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However, it was the Boss who gave him the spark that started a fire. Growing up as one of four siblings in the grim, post-industrial British town of Luton (30 miles north of London) during the 1980s, Manzoor was caught between the cultural expectations of his overbearing Pakistani-immigrant mother and father - Rasool Bibi and Mohammed Manzoor - and his own desires to escape the everyday racism that was part of his stifling surroundings.Īs a 16-year-old, Manzoor faced that lonely battle, and school wasn’t giving him any solutions. In his 1984 track “No Surrender,” Bruce Springsteen famously wrote, “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.” Sarfraz Manzoor knows that feeling.
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Tom Morello reunites with Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder on new album Goldman CEO defends DJ'ing habit, admits Barry Manilow a 'guilty pleasure'īah-humbug! Christmas tree replaced by 'artsy' cardboard, NJ mourns 'tradition' But it's also possible the perception of a lyric deemed too risque for radio did the trick.Bruce sways as Sony pays: Springsteen sells music rights in blockbuster deal By then, Springsteen had his breakthrough with Born to Run, and the connection probably helped its commercial prospects. This time he took a Springsteen song all the way to No. It, too, flopped, as a single, but Mann tried again with "Blinded by the Light" a year later for The Roaring Silence.
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In 2018, Mann told Louder Sound that a DJ in Philadelphia recommended Greetings, which led to him and his Earth Band to record "Spirit in the Night" on 1975's Nightingales & Bombers. Still, the verbosity of "Blinded by the Light" and much of Greetings drew comparisons to Bob Dylan at a time when every talented wordsmith with an acoustic guitar, including such luminaries as John Prine and Loudon Wainwright III, was hailed as a "New Dylan." While that tag was an albatross around the neck for many up-and-coming singer-songwriters, including Springsteen, it also proved somewhat fortuitous in the form of Manfred Mann, who had a few big hits in the U.K. 23, 1973, more than a month after the album came out, "Blinded by the Light" failed to chart. Even though it was deemed commercial enough to be released as a single on Feb. In his autobiography Born to Run, Springsteen wrote that he composed "Blinded by the Light" late in the process, after Columbia Records head Clive Davis heard nothing on Greetings that would work on the radio ("Spirit in the Night" was also penned at this time). Watch Bruce Springsteen Break Down 'Blinded by the Light' "I wanted to do things I hadn't done and see things i hadn't seen." "I wanted to get blinded by the light," he said. The chorus, Springsteen added, presaged the escapist themes that would launch him to stardom a few years later on Born to Run. As for the rest, "Don't overthink the whole thing." His scope is expanded in the next verse, where he described how New Jersey was still stuck in the late '60s, with a cat-and mouse game played between campus radicals (" Some hazard from Harvard") and FBI agents (" Scotland Yard was trying hard"). Hope arrived in the bridge, where playing music in bars put him in contact with a "silicone sister" - which Springsteen believed could be the first reference to breast implants in pop music history - and then " little Early-Pearly came by in her curly-wurly and asked me if I needed a ride." "That's self-explanatory," Springsteen deadpanned. The second and third verses were about sexual frustration, not being liked by girlfriends' fathers and dances at the YMCA where the chaperone would make sure nothing remotely sexual happened.
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He set the song on the boardwalks of the Jersey Shore by referencing a merry-go-round and calliope. Springsteen then broke down the track, the opener and first single from his 1973 debut Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. The "madman drummer" mentioned in the opening line was drummer Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez the Indians were Springsteen's Little League team.