Tom Petty gone

[Sir C]

But no salt?

No salt.

On Sunday I momentarily was able to breathe through my right nostril for the first time in 20 years. It soon re-blocked itself but it made me wonder whether maybe, just maybe, my tubes might actually recover...

[Peter]

Astroturfing, as I'm sure you know, is when a practitioner pretends to be "down-home," local, one of the boys, country, etc. It's often a ploy practiced by corporations or politicians. They pretend to be real Kansans but in fact they're some sh!tfvcks straight from NY's Upper East Side.

Anyway, I must admit I was a bit wrong about Springsteen. I had thought that he spent some time in high school in California. This would have been another form of astroturfing: pretending that one is from blue-collar New Jersey, while actually hanging with the cool kids out in Cali. Now it seems that his *parents relocated to Cali, while Bruce stayed in Jersey. So he is at least from Jersey, and emerged from Jersey. At the same time I do detect a degree of posing there, particularly in the aggressive claiming of the blue-collar mantle. I don't trust it, in fact it annoys me. I grew up close to there, in Maryland, so he's always represented the kind of BS one has to reckon with in one's early days. Fake bards, ad-men, people trying to appropriate whatever is authentic in one's life...

I think I understand, although the message I am getting here is that you know you were wrong, as of course you were/are.

The irony with all of this is that his work is hugely auto-biographical. He is simultaneously accused of being boring because of this and fake because, well, he is claiming to be something he is not.

THe Jersey/California thing is pure laziness on the part of people looking for a stick to beat him with.

I am amazed people cant find more in his music to attack him for. When you have to go to the guy and where he grew up it feels like a losing game from the off. Some of his music is ****

[Burney]

No salt.

On Sunday I momentarily was able to breathe through my right nostril for the first time in 20 years. It soon re-blocked itself but it made me wonder whether maybe, just maybe, my tubes might actually recover...

No drugs, exercise, no fags, no salt and moderate drinking.

You realise you're becoming everything you once despised, of course?

[Burney]

I think I understand, although the message I am getting here is that you know you were wrong, as of course you were/are.

The irony with all of this is that his work is hugely auto-biographical. He is simultaneously accused of being boring because of this and fake because, well, he is claiming to be something he is not.

THe Jersey/California thing is pure laziness on the part of people looking for a stick to beat him with.

I am amazed people cant find more in his music to attack him for. When you have to go to the guy and where he grew up it feels like a losing game from the off. Some of his music is ****

Just cars and girls, though, really, innit.

[Peter]

If it's lack of authenticity you're after, you probably ought to start with Bob Dylan, tbh. A nice, middle-class Jewish boy from Duluth Minnesota who basically spent his early career pretending to have been a boxcar-riding drifter poet a la Woody Guthrie. A complete fraud.

That's ok though. Tapping into an american tradition is fine, particularly as he was from the back arse of nowhere. If you are born and raised in the posh part of Manhattan it would be a bit ****ing much.

Also, its Dylan. He can do whatever he likes and we can all go and **** ourselves.

[Sir C]

No drugs, exercise, no fags, no salt and moderate drinking.

You realise you're becoming everything you once despised, of course?

My plan is to exist (I cannot say 'live') like this for three years, then get bang on it again when I'm 55 and peg out at 60

[Peter]

Just cars and girls, though, really, innit.

Isn't everything?

His real skill as a writer is his ability to make the universal personal. Which is why a song about a dusty beach road on the Jersey shore rings so true with a chap who grew up in Palmers Green.

The car in a Springsteen song is NEVER actually a car. Its important to remember that.

[Peter]

No drugs, exercise, no fags, no salt and moderate drinking.

You realise you're becoming everything you once despised, of course?

Isn't that what we normally refer to as growing up?

[Burney]

My plan is to exist (I cannot say 'live') like this for three years, then get bang on it again when I'm 55 and peg out at 60

You're going to start wiffling on about how much better your new, straight-edge lifestyle makes you feel, aren't you?

[Pokster]

You're going to start wiffling on about how much better your new, straight-edge lifestyle makes you feel, aren't you?

He's started already