About a year ago, when Bruce Springsteen came to town, one of the local radio stations had a clever idea: to take a day or so to play the Boss's entire catalog, in random order. This worked out pretty well, since Springsteen has been notoriously stingy with his official releases, which means there wasn't a whole lot of obscure or subpar material to work around, and a whole lot of truly excellent music. I'm not sure what they did when they got to "Mary, Queen of Arkansas": Maybe they just pretended it was the first song they played and told all the subsequent DJs to forget about it. I'm sure they thought of some excuse.
They even played that simmering live version of Jimmy Cliff's "Trapped" that appeared on the USA for Africa album. It turned out to be a lot of fun, and it must have done pretty well with Old Man Arbitron, because they tried the same stunt again . . . when Tom Petty came to town.
Ugh.
If you thought the front end of Long After Dark was kind of dismal, wait till you hear the filler. Anyway, they have not tried this little ratings grabber again.
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