{"id":21141,"date":"2014-02-15T12:54:04","date_gmt":"2014-02-15T17:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=21141"},"modified":"2014-02-16T19:27:07","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T00:27:07","slug":"last-man-standing-count-offs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/last-man-standing-count-offs\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Man Standing: Count-Offs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sorry,<\/a>

Sorry, Dee Dee!<\/p><\/div>\n

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-<\/em><\/a>! 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.<\/p>\n

This week’s Last Man Standing<\/em> does not threaten to be a stingy one. Quite the opposite. As we seek studio recordings including count-offs\/count-ins<\/strong>, only a few rules apply:<\/p>\n