By Steve Rhodes

I spent some time on YouTube this Christmas Eve and ended up watching the following.
1. Thunder Road/Bruce Springsteen. Live 1976. Greatest rock song ever. The piano is hope; the harmonica despair.
2. Thunder Road/Shannnnon lip synching in her backyard. “I guess bruce springsteen is all i think about.” The comments are priceless.
3. The River/Bruce Springsteen. Live 2003, Milan. The economy with which Bruce tells this story is breathtaking. Each line is more haunting than the last.
4. Badlands/Bruce Springsteen. Live 1980, Landover. Lights out tonight, trouble in the Heartland.
5. Backstreets/Bruce Springsteen. Live 1984, Toronto. Dreams, promises, faith, love, desperation, and betrayal. Tying faith between our teeth, sleeping in that old abandoned beach house, getting wasted in the heat. We swore forever friends.

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Posted on December 26, 2006

By Kathryn Ware

Listening to Christmas carols on Internet radio all day at work.
11: 07 – Man, Xmas carols from my youth suck. Carols to the tune of electric guitar, triangle, boing-boing bass, harpsichord and a chorus of generic white voices are the worst. And three decades ago while we were listening to these holiday songs, we (meaning me and my family) were eating iceberg lettuce and pancakes from a box. Ugh.
11:19 – Holy yule log, is Mel Torme ever boring! He’s like the William Hurt of crooners.
11:27 – Ah, my absolute least favorite holiday genre . . . adults singing like children. Nails on a friggin’ chalk board. It’s beyond me how this was ever seen as cute or charming.
12:30 – Yet another choral carol where it sounds like the group slammed a case of Red Bull and then SANG AS FAST AS THEY COULD!!!
12:33 – Followed by Elvis on quaaludes singing a verrry melllllow “Silent Night.”

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Posted on December 18, 2006

By Don Jacobson

“Do you know what you’re looking for? Will you know it when you see it?”
These questions, asked by the disembodied voice of a little girl, are the opening lines of Andrew Douglas’ love letter of a documentary to a certain downbeat side of alternative country music, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Most seem to think Douglas starts his fine film, released late last year, with these lines because they pretty much sum up what they see as its raison d’ etre – an attempt to examine the poverty-stricken white Southern culture that produced singer-songwriter Jim White’s haunting oeuvre of sparse, gloomy acoustic country songs.

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Posted on December 14, 2006