Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin

Author:Peter Ames Carlin [Carlin, Peter Ames]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction, Music, Biography, Azizex666
ISBN: 9781471112348
Google: 2jcLMQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1439191824
Barnesnoble: 1439191824
Goodreads: 15784590
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2012-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

THAT’S YOUR TIME CLOCK, MY FRIEND

BRUCE AND THE BAND ENDED the 115-stop Darkness tour with a pair of New Year’s shows at the Richfield Coliseum, just outside Cleveland. From there he had three months to catch his breath and write songs for his next album, which they planned to start recording in New York City. Absent the lights, noise, and cheers, Bruce’s thoughts turned back to the faces he’d known in his childhood and the daily routines that kept them marching from one day to the next, even as it cut the lines around their eyes. That world didn’t seem to exist anywhere on the road he had been traveling for half of his life, but he could see it all around him. In the eyes of his sister Ginny and her husband, Mickey, already celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary with their kids running at her feet. Bruce could blame his job, the road, and the extreme focus he brought to work. But most of the other members of the band and their crew still managed to have real lives at home. Bruce saw it all, from a distance.

“When you’re thirty years old or twenty-nine, those are things that start to drift across your landscape,” he says. “Those were just things I became interested in writing about. Because I hadn’t written about them previously, although it was certainly the roots of the place that I grew up in and the people that I knew.”

But no matter how much time he spent with Joyce Hyser, no matter how simply he tried to live, Bruce couldn’t resist clinging to his isolated ways. By happenstance or design, he’d constructed a life built for one. And so he took up his pen and sketched what he imagined he was missing. “The River was me moving into an area where I just thought about those things or I started to try them on,” Bruce says. “So you’re trying on that identity for a few minutes and what it feels like to sing this out. It moves you closer to where you’re moving in your personal life sometimes.”

Picking up where Darkness left off, the new songs sprouted from the fundamental sounds and voices heard in early rock ’n’ roll and country records. Three, maybe four chords, simple verse-chorus-verse construction, and stories described in the language of regular people. No omniscient commentary, no poetic revelations, no anthemic declarations of purpose. Just snapshots of the real world as viewed through the hopes, labors, fears, joys, and struggles of the unheralded many. The people, Bruce said, who might not shake up the world but kept it spinning from day to day.

The sessions started in March 1979 at the Power Station, a New York recording facility that included a gym-sized, hardwood-lined (and uncarpeted) room designed to capture the clamor of a rock band playing on the stage. Neither Bruce nor Landau had thought of recording there until Weinberg, Tallent, and Bittan came back from recording Ian Hunter’s You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic album.

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