The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Nils Lofgren on ‘Bonus Tracks,’ Springsteen
Over the course of 50 years, Nils Lofgren has done a lot of recording — on his own, with his band Grin and with Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.
Not surprisingly there are some “leftovers” in the guitarist’s vaults.
Those were included in his now out-of-print box set “Face the Music,” and they surface Friday, March 19 as “Bonus Tracks,” a 39song digital collection featuring gems such as an earlier version of “Keith Don’t Go” featuring Young, a songwriting collaboration with author Clive Cussler (“Whatever Happened to Music Cafe”), a random guest appearance by Rick James on “Awesome Girl” and more. The stylistic range is characteristically broad, and it says a great deal about Lofgren’s artistry that so many of these “Bonus Tracks” are as good as anything that he actually released...
• After the “Face the Music” box set “became extinct,” Lofgren, 69, looked at pressing more copies. When that proved cost prohibitive, his manager suggested a separate release of the unreleased material. “He said, ‘Well, look, you filled up two CDs with great rarities and bonus tracks, and now nobody can hear ‘em. Why don’t we look at getting those out as downloads so people can at least have the bonus tracks?’” Lofgren says by phone from his home in Arizona. “So that’s what we did, and it’s great.
I really dug through my archives and found a lot of great stuff — some of it’s my favorite from all my years of recording. It’s exciting to have something like this to work on.”
• “Keith Don’t Go (Ode to the Glimmer Twin),” written as a “plea” to the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, was originally released on Lofgren’s 1975 self-titled solo debut album. But the “Bonus Tracks” version comes from 1973 sessions for Grin’s third and final album “Gone Crazy.” “I had worked up that song on the (Neil Young) ‘Tonight’s the Night’ tour in England, when David (Briggs, producer) was with us. Grin was recording in Falls Church, Va., and David said, ‘Y’know, Neil’s passing through tomorrow’ — I think it was a Young and (Stephen) Stills tour or something. He called Neil and said, ‘Look, can you spare a few hours to come out and maybe sit in on a Grin track we’re working on. So Neil came down and he was in great spirits, and I think it was Briggs who, instead of just having Neil overdub his voice he said, ‘Why don’t you play piano and sing?’ So all of a sudden we’ve got Neil’s great, haunting voice singing the chorus with me, and he’s playing some really cool piano. It just gave the whole band a lift...and I’d totally forgotten about this version.”
• For “Awesome Girl” with Rick James, Lofgren remembers working on his 1983 album “Wonderland” with producer and bassist Kevin McCormick.
“We were playing around with some of my songs and we had what we thought was a very cool kind of pop-rock thing. One night we were somewhere drinking, both bachelors, and we got the bug (to record). We found some studio at 3 a.m., some guy’s basement in the San Fernando Valley. We were there for hours and I’m out there singing and all of a sudden I look through the window, into the control room, and there was this very familiar figure in there. Somebody pushed the talkback button and said, ‘Hey Nils, Rick James is here. He wanted to say hi,’ and Rick waves. Then he comes out and says, ‘Hey man, let me sing with you!’ So he sang with us and at the end he did some scatting...It was very cool, totally unplanned.”
• Lofgren says the pandemic has cost him “what was gonna be the best year of touring in my life, with his own band as well as with Young and Crazy Horse. And 2021 was supposed to be with Springsteen and his E Street Band, though Lofgren takes some solace in being part of the “Letter to You” album that came out during November. “We’ve made a lot of great (E Street Band) records, but we weren’t all there at the exact same time...Fast forward to ‘Letter to You’ and we were all in the same room, playing together. Man, it was beautiful. We had a great week in New Jersey, and Bruce said probably three months or so into the new year, plan on coming back...And over those months it got to the point where Bruce was like, ‘Man, I think we got a record. I don’t know if we need to get back together, ‘cause it came out so great.’ And sure enough, the record and the film came out, and it was a real blessing. We were all so disappointed we couldn’t tour safely, but also we were thrilled that he put it out rather than wait, like ‘Let’s share this great music.’ I was grateful for that.”
• Lofgren was, however, disappointed in the recent controversy over Springsteen’s drunk driving arrest in New Jersey, which surfaced after the premiere of his Super Bowl ad for Jeep. “It just seemed like a strange, misguided vendetta of some sort. Obviously Bruce, being extremely intelligent, just played along and was respectful and got it resolved. I thought it was a really powerful ad. I was disappointed Jeep pulled it. To me, it was kind of a cowardly move. I think they should’ve waited ‘til they found out the truth, and then they would’ve been happy they didn’t pull it. But, hey, go figure... They made a mistake. We all make mistakes.”
• In lieu of touring, Lofgren’s goal now is “to challenge myself to write some new music, and maybe by the end of the year have the better part of a record either ready or in the process.” He has some songs that weren’t finished for his most recent album, “Blue With Lou,” and is now “starting to move forward, creatively. I was really kind of getting rusty, musically, and also was in a dark place with what was going on in our country and our democracy. So I’m starting to jump-start back into that process, getting into my notebook and writing a little bit, organizing my thoughts towards a next record.”