I never enjoy looking through used CD’s when I’m with someone, because looking through used CD’s is something I can do for a solid hour without bother. In many cases, it’s a real waste of time to leaf one’s way through the detritus of the ‘90s (that’s primarily when most of the used CD’s you find were created and manufactured, the fleeting hopes and dreams of a thousand bands translated into digital code and flash packaging that you can’t even roll a joint on, to paraphrase Shelby Lynne) but every now and again, you find what you’re looking for. As the Super Bowl approached a few weeks back, I found myself listening to my Springsteen collection – the at-the-knee storytelling of The Ghost Of Tom Joad, the epic sweep of Born In The U.S.A., the stark realities of Nebraska – when I discovered that somewhere in my purchasing history, I had forgotten to lay down for The Rising, which was as close to a 9/11 statement album as Springsteen got.I had resigned myself to buying it on my next Grand Rapids trip when I took a Sunday shopping detour with my visiting mom to some local used clothing stores, and at our first stop (Gold Mine North, BTW) what should I find among the broken plastic cases but a slightly beat-up copy of The Rising for three bucks. Now, this is certainly not his high point of the ‘00s – it’s too long by a few songs, and some of the lyrics swoop awfully close to trite banalities, which can happen when you’ve been writing solid work for over three decades – but it has some gems, and it was three g.d. dollars. And more importantly, it helped to reinforce that the search process will occasionally yield some rewards from time to time, the cream rising to the top.
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