Bruce Springsteen explained that the lick for “Badlands” was taken from “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by the Animals.
During a 2012 talk at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music conference, Bruce Springsteen explained that he found the lick for “Badlands,” which appeared on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), in “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by the Animals. Then he exclaimed, “Listen up youngsters, this is how successful theft is accomplished!”
The video of the entire speech is no longer on YouTube, but there are segments available, including the video below, which is set to start where he begins talking about the Animals.
In the rest of the speech, Springsteen explained the role that music has played in his life, including Elvis, Roy Orbison, and the Beatles. He discussed The Animals, complete with an acoustic rendition of “We Got to Get Out of This Place,” concluding, “that’s every song I’ve every written.”
I found the story about the “Badlands” riff interesting because I had not made the connection. But one may hear it now that he pointed it out. Here are the Animals performing “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” on The Ed Sullivan Show. The lick appears at several points, including the beginning and the end of the song.
Here is Springsteen performing “Badlands” at the Pinkpop festival in 2009.
Can you hear it? He did not mention the lyrics, but one might wonder whether “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” also inspired the “understood” line in the “Badlands” chorus: “We’ll keep pushing ’til it’s understood / And these Badlands start treating us good.”
After the speech, Springsteen performed at SXSW and was joined onstage by Eric Burdon, the lead singer of the Animals (Chicago Tribune review here). So apparently there are no hard feelings about the larceny — or Springsteen’s comments earlier in the speech about how Burdon’s ugliness made him realize he could be a rock star too.
What do you think? Leave your two cents in the comments.
As regular readers of Chimesfreedom know, I am a Steve Earle fan. So you might imagine my delight a few years ago while visiting a shop in Galway on my first trip to Ireland, on the radio I heard Steve Earle’s “Galway Girl” from Transcendental Blues (2000), one of my favorite CDs. In this day and age of worldwide communications and travel, it should not be surprising that an artist is popular around the world. And Earle often has talked about his love of the country and Galway, in particular, explaining that he finds “poetry in the rocks of Ireland.” Still, hearing the familiar song contributed to making the island inhabited by some of my ancestors seem even more like home.
In the performance above, Earle is joined by Sharon Shannon, a fiddle and button accordion player who recorded the song with Earle on her own CD, Diamond Mountain Sessions (2001). In the video above, she plays the accordion, and she plays with a number of artists in different versions including the below version with Mundy. Her recording with Mundy became a national hit, and you can see why this rousing version is so popular.
Mundy and others have performed the song in the Irish Gaelic language. I found one version without much description, so here are “Kevin Mundy and Keith” (neither apparently related to the Mundy from the above video) performing “Cailín na Gaillimhe.”
With Earle’s song becoming an Irish classic, it shows that a great song is not limited by borders. Have a safe and happy St. Patrick’s Day.
What is your favorite Irish tune? Leave your two cents in the comments.
In the last few weeks, many have focused on Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Wrecking Ball. All of the news reminds me that there was already a great album with same name from when Emmylou Harris released her Wrecking Ball in 1995. The Daniel Lanois production and the atmospheric sound of the album created a career-changing sound for Harris. Allmusic argued that the album might have been the culmination of all of Harris’s work up until then, calling it “a leftfield masterpiece, the most wide-ranging, innovative, and daring record in a career built on such notions.” I fell in love with the album immediately, and seeing Harris perform the songs in New Orleans sealed it for me. Just consider three great songs from that CD.
First, the opening song on the album sets the stage for the Lanois production touch with one of his songs, “Where Will I Be.” The question asked in the song — “Oh where oh where will I be. . . when that trumpets sounds” — reflects a theme running through many songs on the album of trying to find one’s place in the world and the universe, whether it be with love, family, or something spiritual.
Later on the album, Harris showed her great taste in music by covering one of Steve Earle’s most heartbreaking songs, “Goodbye” from his Train A Comin’ (1995) album. I love Earle’s version but Harris is the only cover I have heard that captures the aching in the song. On the album, Earle loaned his guitar playing to aid Harris’s voice in creating a great version of the song with one of the greatest lines of all time about a past love, “I can’t remember if we said goodbye.”
Finally, the album also features her cover of Bob Dylan’s religious masterpiece, “Every Grain of Sand” from his Shot of Love (1981) album. In 2003, Harris performed the song at Johnny Cash’s funeral with Sheryl Crow. This video is from San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in 2010. Even though the camera is a little shaky, it captures Harris in fine form with Buddy Miller helping out on guitar (on the CD, Steve Earle played guitar on this song too).
And those are only three songs on Wrecking Ball, which in addition to Steve Earle, included guest appearances by Lucinda Williams and Neil Young with songs by those two artists as well as a beautiful cover of Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl.” I will not dare to say which Wrecking Ball album is the best, but there is certainly room on you iPod for both of these Wrecking Balls.
Happy Daylight Savings Time! As you set your clocks an hour ahead, you might consider the history of the day as well as an appropriate song. On February 9, 1942, a law passed by Congress pushed ahead all U.S. clocks by one hour for the upcoming years. President Franklin Roosevelt advocated the year-round Daylight Savings Time, which was called “war time,” as a way to save fuel for the Allied war efforts. The law remained in effect until September 30, 1945 when Congress repealed it. A similar national law that turned back the clocks for seven months of the year had been in effect during World War I. But after both World War I and after World War II, the wars’ ends meant that states could once again regulate their own standard times.
Eventually, in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act imposing a uniform standard for states to follow Daylight Savings Time, although allowing state legislatures to vote for an exemption. In the 1970s and 1980s Congress made additional changes to the law, including setting the time and date for when Daylight Savings Time begins. A 2005 law extended the Daylight Savings Time ending date from October to November, so now Daylight Savings Time begins at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday of March and ends at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday of November.
An appropriate song for Daylight Savings Time is the 1967 release “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers.
The song has been covered by a number of people, including Joan Jett, the Ramones, and Steve Earle (with Sheryl Crow). The song seems to be loved by some great film directors. Hal Ashby used it in a key scene in Coming Home (1978); Brian De Palma used it in Casualties of War (1989); Oliver Stone used it in The Doors (1991); and Spike Lee used it in Crooklyn (1991). The song appears in several other films too, including Remember the Titans (2000), The Zodiac (2006) and many others according to Wikipedia.
In 2012, though, the use of the song was back in the news. Lester Chambers, the lead singer of the Chambers Brothers reached out to fans because he and the band often did not receive royalties for the use of their songs. Chambers explained that he is living on $1,200 a month and relying upon money from a musician’s charity when all he wants is what is rightly his. The campaign has attracted the support of Yoko Ono and others.
The law can change the clock, but can it turn back time to give justice to Lester Chambers? March 2013 Update: Through help from Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, Reddit, Kickstarter and attention through various media outlets, Lester Chambers — who had faced homelessness and health issues — began doing better and once again making music. He survived when someone attacked him during a performance in 2013 after he dedicated a song to Trayvon Martin. In 2014, Chambers was playing with Lester Chambers and the Mud Stompers. As of 2023, he continues to perform and was performing with Moonalice.
What do you think if Daylight Savings Time? What do you think of Lester Chambers’s campaign? Leave your two cents in the comments.
“This is your last chance, and I’m not talking about one of those Major League Baseball Steve Howe kind of last chances.” — Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun 33 1⁄3 (1994)
Baseball pitcher Steve Howe was born more than fifty years ago this month on March 10, 1958 in Pontiac, Michigan. He died several years ago at the age of 48 by the side of the road when his pickup drifted off the road and overturned at 5:55 a.m. on April 28, 2006.
Howe had been one of the best pitchers in baseball, with highs such as winning Rookie of the Year in 1980 and saving the clinching game of the 1981 World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers. But it was another kind of “high” that haunted his life, as drug addiction led him to be suspended from baseball multiple times. He was suspended for substance abuse problems seven times, including a “permanent” ban in 1992, although the ban was eventually overturned on appeal.
Howe dealt with addiction from a young age, and his cocaine use was his downfall in baseball. Many questioned how many chances one should get in baseball, leading to the above joke in Naked Gun 33 1/3.
Howe played for the Los Angeles Dodgers (1980–1983, 1985), the Minnesota Twins (1985), the Texas Rangers (1987), and ended his Major League Career with the New York Yankees (1991–1996). In the clip below, you can see a young Howe being introduced before the second game of the 1981 World Series at Yankee Stadium with the other Dodgers. It’s a moment of great success, even though the smiling Howe could not know that within a week he would win the fourth game of the series and be on the mound during the sixth game when his team became World Champions. (video starts at 5:05 where Howe is introduced.)
Howe also could not have known at that moment how drugs and suspensions would destroy his career. Despite his demons, though, he still had talent late in his career, serving as the Yankees’ closer in 1994 and earning 15 saves. But that was his last good year, and by June 1996 the Yankees released him. Two days after his release, authorities arrested him at the airport for having a loaded gun in his suitcase.
He tried for a comeback in 1997 playing with the Sioux Falls team of the independent Northern League. The comeback failed, and he ended up in Arizona owning an energy drink company. When he died, he was driving from Arizona to California to visit family.
I cannot help thinking of his last year playing baseball for the Sioux Falls Canaries. He must have known that his career was over and that his drug use had contributed to that. It already had been a few years since he was a Naked Gun joke. What kind of hope did he hold when he took the field in South Dakota night after night following his days wearing a Yankee uniform in New York City just a year earlier? During the next nine years before he was killed in a car crash did he look back on his time in Sioux Falls with regret or happy that he still tried?
As noted above, some argued that baseball gave him too many chances as it was. He had talent and opportunities that few get, so I understand the argument. But I wonder if we should impose limits on opportunities when life’s chances and opportunities always run out anyway. Life is cruel enough, so maybe we should not make it worse.
Howe played baseball for our amusement too, but by the time he had burned up his talent, fans and teams no longer needed him and he was left on his own. And, as U2 notes, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own.” Sometimes you can’t make it with a little help either.
Do athletes get too many chances to make mistakes? Leave your two cents in the comments.
