Sunday's Guardian runs a mid-90s fax from Strummer (via SPL).

Bruce is great… If you dont agree with that you're a pretentious Martian from Venus. Bruce looks great… like he's about to crawl underneath the chords with a spanner and sock the starter motor one time so that an engine starts up — humming and ready to take us on a golden ride way out somewhere in the yonder… Bruce is great because he'll never lay down and be conquered by his problems… He's always ready to bust out the shack and hit the track… His music is great on a dark and rainy morning in England, just when you need some spirit and some proof that the big wide world exists,the D.J. puts on 'Racing in the Streets' and life seems worth living again, life is in Cinemascope again. Bruce is not on an ego trip… Bruce is actually into music. We need people like this… A lot of records today are made by people just to feed their fame. Bruce is great… There aint no whinging, whining or complaining… There's only great music, lyrics and an ocean of talent. Me? I love Bruce Springsteen!!!  Joe Strummer

That you, Boss? Hope so. Booted guy, now @springsteen_fan, did well.

In the Post story on a YouTube star, now getting requests: "It's like you are a kid playing with Legos and someone says, 'Build this house for me.' And you are like, 'Oh, okay, I get it. I'm in construction now.' "

Last week's thing was an attempt of sorts to get back to playing with Legos. To get out of a blockquote slump, literally and figuratively, start with a thought and pour all shapes and colors of loose bricks onto the table to see what you build. What results — a baseball park, a North Pole workshop, the house where you stay at the beach — is going to look ridiculous on the table next to the formal, instructed constructions, but at least you remember how to create. You remind yourself you can.

The thought last week was considering heart as distinct from self. The former's part of the latter, but they're not the same, not when a mind and body (and soul, as one friend added later) are in there too. Each of the self's parts also has to live in the world, and the heart, the most involuntary and reactionary of the bunch, has to work hardest to fit in.

The songs sitting in the back of my mind at the time and through the past couple weeks have been two from odd corners of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which I finally saw, years overdue. Early in the movie, there's Not for the Season (lyrics and concert video) eventually released outside Wilco, and I've been struggling to interpret it: "Summer comes and gravity undoes you / You're happy because of the lovely way the sunshine bends / Hiding from your close friends / Weeding out the weekends." Then chorus: "Candy left over from Halloween / A unified theory of everything / Love left over from lovers leaving / Books, they all know they're not worth reading / It's not for the season."

SongMeanings.net has no great answers on it. Says the most recent song commenter, "This song means to me that Jeff Tweedy is a freakin' genius." But another reader points in a direction, "The words are kind of depressing, but there's a kind of unexplainable hope in there." It's attempting to explain that hope that turns up a good try at a meaning. A Stylus piece says of the song, "The eighteenth century literary critic Motoori Norinaga coined the term mono no aware to describe Japanese literature that emphasized the deep impression of time’s passage and combined a serene acceptance of life’s transience with an appreciation of 'the gentle pleasures found in our mundane pursuits.' "

You know this blog and you know me — I like and fight with this idea. In an old posting, it was the almost-quiet of Springsteen's County Fair that caught my attention one night, walking in late. The annual arrival of the fair and its traditions — known too well, in good ways — are set against the last line (lyrics and music), home and holding the girl in the yard after the fair, "Oh I wish, I'd never have to let this moment go."

You clearly can't hold on, but you count on the fair and night returning. There are different verisons of Not for the Season out there, studio and live. I think I like the rock one the best, a beat ongoing. Audio is here.

But onto the other I Am Trying to Break Your Heart song that's been on my mind, a rare cover: Be Not So Fearful. Mp3 here, lyrics are here, yes.

Finally, the Hangin' Out on E Street video series gives me a favorite. After Gaslight Anthem, Pete Yorn and a host of others have produced basic and/or timid covers, new-to-me Serena Ryder makes Racing in the Street her own in just the right way. Across the top, the changes aren't too dramatic, but she tweaks phrasing throughout and the details add up to more. The end riff is also intriguing because it doesn't mimic the song's original solo piano play-out at all but works in the few seconds we hear it. Play that sucker out. Via Steve and Paul's Facebook feeds.

Anyone got a bed near Monmouth? Got news late Sunday about this:

Dear Mr. Patrick Cooper,

I'm pleased to let you know that your abstract titled "Springsteen and the struggle with the distributed narrative" has been accepted for the Glory Days Symposium to be held September 25-27 in New Jersey. …

Don't know yet if I have to write a paper. Hoping a Powerpoint deck and some good arguments will do the job. Guess I'll find out…

Folks have asked what was up with that one, so here are a few more details, crossposted from Fb: Springsteen held up fan signs for Hava Nagila and Blinded, asking the band to choose. Max quickly began the beat for the former, and Roy joined in. (Both make Jewish rocker lists, and Max has wedding and bar mitzvah band time.) The two went for about half a minute before segueing into Blinded. If anyone other than the Big Man had a chair, who knows how far they could've gone with it.

The BTX crowd appears to be not be counting it in the setlist, and they're probably right on that, not enough played. Had it been played all the way through, it would not have been a world premiere. See the setlist of 2004 Bruce Springsteen and Friends Holiday Show at Harry's Roadhouse (late show) and, courtesy BTX, the excellent mp3.

Between the clapping, the fist pumping, the hand raising, the chest drumming, the pushing away the drunk, the good neighbor drumming, the pogo-ing, the thigh drumming, and the sometimes unrestrainable need to dance, the quality of my photos tonight makes great sense.

Kitty's Back was everything I've spent the last decade hoping it would be live, and with the Phantom gone and Clarence ailing, the funk took a kickass rock turn. The Nils Joad solo delivered on its fan hype in his hometown (even thought I totally missed the fretcam while watching him spin around), and we all owed a Righteous Brother thanks tonight for writing Little Latin Lupe Lu, one of my all-time favorite Bruce covers and one of the reasons a word like "rave-up" must exist. And Rosalita redeemed herself from Fedex with tight grab-somebody exhaustion… Prompting it? Obama/Rosie campaign sign. Well played, random fan.

We also got a Hava Nagila intro to Blinded, like Kitty, Lupe Lu and Seeds — the solos sure help there — another one I'd never seen before (my songs-heard-live tally moves to 124). The Greetings craziness was way more solid than throwaway, and Max and Roy were all over the intro, representing. From the new album, The Wrestler was as expected the standout. Had been reading the setlists, didn't have my hopes up for What Love Can Do. Not on the album, a cover of Stephen Foster's Hard Times Come Again No More came across as a striped escapee from the Seeger tour, but I liked reading the lyrics later. "Many days you have lingered around my cabin door, oh! Hard times, come again no more…"

Thanks so much to Kristen for partnering in line-wait and rock. (For the many of you playing along at home, the answer's no, but thank you for playing.) We were dead center, my first time in that sound sweet-spot, happy a few rows behind the rail. Good to run into Matt and Andrew, sorry not to have seen Cat, J. O'Neal, Ken, Katie, and Russell as well.

Tired. Time for the hay-hittin' sleep-makin' early-wakin' legendary me. Now play a dream of what fretcam must've been like. Dream as fretcam? Dream dissolves into another: But she's so soft, she's so blue, when he looks into her eyes, he just sits back and sighs, ooh, what can I do, ooh, what can I do — crash! A piano falls on me, keys go flying. But I like it.

On Facebook, Mullman tags us and asks us to rank our shows. The fair introduction to his list: "I'm often asked, after ranting and raving about a great show like the other night, how it compares to all the others. I generally shrug and say the request is akin to being asked to rank your kids. They're all fun, and I've never once regretted going. But some are better than others. So here's my stab at a ranking. If you've been tagged in this note, take a swing at it." Okay, let's go.

1. Philips Arena, 2002. I needed a win. I never admitted as much in the blog at the time, but I needed one desperately. That Thanksgiving had been the worst, loneliest day of my life, angry from myself to my family to everyone I knew, and I had to bounce back or I had nothing. Got in line at the arena next to where I worked two days early, and it was some kind of fortune the GA check-in was the CNN Center door closest to my desk, next to my food court cheesesteak place, for the duration. Ended up in the front row, between Steve and Patti. Then found them down on the loading dock giving autographs afterward. Upon review of the bootleg audio and the DVD, Bruce was in bad, sick form, but I had one of the best days of my life that night. It was such a win.

2. MCI Center, middle night, 1999. My first show. I had Greetings and Tracks and maybe Born to Run at this point, but certainly not much more. This was the night that sold me, the night of the conversion. I'd sold my upstairs tix to the Post teen-sex writer, and With good buddy Jeff picked up 100s off the Clarence side downstairs. The set caught me with the extended guitar intro line to 10th Avenue and the ripped cities of Light of Day, and Trapped and BtR sealed the rest. 

3. St. Louis, '00. In the middle of an ice-snow storm down the Illinois highway, I spun a van with my girlfriend and all my friends in it off the road. I was fucked up but observably functional but couldn't write straight for weeks. Thank you to Medill's SPJ chapter for coinciding with the Bruce show, but I apologize to the Daily development desk and again to everyone I scared the hell out of. We sat in the second to last row of Kiel Center, but it was worth it. Rode the make-no-sense St. L light rail back to the hotel, where a dozen-plus of us slept on the floor. The spin may have given us a flat hours later, but we met that hobo — train-jumper, he said — in the back-alley tire shop and he liked Bruce.

4. Nissan Pavilion, 2006. Second row after sprinting from the gates. J. Freedom in the Post called it the most fun show he'd ever attended. Same for me. The Devils and Dust tour was underrated but Seeger Sessions was even more so. God bless the Miami Horns, the Chocolate Wonder and that grad student fiddler. The band was a real band, with a real leader, with all the fun those two elements produce, and getting out of Nissan parking within minutes and back to my apartment within the half hour was pure icing on a pretty night under a tin roof outside.

5. Toronto, 2007. Came up a day early for the ONA conference, met all kinds of cool people in line (shoutout to area French teacher Luigi, who among others stood next to me, held the line and helped me feel at home abroad), wound up in a surprisingly-but-awesomely young GA pit thanks to a deal with security chief Jerry and the lottery. Hot girl a few spots over, you wore the BtR lyrics T-shirt so well I bought it myself. 

6. Richmond, 2005. Like I said, D&D tour was way underrated. I was too young to see the Joad tour, but this got me close. No Mexican suite but all kinds of randomness that the audience had to take and do with what they would. Even halfway back in the upper deck, it was freezing in the arena with the ice under the floor seats. The rawness and the person you were with kept you warm. Most diverse crowd I've ever seen at a Bruce show (thank God) cheered for the prostitute sex/other love in Reno, the family on the run in Long Time Coming and the guitar slap of Promised Land. Plus solo Incident. And Part Man, Part Monkey.

7. MCI Center, October 2004. The finale of the VFC mini-tour, weird to describe to people who weren't there because I'm not partisan.  A try: You only get so many shows meshing all kinds of generationally great music, and I'm glad a friend bought tickets and we were separate from the division that banned going. Example of the crowd split? The couple next to us kept talking about '60s Takoma Park acts of disobedience, and the assholes in front us from Philly kept asking to dance with my girl. The Because the Night pairing with Michael Stipe (Bruce singing the his original lyrics, Stipe the Patti Smith ones in a Gender Studies thesis-worthy moment) and E Street backing Fogerty better than he'd been backed since Mardi Gras were straight-up highlights. The night also sold me more on Dave, sexier-than-ever Raitt and definitely on Cougar.

8. MCI Center, August 2002. Sat in uppers of the far end of an arena that at the time didn't handle sound well down there. Cool to be there a few shows into the Rising tour but damn were we far away and did the sound suck. Still had a fun with then-girlfriend, brother and cousin.

9. Chicago, middle night 1999. Went for free in the 100s, thanks to neighbor and friend Val's Sony/Columbia connections. Didn't know nearly enough about the catalog then to appreciate the random and rocking setlist enough. Also, jerks behind us that Val excellently put on her NYC attitude to yell at. Dudes, you may've been Chicago Police, but you were jerks. Still glad we took the El there and that Val shows up in my Fb news feed. Distant as she may be, she's good people.

10. Verizon Center, 2008. In the mid-level on the Clarence side, the Magic show where I was with somebody, hoping the show would be good for that person. The kid in front of us knew the words to all of it, gestures included, and we cheered for the guys from Walter Reed. 

11. Fedex Field, 2003. Screwed up an upgrade attempt, losing to ex-girlfriend's evil roommate, sat on the field but 90 yards away. Heard I Walk the Line, Paradise and Jungleland on a great summer night, but I still think the old school stadium encores were way overrated.

12. Gwinnett Center, 2003. Drove up after work, stood at the rail halfway back on the floor, talked Stray Cats with the dude next to me, got the Grammy snub jokes, saw security body-slam the fan who rushed from the back of the stage, had a good time. 

13. Lincoln Memorial, 2009. We only got one song, so I can't rate this higher. But we got the Lincoln and we got history. As a D.C. native, inaugurals are important, no matter your partisanship. After narrowly missing some Reagan events as a kid, this was my first inaugural event. Glad a good friend talked me into going. It's cool when there's a choir singing and everyone else on the Mall is rooting for your guy.

14. Is tonight with a friend and as yet unreviewed and unranked.

I went back and forth for weeks on whether to submit an idea for the fall's planned Glory Days Symposium. The idea started as a comparison of Springsteen storytelling to the evolution of narrative journalism into crowd journalism (with narrative existing now and crowd existing then, just in different proportions). Then it became more about how Bruce's life development mixed with change in storytelling challenges. Then it became how a storyteller living in the real world felt the content and connected/isolated identity pressures of that world today. And there it had to stop because with about two minutes to go before the already-extended midnight deadline last night, I had to submit an abstract. 

The worry that had sent me back and forth was being unsure how I'd compete with the academics who drive things called symposiums. I can do Powerpoint at conferences, but my longest college paper was at most 25 pages. And it was the longest by a mile. But the tipping point on this trouble was e-mailing the coordinator late Sunday night and getting a great, friendly response within minutes. Sure, he said, we've had some non-academics before who did fine, so give it a shot.

So, okay. Why not? Even if the abstract falls big-time to Harvard and Monmouth, playing with the ideas and trying to focus them was fun.

Anyway, if you don't know the reference (tight Main Point '75 audio and ridiculous L.A. '85 video with fortune-teller and bear costumes):

I stood stone-like at midnight suspended in my masquerade / I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigade / I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch / I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and came out with my soul untouched / I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd but when they said "Sit down" I stood up / Ooh-ooh growin' up…

Abstract:

The clouded wrath of the crowd is a lot more cloudy than it used to be. Enveloped in this century's wealth of societal conversations, we hide by fact, not by choice, and we have to grow in a paradoxically connected world where everyone and no one notices our story. Do we sit down? Stand up? It's hard to tell the actions apart anymore. 

The challenge for the narrative follows closely. How does the storyteller begin to speak for the masses or even for self? Cultural and personal lenses come in a diversity that exceeds our comprehension. Unable to take it all in, we each push a great deal away and turn inward, observing ourselves and publishing these observations more than ever. Technology for self-expression — in e-mail, blog, song, video, comment, or tweet — has driven the propagation of lenses and perspectives but also allowed us this placement in the narrative sprawl. The storytellers among us, the ones who want to look across the land, have to collect, interpret and filter before even beginning to create the narrative — and far before any storytelling can occur. 

The challenge for the storyteller has always been to live in the world, and now the world is distributed and crowded. For Springsteen, he's seen both aspects in his career but never at the same time until now. The wild, bicoastal cast of characters in his early work came in his first decade of music, and the true crowds came in the second. As the masses packed in, the characters became archetypes or angled examainations of self. 

But in this decade, as the crowds have stayed and as new-media researcher Jay Rosen's "people formerly known as the audience" have amplified themselves to new levels, we have seen Springsteen's song storytelling run in three previously unexplored directions: to deep character minutiae, to a place beyond character and — in a flip of part of the '80s approach — to self as angled examinations of characters. Springsteen the storyteller has always lived deep within the crowd, but decreasing visibility there has forced new narrative resolutions. 

While Springsteen may claim to stay away from the Internet proper, digital's social explosion and its narrative effects have clearly influenced a vinyl troubador's new stories.

Finally, the Hitler meme gets a Springsteen treatment. (Via SPL.)