Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Deliver Me From Nowhere"

Stations of the Boss: Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Joseph Douglas Springsteen.

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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, filmmaker Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Warren Zanes’ eponymous nonfiction book about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska, is pretty conventional. But there’s an odd moment near the end that Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson and I did not discuss on our Pop Culture Happy Hour episode about the movie. While nothing in this barely-fictionalized account of a well-documented chapter in the life of one of the famous musicians in history could be called a spoiler, this is one of the few interpretive choices Cooper makes that’s all surprising or intriguing, so reader beware.

The scene is a coda to the film, following a title card that reads “Ten Months Later,” which I inferred meant that this post-concert scene was set on the opening night of the Born in the U.S.A. tour in June 1984. Springsteen’s father Doug (an underused Stephen Graham) is waiting in The Boss’s dressing room, and he invites his son to sit on his knee. Among his other gentle protests, Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen says, I’m 32 years old, Pop. But Bruce Joseph Douglas Springsteen (b. Sept. 23, 1949) was 34 when that tour began. I’ve probably misstated my age at some point in my life, but I can’t imagine that film as rigidly researched as this one, derived from an excellent nonfiction book and with its subject a frequent presence on the set, could miss a detail like that. I don’t think it’s an error. As I was watching the movie I thought it might be a clue that this a dream sequence. I went back and checked Springsteen’s memoir Born to Run to see if he made any mention of an odd occurrence like this happening on the beginning of the biggest tour of his career. He did not.

If my voice sounds a little odd on the episode, that’d be because I accidentally recorded myself via my crappy computer microphone instead of my Shure SM7B, a professional mic used by, among others, Marc Maron, who has a small role in the film as studio engineer Chuck Plotkin, whose name will be familiar to you if you’ve pored over 30-plus years of Springsteen liner notes as obsessively as I have. It’s only fitting that I encountered a rare recording-quality problem on the episode where we discuss the making of Bruce’s perfectly imperfect 1982 outlier LP Nebraska.

Meanwhile, my City Paper review of the film — where I go on a bit without getting into the weeds about exactly how old the now-76-year-old Springsteen was when — is here.

Stations of the Boss: "Tracks II: The Lost Albums," reviewed.

The only Boss I listen to. (Danny Clinch)

Bruce Springsteen’s curation of his own catalog has always been as beguiling as it is obsessive. Why, during the protracted sessions for his 1980 double album The River, did he pass over the many worthy songs that remained locked away until being compiled on the original Tracks almost 20 years later? While giving the nod to the turgid 8.5-minute ballad “Drive All Night”? And “Crush on You,” a D-list rocker I saw him introduce at a concert in Richmond in 2008 as “the worst song we ever wrote.” How did he decide to bury most of the 83 songs included on the new Tracks II: The Lost Albums for decades while determining that, say, clunkers from 2009’s Workin on a Dream like “Outlaw Pete" and “Queen of the Supermarket” needed to be delivered to his public immediately?

These questions are perhaps unanswerable, but Tracks II provides some clues. My Washington Post review is here.

Prattle & Hum: "Bono: Stories of Surrender," reviewed.

Unos, dos, tres, catorce! My review of Andrew Dominik’s film of the stage play of this book is one of the three pieces I have in yer Washington Post today.

Presenting "Christmas to Christmas," my XIXth annual yulemix.

In the assembly of each yulemix, I reach a point where I realize it’s time to stop. This year it was when I was about to put in the lady yelling “JUDAS!” at Dylan in response to a Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog joke. CHRISTMAS TO CHRISTMAS, the Charli XIXth installment, hath dropped!

ctklimek · CHRISTMAS TO CHRISTMAS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIX: Kid Santa Claus, or Project Dec. 2025

I managed to make on in 2016, and I managed to make one this year. Turn up! Those halls ain’t gonna deck themselves.

After the Tornado: Talking with Gillian Welch for WaPo

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch (Alysse Gafkjen)

I spoke with the great Gillian Welch about one of my favorite subjects — setlist-making — and about how she and David Rawlings put a (great) song called "Hashtag" on a (great) album otherwise populated by (great) tunes with titles like "Lawman," "Turf the Gambler," and "Howdy Howdy." For The Washington Post.

America's Ass: "There Was Nothing You Could Do," reviewed.

The about-to-turn-40-year-old blockbuster album that came wrapped in an Annie Leibovitz closeup of the Boss-terior isn’t any true Bruuuuuuuce fan’s favorite, but it was a cultural landmark all the same. I reviewed Steven Hyden’s new Born in the U.S.A. reflection There Was Nothing You Could Do for the Paper of Record.

Notes on Mellencamp

A Cougar in his natural habitat. (Myrna Suarez)

There were so many parts of my tet-a-tet with John Mellencamp a couple weeks back that I knew I’d never be able to use in the <1,000-word piece the Paper of Record commissioned but that I was loath to lose all the same. When he started, I told him that I’d been listening to his music for as long as I’d been listening to music, so it was exciting and a little intimidating to be speaking with hime. “Well,” he said. “I wouldn’t put that much emphasis on it.”

I told him how it was only in 2021, after hundreds of exposures to his 1985 song “Small Town,” that I realized the line I’d always heard as hate the city was in fact hayseed. Such a specific, regional insult! He told me that audiences at his shows always mime holding a cigarette to their lips while singing along to the chorus of “Cherry Bomb,” his typical set-closer: “That’s when a smoke was a smoke.” Only that’s not the line, despite the evidence of their ears and mine. It’s “That’s when a sport was a sport,” which he said he got from the caption of a photo of him with David Bowie in some British paper in the 70s, probably not too long after Bowie’s then-manager, Tony DeFries, slapped his new client Mellencamp with the regrettable stage name Johnny Cougar. (His grown daughter Teddi Jo still calls him “Coug” to roast him, he said.)

We also talked about the consistent placement of such excellent album cuts as “Minutes to Memories” and “Jackie Brown” is his otherwise heavy-on-the-hits setlists, and why he opens his performances — not concerts — with a clip reel of scenes from films like On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Paper Moon. I misidentified the director of the first two of those as Billy Wilder, realizing after I’d said it that they were both Elia Kazan films — but I pulled the name of screenwriter Bud Schulberg before his assistant could, preventing him, maybe, from thinking me a hayseed.

Completing THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT!

Halldeckers! Merrymakers! Gay Apparel-donners! It’s been another exhausting journey, but my 2022 yulemix, The Airborne Yuletide Event, is now complete in its two-sided analog entirety. And I only cheated on the length a little.

Longtime listeners may spot nods to installments past here and there, because to neglect such a long and rich and long and storied and long history would be ungrateful, somehow. But the vast majority of these 103 minutes — 54 percent of the run-time of Avatar: The Way of Water by volume — are comprised of entirely new old material. There’re even four actually new, released-in-2022 yuletunes strategically sprinkled throughout this most festive and beguiling of sonic canvases.

Listen close, my dear ones, and listen loud. Merry Christmas.

ctklimek · THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVII [Side B]