Sorry, Dee Dee!
I caught the tail end of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Born to Run” while flipping channels on the radio this morning. Have you ever heard that song? In the middle, there’s a instrumental breakdown before The Boss counts the band back into the final verse: 1-2-3-! When I was a teen, first trying to get my head around this phenomenon and trying to find other Springsteen songs that matched the excitement of “Born to Run,” I kept coming back to that count-off. I’m sure, with 82 zillion hours of live performances under their belt (over the course of just a single year of touring) that the band didn’t really need their leader to count them back into the grand finale of the song, but it’s exciting nevertheless. For a 14-year-old boy, or whatever I was, trying to get his head into the mechanisms of how real rock ‘n rollers conduct their business, it was a peak behind the Wizard’s curtain. From that point forward I could become aware of other studio recordings that used the count-off/count-in device, a device that in most cases could have been excised from the final recording, but I guess the artists thought it was as cool to document as teenage me did.
This week’s Last Man Standing does not threaten to be a stingy one. Quite the opposite. As we seek studio recordings including count-offs/count-ins, only a few rules apply:
- Live recordings are excluded.
- All Ramones recordings are excluded, including studio ones, because that could be too easy.
- Songs that happen to include a counting device that’s not related to instructing the band to the song’s tempo do not count (so hold your “All Together Now” and “1-2-Crush on You” entries, Beatles and Clash fans).
As always, your Moderator reserves the right to include new rules as needed.
So “Born to Run” is off the table. Let the studio recordings that begin with count-ins and include count-offs at other points follow!
