The Ned Wood Archive

If Anyone Could Help me with my Obsession

Listen to this amazing haul.  Dr Feelgood: Down by the Jetty; Bruce Springsteen: The Wild, the Innocent, and the East Street Shuffle; Lou Reed: Berlin; Cat Stevens: Catch Bull at Four.  OK, so nobody admits to ever liking Cat Stevens these days on account of his solidarity with our Salman, but back then he made cool albums.  Same as the Feelgoods and Lou Reed and Bruce.  So, I get back from scoring all this vinyl and play through these masterpieces and I try to work out how I’ve managed not to buy Born to Run.  The first week of term you spend half your grant on albums and instead of feeling guilty, you start wishing you’d bought a couple more.  I looked at me collection and suddenly there’s a big gap in it that I hadn’t noticed before.  Up to that point I knew I liked Springsteen and would buy an album of his one day but then, suddenly, the flood gates open and I have to buy them all.  Do you ever get like that?  And why did I buy the Wild, the Innocent and all the rest of it first?  When Born to Run first came out the year before, nobody knew about the guy.  They still don’t play him on the radio.  But slowly he worked his way into our consciousness.  I’d hear about him from Alex back home and I’d hear about him from one or two of the guys I knew at school, and I’d even heard about him through a hep cat on my course during the first year.  Well, he wasn’t strictly speaking on the course, he did Environmental Science, but we shared lectures and he looked like Brian Eno.  He knew I was into some of the same bands he was, so we’d chat between lectures and stuff.  In the summer holiday I’d spotted the album in Menzies and nearly got it and then when I went back to get it, some geezer from school had bought it.  Just a minute, it was Alex who bought it, cos he was bragging about how he got it cheap on account of Menzies never know the value of anything.  Bastard.  It’s weird.  I’ll buy stuff I don’t know whether I’ll like like David Bedford’s Stars End, but I won’t buy Born to Run.  And now I’ve convinced myself, I’ve got to get it.  So a year after it came out, and minutes after I’ve bought the Wild, the Innocent and the E St Shuffle, I catch the bus back into town and get Born to Run.

It is actually the Best Album Ever Made.  Every track is a gem.  Every track is crammed full of heroic guitar and emotion.  Springsteen writes for the ordinary guy, guys who’ve failed, guys who’ve just scraped by, guys whose only release is to get on their bike and drive into the night.  What do I know?  I’m no ordinary guy, I’ve never scraped by.  But he plays it all with such powerful chords, such a solid wall of sound, such inspiring might, that the average Joe he’s singing about is blown up into a superhero.  And it all sounds so romantic because all the every day American visions he sings about sound so exotic to us Brits without his even trying.  Screen Doors slamming.  Porches danced across.  Roy Orbison singing.  Jersey state lines.  Hoods of Dodges.  All foreign images.  All pointing to another magical land.  The images of wild kids on cycles meeting underneath giant Exxon signs, whatever an Exxon sign was.  Boardwalks, auroras, streets full of poets and losers, all alien and American to us, when to be American was still an attraction in itself.  In our wild, shuffling innocence, we embraced the hopes and dreams this guy sang about.  You can lose yourself in his lyrics and invent another country none of us will see.  You can buy his metaphors, but not yet know, because not yet knowing America, whether life is a metaphor for war or war for life.  And never know whether they are both just a metaphor for RocknRoll.

And as the Hungry and the Hunted explode into RocknRoll bands, the man invents a whole new wagonload of RocknRoll clichés.  And invents majestic music: soft infested piano, runaway American riffs, Sax like a killer in the sun to blow you away in the night.  Unforgettable, yet fresh on every listen. Oh, you know that it kills me.

And yet as you listen to it and the meaning sinks in and it helps you grow up, you realise there’s more to life than playing in the sun and having fun fun fun.  You learn that optimism has its limits.  You know there are some things you just can’t fix.  You can live in hell and not shake it off.  You can struggle and never be free.  You can love someone and not be able to help them, not have their love redeem you.  You glimpse the futility, the pain, of knowing that sometimes love is not enough.  Love can sometimes brighten your days, but it can’t always brighten your darkness.  All you can do is grab what precious light there is when you see it and make the most of it, burn it brightly, and hope its echo sustains you through the night.  You try to learn to walk like the heroes you think you have to be but you do really end up finding out that you’re just like all the rest.

Sorry.  I’m getting carried away.  Maybe it’s not quite that romantic over here in sunny England.