{"id":2441050,"date":"2019-02-26T08:42:54","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T15:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=800151"},"modified":"2019-02-26T08:42:54","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T15:42:54","slug":"flashback-bruce-springsteen-plays-streets-of-philadelphia-at-1994-oscars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/music-news\/flashback-bruce-springsteen-plays-streets-of-philadelphia-at-1994-oscars\/","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: Bruce Springsteen Plays \u2018Streets of Philadelphia\u2019 at 1994 Oscars"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Academy Awards aren\u2019t known for their stellar music performances, though there have been some very notable exceptions over the years. Isaac Hayes delivered a career-defining \u201cTheme From Shaft\u201d performance at the 1972 ceremony, Bj\u00f6rk rocked \u201cI\u2019ve Seen It All\u201d in her swan dress in 2001, Adele crushed \u201cSkyfall\u201d in 2013 and Mariah Carey staged a diva-off with Whitey Houston in 1999 for The Prince of Egypt\u2019<\/em>s \u201cWhen You Believe.\u201d And just this past week, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper revived \u201cShallow\u201d from A Star Is Born<\/em> and stole the show.<\/p>\n

Maybe the best year for musical performance was the 1994 ceremony. It was the night when Schindler\u2019s List<\/em> took Best Picture, Tommy Lee Jones won Best Supporting Actor for The Fugitive<\/em> and a young Anna Paquin took home the statue for her supporting role in The Piano,<\/em>\u00a0Tom Hanks won Best Actor for Philadelphia<\/em>, and Bruce Springsteen<\/a> and Neil Young battled it out over Best Original Song for their contributions to the movie\u2019s soundtrack. They both played that night, and here\u2019s video of Springsteen singing \u201cThe Streets of Philadelphia\u201d shortly before he won.<\/p>\n

This was a pivotal time in Springsteen\u2019s career. The reaction to his two 1992 albums Human Touch<\/em> and Lucky Town<\/em> was, at best, extremely mixed. He toured them all over the world with a new band and sold a ton of tickets, but most fans missed the E Street Band and he seemed like yet another Eighties icon that would unable to adjust to a post-Nirvana world. But when asked to write a song for Jonathan Demme\u2019s AIDS drama Philadelphia<\/em>, he created a haunting tune using drum loops that was unlike anything he\u2019d done before. The song shot to Number Nine and was all over the radio and VH1.<\/p>\n

He performed it at the Grammys and the MTV Video Music Awards with Max Weinberg on drums, but at the Academy Awards Human Touch<\/em> tour drummer Zack Alford was behind the kit, possibly because of Weinberg\u2019s commitments to his new gig with Conan O\u2019Brien. As you can see here, Alford did an incredible job recreating the drum machine from the original recording. \u201cI actually got a great compliment after that gig,\u201d Alford told Rolling Stone<\/em> in 2013.<\/a> \u201cA drummer that I respect named Charlie Drayton came up to me and said, \u2018Why did you guys mime to that song?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Actually, we didn\u2019t.\u2019 That was a huge compliment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later in the evening, Springsteen took home the Best Original Song award. \u201cThis is the first song I ever wrote for a motion picture, so I guess it\u2019s all downhill from here,\u201d he said. \u201cBut, Neil, I gotta share this with you. You do your best work and you hope that it pulls out the best in your audience and some piece of it spills over into the real world and into people\u2019s everyday lives. And it takes the edge off fear and allows us to recognize each other through our veil of differences. I always thought that was one of the things popular art was supposed to be about, along with the merchandising and all the other stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two years later, Springsteen wrote \u201cDead Man Walkin’\u201d for the Sean Penn\u2013Susan Sarandon movie Dead Man Walking<\/em> and was nominated for another Oscar, but this time was beat out by \u201cColors of the Wind\u201d from the Pocahontas<\/em> soundtrack. In 2009, he won a Golden Globe for his song \u201cThe Wrestler\u201d from the movie of the same name, but he somehow wasn\u2019t even nominated for an Academy Award.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Academy Awards aren\u2019t known for their stellar music performances, though there have been some very notable exceptions over the years. Isaac Hayes delivered a career-defining \u201cTheme From Shaft\u201d performance at the 1972 ceremony, Bj\u00f6rk rocked \u201cI\u2019ve Seen It All\u201d in her swan dress in 2001, Adele crushed \u201cSkyfall\u201d in 2013 and Mariah Carey staged […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2441050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-14 16:04:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2441050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2441050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2441050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2441050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}