On September 11, 2001, my phone rang at an insanely early hour.
It was my friend Eric, who said only one thing: “Turn on your TV.”
“Dude, what are you doing?” I said, my eyes burning. “Do you know what time it is here?”
“Just turn on your TV,” he said. And it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything else until I did.
It didn’t matter what channel, he said. And, sure enough, when I turned it on, there it was — the Twin Towers, both burning. Both doomed.
In the months and years that followed that awful day, there have been many songs writtern about it. Toby Keith’s “Angry American (Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue)” was a hot button one. Then there was “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag” by Charlie Daniels, “Let’s Roll” by Neil Young, ” and “World on Fire” by Sarah McLachlan, among others.
But none matched the intensity of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising.”
When I first heard this album, about a year after the attacks, it brought about a new wave of mourning. While Keith and Daniels took a kick-ass-and-take-names-later approach, Springsteen’s album explored the emotions relevant to that time and it warned us to sit back and think a moment before seeking an eye for an eye.
Ironically, many of the songs were written prior to 9/11, including “My City of Ruins” — a song about Asbury Park, NJ. Yet, even those songs just seemed to work.Other tunes, like “The Rising,” were written specifically about the day.
It’s a touchy matter — you don’t want to appear to be making money off a horrible event — but Springsteen pulled it off. If you listen to some of those songs — “You’r Missing,” “Empty Sky” or “Into the Fire” — you just can’t help but remember those images from the TV and think about what New York City was going through.
Because while it was still in the same country, as surfers dotted the Morro Bay lineup that fall morning, New York felt like a world away.
Posted on September 11th, 2008 by Pat
Filed under: Music
I remember hearing the first news reports about the Sept. 11 attacks on NPR as I drove to work.
I thought it was a hoax. It just didn’t seem possible. Didn’t seem real.
When I walked through the doors of my office (I was interning at a newspaper in Albany, Ore., at the time), every television in the building was on — tuned to different news channels but all showing the same horrible image: smoke and fire rising from the World Trade Center. Nobody really knew what had happened but we all watched, waiting for more information.
After a couple hours, we remembered that we had a paper to put out and started making phone calls. It was a relief, strangely, to talk to folks with connections to New York City and WTO, to compile a list of Sept. 11 prayer services, to find organizations setting up efforts to help.
It made me feel like I was doing something — a very small something, but something nonetheless.