Where's disc one?
I know people talk about making mixes of their favorite artists to give to their friends and hook them, but I'll admit I can't do it with Springsteen. I can do themes of Springsteen maybe — maybe songs with big drums or songs about depression — but nothing overarching. Put a gun to my head and say, "Your mix or your life," and the story ends in the old joke. If anything, if you're super menacing, I'm taking Mary Queen of Arkansas into Wreck on the Highway into Mansion on the Hill into Cautious Man into all of the Ghost of Tom Joad album into Lift Me Up into my escape while you're wondering what the hell that falsetto's all about.
It's an awful mix, but you're the one with the gun. If you put it down (or don't have it to begin with), I suggest picking up Greatest Hits or the Born to Run album. The sampler and the masterwork do fine. And if you want any other artists, I can probably do better. But I can't promise much. The Marah sampler I made a few months back, thanks for a couple coworkers who got me into the Replacements, it's a mess.
On Rolling Stone's site this summer, they pare down The River from a double-album to a single. The results, as you might expect, are disastrous. "The record's themes come through even more strongly: desire, the responsibilities that come with it, and over and over again, the death that follows it," the writers say. Then they go and cut The Price You Pay, a slow-burning, final-blasting assault on desire, responsibilities and death — simultaneously — and put on Roulette, an amazing song … about nuclear threat and government paranoia.
I tip my hat to the act of editing, but damn. Recent Springsteen boards show lots of people trying to do better, with many succeeding. There's applause for a guy who says the best editing of The River would make it a triple. A sweet baseline in all this is how Springsteen's own site lists the songs in a row without album or side breaks.
I say all this because I've somehow edited down my copy to a single album as well. After a month of vacation loading, car cleaning, apartment cleaning, music shuffling, and stereo examining, if you remember where I left disc one of The River, please let me know.
