As someone raised with a half-working record player in the house, I think using physics to recreate the sound of aged and unplayable records is about as cool as physics gets. California scientists are hard at work on such a project, News.com reports. The results, especially from the older cylinder-recorded material, are amazing.

On the topic of recreating sound, the good people at the Stone Pony London message board recently discussed Sesame Street's Born to Add and Barn in the U.S.A. (audio clips of both here. Even though I'd heard both songs before, I'd never known until now about the early Born to Add cover art, which gets major parody points next to the iconic original.

In other news, EPE has released the full details on the '68 Comeback DVD, a big part of my expected good music week.

My introduction to music and flamingos came through Springsteen, not surprisingly.

The introduction was never even a B-side, with all of obscurity and none of the play or wax, just some ideological irony cut loose like a deuce or douche or something running in the night. But the magic of bootlegging saved it and made it alright, and for that I've been thankful.

The flamingo was born for me around 1975; Manfred Mann had formed his Earth Band and was about to make a psychedelic hit out of Springsteen's Blinded by the Light. Circulating the country-extended on tour, the younger was simultaneously reaching back into the elder Mann's catalogue and finding Pretty Flamingo.

Of course, I wasn't there. I missed the whole thing. Didn't even get around to being born for another five years. But when I eventually got into the old Springsteen tapes, finally there came the flamingo.

The song, as Springsteen sang it, cascaded.

All the guys … on my block … call her flamingo

And when she walks … she moves so fine … like a flamingo ….

The bird was unexpected but welcome. Even gentlemen who preferred brunettes could find their sympathies shifting under that light. And when the song faded gently, "Sha la la, la la la la, pretty flamingo …."

The end of the syllables were what grabbed me the most. Each trailed — "Fla-Ming-Go" — with the middle syllable almost curling up on the floor.

Where Tom Waits entered the picture was with a discussion of the Chamberlin 2000. Waits had bridged Jersey Girl and a whole new set of sha-la-las down the street to Springsteen. The Chamberlin 2000 was one of the first popular keyboard samplers.

Waits was talking to Jim Jarmusch of U.K. jazz magazine Straight No Chaser in 1993 when they got onto the topic.

Waits said he had used the strange instrument on the previous fall's "Bone Machine" as well as some earlier works. As he described it, offering as good a description as any, "it's a 70-voice tape loop, it's a tape recorder, an elaborate tape recorder with a keyboard."

Waits then got to talking about the instrument's complications, which include a bicycle-like chain among other parts. "It's like operating on a flamingo," he said.

"You don't even know where the heart is, nothing. If you touch there, you know, the world will end. If you touch this tape here, I dunno, you may lose your hand. It has that kind of danger about it."

The quote was curious because that dangerous flamingo wasn't the one I thought I was chasing; but it was one just the same, according to Waits, about 10 years younger. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe that flamingo was the one.

I had been reading Da Capo Best Music Writing 2003 a few weeks before when the bird had first appeared, deep inside a long Elizabeth Gilbert profile of Waits in GQ.

Gilbert had gotten him talking in a beat-up California bar about music and love and musical love, and in her rhythms and his words you could feel him mixing, cautiously.

Gilbert wrote:

He abhors patterns, familiarity and ruts. He stopped playing the piano for a while because, as he says, his hands had become like old dogs, always returning to the same place. Instead, he had fantasies of pushing his piano down the stairs and recording that noise. He is known to sing through a police megaphone. He once recorded a song in which the primary instrument was a creaking door. And on Blood Money, one of his new albums, he actually recorded a solo on a calliope–a huge, howling, ungodly pneumatic organ, best known for providing music for merry-go-rounds.

"I tell you," Waits says, "playing a calliope is an experience. There's an old expression, 'Never let your daughter marry a calliope player.' Because they're all out of their minds. Because the calliope is so flaming loud. Louder than a bagpipe. In the old days, they used them to announce the arrival of the circus because you could literally hear it three miles away. Imagine something you could hear three miles away, and now you're right in front of it, in a studio … playing it like a piano, and your face is red, your hair's sticking up, you're sweating. You could scream and nobody could hear you. It's probably the most visceral music experience I've ever had. And when you're done, you feel like you should probably should go to the doctor. Just check me over, Doc, I did a couple of numbers on the calliope and I want you to take me through the paces."

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, 'What happened to your hand?' And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle."

That's a good day of work. A bad day is when the right sound won't reveal itself. Then Waits will pace in tight circles, rock back and forth, rub his hand over his neck, tug out his hair. He and Kathleen have a code for this troublesome moment. They say to each other, "Doctor, our flamingo is sick." Because how do you heal a sick flamingo? Why are its feathers falling out? Why are its eyes runny? Why is it so depressed? Who the hell knows? It's a fucking flamingo–a weird pink foreign bird. And music is just that weird, just that foreign. It is at difficult moments like these that Kathleen will show up with novel ideas. (What if we played it like we were in China? But with banjos?) She'll bring him a Balinese folk dance to listen to, or old recordings from the Smithsonian of Negro field hollers. Or she'll just take the flamingo off his hands for a while, take it for a walk, try to put some food into it.

I ask Tom Waits who does the bulk of the songwriting around the house–he or his wife? He says there's no way to judge it. It's like anything else in a good marriage. Sometimes it's fifty-fifty; sometimes it's ninety-ten; sometimes one person does all the work; sometimes the other. Gamely, he reaches for metaphors:

"I wash, she dries."

"I hold the nail, she swings the hammer."

"I'm the prospector, she's the cook."

"I bring home the flamingo, she beheads it …."

In the end, he concludes this way: "It's like two people borrowing the same ten bucks back and forth for years. After a while, you don't even write it down anymore. Just put it on the tab. Forget it."

The postal service was very kind this week, at last giving me confirmation and rock 'n' roll visuals that I was where I was and I saw what I saw.

Last year I told you about my front-row experience at Springsteen's Atlanta concert and showed you what happened after the show.

But now, thanks to some hard-working folks out in Internet land, we've got a little proof and I've got more than a little giddy closure.

Please see Mr. Springsteen and I at the show.

Gives Essential Springsteen an 8.6 out of 10. This ranking is higher than the marks they gave the latest from Ryan Adams (2.9), the White Stripes (6.9), Fountains of Wayne (7.5), Jay-Z (8.0), OutKast (8.0), The Darkness (8.4), and Missy Elliott (8.5).

The remastering job is terrific on the Bruce discs, but we're talking about a greatest hits collection here. One should give The River an 8.6, not a Springsteen compilation. Where's the Pitchfork elitism I've come to know and not understand?

I know I wasn't liking winter this morning, but then I cheered up a little bit. I got Santa Claus Is Coming to Town in my head "“ the Bruce version, of course. And I got to thinking of Clarence ho-ho-hoing and the shaggy dog Christmas stories Bruce used to tell before singing the song.

Here's the story as told in Portland on December 19, 1978, and as now available on Crystal Cat's Paramount Night bootleg:

The bonus disc in the new Essential Springsteen release starts with the River-era rocker "From Small Things (Big Things One Day come)," and the song's lack of congruity is about as appropriate a start to the disc as one could get. There's a hamburger stands, an affair and finally a killing. "Well she shot him dead," the narrator relates, "on a sunny Florida road / When they caught her all she said / Was she couldn't stand the way he drove."

Who needs a good reason? That's the order of the day. On a disc encompassing tracks acoustic, live and soundtracked, the high-falutin' qualities of order and mixture come short in the shrift department. Prior to this point, the Essential Springsteen listener has already gotten two discs of his classics, carefully chosen for their artistic and popular weights. Disc three offers none of the same, for better or worse.

The soundtrack songs are the most experimental of the bunch "“ "Missing" tests a drum machine, "Lift Me Up" tries a falsetto, "Dead Man Walkin'" mixes acoustic with a darker backing. Sparser arrangements find placement back-to-back with full-band power, and the juxtaposition keeps the disc off balance. Rockabilly "The Big Payback" finds itself next to the live version of minute-rocker "Held Up Without a Gun." Before you have time to ponder the consequences of the global oil market, on comes a live "Trapped" from the We Are the World compilation.

The situation repeats itself toward the end of the disc, with the beautiful and melancholy "County Fair" wedged between a live "Code of Silence" and a live-in-the-studio "Viva Las Vegas" cover. A country blues version of "Countin' on a Miracle" ends the selections, spinning down the disc down with a high-pitched and lonely rattle. This final choice is simultaneousaly understandable and incomprehensible. While the video of this version accompanied concertgoers to the exits during the Rising tour, the lyrics strangely bring Sleeping Beauty closer to the Delta than she's ever been before. I'm not sure what to make of it.

The track most comfortable with its mission here comes in the middle. An outtake from the Born in the USA sessions, None But the Brave show a lush sentimentality no Springsteen record has seen since the River. The sax goes on what seems like forever, and nameless girls dance and slip away. The sound is both a nod to the shoreline past and a milepost down the road into a deeper darkness. Only one guitar leaves a real mark on the record, chugging alone like a rough motor in the air.

The mix drifts, but so do the lyrics, and to gorgeous effect. "Set in the bars and '70s circuit in Asbury Park," Springsteen writes in the liner notes. The setting is same as so much of his previous work, but there's a colder wind blowing down the streets: "Tonight now I see old friends / Lost in a game they've got no chance to win." Turn up your coat collar, he says; the town's fading out. Longing comes open-ended, searching to satisfy a dedication to what time can lose. When the phrasing streches at points, we go along and hope to catch a name or a scene before they all vanish for good.

The chorus offers refuge and honor to those who'd survive a world stacked against them. The lines slide down like raindrops on a windowpane, with gracefulness present and a mind quietly concerned with how each will turn out. Hope holds despite the street: "None but the brave / No one, baby, but the brave / Those strong enough to save / Something from the love they gave."

The two-disc Springsteen extension to Sony's "Essential" line releases in stores in two weeks, offering a solid retrospective and, unlike the rest of the line, throwing in a third bonus disc with B-sides, soundtrack songs and — wonderful to see — previously unreleased material.

I'll address the third disc in a post later today, but right now I want to focus on the first two. After all, dedicated Springsteen fans will take any and all new tracks. But get selective with the existing material and you've got yourself a fight.

At least the Essential title does away with any pretense of Greatest Hits. His GH release of 1995 was more a sampler than anything else. If you want Springsteen's real greatest hits, buy Born in the USA and download Hungry Heart, Streets of Philadelphia and Secret Garden off the Internet. That's all the hits right there.

But with Essentials, the record company is saying, "It's a sampler, only cooler." While any compilation is strange for an album artist like Springsteen, I can stand that admission. The track listing works through the material in efficient fashion, drawing on song that have typically receive the best reception on the tours of the last few years. There are some exceptions made for space reasons — all of Born to Run can't fit — but any attempt at variety must be welcomed after 1995's overreliance on 1984 (four songs from Born in the USA while only two from Born to Run and one from Darkness on the Edge of Town).

Still, satisfying everyone will be as impossible as P.T. Barnum famously said it was. Of the Sony Essentials line, I only have the Sly and the Family Stone discs so far. Although the album works well for me, it works for reasons the Springsteen discs won't be able to.

With Sly's limited output — a CCR-like hits stretch plus a healthy number of outliers — the album can be deep instead of wide. Stand and There's a Riot Going On make it to the compilation almost in their entirety and to very good effect. On these albums "the Family Stone nailed both sides of the countercultural coin — euphoria and bummer churned out in a blast of undulating, groundbreaking groove," writes Amazon reviewer stolenmoment. Not bad to fit that kind of narrative onto a compilation.

Fortunately and unfortunately, Springsteen has had 30 years of output without tremendous disparity in quality. Even the 1992 replacement band albums have their redeeming spots. With this history, the wide vs. deep equation gets drilled down to more minute levels. Forced to broaden, Springsteen's narrative choices drop down to the likes of those seen on Blood Brothers, the 1995 documentary of the GH compiling and brief E Street Band reunion.

The decisions were only on the margins: Should the then never-released Frankie make the disc? Should the rerecorded Secret Garden have strings? No and no were the answers. Despite holding a vote that went in favor of the strings, Springsteen eventually decided they "distracted from the narrative" and threw out his own poll.

With Essentials, the two-disc length extends the margins some but not much. Essentials may be able to capture the albums' flavors more than GH, but I think it will take a few spins to determine how well. How do you use the two-disc depth to do the albums justice without making buyers wish they had the albums instead? Halfway into the darkness is a difficult place to stop running.

The third disc and its previously unreleased tracks could be the final weight in the compromise. Album fans on this set won't get the second side of the Wild and the Innocent, and they'll only get a tenth of The River. But fans of albums are also suckers for what never made the albums. You know the old joke about digging half a hole? The task's impossible, no doubt about it. But if the digging's good, why would you mind?

Mix Magazine describes the production behind Springsteen's recording of The River album. Despite the ultimate double-record format, I'd argue the album stands as perhaps his most decisive work. Why? The article explains well: possessing options, options, options and the ethic to deal with them.

Hobo Spike was crowned Hobo King last month in Britt, Iowa. Unfortunately, there's no picture of Hobo Spike. I wonder if he ever met the St. Louis Hobo.

April 2000: After striking out at three gas stations and a Car Quest, the Northwestern road trippers finally got a leaky van tire patched for $10 at a St. Louis back alley repair shop. There waiting, I met the St. Louis Hobo. He liked to call himself a "train jumper" and liked that I was studying journalism at NU. He had been in a television documentary once.

He didn't look so good — the previous day he'd gotten hit in the face by a two-by-four — but he was in good spirits. He gave a big smile when he heard where I was headed that night. "Bruce Springsteen, huh? He's an all right guy."

Article of the day: One man explains how he and Bruce Springsteen have never met. In a cruel world where it sometimes seems like everyone else has met Bruce, I find a little encouragement in this man's story.

For as bad as it's been for me (had him stand directly above me in concert, met the band and saw him drive away, interviewed Clarence, had a coworker spend hours with him in a Bob's Big Boy, had a professor hang out with him in Chicago blues clubs, had my girlfriend invited to his barn, et cetera), it's been far worse for the man who wrote the article.