Bruce Springsteen announced that his five homeland shows at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium over the next two weeks—the final concerts to take place at the Meadowlands’ football stadium, which will be torn down at the end of the 2009-10 football season—would each be devoted to classic albums from his back catalog: Two shows each will be devoted to Born To Run and Born In The USA, while one will be given over to the Boss’ 1978 album Darkness On The Edge Of Town. More »
Creation Records founder/Guardian music scribe Alan McGee thinks that Bon Jovi should be among New Jersey’s musical/cultural ambassadors to the world. Well, Bon Jovi is better than The Sopranos, by which I mean Bon Jovi has given us more emotional/historical signposts to cling to than Tony et al. But Bon Jovi is hardly the emblematic New Jersey band of the ’80s, let alone the one that should continue to represent the state into the new millennium. Because the greatest New Jersey bands of the last few decades have worked in an idiom laid down by the quartet that made art from the Garden State’s late 20th-century ability to turn anything into junk food: the Misfits. More »