8.28.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
day I will be reading content from smithsonianmag dot com.
As a reminder, Radio I is a reading service intended
for people who are blind or have other disabilities that
make it difficult to read printed material. Please join me
now for the first article titled how Bruce Springsteen created

(00:23):
the greatest rock album ever? Fifty years ago, the Boss
was at a pivotal moment in his career. A new
book details what it took to launch Born to Run
by Beth Pye Lieberman. In the late summer of nineteen
seventy five, Bruce Springsteen's third studio album, Born to Run,
launched to critical acclaim and rapidly climbed the Billboard charts,

(00:48):
holding at number three. Engraved and vinyl were the masterful
song lyrics and musical arrangements that played out like a
tragedy in eight acts. Gracing its iconic cover is the
oft dated photograph by Eric Neola of Springsteen leaning on
the back of saxophonist Clarence Clemmons. I can listen to

(01:08):
it now fifty years later and think that every note
and word are in exactly the right place, says Peter Ames. Carlin,
Springsteen's biographer and author of the just released to Night
in jungle Land, the Making of Born to Run. The
album continues to draw audiences, with an estimated total of
seven million copies sold in the US alone over the

(01:30):
past five decades, and is listed for its cultural Importance
in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.
In eight tracks, a quick paced thirty nine minutes, Springsteen's
raspy vocals and resonant lyrics paint vivid imagery laden with complexity,
metaphor and poetry. Thunder Road is about the path taken

(01:52):
to achieve success. Tenth Avenue, Freeze Out, the making of
a band night, the dreams of a nine to fiver,
back streets, the loss of friendship, Born to Run, the
chase for the American dream, She's the One, the broken
hearted quest for love, meeting across the River, the dangerous
making of a fast buck, and finally, the noir like

(02:15):
jungle Land, the Hero's Last Stand. Springsteen has said the
songs are a series of vignettes taking place during one
long summer day and night. Carlin says the album continues
to hold up as unique even now, fifty years after
its release. I can't think of another album that makes

(02:35):
me feel like Born to Run, including every subsequent album
by Bruce Springsteen, which I think is on purpose. He
set out to make one distinct album, hugely distinctive. The
mid nineteen seventies was a time of upheaval. The country
was in an economic recession and facing the political aftermath

(02:56):
of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. Against that backdrop,
the twenty five year old New Jersey born musician set
out to become a rock star. He would succeed in
a way that he could never have imagined at the time.
The world renowned performer, musician, and story teller of the
working class and the oppressed, America's Bard has sold more

(03:18):
than one hundred and forty million albums. Critics have compared
him to John Keats, Walt Whitman, and even William Shakespeare.
A Springsteen portrait by photographer Albert Watson that ran on
the cover of Rolling Stone in two thousand nine bears
a similarity to the striking pose Shakespeare takes in the
circa sixteen ten Chandos portrait. Both men sports scruffy hair,

(03:42):
high collars, and earrings in their left ears. Like that
other Bard wrote the literary scholars Roxanne Hard and Erwin Street.
Springsteen's vision is often turned toward the tragi comic, the
authentically human. The whole world is his stage, and the
play and his songs could be any people anywhere. Born

(04:04):
to Run opens on Mary's front porch with a scene
that mirrors theatrical stage craft. One can envision her dress
swaying in the breeze and almost hear the notes of
a Roy Orbison tune playing on the radio, along with
the pleas of the young guitarist coaxing her to take
a chance on the launch of his career and leave

(04:25):
behind their town full of losers. The album closes on
a bluesy ballad with an over two minute saxophone solo
and at the end Springsteen's anguished howls. The tale describes
in metaphor, the artist's own efforts to make his breakthrough
as a musician. The players flash guitars just like switchblades,

(04:47):
hustling for their record machine. Springsteen's alter ego is the
song's magic rat, chased by the police and gun down
a dark vision of failure in his own epic quest
to Crafton album that record stores could and would sell
the greatest rock album ever, as Carlin puts it into
Night in jungle Land. This was the goal that the

(05:09):
ambitious twenty five year old musician, along with his equally
ambitious producers Mike Apple and John Landau, had set out
to meet Two years before the release of Born to Run.
Springsteen's first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey,
and The Wild the Innocent and The East Street Shuffle,

(05:31):
had met with critical success, yet failed to sell. The
first album stalled somewhere around twenty thousand copies, and the
second won the same acclaim but also the same week sales.
Carlin writes his recording company, Columbia Records, had hoped for better.
A band of executives argued in January nineteen seventy four

(05:53):
to cut their losses and leave Springsteen behind. He was
still a cult artist, says Carlin. His shows didn't really
sell out, and the people who went were super into it,
but it wasn't like he was a superstar or even
really a huge star. He was well known and admired,
but a bunch of people had no idea. Written as

(06:15):
a thrilling page turner, Carlin's book, which includes new interviews
with Springsteen, recounts the minute by minute details leading up
to and immediately following the album's release, lingering on the
intimate happenings at the recording sessions, Springsteen's perfectionist struggles, and
the grind to craft and record each note and word.

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It was that period where he had everything to prove
and it could go either way, says Carlin, adding that
he wrote the book because he wanted to dig into
what Springsteen's emotional progress was like, what fueled him, and
what it was that threatened to undermine him. In the
late summer of nineteen seventy four, Columbia Records top executives

(06:59):
appeared most disinterested in promoting his earlier albums. Yet, thanks
to the scrappy initiative of Apple, who had mailed copies
of Springsteen's new single Born to Run to djays across
the country, radio stations started playing the raucous Anthem with
its heart pounding drum intro. Meanwhile, the players in Springsteen's

(07:21):
band were reshuffling. In early nineteen seventy four. The band
included the pianist David Sanctius, the saxophonist Clarence Clemens, bassist
Gary Tallent, drummer Ernest Carter, and Danny Federici with his
trademark keyboard Glockenspiel rigged to his Hammond organ. Months later,
pianist Roy Bettan and drummer Max Weinberg replaced Sanchez and Carter,

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marking the formative beginnings to Springsteen's East Street band that
would hold up for most of the next five decades.
Recording sessions got under way in January of nineteen seventy
five at nine fourteen Sound Studios and Blauvelt, New York. Landau,
a renowned music critic and new friend of Springsteen's, began

(08:08):
to make periodic visits and listened in. By April, he
was the album's third co producer, along with Springsteen and Apple.
The previous May, at a Springsteen performance at the Harvard
Square Theater, Landau had published his landmark review for a
Boston newspaper, I Saw rock and Roll Future and its

(08:29):
name is Bruce Springsteen. The precient writer would become Springsteen's
lifelong producer and collaborator. Apple would eventually part ways with
the musician. Landau moved the band to another studio, the
Record Plant, in Midtown Manhattan, you're a first class artist.
You need to work in a first class studio, he

(08:50):
told Springsteen. The sessions were grueling and many times lasted
into the early morning hours. I was concerned about one thing,
which was making an absolutely great rock and roll record,
Springsteen told Carlin. Whatever happens after that, I don't have
control over, but I do have an opportunity to make

(09:10):
a record, and I want to make the greatest rock
and roll man. I want to make the last rock
and roll album you're ever going to need to hear.
Throughout the summer months, the lyrics evolved, the instrumental preambles
were honed, and the mood and settings of the stories
took shape, leaning into his musical influences the early rock

(09:31):
and rollers Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Sam Cooke,
Elvis Presley and Wilson Pickett, as well as Phil Specter
and Brian Wilson, and the b movies and noir films
he enjoyed. Springsteen pushed hard to get the right sounds
and notes from his musicians. For hours and into the morning,
Clemens worked and reworked his saxophone solo and She's the one,

(09:55):
Springsteen recalled to Carlin his state of mind, I've felt desperate,
you know, that was who I was. I was that
desperate character, desperate to be recognized, to be heard, to
be seen, just to transcend what I felt were the
awful beginnings of my life. So I was chasing this transcendence,
and my vehicle for that was the music I was

(10:17):
writing and the shows I was performing. The deadline for
the album July twentieth loomed. The record needed to be
in the stores for the back to school college crowd
in September, and the band needed to be on the
road for their promotional tour. They took it right to
the wire all night and into the morning of the twentieth.

(10:37):
Carlin details the final hours in his book. The work
spread across the record plants, studios and floors, with mixing
going on in one room, the jungle Land saxophone work
in another, the rest of the band rehearsing for the
tour in a third. When Bruce finally walked into the
rehearsal room, strapped on his telecaster and took his place

(10:58):
at the center, the recording of Born to Run was
officially finished. The album was released on August twenty fifth,
nineteen seventy five. By October, album sales had reached gold status,
with five hundred thousand copies sold. Later that month, on
October twenty seventh, nineteen seventy five, Springsteen did what he

(11:19):
had set out to do, achieve rock star status by
landing the cover stories on the national news magazine's Newsweek
and Time. The original artwork for the Time cover, a
graphic rendering of Springsteen with his telecaster guitar by artist
Kim Whitesides, is now part of the collections of the
Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Looking at the portrait five decades

(11:43):
after it was made, the museum's historian Nindi Farmer notes
the musician's signature hat, charming smile, facial scruff, and guitar,
and how the artist chose a deep red to highlight them.
She says the image mirrors visually how Time editors characterized him.
They describe him as primal, says Farmer. You can see

(12:05):
that in this portrait we don't even know if he's
wearing clothes or not. All we know is that he's
wearing his guitar. We have to remember that newspapers and
television played a really important role in how you came
to know about certain trends and people. She adds, so
to be on both was remarkable. Newsweek doesn't review his

(12:26):
work particularly well, but the Time article is much more glowing. Definitively,
the Time article proved to be more prophetic to Carlin.
The image reflects Springsteen's enthusiasm and joy the artist, he says,
captures the Jersey boardwalk beach rat that he was in
those days. He's radiating the Jersey shore. In his book,

(12:49):
Carlin describes what happened the day the two magazines hit
the newstand. Guitarist Stephen Van's aunt, who'd joined the band
during the recording sessions, was the first to retrieved copies
for the touring members and brought them to Springsteen at
the hotel room where they were staying in Los Angeles.
He leaped up from his chaise, sprinted into his room,

(13:11):
and slammed the door. Carlin writs. It just freaked him out.
Says Carlin, in Time, he's rock's new sensation, and the
newsweak one was far more skeptical. They focused on all
the kind of industrial work that went into making him
a rock star. How could this kid who grew up
in Nowheresville, New Jersey, be this smart and sophisticated and accomplished,

(13:33):
like it doesn't make sense, which is also what's happening
in the back of Bruce's head. One of the interesting
things about Bruce, says Carlin, he is torn between two
visions of himself. On the one hand, he felt faded
to be this iconic character. On the other he was
terrified that he was really a phony, that people would

(13:54):
decide that he was a bunch of height. Fifty years
have proved otherwise. To date, Springsteen has released more than
twenty studio albums and numerous boxed sets, compilations and live albums.
In June, he released Tracks two The Lost Albums, a
set of archival recordings and rare versions of his previous songs.

(14:17):
He's earned twenty Grammys, an Academy Award, two Golden Globes,
a Tony, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This October,
a biopic starring Jeremy Allen White Springsteen Delivered Me From
Nowhere debuts and theaters every August. On the anniversary of
Born to Run, Springsteen told Carlin he gets in his

(14:40):
car and plays the album as he drives around the
New Jersey Town, where he was living when he was
making it. When he hears the opening notes to jungle Land,
he drives to and parks in front of the Little
Long Beach Cottage where he wrote the songs. He says,
he just sits there and listens to all of jungle Land.
Carlin says when the final notes over, then he drives

(15:01):
away next to combat summer reading slumps, This timeless children's
television show tried to bridge the literacy gap with the
magic of stories. With the charismatic host and charming book
readings and reviews, The hit series Reading Rainbow stands as
a beacon of children's literature by Kayla Randall for generations

(15:26):
of readers, or words convey what it means to love books,
Butterfly and the Sky. These are the opening lyrics of
the famous theme song for the beloved children's program Reading Rainbow,
hosted by actor LeVar Burton. PBS premiered the show in
nineteen eighty three, and it ran for twenty three years,
received twenty six Emmy Awards, and won the hearts of millions.

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The series, like the song, encouraged young readers to take
a look because whatever knowledge they sought it's in a book.
As those who want the show know, Butterfly in the
Sky became the words that always preceded a good story.
The words are so significant to the legacy of Reading
Rainbow that they serve as the namesake for the twenty

(16:13):
twenty two documentary about the cult classic program Butterfly in
the Sky, The Story of Reading Rainbow. In recent years,
numerous reports have warned of a national literacy crisis for
children and adults alike. Reading Rainbow is the essential example
of a show about the importance of literacy, reading comprehension,

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and the joy of storytelling, loved by viewers of all
ages and from all backgrounds. In terms of child literacy
rates going down, that was really what Reading Rainbow was
designed in response to, and in particular the summer slide
they call it, which is when students are out of school,
their literacy levels slide backward, says Ryan Lintelmann, entertainment curator

(16:58):
at the Smithsonian's now National Museum of American History. Lentilman
says plenty of research confirms that when students come back
to school in the fall, teachers need to take some
time to bring them back up to speed. To the
levels of literacy and reading comprehension that they were at
when they ended the previous school year. Reading Rainbow was

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made to bridge this reading gap for children and improve
their reading skills, and to be a show that kids
wanted to watch. It was known that kids were watching
TV all summer, Lentleman says, so why not do something
with it. On each half hour episode of Reading Rainbow,
Burton introduced the real world subject matter of a children's

(17:41):
book through field trips, from going to the barber shop
to visiting an orchestra in a concert hall, and then
the book itself was read by a performer. Ruby d
Helen Merrin, Keith David ed Harris, Gregory Hines, Jeff Bridges,
and Pete Seeger are just a few of the actors
and musicians who have graced the show with their voices.

(18:04):
The chosen books are childhood staples such as If You
Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numrov, Amazing Grace
by Mary Hoffman, and Stella Luna by Janelle Cannon. The
program mixes the calm, steady presence of Burton with the
warmth and coziness of getting wrapped up in a book,
and at the end of the show kids review books

(18:26):
they've read. For over two decades, the show achieved its
goal of not only reading to kids, but also making
kids want to read. In nineteen ninety seven, the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting released a study about the use of
television and video in classroom instruction. Current, a news outlet

(18:48):
covering public media, reported that teachers responding to the survey
rated public TV programs as the best they'd used for
educational purposes in nineteen ninety six to ninety nine eighty seven.
Reading Rainbow was named by a higher percentage of teachers
than any other program. I think it's been shown to

(19:08):
be super successful, Lintelman says, adding that the show inspired
a lifelong love of reading in its audience. People who
have been interviewed for this documentary talk about how Reading
Rainbow was such an important part of their lives and
the entire generation. I count myself among them of people
who grew up watching that show and learning about new

(19:30):
books through it. The curator notes that The Reading Rainbow
was unique in how it spoke about books, showing both
the featured books illustrations and Burton's real adventures, seeing the
people and places represented by the books. The show also
made its host Burton, who had been known for his
role as Kuta Quinte in the nineteen seventies mini series Roots,

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into an icon of education. He later went on to
star as Geordie LaForte in another beloved show, star Trek
the Next Generation, which ran from nineteen eighty seven to
nineteen ninety four. Hearing the story from the people who
made the show, and hearing their evident passion and commitment
to doing this children's television show, every person feels like

(20:18):
they were making a significant contribution to culture, Burton told
the Associated Press in twenty twenty four. And they care
deeply about what we were doing. I get it. I
understand the importance that y'all have placed on this part
of your lives, your childhoods, and I'm proud, genuinely proud
to be a part of your lives in this way.

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During the a P interview, Burton was asked if he
ever thought that his most meaningful legacy, despite all his
acting work in film and television, would be tied to
reading Rainbow. I'm good with that, Burton said, as a
son of an English teacher, as a black man coming
from a people for whom it was illegal to know

(20:59):
how to read, not that long ago. I'm good with that.
The story of Reading Rainbow begins in Buffalo, New York
as a w n E D t V program idea
before it made its debut on p b S. Three
people who worked on and helped make the show, Tony Bettino, Senior,
Barbara Erwin, and Pam Johnson collaborated on a twenty twenty

(21:22):
four book about the process called Creating Reading Rainbow, The
Untold Story of a beloved children's series. Working with educators
and librarians on summer reading programs, Buttino led w n
E D t v's Educational Services department at the time.
Johnson was the liaison with the executives working on the show,

(21:44):
and Irwin was an intern in that department at w
n E D. Working alongside Bottino and Johnson. She worked
on community outreach and on production of the book review
segments of the show that were done in Buffalo for
the first several years. Buttino, as director of the department,
led in the creation of the show and searching for

(22:06):
a Reading Rainbow host. Irwin says, Tony knew that he
wanted some one like mister Rogers. He wanted a real person,
somebody who could really communicate well with children. Burton was
mostly known then for being on Roots. Erwin says the
team at w n e D, who recognized his capability
as a magnetic speaker and reached out to him about

(22:29):
the job, which he had accepted, had found their host.
To day, Bino is retired from his role at w
N e D, Erwin is retired from her work as
a communications scholar at Canisius University, and Johnson is the
executive director of the Corporation for Public Broadcastings Ready to
Learn Education initiative. The trio speaks fondly of their time

(22:53):
working on Reading Rainbow. Erwin says the first proposal that
w n e D submitted to the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting for the show was for one season's worth of episodes.
That proposal was rejected, but the team was funded and
then shot in November nineteen eighty one, says Erwine. After

(23:14):
the pilot, the team did more research to put together
a new proposal to get the show made. W N
e D partnered with Great Plains National in Lincoln, Nebraska
to submit the new proposal to the Kellogg Company and
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That proposal was his success,
and Buffalo and Nebraska test audiences got to see the

(23:37):
show before it made its national debut on p b S.
This was intended to be a summer series, Bettino says,
but of course it ended up transcending that people loved
the program like the fans who watched Reading Rainbow. Erwin, Bottino,
and Johnson have their own favorite episodes and books among

(23:57):
the one hundred and fifty five total. The book that
I really love is called Enemy Pie, Johnson says. The
two thousand book by Derrick Munson tells the tale of
a boy befriending a peer whom he didn't like at
first after eating pie with him. It's a beautiful theme
about welcoming in others, she says. Boutino and Irwin both

(24:18):
appreciate tight times, and Irwin ads bringing the rain to
Kapiti plains another special book read by James Earl Jones
on the show. Stories and story telling are so important
to the human experience, Erwin says, in the case of
Reading Rainbow, those stories open diverse worlds of possibilities for children,

(24:40):
offering these opportunities to meet different kinds of people, to
travel to different places, to experience different things, to go
back in time, to go into the future. That's the
power of story telling, Erwin says, and no series did
it any better than reading Rainbow did. Finally, de Lulu, skibbeity,

(25:01):
and tradwife are among more than six thousand words added
to the Cambridge Dictionary by Ella Feldman. No, You're not delusional.
Delublu is now an official word and the Cambridge Dictionary
a popular online language resource. The buzzy shortening of delusional
is one of six thousand, two hundred and twelve new

(25:23):
entries to the dictionary. Among them are tradwife, a portmanteau
of traditional wife that describes a controversial subculture of submissive,
domestic married women who promote their lifestyles online, roligarchy, which
describes wealthy men who usually work in tech and wield
or seek political influence. And skibbety, a gibberish viral word

(25:46):
that Cambridge's own definition says can have no real meaning.
Viral Internet moments can be fleeting, but Colin Macatosh, the
lexical program manager at Cambridge Dictionary, says experts select words
that they think will have longevity. We only add words
where we think they'll have staying power, Macintosh says in

(26:07):
his statement, Internet culture is changing the English language and
the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary.
Not every word in the latest round of editions is
as novel as skibbety, which is derived from an uncanny
animated YouTube series called Skibbety Toilet that dates back to
twenty twenty three. The word look l e w K

(26:32):
was added to Cambridge this year, three years after it
was added to Miriam Webster and more than a decade
after it was popularized by fashion influencers and drag queens.
Another edition was enspo, a term that has referred to
inspirational online images since the early days of Instagram. Even

(26:52):
words like de lulu have been around longer than people
might think. Christian Ilbury, a socio linguistic lecturer at the
University of Edinburgh, tells the associated presses lydia doya, it's
really just the increase in visibility and potential uptake amongst
communities who may not have engaged with those words before.

(27:13):
Ilbury says of the addition of viral words to dictionaries
like Cambridge, some of the dictionary's newest words reflect shifts
in human behavior and culture. A mouse jiggler is defined
as software that makes it look like you're online and
working even if you're not. A product of the post
pandemic surge in remote work environments. A new definition for

(27:36):
snackable describes Internet content that is short enough to keep
up with shrinking attention spans. The term forever chemical is
now in the dictionary, reflecting ongoing concern over damaging artificial
chemicals found in consumer products. A dictionary should be a
public record of how people use language, Ilbury tells the AP.

(28:01):
This includes readings from smithsonianmag dot com. For to day,
your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening,
and have a great day.