In addition to those schools, he has taught at Harvard, Fordham and Sarah Lawrence College.
Cullen’s many books include Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, and Martin Scorsese and the American Dream.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Jim Cullen's website.[E Street Band member Steve] Van Zandt liked Born to Run. But he also recognized that something was changing. “As impressed as I was, I thought the middle section was too complex,” he said of the title track in terms of its likely success as a pop record. In years to come, Van Zandt expressed disappointment about Springsteen’s subsequent musical direction, which moved further away from the Shore Sound, though he remained a steadfast friend and collaborator. Van Zandt was among those bemused by Springsteen’s perfectionism on Born to Run; others got increasingly impatient, then angry. When Springsteen famously threw an early pressing of the album into a hotel pool in the presence of shocked band members, a desperate Mike Appel disingenuously agreed with Springsteen that the project was a failure. “Let’s scrap the whole thing. I mean, obviously, just fuck it.” It was during the tense subsequent car ride home on the New Jersey Turnpike with Appel, his brother, and Springsteen’s girlfriend Karen Darvin that Springsteen began to laugh, his dam of reluctance finally breaking. “I was born, grew old, and died making that album,” he told Playboy in 1976.My book traces the often uncanny parallels in the careers of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, and page 99 happens to focus on the making of Springsteen's classic album Born to Run. Both Joel and Springsteen were young men of fierce ambition. But by the mid-1970s both were in danger of losing their record contracts because each had released two albums for Columbia Records that were viewed as relative disappointments. In 1975, Joel was working on his third album for the label, Turnstiles, which, while not a commercial success, did impress a number of important people and allowed him to last long enough to make his breakthrough album The Stranger. But Springsteen at this point had his back to the wall. He was only given enough money to make a single; that song, "Born to Run," of course, transformed his career. But even after he had been given a vote of confidence to finish making an album, an obsessive Springsteen pored over the record, driving everyone around him--and himself--crazy.
In terms of the larger themes of the book, page 99 takes up the heart of the matter: how Springsteen and Joel were shaped by their geographic origins. By 1975, Joel, had spent a few years in California, was literally and figuratively coming home. Springsteen, by contrast, was moving away, literally and figuratively, from the Jersey Shore music scene that had shaped him so decisively. This is one of a number of times when their creative imaginations would intersect.
The Page 99 Test: Sensing the Past.
The Page 99 Test: From Memory to History.
The Page 99 Test: Martin Scorsese and the American Dream.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
