with plants.

reference

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Curb Your Enthusiasm’s finale was a mission statement for the show

And so, after twelve seasons and twenty-four years, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm has finally come to an end. Opinion online has been divided as to the effectiveness of the ending, in which, spoilers, Larry is placed on trial in Atlanta for inadvertently breaking the Electoral Integrity Act by offering a voter a bottle of water in the line; a rare act of kindness he suffers for. It was an intentionally low-key ending that can nonetheless allow for callbacks to early episodes and brief returning cameos from the guest stars who have somehow been maligned, offended or otherwise dismayed by Larry’s antisocial antics in the previous quarter-century.

curb your enthusiasm

Friday

Alexander Larman

Age is catching up with our much-beloved musicians

On the Who’s 1965 single “My Generation,” the band’s twenty-one-year-old lead singer Roger Daltrey half-sang, half-sneered, “Hope I die before I get old.” The song, written by the then-twenty-year-old Peter Townshend, has remained a classic for nearly sixty years, boasting both a fantastic tune and unforgettable lyrics. Yet even as the Who continue to tour the world — often in the company of that invaluable accessory for any self-regarding rock band, a full orchestra — it is now with self-aware amusement that the seventy-nine-year-old Daltrey and seventy-eight-year-old Townshend perform it.

musicians

Tuesday

Teresa Mull

RFK goes it alone in Philadelphia

Had you blindfolded me yesterday morning, led me to the front lawn of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, removed my blinder and asked me to guess where we were, I would have said, “A James Taylor benefit concert for NPR.” In the crowd on this sunny fall day was a heavy contingent of the boomer delegation, of various stripes and checks. There were even some traditional tweed, and, with blazers out in full force, on both men and women, paired mostly with denim — though late-season red chinos and season-rushing corduroys were on display, too — and invariably some statement eyewear, leather dress shoes, and baseball caps keeping flowy silver hair tamed and sun-spotted skin safe. It was plain from their collective style that this group was at least self-aware.

rfk

Monday

Kit Wilson

The Springsteen-Obama podcast is rambling and sloppily edited

I was not born in the USA. But I am, technically, American — or at least, one half of me is. My mother hails from Ohio, where some of my family still live today. As a kid, I’d jet into the States on my American passport and back out again on my British one. This strange part-tourist part-citizen relationship ended up making me doubly nostalgic for the mirage of America. So for all my English cynicism, when I heard about Renegades, the new podcast by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, I actually thought it sounded quite appealing. I’m a sucker for what you might call Obamaganda or Springspeak — that kind of folksy, wistful, idealistic American rhetoric, the vocabulary of which consists largely of better angels, bridges, and melting pots.

bruce springsteen barack obama

Tuesday

Cockburn

Barack Obama’s music taste remains painfully mainstream

Like Moses descending from the heights of Mount Sinai, former president and current prophet Barack Obama has today delivered his latest tome to the masses. A Promised Land, his fourth book, is a 'riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making — from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy'. Or so his publisher says. Cockburn, old-fashioned fellow that he is, has believed in the power of democracy for longer than 12 years. To mark the book's publication, Obama has summoned one of the spirits of his bygone era: he's tweeted out a playlist. 'Music has always played an important role in my life — and that was especially true during my presidency,' he writes.

barack obama

Tuesday

Steven Van Zandt

Steven Van Zandt: Teachers make great audiences, probably because they never get out

I’m at the airport in Salt Lake City, waiting for the snow to stop so we can get up to Vancouver. I’ve been on the road with the Disciples of Soul since a month before Thanksgiving. This tour, the Soulfire Teachers Solidarity Tour, has been going on and off for a year and a half now, and it ends on December 16. The road is a lifestyle I’ve gotten used to. I miss my wife, I miss my dog. But we don’t go out so long, three or four weeks at the most before going back home. It’s not like the old days, the we’d go out for a year, and stay out. It’s much more civilized now. The tour promotes my music-based school curriculum, TeachRock.org.

steven van zandt