24 Comments

there comes a time when the kind of money you are talking about becomes nothing. What would you do with trillions or billions or even millions? buy an island ? Buy a country and make yourself king? A solid gold toilet? I laugh at pastries that cost $40 a piece. Yes, you can find them in St Paul.

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A $40 doughnut? Good heavens. Of course you're right. Time is the real luxury, not extravagance.

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My young friend asked me if I thought a Rolex was too much luxury for a young man. I'm going to tell him to take care not to confuse luxury with extravagance

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Of course no one needs that sort of money. The Boss seems like a person with the depth of character to realize this. I suspect that he might use the money to start a foundation to do some good for the people of his hometown and beyond - if he hasn't already.

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A Broadway show with Prairie Home Companion Music as the subject of the play. You could be accompanied by your PHC orchestra as you tell the founding circumstances and feelings for your music and stories. Limericks could top off the show. This is the avenue to that big money pay-off. Although, it might tarnish that down home everyday man's persona that you have. Money has a tendency to do that to our perceived character.

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This musical would run for two days and an afternoon and lose a truckload of money for peopleI have no right to bilk, so I'm going to sit and write a new book insteead, called BOOM TOWN, which won't make money but won't lose it either.

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Boom Town, good name and good idea.

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founding

But what would you do with all that money, Garrison? Probably blow it on books you'd buy and never have the time to read!

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Maybe I'd endow a chair in Light Verse at Vanderbilt.

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The simplicity of the street names being alphabetically arranged is not necessarily unique. Even Boston's back bay has streets alphabetically arranged (although they did skip I, J, K & L).

Of course, Steve Miller said it best-'Take the Money and Run'. The evolved version of 'Born To Run'.

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Dec 22, 2021·edited Dec 22, 2021

I never cared for Springsteen. His songs and his music don't appeal to me. But here we have a guy who passed through the doorway of 70 years, sells his music, his history, to sony for a half-billion. If you're going to sell out, you do that in your 30's or 40's when you have decades in front of you to use it. Not when you are neighbors with the grim reaper and regularly have coffee with him at the local Dunkin' Donuts. Now unless if he plans on using that money to dump his consciousness into a robot so he can live on for another century or giving it all to animal rescue groups, I see the whole transaction as pointless.

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Good for B S .He has earned it...likewise B D. Their next concerts will NOT use the old stuff.(imagine paying royalties to cover yourself, I know it happens ,but usually there is creativity involved [see T.S./RED...5 ) years ago, Dylan didn't sound like any recording of him I'd ever heard. Now Bruce is going to have to work on that. As for creativity...he has constantly reinvented himself...Bless his bouncy little bottom!

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Mr. K,

Wow! Taking shots at The Boss. Release the hounds.

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Priceless! =

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founding

"Men don't dream of the hitchhiker life. The Hobo is a faded American legend..." Possibly. My "hitchhiker days" were the 80's and 90's, in California, when I tried to drive on every non-urban road in the state, and picked up hitchhikers - sometimes 3 or 4 to a trip. Once, next to a slow uphill track, I picked up a genuine hobo who had just "detrained". I had been reading some of these paeans to "Life on the Road." I asked him, excitedly, to tell me about jumping trains. "You're making a mistake if you're glamorizing the hobo life," he replied. "It would seem that the easiest place to hop a train is in a rail yard, but they often have monitors with big sticks looking around for folks hoping for a "free ride." One guy I knew, new to the game, went to get into a boxcar as the train was gathering speed. He leapt for the open door and missed. The train rolled over his leg, again and again. He was lucky somebody dragged him off the track, and that they could amputate the leg and leave the rest of him in one piece!" And as fer wimin, if you're respectable, there's no place for you in a hobo camp longside the tracks. Folks'll figger that if you're there, you're free for the taking. Best you just stick to roadside hitchhikers, and let us tell you about our adventures - not yours!

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It is so hard to be critical of "The Boss" but you have a point. Why not your little ditties? They are swell! Good luck with the bidding Garrison!

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I heard that Richard Pryor once said that the source of humor is anger. This essay is a perfect example of that principle. I'm a huge Springsteen fan, but this is one of your funniest pieces and the lyrics to your old PHC ditties was an added laugh out loud bonus. And then to add in what your wife said to you and your poetic response....priceless. Keep making us laugh, GK! And good luck with the bidding.

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Your voice encapsulated as Katz's Deli intrigued me. My two cats' plural is always katz. But I digress. I was hoping I'd find Dylan in this Emergence column, and I did, positively there on some street somewhere (probably 4th.)

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Early in Bruces' Broadway show he comments that the show was the first time He's had a daily job, and though He's rich, He puts on the clothes of His working class Father to sing for the Common man. That's how good a songwriter he is, to create the magic trick of pulling a spiritual experience out of thin air at each performance. Early in His career he said "More than fame or riches, I wanted to be great." I think He is great. His songs have a meaning and gravitas, while entertaining, that most singers lack. Selling these catalogs is a way to take the burden off their kids, it can be quite a job to control. Also heirs have less to fight over.

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Good to know the man has your complette loyalty.

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I love a good Garrison Keillor song and I love the entire RAMONES catalog. What does this say about me?- confused in Texas

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Be sure to include the UofVirginia Wahoowa song that you sang to Rocky Top!

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