In school,
Bruce Springsteen was a discipline problem and an unmotivated student.
He taught himself piano and harmonica and meanwhile in high school he played
at local bars and clubs. In 1972 he signed with Columbia Records.
He came out
with his first album, "Greetings from Asbury Park N.J.", in 1973, and released
a second, "The wild, the innocent & the E Street shuffle", in 1974.
His next album, was "Born to run" (1975). The album, "Dancing in the dark"
won him a Grammy for best rock vocalist
In 1988 Springsteen
went on a six-week world rock tour to benefit Amnesty International.
He simultaneously released
two albums in 1992, without the E Street Band, "Human touch" and "Lucky
Town". An Oscar rewarded him for his contribution in the music from the
motion picture "Philadelphia" ("Streets of Philadelphia", 1993).
In late 1997 Springsteen
finished a record commonly refered to as "The Ghost of Tom Joad "The
Ghost of Tom Joad." There were some reports that it was even darker than
TGOTJ.
For a number of reasons
Bruce and Landau decided to put this new record on hold for the time being.
Maybe Sony was uncomfortable with the direction that Springsteen appeared
to be going, perhaps it was deemed a mistake to put out two quiet acoustic
records back to back. The first decision to be made was how many discs
worth of songs they could reasonably be expected to compile. The Box was
originally conceived as a 3 CD set with something like 40-50 songs covering
Bruce's career from 1972 to 1998.
Once they started working
with the master tapes from the original recording sessions Bruce and his
team ran into problems. Some of the older tapes were in such poor condition
that they were almost unusable. What started out as a simple job of gathering
the old session tapes bacame in the end a recording project on par with
many of the regular records that Springsteen had created over the years.
Springsteen appeared
at the annual Sony convention in Orlando and played a DAT recording of
three of the songs slated for the Box. At the time he stopped by the convention
Bruce was still telling Sony he would have 100 songs into them by the deadline
and that's what the record company was planning for. Around this time another
serie of rumours started to make the rounds In the end this is what happened,
Springsteen and his people just ran out of time. Too many of the older
songs needed too much work and it cost him time which he didn't have.
If these latest reports
are true I would expect there to fewer songs from 1972-75 than we had at
first thought because these are the songs that were probably causing all
the delays.
Another reason to
look for fewer old songs is that many of the songs Bruce recorded in 1972-75
were much longer than what he did later on. In the end I think everybody
will enjoy the Box but have the feeling it could have been better.
Bruce was a famous
and fabolous singer and composer. He is a very big man. His music is very
beautiful and maravellous. One of his songs are "Strets of Philadelphia"
in the film Philadelphia, with Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas.