The King Evrock is an American who was born with a fat Irish face in the early 1980s. After a brief stint as a break dancer, Evrock discovered skateboarding and punk music. We found him doing things like this on the interweb and thought he might like to write about some music records for us. Evrock’s goal in life is to meet the ghost of Joe Strummer, he can do 50 push-ups in one minute, and his uncle was Captain Pike on Star Trek. When he dies, Evrock wants to be buried inside a skate ramp and he wants everyone at his funeral to be dressed as a team member of the 1984 Boston Celtics. He also makes great mixtapes, maybe we’ll save that for another day though.
So there I was, racking my brain at 8 a.m. trying to figure out the exact identity of the woman that was lying next to me on this twin mattress in this shabby Bushwick apartment. I felt like a hung over Scooby Doo sleuth, attempting to solve the mystery of my strange hipster seductress. Her place was your typical disgrace, a pile a dirty clothes and dishes on the floor and poorly taken Polaroid photos stuck effortlessly on the wall, all the while the sound of a buddy going “balls deep” in the adjacent room echoed throughout its pitiful architecture. 8 whiskey highballs had sent me shooting through an intoxicated time-traveling black hole the previous summer night in 2002, but there was one saving grace to the entire debacle, Nebraska.
There it was, spinning on her turntable, quietly popping at its end. I brought the needle back to the beginning of side B. It was the Boss that I knew, but he was more vulnerable and honest than I had heard him before as he sang about his daddy’s used car and man’s eternal plight of trying to be somebody. This album was like a collection of distant ghost songs from some strange planet. I felt as if I had been invited to some secret rock n’ roll christening as a lit up a cigarette, trying not to wake my beautiful captor. The sound of Nebraska had became important to me on that sweaty city morning, I wanted to be a part of Springsteen’s brut honesty…I wanted to hear everything he had to say.
The craziest thing about this masterpiece is that is almost didn’t happen. It was the same old story of the record label adhering to its usual “bad decision” regiment, wanting Nebraska to be a polished rock record with an 8-piece band. By stripping it down to a man, a guitar, and Portastudio, Springsteen had created a masterwork with nothing but venom, turmoil, and heart. With musical nods to his heroes like Hank Williams and Suicide, Springsteen’s Nebraska is a must have album for anybody who loves music that is wonderful and real. It’s definitely not the prettiest of records, but for a man who is searching for self, Nebraska can be the perfect road map.
Sample Track: Atlantic City
Here’s the album on Spotify…
Evrock has a major hand in these sites, check ‘em out.