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Saturday, October 6, 2012

Early Fall on the Lake


Every day, the New Jersey lake I live on looks different. As used as I am to seeing the same familiar stages of a season, every year there is something that I have never seen, or noticed, before.
I sit on my dock looking to the west, where brilliant sunsets stage performances, but it is nearly seven in the morning and the sun has only been up a half hour. The light makes the white trim on the west bank house shine as though lit up. My side of the lake will be in shade until at least noon, so huddled in hoodie and jeans I use a mug of steaming coffee to make the slight chill bearable. Usually a book, sometimes a laptop as my diversion, I watch lone fishermen soak their bait.
This particular morning, I see something that I haven’t noticed in the thirty-two years I’ve lived here. This time of year, pollen dropping from the trees, forms a green skim on the surface of the lake. Since the water moves west to east at slightly less than a half mile an hour, it drifts past my dock and I can take inventory of the objects that have joined the stream—a child’s plastic shovel, a volleyball from the main beach, a submerged branch with one stick straight up, breaking the surface. In the distance a wedge of geese scrape the tree tops of the mountain on the north horizon, skirting my lake with its protective swans.
This morning in the center of all this, a fish had leaped clear out of the water—bass, trout, or perch, I’m not sure. The concentric waves that break from his leap form the pollen skim into a swirl that reminds me of a far galaxy on a clear night sky, and I wonder, once again, why I have never seen anything like that before.
galaxy swirl

There is one lone fishing boat at the east end of the lake and I see him slowly making his way to the swirl, so I bound up the slate path to my house and quickly retrieve my camera. By the time I return, the boat is just a few yards off the swirl, so I hurriedly take my pictures.
Later, a large swan behind my back, a few docks down, is diving for vegetation on the lake bottom. His motion sends concentric circles that radiate under my dock and make ripples that race towards the eastward movement of the water. Fall signaling brown leaves slowly bob and I am reminded that my days on the dock will be limited. I try to push the thought out of my mind, knowing that soon it may be too cold to do this, one of my personal pleasures. Sometime later, I will replace this routine with tying on my ice skates, progressing to the lake’s next seasonal stage.

Our swans with their tiny ones.

Erskine Lake in early fall

Sunset in summer

Black ice awaiting skaters

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Bruce Springsteen in the Swamps of New Jersey


I like to think that I was there near the very beginning of Bruce Springsteen’s career. I first heard of him in the fall of 1970, owned a first pressing of his original album, and now after all these years find myself among a select few who attended the now iconic and legendary performance at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic during the Darkness tour in 1978. So that puts me in some rare company and living in New Jersey also puts me ahead of out-of-state critics because they can never really, authentically, have a New Jersey mindset.




Programs from the Capitol Theatre concert, top - cover; bottom - inside ad

Over the years I’ve seen a sampling of Bruce’s concerts from nearly every phase of his career and last Friday night I finally got to see a performance from the Wrecking Ball tour. This is the tour, I can safely say, that has seen more changes than any other Springsteen tour to date.
The obvious changes: Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, so essential to the “E Street sound,” are no longer with us. Since every musician has their distinct sound or musical footprint, Clarence and Danny can never be truly “replaced.” Their fill-ins last night did an admirable job but as close as they came to approximating the sound, you felt and heard it as different. The size of the band: The E Street Band has now morphed into a large ensemble rivaling the large collections of musicians in the band Bruce formed and called “Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom.” With Dr. Zoom, in those early days (early 70’s), most nights there was a band member on stage playing monopoly. There was no monopoly game on stage at Met Life Stadium (aka The Meadowlands) Friday night, but at one point I counted 19 band members on stage, and, at times, some would have been free for a couple of dice rolls.

Bruce used to start his concerts with a beginning, rave up favorite. The Darkness tour always stared with “Badlands” as the set main opener. Sometimes he led into the concert with a cover of another well-known rocker. In the Madison Square Garden concert on that 1978 tour, he led into Badlands with the Roy Brown tune "Good Rockin’ Tonight” made popular by Elvis I never understood why but he led into his concerts that way, especially when he had any number of great intro songs of his own, but he did and still does.



Last Friday night, Bruce opened with "Living on the Edge of the World," dredged up from the Tracks collection  then followed with the obscure "Open All Night" from Nebraska, warning everyone that he wouldn’t know all the words and dropped a number of f-bombs, while the crowd nervously laughed and covered up some young children’s ears.
He showcased a number of obscure tunes, including "From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)," a song intended for but not included on The River album. It left me with the impression that he somehow needed to get those in because at the end of the tour someone would proclaim that over his God-knows-how-many shows on the tour he had performed an impressive number of different songs. I appreciate his attempt to display his whole catalogue, but not playing "Thunder Road" left me feeling a void. Other nights got “Jungleland,” Racing In The Streets,” and Prove it All Night.”
This brings us to another point. While “Living On The Edge Of The World” is normally an interesting raucous filler song, great for the interior section of his concerts, as a lead-in it had the effect of weakening his opening. The reviewer for the Star-Ledger, Tris McCall, proclaimed this to be one of Bruce’s best concerts, and he’s probably been to some terrific shows, but he also admits to only joining Bruce’s career in the late 80’s.  This means that he isn’t measuring this concert against the Darkness and The River tours and is using the Born in the USA tour as his baseline.
"Open All Night" was reassuring and he followed that up with "Out in the Street" but then seemed to feel the tone was set and turned to a number of slower songs that sat everyone down.
In comparison, he opened the Radio Nowhere tour at Giants Stadium with six of his biggest openers that lasted for 34 straight minutes. Everyone was standing and dancing for the entire time and utterly relieved when he slacked off for a quiet number, allowing his audience to collapse in their seats to collect their wits and allow the oxygen to catch up in their blood streams.
Holding up signs to request songs is getting a bit old. I think he values the spontaneity over carefully considering what fits and what songs are better together, even if pulled from some back shelf. To his defense I’d have to wonder about all those zillion songs that never made their way to vinyl and ones we’ll never hear. If those songs never made it, what chances do we have hearing “Kitty’s Back” or “Jackson Cage” bracketed by other sensible hand-picked catalogue staples?
I was grateful for the biscuits thrown my way that night, “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street,” “Out In The Street,” “Lost in the Flood,” and “New York City Serenade.” It was also fun realizing as he ended that last one that if you owned The Wild and Innocent (album number two) that “Rosalita” was on its way because that’s how the two songs are grouped on the vinyl.
Having Gary “U.S.” Bonds on stage to help with “Jole Blon” was a stroke of genius leaving me wondering why Southside Johnny couldn’t be coaxed up for “Talk to Me”— admittedly penned by Bruce but a signature song of the Jukes when they released the Hearts of Stone album.
There were heart-warming sections, especially the nice touches with “My City in Ruins and the tribute to Clarence in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” Even though he alluded to Danny Federici in “My City in Ruins,” although some could be thought to have conjuring up 9/11 as well, it was a shame his reference to Danny couldn’t be more poignant, like using a song like “Sandy.” Maybe he feels he shouldn’t tamper with Federici’s classic.
I was thrilled that he reprised his Super Bowl “Ramrod” sketch with Miami Steve and I enjoyed “Bobby Jean,” especially now that I understand the song was written about Miami Steve, not a long lost girlfriend. (Bruce was feeling the loss of Miami Stevie when the guitarist left the band in 1984 to pursue some personal projects. (he returned in 1995)
When the pace of the concert slowed to a crawl I found my mind wondering and the thought struck me that this was a modern day version of a Glenn Miller, big band orchestra (especially with the large brass section). Bruce was more like an orchestra leader, using a hand instead of a baton, but essentially performing the same function. Glenn Miller had a clarinet at the ready and would join a song in the bridge, much like Bruce slings the guitar over his back and then pulls it out like a rifle when needed.
 There were no long-winded political diatribes in this concert. Several early tour attendees did remark that Bruce pushing his politics took away from their experience. Here it wasn’t Richard Gere or Susan Sarandon sharing their political expertise, or the conversion experience of Tom Cruise jumping up and down on a couch, Bruce’s early tour political spadework had the effect of a solicitation call during the dinner hour, something barely tolerated and nearly as annoying. I wondered when he was singing "Death to My Hometown," a dramatic song about bankers causing a hometown factory to close, if he had a balancing song that asked whether the town’s main factory was closing down because it was producing products that nobody wanted and whether the banker had been driven to the cut-bait moment by unions escalating their wages beyond a limit that priced the product over their competition.
Maybe he should have suggested something like how we shouldn’t be building any more gas-guzzling SUVs and maybe getting paid by productivity rather than seniority or position on a union roll call. (See the longshoreman union's destruction of the US shipping industry.)
There are many ways to gauge a concert. I had this gut feeling about the concert Friday night that involves who I’d want to share the concert with. One by one I was taking my daughters to see Bruce. The first daughter got to see The Rising tour. That was such incredible fun to finally get one of my children to directly understand my obsession with Springsteen’s music. Then, in 2009, I was able to get the second daughter to the Radio Nowhere tour (That’s what I call it although the album is correctly called “Magic”) The second daughter is the biggest fan of Bruce, and especially liked Radio Nowhere, so it was a tremendous thrill to have her there and to see it in the very beginning, kicking the show off.
On Friday night, about an hour into the concert when it started to slow to a slog, I revisited my prior regret that I couldn’t get daughter number three to see Bruce. She had to return to Florida just before this recent set of stadium dates. The timing will have to be just right, especially if I want her to see Bruce in New Jersey. (Is there any better place to see the Boss?) I thought had she been there next to me, she would have been horrified and underwhelmed and thought all my prior comments about how unbelievable his shows—no his “experiences,” had been over the years.
Happily he kicked it into another gear and the last two hours seemed like a typical epic concert of his. The question is why he almost rumbled to a standstill before going racing in the street? I think the only real answer is that substituting requests, and then playing “Death to My Hometown”, “Shackled and Drawn” and then not playing “Thunder Road,” “Backstreets” “Jungleland,” “The Promised Land,” “Atlantic City,” and “Growing Up,” he was leaving out the heart of the concert.
I absolutely love “American Land” and “Land of Hopes and Dreams.” “Wrecking Ball” is a flawed song and maybe it’s the fact that he’s reminding me that New Jersey taxpayers are still paying for the Giants Stadium that was knocked down—to the tune of $100 million of debt or $13.00 for every New Jersey resident. The old stadium brought in $20 million in annual revenue while the new stadium brings in a paltry $6.3 million. Consider that the Giants raped their season ticket holders for a one-time personal seat franchise to help finance the obscene cost of putting up a new, gray-drab mausoleum, a stadium that replaced a perfectly good stadium. It struck me as humorous, sitting there, that only the 1 percent-ers could afford to buy or build a seat so that Bruce ticket holders (more 1 percent-ers) could listen to a diatribe against corporate greed and the owners and CEOs - the other 1 percent-ers.


Parking lot 3 hours before starting time on ticket; 4 hours before the actual start

Last night was really a two-part concert. The first solid hour was a warm-up for the typical frenetic finish characteristic of a Springsteen concert. I personally enjoyed the older songs that I’ll never tire of hearing. Given that Bruce’s worst performance is still a whole lot better than most performers’ best nights, it was still a great concert. Having said that, this was not one of the concerts from my personal experience that I would put even in my top ten. I was still thankful for having access to the ticket, [thank you Kathi and Brian] wouldn’t have missed it except for dire circumstances, and it was completely worth the effort to get there. 
The night was balmy and even for Bruce in his home environs of New Jersey, impossible to dial up a better night on request. As Bruce said during the concert, his favorite time of year is end of summer/beginning of fall. Friday night was perfect. I don’t think there’s any place I’d rather have been than at a concert given by the Boss. Even though his concerts have definitely changed, he is still the best rocker to ever strap on a guitar and take to the stage.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Write Who You Are

The summer of 1969 stands out, apart from the other 43 summers of my life that have since passed and etched impressions on my memory. Two stand out personally: Woodstock and the Apollo 11 moon landing. 1969 had some other memorable events: Ted Kennedy's presidential aspirations went off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, the Manson murders, British troops were sent to Ireland for a few days that turned into decades.

Maybe everyone feels about this way about the transition year from high school to college or their college years. I think the moon walk and Woodstock were some pretty heady watershed years to bank my seminal memories on. The following excerpts are from two eBooks I am working on. The first is a narrative of growing up with  the Bruce Springsteen phenomena. The second is from a memoir/nonfiction book about the missing moon rocks brought back from the Apollo 11 and 17 missions.

Woodstock- from "A Notion Deep Inside"


The same friend I dragged to that first Springsteen concert at the Nassau Coliseum in 1978 had been to Woodstock. He said that night [June 3, 1978] Bruce was better than anything he had seen at Woodstock. High praise indeed. I never made it to Woodstock for a number of reasons. It's funny when people I talk music with wonder why I never made it to that musical Mecca if I'm so into rock, especially rock from that era. People forget that Woodstock was expensive.

Woodstock took place in August of the summer before my freshman year I college. I was getting paid menial wages for a summer job that relied on the heavy business days of the weekend. It was a health club and locker room of a high end public golf course. Prime time was early Saturday morning to late Saturday night and then early Sunday morning until late Sunday afternoon. Since the facility had to be staffed minimally during the slack weekdays, working hours were only given to the selected few who pulled the long weekend hours.

That summer I was behind the eight ball in my savings for college. As the summer wound down, I still needed to save every penny for college. Earlier that summer, my family took a week's vacation at the bucolic Maine cottage of my older brother's future in-laws. I had to beg the boss for that weekend off from the health club and then promise that I wouldn't take any more days off for the summer or get fired. Fortunately for me,  the Maine vacation  was the weekend of the Apollo 11 moon walk so instead of waiting hand and foot on golfers, cleaning up after their mess, polishing shoes and cleaning spikes I watched Neil Armstrong make history.

People tend to forget that originally Woodstock was not a free concert. As I remember, you could buy the three-day pass or single-day tickets. The lineup was a rock and roll who's who. Few big names were missing-the Rolling Stones, Dylan-but other than those rock icons, not many other big acts were missing. Even if you wanted to buy a single ticket, the choice of which day to pick was excruciating. The big acts were spread out. The decision became moot because the crowds just overwhelmed the fences and broke in and the famous announcement came over the sound system that declared the concert a "free concert." Magnanimous gesture, yes, practical, absolutely; nobody wanted a full scale riot of a million people.

But at first, the thought of about $15.00 a day or $45.00 for the three days seemed steep. Translate that from 1972 dollars and it was one whopping price tag. A normal concert at the time cost about $4.50. Tickets at Central Park during the summer for many of the same acts cost $2.00. The argument was that $15.00 was steep but very economical for such an all-star lineup of rock and roll acts.

Couple the expense of that concert plus the three days of work that I would miss, about 28 hours at $2.00 an hour, or $56.00, one giant financial hit I would take. Plus, the timing was bad because I still didn't have enough money saved for college and this was in the middle of August. I would have to lay out that money and, getting fired, not have the ability to earn another two paychecks before I'd have to leave for college. Add to the ticket price travel costs, food, gas and parking. It was the perfect storm of rotten luck and I thought that there would be more concerts just like Woodstock. I was wrong.

I remember watching Johnny Carson that weekend Arlo Guthrie, who had performed and had been helicoptered interviewing out because the roads were so jammed, bubbling over  with  enthusiasm, almost jumping out of his seat declaring "The Thruway, is CLOSED, man."  At that point, I realized I had missed the concert event of the century and also possibly the concert event of a lifetime. In a way, Bruce Springsteen made up for all that. I didn't have to lose money, starve, suffer soaked to the bone, hassle  with  ridiculous crowds, and put up  with  untold filth. Not that I wouldn't have done it. I just didn't have to put up  with  all that to listen to the best rock of my age.  I'm reminded that "someday we'll look back and it'll all seem funny."

The moon walk- from "Lost from Space"


Landmark events indelibly mark our memories and we recall years later where we were when the impression was made. I was in seventh grade when our principal, tears streaming down her face, burst into our classroom and stunned us with the news that President Kennedy had been shot. Six years later, by the time Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had been strapped into their Apollo command module that Friday in July, 1969, I had probably finished tossing the last items in the family station wagon for the trip to a Maine beach house for the week. There were a number of parallels.

My brother met his future wife in college as a sophomore and his fiancé's parents had a charming but Spartan cottage on a small peninsula on the southern coast of Maine near Kennebunkport, called Biddeford Pool. The oceanfront structure was separated from the surf by about 100 yards of tall, waving dune grass and walking that deserted, pristine shore line was both  therapeutic and cathartic. I was either too young or had too few issues to take full advantage of the cathartic properties but a walk for a mile or two in either direction while only meeting a handful of people allowed plenty of time for thinking.

I remember working at my summer job in the golf course club house and seeing the Apollo rocket lift off and then the boss barking at us to get back to work. While the astronauts were starting their 60 orbits and 240,000-mile journey to the moon, I was working my last day before going home, sleeping, and putting the finishing touches on the vacation packing.

To get to Maine was a process of deciding what to take without overloading the family Chevy; all five of us and everybody's stuff had to fit, allowing for everyone's comfort over an 8-hour drive. We were travelling into the unknown; we had never before stayed in a tiny Maine beach house.

The journey was smooth but cramped and we were delighted by the sight of the cute red cottage and the chance to stretch our legs, the drive made longer by the excitement of anticipation. The entrance door opened into the tiniest of foyers and immediately into the galley kitchen with a counter open to a small dining room that transitioned into a Lilliputian living room, a fireplace anchoring the far end. On one side of the knotty pine-paneled room was a large window that displayed the ocean and dunes as a neatly detailed picture. 

On the small table, just to the side of the window, a tiny black and white television set with rabbit ear antennae stared back at us. I didn't recall ever seeing TV sets that small but we were on vacation in Maine so network programming wasn't the foremost thing on our minds. Sparse technology in either the kitchen or the bathroom would be more of a problem. I recall being relieved because I knew that this rustic retreat at least had something to view the lunar landing, not sure what exactly that viewing would be.

At some point, that Maine television was finally turned on and after seeing the reassuring TV spokesman, Walter Cronkite, at his table explaining things with a collection of plastic models, we settled back for what we thought would be an exciting evening of watching men finally walk on the moon.

Nobody had told us until Walter confided that we would not "see" the landing and that once the craft touched down, the astronauts would sleep for six hours before actually getting out and walking around. We thought that this would be just like Flash Gordon. The rocket touches down, they turn off the engine, open the door, scramble down the ladder, and with space guns pointing in several directions, they take a look around.

What we really got was different by huge measures. On the screen was this gray drawing of nothing, really, sometimes a vague shot of the Lunar Excursion Module (LM) with  its spidery legs and other times dotted flight lines showing where they came from. These shadowy drawings were presented  with  a soundtrack of the radio transmissions from Houston to the LM, now descending to the lunar surface from 60 nautical miles above. For all we knew, these crude clever artworks were probably gray on color TV sets and why in the world do you use nautical miles in space?

The transmission went exactly like this:

CC:       That's affirmative.
LMP:      Like - AGS to PGNS align.  Over.
CC:        Say again?
LMP:      Like an AGS to PGNS align.  Over.
CC:        Roger. We're standing by for it.
LMP:      ....quantity...
CC:        Eagle, Houston. You are STAY for T2.  Over.
CC:         Correction, you're  -  -
LMP:      Roger.  STAY for T2. We thank you.
CC:        Roger, Sir.
CC:        Tranquility Base, Houston. We recommend you exit
             P12.  Over.
CDR:      Hey, Houston, that may have seemed like a very long
              final phase. The AUTO targeting was taking us right
              into a football-field sized crater, with a large number
              of big boulders and rocks for about... one or two
              crater diameters around it, and it required a ...
              in P66 and flying manually over the rock field to find
              a reasonably good area.
CC:        Roger. We copy. It was beautiful from here,
             Tranquility. Over.
LMP:      We'll get to the details of what's around here,
             but it looks like a collection of just about every
             variety of shape, angularity, granularity, about
             every variety of rock you could find. The colors
             -  Well, it varies pretty much depending on how
             you're looking relative to the zero-phase point.
             There doesn't appear to be too much of a
             general color at all. However, it looks as though
             some of the rocks and boulders, of which there
             are quite a few in the near area, it looks as
             though they're going to have some interesting
             colors to them.  Over.
CC:        Roger.  Copy.  Sounds good to us, Tranquility.
             We'll let you press on through the simulated
             countdown, and we'll talk to you later.  Over.
CDR:      Roger.

The techno-geek speech was exciting. We were listening to conversations that we had no idea what was being said and, in that moment, wrapped up in probably the most dramatic exploration experience since Columbus clanked ashore wearing equipment as heavy as these astronauts. This was about as exhilarating as it could get. In comparison, none of the networks were there on San Salvador Island in the Caribbean to interview Columbus and he had no ability to twitter anyone so we'll be left guessing as to what really happened.

That touchdown was stunning and exciting, a lot like few other moments that just we supposed couldn't be happening, similar to beating the Russian hockey team in 1980 but without Al Michaels yelling, "Do you believe in miracles....Yes!"

Back on the moon, our guys assured us that there were no little green men and no evidence of any green cheese anywhere; we were staring out at what was called "magnificent desolation" and the endless expanses of gray, with dots of distant craters and boulders was fascinating, especially to all those viewers who thought a trip to a Maine beach was a big deal. This was heady stuff. The next day 
60 percent of the world news coverage concerned the landing.

The first day, we were treated to cartoon pictures and plastic models juggled by Cronkite, a bit like Andy playing with Woody and Buzz Lightyear and we were entranced. The promise of more than that type of viewing brought us back the next day when the astronauts would actually leave the vehicle on the first ever, Extra Vehicular Activity- EVA. They took hours to get dressed, longer than your high school prom date, but Armstrong eventually made it down the ladder to plant his paw print and we were riveted, watching all this unfold.

The first descriptions satisfied years of pent-up curiosity and at about the 28th gray rock being described probably 30 percent of that world audience went back to the killing and famines and whatever the particular horror the day was and rest of us continued be frozen in front of the tube.
I imagined that people were sitting in front of their sets like it was fourth down and inches, yelling at the coach to go for it; just pick up the damn rocks. What if something weird like a solar flare up or that monster-in-the-sand's fin could be seen? They would have had to scramble back up the ladder, get back in the LM, blast off and get out of there without having anything to bring back.

That weekend, I walked the extremely wide expanses of the beach, trying to wrap my mind around what had just happened, looking for different shades of sea glass and shells, occasionally popping them into a pocket, eventually discarding the first pretty ones for even more pretty ones. I had some ideas in back of my head what I would do with  them when I got back to New Jersey but they were rather vague plans, easily discarded a day after returning from vacation, when my attention was recaptured by the daily routine of working and living day to day.  Eventually those highly- regarded-at-the-time objects would be located in a forgotten part of the rock garden. Where those shells were forty years later, I couldn't tell you. That was another parallel I had with Neil and Buzz but that explanation's a bit complicated.  

Both events left lasting impressions that I am reminded of every time their anniversaries come up. The events fuel my imagination and I enjoy the opportunity they give me to write about how they affect me and my outlook on life. This is rather a dictum of not "write what you know" but rather "write who you are."

for additional reading about the "Lost Moon Rocks"  http://tinyurl.com/86478tz

more about my writing:  http://gregbmiller.webs.com

Friday, August 3, 2012

Fellow Prisoners of Rock and Roll


Conditions were perfect for an outdoor evening concert at Ramapo College last night but the cherry on top was the B Street Band, the longest running Bruce Springsteen tribute band, bringing life to selections from Springsteen’s repertoire. Every so often, at day’s end, you characterize the past 24 hours as one of your better days.

Since I work four-day weeks—four long days—Thursday nights are my Friday nights. Knowing I wouldn’t have to drag my carcass out of bed this morning, combined with wonderful music, the Boss’ music, fantastic weather—the moon didn’t need to be full, but it was—and the company of good friends, saturated this Thursday night experience with good karma.

I worked my way around the back of the band shell moments after the performance, located the open door, waded through backstage clutter, and found the band unplugging and packing for their next gig. There was no need this time to wheedle my way through layers of security using a press pass and fast talking.

            I finally got to meet William Forte, owner-performer of the B Street Band, face to face and he graciously introduced me to the lead singer, Bruce-mimic, Glenn Stuart. I had been exchanging emails with the band and had explained although my Springsteen ebook is temporarily moth-balled, I want to finish the few remaining interviews. The urgency to get the book out is waning but, before I put A Notion Deep Inside into suspended animation, I need to complete the writing.

I also know how hard these guys work and how busy their schedule is—too much to even think of interviewing them before or after a gig. I only wanted to connect the faces, meet an email connection, and lay the groundwork for future interviews with them.

The first thing you need to know is when I walked onto the stage last night their joy was palatable. My first impression was how envious I was that these people were loving what they do to the point where you felt the joy envelope you as if you walked into a wet mist. Sweat was pouring off William’s head but he was beaming like a Buddha, having ridden the high of a 2-hour concert.

“Great performance,” I said, pumping his outstretched hand.

“Could you hear us out there?” William said, worrying about their projection.

William Forte

I was seated two-thirds of the way back in the audience and had no problem with the sound so I assured him it was just fine. Their rendition of Jungleland had the full wall of sound familiar to Springsteen fans, yet I could clearly make out Stuart’s elocution of Bruce’s raspy, throaty style above the boom of the drums and the wail of the saxophone.

Glenn bounded across the stage. “This is the guy writing the book?” As he extended his handshake, I was a bit surprised that he could still bounce like that after two hours singing with no break. He looked like he could do two more.

Glenn Stuart

“Greg Miller,” I said, barely omitting “Bergen Record,” the standing greeting from the old days. (There is always a conscious need as a reporter to identify yourself immediately so that, one, you warn them everything they say from that point on might be “on the record” and, two, you want them to know, from the start, exactly where their utterances might appear, as opposed to appearing in a free shopper, a small, weekly newspaper, personal blog or website. In this case, they immediately connected me to my purpose but “Bergen Record,” as it was called in the old days, almost slipped out from habit. I had this déjà vu of my old reporting days, a warm fuzzy familiar feeling that never lose when I interview. In this case, it was neither of the two warnings.)

Besides personal time travel, last night also allowed me to stockpile questions for their future interviews. The last time I had seen them perform was the summer of 2010 at same venue. At the time, I had no idea I would write a 70,000-word ebook on Springsteen, so I was delighted when my friend, Donna reminded me last week they were playing again at Ramapo.

I told Glenn the story about the first time Bruce had played Madison Square Garden, a performance that came during the Darkness tour in 1978. I hadn’t remembered that performance until last night when the band started into Jungleland and sang the opening lines, “The Rangers had a homecoming.” It brought me back to 1978 and a booming thunderous response at the Garden, home to ice hockey’s New York Rangers.

Glenn looked at me and said, with a twinkle in his eye, “I was at that performance!”

“And you remember that, right?”

“Yeah, yes I do,” he said. A repeat of the common bond all Springsteen fans have, of having been at the same performance and having felt the same emotions. We were both prisoners of rock and roll.

Last night alerted me to all the conveniences of a B Street Band concert. Getting to Ramapo was so easy. Parking wasn’t frenzied. You could sit anywhere and on anything (I suppose if you brought a pickup truck nobody would object to unloading a couch and end tables. Some dinner spreads had everything but the candelabra.) You could bring in whatever you wanted to eat or drink. And, huge bonus, last night’s concert was free. Last night, you didn’t need a ticket, you just got on board.

The B Street Band 

Even if you are not a devoted Springsteen fan, you must see the B Street Band perform. Please visit their website: http://www.bstreetband.com/  to view their performance schedule. 

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Write the Query Letter First


I have finally come to an epiphany about starting a novel. I am within a few words of finishing my third. I personally think the key is the query letter. The key, that is, if you want your novel published. Self-publishing is a whole other consideration.

My first novel was a whopping 121,000 words and I found it very difficult to boil all that down to the 250-275 words total that would be the limit for a query letter. My second novel was 90,000 words. I had the same problem. My third, almost finished is 55,000 with about 10,000 words to go. My forth is planned for about 95,000 words.

The query letter needs to introduce the key items of the plot without giving away the climax and the solution. The key highlight is pointing out what is at stake for the protagonist and what are the obstacles that he/she must overcome. That differs depending on the genre, but the query letter must have that in the most economic number of words and the letter must contain the best writing of your life.

Think of the query letter as being the ultimate “show-don’t tell.” If the letter is poorly written, has typos, and contains mistakes in spelling, the agent or publishing house has to assume the manuscript is just like the query letter. You have 250 words and maybe 30 seconds. They will know immediately if it is for them. They are under a crunch for time so unless the idea is obviously spectacular and unique, they are looking for ways to disqualify the submission and might not even finish reading to the end of your letter. Sounds cruel, but it’s the fact of life. No matter how engaging your letter is  −  your story about zombie  − werewolf teenagers biting classmates’ necks on a date - if you send it to the wrong place or if it reads like a10-year-old who can’t spell, you’re done.

I’ve droned on enough about the nature of the query letter, but here is the real key: write the query letter first, AND THEN write the novel. Sounds backwards but I have found it so much easier. You distill your idea down to its essence and you have a clear picture of what your story is and what’s at stake. You might change things in the actual writing but then you can easily go back a tweak the query letter.
If someone asks you what you are writing about, you can relate the story right back to them without hemming and hawing and tangents. In 30 seconds, they know all they need to know. If they want details, they will ask you questions and you can clarify. This is also a good exercise in verbal pitching. Think about it − if you don’t know exactly what you’re writing about and are not able to verbalize it simply and in a straight forward manner, you can hardly expect anyone else, specifically agents and publishers, to want to read your novel.

Now, sit down, and write that query letter.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

More on the Book Trailer


This has been quite a week in my writing life. For reasons I'll save for later, this is a week that I may look back forever and say it marked a turning point.

I had an opportunity to show the book trailer to my local chamber of Commerce. My daughter and I had collaborated on a video mash up promoting Baltimore as a place to retire (Inner Harbor). We took two dogs of a video, and combined the best scenes, substituted some of our own original photography, and video swapped out the pathetic sound track with an appropriate killer track, and boom, we had a great video. We showed our local chamber that this is the kind of video we could create for our town.

As an example of the video editing prowess of my daughter, Liz, I showed them the two minute book trailer for The Fastnacht League, my book. Now I need to remind you that there are a number of flaws in that video. But those flaws are known only to Liz and me because we have seen the video countless number of times.

For instance, we know that in one instance the words do not match the image. We also know that one of the clips we used is too short to convey what we want. But these things are known only to Liz and me. When we showed the video to the group, they were absolutely blown away.

I am starting to understand another problem with book trailers. The first problem, and the one made known to me by my writing mentor, was that book trailers attempt to mimic movie trailers and give away too much information. We were very, very careful with this video NOT to do that. In fact, we were too subtle in the first versions; nobody could understand what we were talking about. That all changed when we put the 1873 baseball game shots into the video story.  The second problem seems to be that the video was too effective, if that is at all possible.

The "star" of the video

They wanted to know when the movie was coming out. A little voice inside of me was laughing his head off. Another little guy in my head was wishing I had this full-length movie all completed. I immediately came right back to earth when the next question was asked:  How much will it cost to do this for us?




You can view the trailer at   www.amishandbaseball.com on the trailer tab.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Making the book trailer


I am far from being an expert on the subject but, having just gone through the excruciating process of creating my first book trailer, I am sure any advice I pass along could be valuable.

There are a number of reasons why making a book trailer can be beneficial to your writing, even if you never post it on the net. One benefit is that it forces you to focus on the key elements of your writing. My trailer is for a fiction novel.

When I finished my novel and then had to write a query letter, I ran into all sorts of problems. I had to condense the plot of an 88,000-word novel into a single page of less than 250 words. It took me eight weeks and about that many emails to my mentor to get it to the point where I considered it acceptable. I was lucky to have a great mentor and he kept rejecting it until I was forced to get it right. In fact, after the first month and four tries I was so angry and frustrated that I gave it a rest for about six weeks. Then my mentor and I started the arguments again. The second round I was finally on the right track and the last three revisions were just fine tuning.

I thought this post was about constructing the book trailer? It is. I found out that the book trailer is pretty much like the query letter but even more condensed. In fact, it gives even less away. In a query letter, you don’t give away the whole plot, just enough essentials to make the agent or publisher curious enough to ask for some or all of the manuscript.

It’s the same thing with the book trailer. How many times have you sat in the theatre and watched movie previews that gave away everything? So many times I’ve sat there and thought to myself that I didn’t need to see the movie now that I had seen the trailer.

I’d also venture to say that a picture is worth a thousand implied words. A quick count of the words in the trailer reveals that I used only 58 words, 66 if you include the title and my by line. So from 88,000 to 275 to 58. Quite a distillation.

Here is how I made it. From the query letter I picked out what images I would need to highlight the main points of the plot. In my case, it involved farm scenes of plowed fields, corn and hay. So I drove the three hours to the farm area where I grew up and filmed lots of field images. By luck, some people and objects (I don’t want to spoil the trailer, unless you want to view it first and then come back to this discussion) wandered into view and I was able to capture them on film. I drove to the actual setting of the book and got some real specific images.

After a review of what was usable, I located some background music. This beta version of the trailer on my website will not be used in the final or in the YouTube version. I will use a very simple piano part that I own the rights to. Find a friend and get them to tinkle on the keyboards, hook Audacity up to your recorder, iPhone, and video camera, whatever and download it so it’s digitized. I then moved the images around to match the music.

I wrote all the word slides which are basically parts of the query letter that I wanted to feature. I moved them around with the pictures until they made sense and used fades and overlays.
After my family watched the trailer several times I used their feedback to rearrange some of the images and change some of the timing and punctuation of the word slides. Something was missing and we figured out that there were no people in the movie. Because of another spoiler alert, I can’t tell you exactly what it was but we found out a particular event would be taking place in our town in three days, and that event would supply all the people images we would need. I immediately sent emails to the two organizations asking permission to film them. I told them exactly what we were doing and how the images were going to be used. That’s real important – to be open and honest with them. They gave me much more access than I dreamed possible.

Then I added those images to the third try of the trailer and that is what I put up on the book website. Three tries and about eight weeks of fiddling and the beta was good enough to put on the website. I still need a little bit of music tweaking and maybe a small change or two (depending on what my writer friends tell me will improve it) and I’ll put it on YouTube and Facebook and put links on Twitter.

Making the trailer was not easy but it’s not impossible. I am amazed, looking back, how much making it forced me to focus on the essence of the story. I now think that if you can’t think of actual real life images that match your novel, than you cannot expect readers to imagine your plot. This could be the ultimate “show, don’t tell.”

I am doing research for a novel that I plan to start writing sometime in September. I decided to take some advice that I heard over and over but didn’t heed because I didn’t understand it: write the query letter first, and then write the novel. I did write the query and now I have a clear direction where I need to do my research and what to focus on.

You don’t need to be a slave to the plot in the query letter. Why not revise the query as you go along?  Then make a movie. Nobody ever said you had to show it to anyone. It might be too hard to make the trailer first but what a focusing tool that would be!

The trailer for my novel, The Fastnacht League, can be easily found on my book website  www.AmishandBaseball.com . Any constructive feedback is very welcome and feel free to ask any questions. By the way, until you make one, you have no idea how much fun making a movie can be!