NILS LOFGREN - Bullets Fever 45RPM Single, New
$
26
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Description
A brand new, unplayed copy of Bullets Fever by Nils Lofgren. I lived in Washington D.C. in 1978 and bought two copies when it came out. I'm now selling my second copy. Here's the story behind Bullets Fever, written by Michael Graff of Dime magazine. It recounts how a Maryland musician who had just lost his band was sitting around and became inspired by the Washington Bullets:
He (Lofgren) wrote “Bullets Fever” that night. The next day he called a friend, Bob Dawson, who had a studio. Lofgren laid down an initial track, then played all the instruments and sang (guitars and piano and harmonies). Dawson made the mix and ran off 25 cassettes. The next day, Lofgren opened the phone book and wrote down the addresses of radio studios around Washington. He drove each cassette to a different studio and asked that it land on the desk of the program manager.
“And sure enough, they kept winning, and somebody started playing it, and next thing you know, it was like the most requested song on local radio,” Lofgren told me recently. “God bless ’em. They kept winning.”
For weeks, Lofgren’s high-pitched voice piped into cars around the beltway:
You gotta be a fan from old D.C.
To know what the Bullets mean to me.
To see them get up and go all the way
For me, Bullets Fever is here to stay!
Not exactly “Like a Rolling Stone,” but still catchy. Bullets owner Abe Pollin took a liking to it and invited Lofgren to meet with him. A few days later, Lofgren was walking around the Capital Centre, the old swoop-roofed arena out in Landover, Maryland, where the Bullets and Capitals played for decades. The meeting was at 10:30 a.m.
“I looked like a homeless person,” Lofgren remembers. “Disheveled and just very casual, kind of in my own world.”
Pollin told Lofgren he loved the song, but he had some questions about how it came together. Who wrote it? “I wrote it,” Lofgren said. And who sang it? “I sang it.” And who are the musicians in the background? “Just me.” Wait, what do you mean? “I played everything.” Well, who are the girl singers? “That’s not girl singers. I’m singing falsetto. That’s me.”
By the end of the meeting, Pollin and Lofgren agreed to press 1,000 45s and donate the proceeds to Pollin’s leukemia foundation. They sold out almost immediately. An original copy of “Bullets Fever” remains a rare find because, of course, Lofgren had to update it.
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