Last night I heard "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" on XM.

How many great tracks are there on "Born To Run"? Better yet, name a loser! Maybe "Night". My favorites are "Meeting Across The River" and "Jungleland".

Did I ever tell you I saw Bruce perform "Jungleland" at the Bottom Line in the summer of ’74, before the mania hit? I bought "Asbury Park" based on the hype. "Spirit In The Night" is still one of my favorite Springsteen tracks. Want to go down to Greasy Lake? And, curiously, because I almost never hear it mentioned, I became enamored of "For You". I liked "Asbury Park", but it tried too hard to be Dylan when Springsteen was something different.

I liked "Asbury Park" enough to buy "The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle". With a cover that looked a lot less expensive than the first, it seemed Columbia no longer believed. And almost nobody else did either. But if you heard the second side, "Incident on 57th Street" into "Rosalita", you were hooked. Because of the EXUBERANCE!

That’s what led me to the Bottom Line that hot night. But I had no idea Bruce and his band were going to be THIS good! "Jungleland" was an intimate story of the city, not the stadium pleaser it ultimately became after being released on "Born To Run" the following year. I drove cross-country with all of the second album and the two aforementioned cuts from the first. I knew every note. People would get in my car and see the cassette and ask "Who’s this?"

Then Jon Landau wrote that he saw the future of rock and roll and the whole country got on the bandwagon. Because not only was Bruce that good live, the records delivered. From start to finish. And, after the dust on the lawsuits settled, "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" arguably eclipsed them all.

That’s a four album run, if you’re counting. Pretty damn good, but not as good as Pixar’s nine movie run.

Pixar’s had nine successes in a row. Nine HITS! How can they sustain when all the major studios fail? Because of a dedication to, a focus on, only one thing, quality. EXCELLENCE!

The majors are busy feeding the pipeline, keeping that distribution operation humming. They’ll greenlight pictures without finished scripts when Pixar wannabe directors are making shorts. They’ll do audience research when the Pixar creators are operating from the gut. They’ll remake a TV series instead of coming up with something fresh, something riveting. That’s why we loved Bruce, he was an ORIGINAL!

A record label says one hit has to pay for all those failures, that’s why the royalty rate is so low. But, based on the history of Pixar, do there really need to be all those failures? Or, are the labels just keeping that distribution machine humming, do they want constant billing and returns as opposed to one giant victory?

Maybe the equivalent of the musical short subject is an album recorded on a low budget and not marketed heavily. Maybe this is how an act starts its career arc. But the record has to be good.

Nobody in the audience, no one in the customer base, believes CDs are good from start to finish. They’re too long, impenetrable. Thank god for iTunes, for P2P. So we can only get the hit. The rest is shit. And, if it’s not, almost no one pays attention, because they’ve been taught not to. The Beatles legitimized the album format and the major labels (and full of themselves acts!) killed it. Albums were a personal statement, now they’re a collection of tunes that can be sold at a certain price point.

Only release what’s good. If that’s one track, or ten. Change that, only release what’s GREAT! Because we’re not interested in anything that’s not great. Believe me, I know when I hear GREAT!

I’ll barely go to a movie, but I’m going to see "Wall-E", the best-reviewed film of the year. But, although the reviews have impressed me, I’m most interested because of the director, Andrew Stanton, because he made one of the best movies of the twenty first century, "Finding Nemo". May not have Angelina Jolie, or blood and guts, but it’s got humanity, it’s got emotion, it’s got truth. And that’s what makes us believers, not the train-wreck.

I’ll leave you with this. The album I’m dying to hear most is the new Nickelback CD. Not because I’m the biggest fan of the band, although they have had some catchy singles, but because they’re working with Mutt Lange, the best record producer in the business. The guy who not only made "Back In Black", but fashioned a nobody from Canada into the biggest country star in the world and even cut a memorable track for Michael Bolton. Mutt’s that good. He’s got a hit to shit ratio even better than Bruce’s. He’s earned my respect, my admiration, my time, my ears. That’s what you’ve got to do, earn your audience’s respect. You do that via quality, not marketing. Memorable tunes, not great videos. Honesty, not artifice.