Even a casual fan would have recognized that it was a Bruce Springsteen song blasting out of the sound system of the Cabaret Room at the Avalon Night Club on a recent Friday night.
The laughing vitality of Springsteen`s vocals and the baroque arrangement-played with gusto by the E Street Band-pegged the song as early Bruce.
”Straight from the Bronx/Hung off the line/She slips, she slides, she stomps, she bops/She bumps! She grinds!” sang Springsteen.
But even a serious fan would have been hard put to place the song, because indeed the song appears on no Bruce Springsteen album and was not legally released at all.
Even so, the song is legendary among Springsteen collectors. It`s an exuberant hymn to a dancer called ”Thundercrack,” and presiding proudly over its playing at the Avalon was the consummate Springsteen fan, Charles Cross, editor of the consummate Springsteen fan magazine, ”Backstreets.”
”Backstreets” is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the publication of a new coffee-table volume on Springsteen, entitled ”Backstreets-Springsteen: the Man and his Music” (Harmony, $24.95). Cross was in town to promote the book and to play guest host to a small get-together of Midwest ”Backstreets” subscribers and friends.
The book comes at a lean time for hard-core fans as well as the come-latelys. Their ever-more-reclusive hero remains out of sight, and it looks as if they`ll have to make do with the book for now, maybe for some time.
Springsteen`s last album (”Tunnel of Love”) came out in 1987; since then, besides some well-publicized personal problems, the only Springsteen news has been that he has quietly disbanded his E Street ensemble. The next Springsteen album could come out next month or next fall-he doesn`t stay in touch with his record company. ”It`s possible we`ll see something in 1990,” says CBS publicity honcho Marilyn Laverty. ”We`re keeping our fingers crossed.”
The Avalon-in the heart of the busy Belmont-Sheffield neighborhood-was a de rigueur stop for Cross because it was here, when the club was called the Quiet Knight, that on Jan. 24, 1973, Bruce Springsteen made his first Midwestern appearance.
Springsteen fans-serious Springsteen fans, like the ones who subscribe to ”Backstreets”-care about such things. They`re extraordinarily sentimental and chagrined only a little that their one-time cult hero is now the idol of kazillions.
Cross is bespectacled and friendly and refreshingly uneccentric. The world of serious rock `n` roll collecting is filled with weirdos these days-a recent issue of Goldmine, the collector`s tabloid, published a letter from a reader who collects Glen Campbell CDs and keeps them sealed.
Cross, by contrast, is a voice of reason and perspective. Over 10 years of ”Backstreets,” he`s done his best to put the fan back in fanatic.
”`Backstreets` is nonexploitative and not about his personal life,”
Cross said flatly. ”When I first saw Bruce in 1974, I did not come out of the theater wondering who he was sleeping with.”
Instead, ”Backstreets,” while a bit obsessive, has focused on Springsteen`s background, particularly the history of the Asbury Park, N.J., rock scene, Springsteen`s concussive live appearances and those unreleased recordings, of which ”Thundercrack” is only a very small part.
”People don`t realize how prolific Springsteen is,” Cross said. ”The Beatles recorded 300 songs in their entire career. Bruce has recorded 300 songs in the last few years. He recorded 150 songs for ”The River” (his 1980 double-set) alone.
”And for every `Thunder Road` (that is, for every released classic)
there`s a `Thundercrack.”`
Cross has an extensive collection of unreleased recordings by Springsteen, and an even larger collection of tapes of his live performances. Like many collectors, he is ambivalent on the subject of bootlegs-illegally reproduced recordings sold to fans at high prices. He can appreciate their appeal but laments their marketing.
”Early in his career, Springsteen was very aware of bootleggers,” Cross said. ”At least a couple of times, he started off shows by yelling,
`Bootleggers, start your tapes!` Later, however, he cracked down, once he realized that bootlegging was an industry that ripped off both him and his fans.”
The ultimate concert
Cross claims not to own a single Springsteen bootleg; his recordings, he said, are either tapes or record company acetates, the unmarked, often crude first pressings of an album. He acknowledges, however, that there are ”about 20” bootlegs better than Springsteen`s own five-album live LP set. ”Of course, there`s another 350 that are awful,” he said.
Cross has been a Springsteen fan since 1974, but it wasn`t until an epiphanic live appearance in Seattle in 1978 that put him over the edge into fanzinedom.
After a typically momentous show by perhaps the world`s greatest rock `n` roll performer at the height of his powers, the fans in Seattle, drained after three encores, were filing out of the building. Cross was turning to go as well when he saw an incredible sight: Bruce Springsteen, his band in tow, running back on stage to play final, farewell versions of ”Rave On” and
”Twist and Shout” to the stragglers in the audience.
It was after 1 a.m. when the show finally ended, and the Seattle monorail was down for the night. ”I made it home at 15 minutes after 4 in the morning of December 21. It had never felt more like Christmas,” Cross writes.
”Backstreets” the magazine started in 1980, and has continued quarterly since; Cross has devoted time to it in when he`s not at his job as editor of the Seattle Rocket, a music monthly. It quickly became more professional than the average fanzine-Cross is a designer as well as an editor-and even delivered a couple of scoops over the years, like the first news that Springsteen`s longtime guitarist, Miami Steve Van Vandt, was leaving the E Street Band.
”Backstreets” the book is cozy and affectionate. It does lack the song- by-song breakdown of Springsteen`s released and unreleased work that made the British book ”Blinded By the Light” such a must for fans. By definition a bit fanzine-y, the book lacks Rolling Stone-style lavishness in the photos, and the writing, besides the several contributions by Cross, who`s a pro, leans to the amateurish.
But the photos on second glance suddenly become revelatory: A great many are candid shots from early on in the career of a man for whom the word
”candid” has lost any meaning. There are many shots of the young, scrawny youth who, in a decade or two, shaven and brawny, would stand at a peak few reach.
More recent and relaxed portraits contrast with the sweaty and serious
”Born in the U.S.A.” era, or the courtly and weathered ”Tunnel of Love”
star.
The book contains as well Cross` own ”A to Z” guide to collecting, a complete list of Springsteen`s studio sessions, and an extraordinary rundown of every concert Springsteen ever played, from his first garage-band appearance in 1965-Springsteen, one suddenly realizes, has been in the business for 25 years-to a number on stage with Neil Young last June.
What does Bruce think of ”Backstreets” the magazine? ”He reads it-we know that,” said Cross. ”We have sources in his organization, his band, the whole shebang. People have seen it on his nightstand.”
Like most other Springsteen fans, Cross is just happy that the rest of the world has come around to his way of thinking. ”That`s how `Backstreets`
started,” he said. ”I was finding myself spending a lot of time explaining Bruce Springsteen to my friends. I finally thought that I`d just write it all down.”
