“Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” from the 1973 Bruce Springsteen album The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle.
Joyous, raucous energy, cool story.
(5 minute read)
*Note – I’m not even going to try to rank songs. I just plan to periodically write a little bit about some songs that I like.
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If I didn’t know me so well, I’d expect I’d love Bruce Springsteen. An East Coast white guy in my mid-50s, I grew up on 70s rock. I have a soft spot for horns and bombastic songs, and powerful songs about average people just living their lives. I value artists who seem like decent people, and who have a bit of a stick-it-to-the-powerful streak to them. And I do love a great rock and roll performer. But just like poison ivy, I’ve never had Bruce Fever.
For 18 months I dated a woman who loved Bruce. It was a lousy relationship that ended badly (her and me, not her and Bruce), and I used to attribute my disinterest in The Boss to that experience. But it was 35 years ago, and the drama of it seems so silly after all the living that’s ensued. So I gave him another listen in the past 10 years, and found I was still not susceptible. I guess it wasn’t her fault. You see, I don’t seem to get poison ivy[ref]Although I won’t take on any dares to prove it. I just have never really had it.[/ref], and I don’t seem to get Bruce Springsteen.
Except for “Rosalita,” a joyous, raucous, multi-part spectacle with several chill-inducing swells, a funny story and about a million words. It’s not a perfect song (I’ll get to that), but to me it’s the perfect Boss song. It’s a song that makes me go, “Okay, I get why people love this guy,” even though none of his other songs seem to give me that experience. Perhaps if I rolled, naked, in a deep bed of poison ivy I would experience what it’s like to have a reaction. Maybe “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” is like a poison ivy wallow. (In a good way.)
“Rosalita” is immediately – from the first two organ chords – all about building and releasing tension. The song sits on top of a bouncy sax riff from Clarence Clemons that drummer Vini Lopez stays on top of with little rolls and fills. The E Street Band (on this album, and counting The Boss) includes a sax, a guitar, an organ, a piano, and bass and drums. This means they can throw in all sorts of interesting riffs and sounds throughout a song. In the verses, organist Danny Federici plays a lot of little curlicues, and pianist David Sancious adds nice emphasis. There’s so much good stuff going on from the whole band through the entire song.
The verses are key to how “Rosalita” works. (Here’s a link to the lyrics. You’ll need them.) Each verse in the song has two parts – a spirited, wordy, first half and a mellower second. For example, at 0:27 (“spread out now Rosie …”) and at 0:52 (“you don’t have to call me …”). At the end of that second half, (1:05, “Rosie, you’re the one!”) Clemons plays a rising sax riff that … doesn’t resolve. It’s just a tease. Our ears are ready for something big and new, but instead we get another verse, some nonsense about what Dynamite and Little Gun are up to. But that rising riff is key to the song, because it keeps coming around. And whenever it delivers a chorus, as at 1:53, the sense of joy and release and power is inescapable.
But I have to write a bit about the lyrics, because they may be, generally, the reason I can’t get into Bruce. I don’t need poetry: I love Yes and Van Halen and AC/DC, none of whom are what would be called wordsmiths, or Voice-of-a-Generation types. But I also love XTC, The Beatles, Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello – artists who can move you with a simple phrase. I even love Steely Dan and Jimi Hendrix and Belly, and The Stone Roses, each of whom must be making some point, but I generally have no idea what it is.
But many of Bruce’s lyrics seem sort of goofy and embarrassing[ref]Granted, I only know a few of his songs.[/ref]. He goes on about highways running, calling his car a “machine,” and talking about all the dangerous guys and tough chicks on street corners that he knows. Bruce always wants you to know he loves you, baby, and that together you’ll make it, despite the long odds. And he’s forever asking you to put on that cute little dress of yours (you know the one), so he can sit you on the back of his motorbike and ride down suicide streets and whatnot. (He seems like the kind of guy who’d say “motorbike” – maybe he doesn’t.) I don’t know. He always sounds like a handsome horndog with a terrific rap. Maybe I’m jealous of him. But what do I know? One of my favorite songs has the lyrics “Anger, he smiles towering in shiny, metallic, purple armor.” I guess it’s all a matter of taste.
But in “Rosalita,” I’m able to put all my qualms aside. His lyrics are goofy as ever, but they’re so joyous, and tell such a great version of Romeo & Juliet that I’m even able to (basically) overlook his assertion that the only lover he’ll ever need is Rosie’s “soft, sweet little girl’s tongue.” Look, songs by men have forever demeaned their targets with patronizing terms like “little girl,” I get it. But even setting that aside, the line sounds more like a serial killer’s letter to the newspaper than romantic badinage. But who cares? I’ll put up with it, and Weak Knees Willy, too, and Sloppy Sue, and his machine that’s a dud, and mama in her chair, and all that jive, because I like the story.
But back to the music! We left off at the chorus (1:53), which is pure shout-along, frenzied fun. The backing harmonies are terrific, and it all passes much too soon, leaving us back in a verse with Jack the Rabbit, et al. (Okay, again, I understand that lyrics don’t have to make perfect sense, but how are they going to “skip some school” if they’re doing this at night?) But this verse does have a tremendous couple of lines: “Windows are for cheaters/ Chimneys for the poor/ Closets are for hangers/ Winners use the door.” Then after another rousing chorus, we hit the magnificent bridge.
But first! At 3:18 there’s another crazy tension-building section. The organ tootles up and up the scale, the bass joins in ratcheting the anticipation, everything is coming to a head … then (3:43) Clemons plays a sax riff that doesn’t exactly break the tension, but doesn’t relieve it, either. (By the way, through all this drummer Lopez is playing like a man possessed.) The band joins in the riff, and it almost seems like they’ve forgotten what song they were playing. But they come out of it and bring things down (4:17) so a simmering Bruce can start moving us – oh so gradually – to the story’s big payoff. Rosalita’s family hates, him[ref]It’s worth noting, I think, that in 1973 “playing in a rock and roll band” was a lot shadier than it is now. I mean, parents back then weren’t signing their kids up for cute Rock Band classes, like nowadays. They were sending them to trombone lessons and claiming that electrified music wasn’t real music. Believe me, I know.[/ref], fine, but he doesn’t care. And he really does sound sexy announcing his plans to “liberate you, confiscate you.” We’re approaching resolution … but first …
Before he gets us there, he leads the band in a sing-along of “papa says he knows I don’t have any money!” I mean, come on Bruce!! A little teasing is fine, but this is starting to get annoying! But then, finally, at 5:11, when The Boss reveals he’s gotten a big advance, the exuberance is palpable! The payoff seems worth all the buildup throughout the song, and I never feel manipulated. It feels satisfying, like a good short story or TV show, like the writer and I have bonded. The rest of the lyrics are denouement, and I don’t even bother myself with questions of how he’ll get Rosalita to the airport (they’re headed “down San Diego way[ref]Oh brother, Bruce.[/ref],” after all) with his car lost in a swamp. Or how she’ll know to pack a bag for what originally sounded like a simple evening on the town, playing pool and going to Woolworth’s, but now involves a cross-country trek. (At least now the skipping-school part makes sense.)
It wouldn’t be right to simply fade out or end the song un-bombastically, so The Boss throws in some “hey-hey-hey”s at 6:31, then Lopez leads everyone through a twenty second flourish until a simple, warbling organ is all that remains. It’s an exhausting song, like a good workout. When you watch live clips of Bruce playing the song, it’s a wonder to behold. They played this version on MTV all the time. There’s a version of a young, Mike Nesmith-looking Bruce playing in London. Folks have often told me that I haven’t caught Springsteen Fever because I’ve never seen him live. I haven’t been close enough, just like why people say I’ve never had poison ivy. If that’s the case, I’ll probably never fully get into The Boss. But I sure do have a reaction to “Rosalita.”
IN A NUTSHELL: Houses of the Holy, the fifth album by the mighty Led Zeppelin, is eight different songs, eight different genres, and all kinds of cool. Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham are in fine form whether playing famous riffs, supporting lush orchestral works, or taking on funk and reggae. It doesn’t sound like other Zep records – and that might be why I love it!
by this grand pronouncement: Every artist abhors plagiarism.
However, creativity is a weird thing. The raw materials of creativity are pulled from the surrounding world, and most people experience that world – at least in part – via the art around them. Books, movies, songs, visual art … it all becomes – along with everything else in the artist’s life – another input to creation.
of pop music[ref]A brief list I put together indludes A$AP Ferg, Chuck D, Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, Talking Heads, Radiohead, Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Michael Stipe, Kanye West, Florence Welch, Mick Jones (The Clash), Tupac Shakur, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Lady Gaga, Joni Mitchell and Ronnie Wood. And that’s just one quick search![/ref], from Pete Townshend and Keith Richards through A$AP Ferg. Musician/novelists include country-rocker Steve Earle and John Darnielle, of 
Chuck Berry song “
modern pop music. 
and 
good enough writer to disguise it – I would completely steal four pages from Chuck Klosterman’s 2005 book Killing Yourself to Live right here. On pages 197 to 201 of that book, he explains the popularity of Led Zeppelin with men, and posits that “every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitory period in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed.” In a resonant few hundred words he concludes “Led Zeppelin sounds like a certain kind of cool guy; they sound like the kind of cool guy every man vaguely thinks he has the potential to be, if just a few things about the world were somehow different … For whatever the reason, there is a point in the male maturation process when the music of Led Zeppelin sounds like the perfect actualization of the perfectly cool you.”
My freshman year roommate 
“the best” 
both had been around the music business for years before Led Zeppelin began, so they knew their way around contracts and rights. They either thought no one would know, or they thought they’d changed it enough to disguise it.
Led Zeppelin is a collection of four talents unsurpassed by any other rock band, and bassist John Paul Jones (who is my favorite member, although I play bass and so have a special fondness for bassists) starts showing his skills immediately, bouncing behind Page’s guitar. Page has a nifty solo, and then the song slows to allow the mighty Robert Plant to start singing. My only complaint about this song is Plant’s voice, which is slightly speeded up, giving his already high-tenor sound a kind of mosquito-esque timbre. His lyrics are about 
From Page’s solo at 3:47 until Plant enters again at about 4:50 is one of my favorite 60-seconds-worth of rock music. It’s a fantastic opening track.
each verse Page beautifully calls to mind rainfall on a series of descending runs (1:08). The band has never been shy about putting orchestral arrangements in their songs, and they revel in the lushness on this song, taking time to let the music swell and ebb, nearly 3 full minutes without vocals. So much happens in those three minutes – Jones plays lovely piano, Page deftly supports it all, and John Bonham finally enters, with some soft triplets. It’s a lovely piece, and Plant has barely sung at all, but the last half is his. His melody lags behind the music, helping give the entire piece a hypnotic, drowsy feeling. Behind the second verse, the Bonham’s drums are gradually building the song’s momentum until, just about 4:55, Page’s acoustic sets up the crash of drums to transition the song into Full Power Mode. It pulls back for the final verse, and resolves with a last acoustic coda. This song is wonderful and should not be blamed for any 
most Led Zeppelin song Led Zeppelin ever played. The first minute and a half is country-folk, almost CSN&Y-sounding, but Bonham crashes in at 1:26, and Plant uses his signature wail on a 
ever played in a 9/8 time signature, “
but instead is a phonetic spelling of the country Jamaica, the birthplace of reggae. It’s another song some Zep fans hate, but I love the big drums, the clear Jones bass, and the sound of Page’s guitar, especially the picking behind the vocals. Plant avoids the temptation to affect an island patois in standard “
it while inebriated
dissonant chord 5 seconds in! The wailing guitar by Page sounds cool, and Jones plays a strange synthesizer that isn’t noticeable at first, but by the second verse is peeking through. Plant 
then powers ahead with a 4/4 beat, with 3/4 thrown in every fourth measure. I imagine Page coming up with this riff, and whereas most drummers would ask him to hold the last note an extra beat to keep the entire thing 4/4, Bonham instead rose to the challenge and just incorporated it. Plant is at his upper register, wailing in his best blues style 
Later, at 3:17 they transition into a sort of 50s rock-and-roll style coda to bring the song and album to a close. It’s a great ending, in the show-biz tradition of big bands or stage extravaganzas, and I have to agree with Plant when he exclaims, “Oh, it’s so good!”
IN A NUTSHELL: The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s wildly successful album, is another record from Floyd that demands to be heard in its entirety, first song to last. Roger Waters may have written most of the songs, but this is a David Gilmour tour de force, both for guitar and vocals. It’s a timeless record deserving of its many accolades and commercial success. The themes of being human in a modern world still resonate today, nearly 50 years after its release.
The attitudes were, by today’s standards, a little crazy. For example, seeing kids 10 or younger walking down the street smoking cigarettes would elicit a “tsk, tsk” sort of reaction from most grownups, equivalent to the reaction you’d get if a kid drank coffee. People just didn’t worry much about tobacco use. 
Most adults were less blasé about alcohol, but even so by high school there was a small but significant percentage of parents who didn’t give a shit if their kids got drunk. Many of them bought the beer for “partying.” Their attitude was “it’s just beer, what’s the big deal?” Most of them had been drinking beer since their own pre-teen years.
“Drugs” were less well-understood by the adults around me. Most of them were either too old or too square to have been truly a part of 
out with only one’s closest friends while drinking. These are the people you like, the people who are fun, the people most likely to be forgiving if you do something stupid, the most likely to help you out if you do something stupid and dangerous. I only had two friends who I knew used alcohol – most of my close friends were 
required careful consideration of impinging factors, each influencing the others producing a variety of, at times, seemingly irreconcilable possibilities. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn expert teen drinkers from 1980s rural Pennsylvania went on to careers planning and executing 
although it was customary to give the thief a few bucks for the effort. It was also gross to drink, generally didn’t last long, and induced vomiting at a rate higher than other comparators. As for wine, well, come on, nobody was bringing wine anywhere. (SIDE NOTE: This was the beginning of the wine cooler era, which did show up at some drinking events. Wine coolers were an example of goods in which the 
or b) go to a Beer Distributor to buy cases and kegs. This would initially seem like a barrier for teen drinkers – having to go into a store for beer as a (generally) obviously not-yet-21 customer. However, there were countless middlemen (older siblings/ cousins/ random weirdos/ parents) willing to make the purchase for you for a fee. Also, plenty of bars and beer distributors were more concerned with making a buck than with laws and safety and were happy to pretend that some dude, barely able to grow a few whiskers and wearing a “Class of ’85” t-shirt in 1985, who arrived in a station wagon with a “Proud Parent of an Honor Student” bumper-sticker, was likely older than 21. You didn’t even 
Although parents in the mid-80s were less likely to get their collective panties in a bunch over alcohol use than today’s grown-ups, the consequences of being caught drinking or drunk as a teen were clear (possible arrest, parents being informed, etc.), and the extreme consequences (your angry parent has heart-attack at news of arrest, etc.) were always in the back of my nervous, rule-following mind. So one had to be careful about where to go. Of course there were 
fire-watching tower called “
You’d park somewhere (somebody always seemed to know where) and you’d walk through the dark woods (somebody always seemed to bring a flashlight) and you’d stumble over roots and stumps (somebody always seemed to fall and get mildly injured) and try not to drop the cases of beer (somebody always brought bottles instead of cans) and eventually emerge in a clearing with one big tower in the middle and a million empty beer cans around it. Then up the tower, lugging that beer, where drinking commenced.
didn’t follow the trail of beer cans (somebody always had to drink on the walk to the tower) and come visit the tower every 90 minutes; and b) nobody ever fell off – including the kids who always drunkenly dangled over the edge. (Somebody always drunkenly dangled over the edge – in those days there was only a waist-high railing encircling the top of the tower.)
The great thing about cassettes was that you could stash a few in your pockets, or girls could put some in their purses, and you’d have a lot of music handy. Sure, it wasn’t as easy as 
These were great drink-along, background music songs, for getting loud (Zep), getting weird (Peppers) and singing along (Eagles). But at the end of the night, when the drinking had slowed and most of the crew had begun hiking back through the deep, dark woods; when any craziness and danger had ceased; when the alcohol had massaged our emotions, and the folks who smoked weed had finished smoking their weed, one of the three or four of us who remained would pull out The Dark Side of the Moon, (somebody always pulled out The Dark Side of the Moon) and we’d just sit there and listen.
to be listened to in one sitting, beginning to end. I don’t think I’m being very controversial in saying that Pink Floyd albums, particularly ones from the 70s, have far more impact as a singular artistic statement than as a collection of songs – even though many of the songs are brilliant in their own right. Founder and sometime bandleader, bassist Roger Waters, was fond of grand themes and he has stated that Dark Side of the Moon was “an expression of political, philosophical humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out[ref]He said this in the great BBC program “
cool bass octaves and drummer Nick Mason plays some Ringo-esque drums behind nice keyboard work from Rick Wright and mournful pedal steel guitar by Gilmour. The band plays a nice long intro before Gilmour’s voice enters on lyrics from Waters that give 
masterpiece[ref]Either headphones, or totally wasted on top of a 50 foot tower in the middle of some woods.[/ref]. Gilmour’s subtle harmonies and guitar voicing, Wright’s organ flourishes, the “surround sound” production … it all is tailor-made for headphones.
if I ever happen to forget, that David Gilmour is one of the most remarkable guitarists in rock music. After the clocks chime (a rather obvious sound-effect for the song, but so what? It sounds great…) there is a long, ominous build-up of metallic-sounding, echoing low notes coupled with Mason’s toms and Wright’s subtle organ, and this compelling introduction really sets up the entry of Gilmour’s voice, at 2:30, to sound all the more powerful. Gilmour also plays so many cool, bluesy riffs that it makes one’s head spin. Background oohs and aahs give way to Gilmour’s first solo at 3:30. He’s got such great tone and control, and I love at 4:28, when he eases back into the chorus chords, with the background vocals. It’s a solo that does so much in a minute and a half, 
and when it’s done he continues to throw in cool stuff like the little descending figure at 5:00, behind the vocals. The lyrics are another sort of warning to youth about 
like 
His playing is once again Ringo-ish throughout Gilmour’s terrific soloing, which has a cool breakdown part at about 3:48 then blasts into overdrive again at 4:30. By the way – let’s not forget the amazing saxophone solo by Dick Parry. “Money” continues the album’s prodding of young adult minds grappling with the question of “what it all means,” and fades out to more snatches of conversation, blending quietly into another Big Question song, the lovely “Us and Them.”
Dick Parry’s sax provides a gentle entry into Gilmour’s vocals. I was typically half-asleep by this point up on that tower, but concentrating on 
These two songs together may be my favorites on the album, although “Time” and “Money” are near the top as well. These are the only songs on which Floyd mastermind Roger Waters sings lead, and he does a great job on lyrics about the feeling of 
I left the booziness behind, but not the album. When “Eclipse” starts, at about 3:50, with Wright’s organ cadenza, I’m transported on the sound-waves to my youthful self. I still feel moved by Waters’s list of the contents of one’s life. I understood that list differently as a 19-year old than I do as a 50-year old. Back then I thought, “Is that all there is?” Now I think, “Boy, I packed a lot into life so far.” But the feeling is the same – the feeling of being human. The Dark Side of the Moon is an album that stays with you for life.
but that fact didn’t make me interested in what their music sounded like. Then, during the horrible 80s, a horrible song by a horrible singer was released, and like a fart in an elevator or the Ebola virus, there was no escaping it. 1987’s smash hit … “
