Bruce Springsteen’sWrecking Ball is not a great album. In fact, it’s debatable whether relative to Springsteen’s body of work, it’s even a particularly good one. It evidences the same weaknesses that more than a little of Springsteen’s work has suffered from since his last masterpiece, Tunnel OfLove (1987); over-thought and over-intellectualized concepts that border dangerously on self-importance, backed by music that feels like it’s made by an artist who desperately wants to find new sounds that are the equal of his older ones, but who cannot quite locate them. It is an ambitious album and it is certainly a failure, one of the biggest of his career.
If Wrecking Ball is Springsteen honing in on the Great Recession and placing blame where he thinks it belongs, his chronic tendency to overthink things has him deliberately and needlessly link it lyrically it to past American crisis’, whether it’s the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement or striking railroad workers in the 19th century, which only diffuses the power of the songs for the present they are attempting to speak to. And the music, mostly folk based with touches of gospel, r&b, rock and inexplicably, Irish folk, has a modern sheen, but more often than not, it feels old, as though Springsteen is writing songs for the downtrodden workingman from 1937, not 2012. It sounds like Springsteen has chosen to aim the gun--and has picked up a musket instead of an automatic weapon.
When Springsteen sings of “robber barons” and “cannonballs” in “Death To My Hometown;” or “fat cats” on the woefully clichéd “Easy Money,” the ancient language makes everything feel embarrassingly impotent; it’s as though Professor Springsteen has taken over, and instead of powerfully addressing the breakdown in American society as it exists and is spoken of right now, he’s writing the songs to double as history lessons. What Springsteen has forgotten is that great political albums (whether it’s Dylan or What’s Goin’ On) speak and live in the present and then become timeless—they make history more than they sing about it.
Wrecking Ball’s first single, “We Take Care Of Our Own,” is firmly placed in the present as it lists all the places that we don’t take care of our own, but its ode to the E Street sound (yes, including glockenspiel) is all too shiny and glossy, brawny but empty. Producer Ron Aniello (Jars of Clay, Candlebox, Lifehouse) cannot (as Brendan O’Brien could not) find a guitar tone that sound anything other than, well, mainstream cheese. (For the great rocker he is, it’s inexcusable that Springsteen hasn’t had a consistently cool sounding guitar tone on record since 1984.)
Aniello and Springsteen produced the album pretty much as a duo, with Springsteen playing the majority of instruments himself and Aniello providing percussion and sampling. The samples are fine, but they provide little—they feel tacked on, obvious, and ultimately, unnecessary. And why Springsteen, one of the greatest rockers of all time, has chosen to work with the guy whose biggest credits are Jars Of Clay, Lifehouse and Candlebox is a mystery, other than the fact that they met through Aniello’s production of a Patti Scialfa album. The choice of Aniello evidences another breakdown in the Springsteen camp in recent years—the lack of collaborators who are at Springsteen’s level and can elevate him. At the end of the day, taste matters, and many of the production decisions made on Wrecking Ball exhibit a fatal amount of middling taste.
There are some fine moments on the album. “Shackled and Drawn,” despite its Irish lilt, is buoyant enough to overcome its arrangement. “This Depression” leaves the Irish folk by the wayside and with a beat straight out of “When The Levee Breaks,” has a yearning that and sense of loss that is affecting. “Land Of Hope And Dreams,” a great Springsteen song that he’s been playing since 1999, is rearranged and is far more effective rhythmically than it’s ever been with the E Street Band. “Rocky Ground” has an overtly gospel tone that uplifts. But none of these recordings, not a single one, is a classic, and every Springsteen album in the last decade, even Working On A Dream, has had its share.
You can’t fault Springsteen’s good intentions on Wrecking Ball. His passion and commitment is still palpable. But ultimately, this is an album that won’t make the sub prime mortgage guys at Goldman Sachs lose a single minute of sleep. At the end of the day, Springsteen has done no better than the Obama Administration to hold to account those responsible for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. If anything, so far in 2012, Obama is having a far better year than Bruce.
I first experienced the healing power of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on August 14, 1985. I was fourteen, had just gotten home from sleep away camp a few days earlier, and had a couple of weeks of summer vacation left before school started. And instead of being by the pool, I was in bed, really sick. I knew what it was—I was asplenetic, the result of being in a car accident when I was six, and not having a spleen left my immune system compromised, so I had the same infection that I came down with four or five times each year as a child--swollen tonsils so bad I could barely swallow and a temperature of 104. Given its frequency, I wasn’t worried, but I knew that I had at least three days of being hellaciously sick in front of me.
Then my older brother Robert called.
Robert was almost seventeen years older than me. Technically, he was my half-brother (same father) but he never occurred to me like that—he was my big bro. When I was a little boy I worshiped him and he was about as incredible a big brother as anyone could have. When I was in the car accident that had me lose my spleen (and my mother) and was in the hospital for a week recovering from my injuries, Robert, who was serving in the Army in Germany, immediately came home on emergency leave, and except to go to my mother’s funeral, didn’t leave my side for that week, sleeping in a chair next to me every night.
As I got older, our relationship inevitably became more complicated and occasionally stormy. But the love was still there, and in terms of my musical development, he was critical. It was from Robert that at the age of nine or so, I first held Born To Run in my hands. Robert turned me on to the Ramones and the Talking Heads and a zillion other bands that most pre-teens just didn’t listen to, and when I got into the Who, he insisted on playing Quadrophenia to the exclusion of all other Who records. It was from him that I got a cassette that he had picked up while stationed in Germany. The label copy was all in German except for six words: The Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed.
Robert’s call came in and someone yelled up to me to pick up. I wearily brought the phone to my ear, and the first words I heard were, “You want to go see Springsteen in Philly tomorrow night?”
I shot straight out of bed.
“Really???” I asked. Yep. And he told me that he had paid $125 for each ticket that had a face value of $17.50. I told him I was sick and he just said, “Well get better quick, kid. We’re going.” I told him I would and hung up.
I ran downstairs to tell my dad. I was now something beyond manic. My dad loathed rock and never pretended to understand my devotion to the music, but his response was typically great. “Well, if your temperature is normal by tomorrow morning, you can go.” I gobbled some more aspirin and took a couple extra anti-biotics. There was no way in the world I was missing this. By 8am the next morning, Thursday, August 15, my temperature was 98.6. My dad gave me the green light to go to the show.
My brother picked me up in the afternoon, and we drove down to Philadelphia. I’m not sure I had ever been more excited. It was not only my first Springsteen show—it was my first rock concert. It was the height of Born In The U.S.A. mania and that mania was palpable. Bruce was the biggest rock star on the planet, and Veterans Stadium felt like the center of the earth on that immensely hot and humid night.
Bruce opened, as he did practically all his shows on that tour, with a booming version of “Born In The U.S.A.” I pumped my fist in the air like everyone else. But the loudest applause in the early part of the show, even louder than when the band came out from the wings, was during the night’s second song, “Badlands,” when Clarence played his first solo of the night. The sax signified something larger than the guitars or drums; after all, every rock band had guitars and drums, and most had keyboards. No, the sax meant that we were at a Bruce Springsteen concert for real, and that fact being drilled home through Clarence’s tenor filled 65,000 people with an incredible amount of joy.
The four hours (including the intermission) went by in a blur, and Clarence felt almost as important to the night’s proceedings as Bruce himself. He was the foil, visually and musically, and his solos on “Trapped,” “I’m Goin’ Down,” “The Promised Land,” and “Hungry Heart” lit the whole of the stadium. When Bruce closed “Thunder Road” by sliding across the stage sixty feet across his knees to kiss Clarence right on the mouth, it felt both shocking to my 14 year old self and completely right. In a lot of ways, Clarence felt like the most popular person in the stadium that night.
That night, August 15, 1985, was the first night I shared with the band, the first of dozens to come. The huge majority of those shows came after Bruce reunited the band in 1999, and by then, Clarence was not nearly as mobile as he once had been. But he was still the Big Man, still playing well and his sax served as the ultimate signifier that the band was indeed back together; perhaps that’s why he was treasured more than ever. The centerpiece of the tour, a 20-minute version of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” climaxed every night with Bruce’s introduction of Clarence and those first two lines of the third verse of the song: “Well they made that change uptown/And the Big Man joined the band.” That was it. That was what, in a lot of ways, it was always all about.
The absence of the band for 10 years had made hardcore fans like myself very conscious to enjoy each moment we experienced with the band. The experience was no longer to be taken for granted, if it had ever been. And of all the many rituals at a Bruce and E Street show, my favorite was always the first notes of Clarence’s first solo every night. I anticipated it every night, and sometimes would look at the crowd instead of Clarence, so I could watch the faces transform into beams of joy as his sax washed over the crowd. It was a clarion call of sorts, living testament to a lot of what Bruce wanted his music to be about—friendship, joy, the search for connection, meaning and soul. Life right here, right now.
And it was about love. To experience Clarence Clemons was to experience love; the love that he put out every night to the crowd, his obvious and immense love affair with Bruce, his love of earthly pleasures, his love of soul and spirit, and his love of providing people with joy. And that love he gave was returned to him from the crowd every single night in most beautiful of ways. While there are a lot of hardcore fans that have complicated feelings about Bruce over a variety of matters (his politics, his newer material, etc.), about Clarence there was no such ambivalence. We all agreed on Clarence. And therefore, the love reflected back at him from the crowd was pure love, about a pure a thing as I’ve ever seen. Thankfully, he knew it, loved it, and reveled in it.
As a player, Clarence was both unaccomplished technically and completely perfect. He was a honker in the King Curtis tradition extending back to Los Angeles jump blues bands from the 40’s and Atlantic R&B of the 50’s. But he was always the band’s link to soul, in both music and attitude. Like the best of Springsteen’s music, where the songs simultaneously contain joy and sorrow, Clarence’s best solos in “Trapped,” “Jungleland,” “Drive All Night,” “The Promised Land,” and others, felt to me like a burst of freedom with a large heaping of knowing sadness. They may have been triumphant, but the triumph always came with a price.
I saw that price up close in April of 2009, back in Philadelphia, where I had first seen the band almost 25 years previously. The lights went down, and the band went to their spots onstage. I was about 15 rows up on the side, Clarence’s side, and even in the dark, I could see Bruce helping Clarence, who had just undergone knee and hip replacement surgery, to his spot onstage, much the way a son helps one of their infirm parents. It was clear that Clarence could barely walk. When Clarence got to his spot and Bruce knew he was properly situated, they embraced and kissed, and before the lights went on and a single note was played, I was crying.
Hearing the news of his death on Saturday night was both totally expected and a complete shock. But what surprised me was the intensity of my reaction. I got home, poured myself a scotch, scoured the Internet, made a “Clarence” playlist on iTunes—and cried off and on all night into Sunday morning. I drove out to Jersey to be with my dad on Father’s Day and the second I heard that ethereal organ intro to “Independence Day,” I lost it in the car. I cried not because there won’t be any more Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band shows with Clarence Clemons. I cried simply because I really loved living on the same planet as him, and knowing that he won’t be around anymore in the flesh really, really hurts. And it hurts today. It seems ridiculous in a way to me that losing Clarence feels like losing a member of the family, but it does. It’s a death in the family.
No matter. His body may no longer breathe, but his being--who he was for Bruce, the E Street Band, and the people he played for--lives on through thousands of hours of music and will continue to inspire and bring joy to multitudes. Perhaps it will even heal another sick fourteen-year-old boy, but it most likely won’t be because he needs to get better because the E Street Band are playing in Philadelphia the following night.
Rest in peace, Big Man. Thank you so much for everything.
On October 13 at 4pm, E Street Radio will be broadcasting the latest Springsteen Community Conference that I co-hosted with my good friend John Franck. Titled, "The Ties That Bind: Springsteen and the Next Generation," it's a great exploration of Springsteen's influence on a new generation of musicians.
Our guests for this include Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine), Pete Yorn and drummer Jay Weinberg. It's a killer show, with some great, informative and often hilarious anecdotes, much like the one below. If you're a Bruce fan, you won't want to miss this!
I first heard Vampire Weekend in the summer of 2007 when they were blog buzzing. A friend sent me a link to their Myspace page and said something smarmy about them, asking me where everyone's balls went. I didn't think much of what I heard-this was obviously "smart people" music made by overeducated kids who had probably majored in semiotics, or something in that realm. But whatever, they kind of blew up. I've listened to their albums and while I can listen to them and experience a bit of pleasure, broadly speaking, they do nothing for me.
There's a YouTube video of them doing Springsteen's "I'm Goin' Down" a couple of weeks ago in Vancouver that's been making the rounds. It took me a couple of tries to get all the way through it-it's so horribly cutesy and neutered that it occurs as pointless. I can't help but wonder why they even played it, as they bring nothing to it; not humor, not longing, not sadness and not fun. Yes, there's an interesting novelty about a hot indie band playing a song off of Born In The U.S.A., something that would have been unthinkable ten to twenty years ago, but all Vampire Weekend does is flatten the song into a non-entity. Listening to it, it's no wonder they've been dubbed the world's Whitest Band.
"I'm Goin' Down" is sometimes considered one of the slightest songs on Born In The U.S.A., but it's really not slight at all. It's a Springsteen song that sounds happy but is really sad, following in the grand Springsteen tradition of uptempo songs with much darker lyrical undertones. What it's really about is how love fades or becomes obscured over time. Or said in a better way, how familiarity breeds contempt.
Bruce spoke of this in his introduction to the song on the Born In The U.S.A. tour in 1984-1985. It's a funny little rap, and by putting the song in its rightful context, he takes something that could be seen as slight and elevates it to the level of something truly special, something that eludes Vampire Weekend utterly and completely.
At long last is the posting of the Springsteen Community Conference on Sirius/XM's E Street Radio from this past April. The subject was "Bruce and Politics" and I moderated a great panel featuring writer Dave Marsh, John Franck, Jovan Mrvos, Stan Goldstein and Lisa Ianucci. We covered a broad range of subjects and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy.
Last week, Sirius/XM's E Street Radio broadcast another roundtable discussion that I participated in. This time, the topic was Bruce Springsteen in the 1990's, a decade that many fans, myself included, view with varying degrees of ambivalence. I hesitate to say that it was a "lost" decade, as Springsteen wrote and released some wonderful music, but looking back, it's clear that things didn't work with the same consistency as they had in the 1970's and 80's. And as a new generation of great rock bands emerged in the early part of the decade, Springsteen's place in the rock world was somewhat upended and newly up for grabs.
My co-panelists for the discussion were Flynn McLean and Jonathan Pont of Backstreets Magazine, and John Franck, the only man in the world I know who can speak expertly about both Springsteen and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. We had a lot of fun, and I think it comes out in the broadcast. And we are not shy with the criticism.
So at long last, here is the mp3 version of the panel discussion I co-moderated on Sirius/XM's E Street Radio on the 25th Anniversary of the Born In The U.S.A. tour. We had a great panel and I couldn't be more pleased with how the discussion turned out. If you're a Bruce fan or a student of rock history, this is for you.
Not only was this past decade Bruce Springsteen's most productive decade ever, with five new studio albums released, it featured some of his best work ever. Album for album, none of them (The Rising, Devils & Dust, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Magic, Working On A Dream) were quite at the level of Springsteen's work from 1973 to 1987 (from the Wild & Innocent through Tunnel Of Love), but the following 25 songs rank favorably with the best of his work, and I'd love to know another artist who had 25 songs that are the equal of these.
1. "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" (Magic, 2007)
The sound of a weathered and bruised man trying to get out from under a whole lot of loneliness and heartbreak, stepping out and ready to love again, knowing that love is the only thing that saves, and all too aware time waits for no one, especially him. With a super-compressed 12-string acoustic guitar, a Pet Sounds influence all over the thing, and lyrics so vivid that they're worthy of the bridge of "Born To Run," this isn't just Springsteen's best song of the decade, it's one of his best songs ever. An absolutely magical recording - it's no wonder they never got it right live.
If you read "Portraits Of Grief," The New York Times section on the victims of 9/11, it sometimes seemed as though in each day's section, there was at least one victim who was a huge Springsteen fan. Springsteen took in the events of that day and even more importantly, the aftermath, speaking to families about what they were going through in the wake of the horror. Then he made it all personal - people with an uncertain determination to pull through betrayals private and public, with music that was like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
3. "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live" (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions [American Land Edition], 2006)
Taken from Ry Cooder who took it from Blind Alfred Reed, Springsteen kept the original first verse, and then rewrote it as an indictment of the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. One of Springsteen's most powerful protest songs, it burned with an anger and resentment that made it one of his greatest songs ever. If there was a better protest song written and released in the wake of Katrina, I don't know what it is. 4. "Long Time Comin'" (Devils & Dust, 2005)
Debuted live in 1996, but released in 2005, "Long Time Comin'," with its pedal steel, and the swing of Steve Jordan on drums, hit the mark perfectly in the studio - the beauty of the arrangement matching the hard earned contentment of the lyrics.
5. "O Mary Don't You Weep" (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, 2006)
I was hooked on this from the moment I heard it in the spring of 2006, and the natural joy of it never ceased to thrill me after dozens and dozens of listens. Unlike the Brendan O'Brien produced material of the decade, The Seeger Sessions was recorded live and had an ease about it that hearkened back to The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. Bruce's mastery of soul and gospel shone through abundantly on this, and it makes me long even harder for a whole album of soul style originals.
6. "My City Of Ruins" (The Rising, 2002, debuted live 12/17/00)
From the moment it debuted at Springsteen's Christmas shows with the Max Weinberg 7 in Asbury Park in December of 2000, it was recognized on first listen as a special song. The Asbury crowd, despite never hearing the song before, had their fists in the air by the second chorus, singing "Rise up!" along with Bruce.
After 9/11, it was obvious that the song, despite being written for and about Asbury Park, fit the aftermath of the horror perfectly. So Springsteen opened with the 9/11 telethon with a smart and hymn-like version of it, led with acoustic guitar.
On The Rising, Springsteen found the perfect arrangement for it, with Max Weinberg's drums, sounding more modern in feel and tone than he ever had, leading the way. And anyone who has ever lost someone can relate to the final question Bruce asks, "How do I begin again?"
7. "The Rising" (The Rising, 2002)
Think about the subject matter of "The Rising" for a second, and then think about how utterly disastrous it could have been: A firefighter is called to duty, ascends into the darkness and then ultimately, his death, and then speaks to his beloved from beyond. What other rocker could write about that, and then write about it as movingly and effectively, without pathos, as Springsteen did?
On record, Springsteen found the perfect balance between the somber and the exultant - live with the E Street Band, played in a higher key, the song eventually became anthemic overkill. But Springsteen found another home for it on acoustic guitar, playing versions of it on 2005's Devils & Dust tour that were heartbreaking, and made it clear that it's one of his greatest songs.
8. "Reno" (2005, Devils & Dust)
A song that was an instant "love it or hate it" proposition for many Springsteen fans, with the majority winding up in the latter camp, "Reno" is one of Bruce's saddest songs, a song about a man debasing himself, fantasizing about his lost love while with a prostitute. On record, Springsteen missed the mark on it, but live, he found the true power of the song, turning it into something like a Hemingway short story set to music.
9. "Maria's Bed" (Devils & Dust, 2005)
Bruce introduced "Maria's Bed" in Cleveland in 2005 by saying it was about "the ecstasies of love, the pleasures of passion," and you could taste both the ecstasy and the pleasure in every note. Whether on Devils & Dust or live, the song was a moment on the peak, before the inevitable descent into the valley.
10. "You're Missing" (The Rising, 2002)
A song about the incomprehensibility of sudden death - how the mind struggles to understand loss when the physical evidence of a departed loved one's presence is still around. The genius of this song was in the details - the shirt hanging in the closet, the children asking if their parent will be back - and then an organ coda by Danny Federici that put in whatever the lyrics might have left out.
11. "Livin' In The Future" (Magic, 2007)
A rarity in Springsteen's career - a brilliant studio track that almost completely missed the mark live. On the album, it swung, and Springsteen's harmony vocals, doubled against each other along with Steve and Patti, provided moments of pure bliss for a lyric that was filled with dread for a second George W. term. Simultaneously the sound of the old Asbury boardwalk and something new, mainly due to the primacy of the guitars, this is one criminally underrated song.
12. "Eyes On The Prize" (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, 2006)
Bruce take the old spiritual and does the almost impossible - he makes it sound like he wrote it. Maybe that's because there's not much spiritual difference between "it's a town full of losers/and I'm pulling out of here to win" and "keep your eyes on the prize, hold on."
The vitality of the recording - from Soozie Tyrell's fiddle to the New Orleans feel of the horns - it astounding, a river that knows exactly where it's flowing. When Bruce cues the horns for their second solo by commanding, "Horns Go!" it's a little piece of Springsteen heaven. Hold on.
13. "You'll Be Coming Down" (Magic, 2007)
Lyrically, it's a sort of weird song, seemingly a message to a beautiful young woman, someone like Lindsay Lohan, warning her of being ground down and used up. Nothing particularly profound, but the song sounds so goddamned good that it doesn't matter. He should have played this one live a whole lot more.
14. "Empty Sky" (The Rising, 2002)
From the moment I heard its opening drum loop, I knew that Bruce made the right decision to work with Brendan O'Brien. O'Brien brought an unmistakably modern feel to the E Street Band, while still having it sound like the E Street Band. The sound of the acoustic 12-string; the natural sounding crack of Max Weinberg's drums, the perfect placement of Roy Bittan's piano in the chorus - the whole arrangement worked in a new way for Springsteen.
Filled with grief, rage and confusion, "Empty Sky" may be about the aftermath of 9/11, but it's also beyond the event, which is why the song will continue to resonate powerfully in the coming years.
15. "Leah" (Devils & Dust, 2005)
"With this hand I build/and with this I burn." In that lyric in "Leah," Springsteen posits that we, and we alone, are the genesis of both our salvation and destruction. How to avoid the destruction? Love. And you gotta work at it.
The impossibly beautiful arrangement embodies the lyric perfectly, and when a mariachi trumpet blows, it's enough to make you want cry. Had Devils & Dust had 11 songs all this good, instead of about five, it would be one of Springsteen's greatest albums.
16. "The Last Carnival" (Working On A Dream, 2009)
A tribute to E Street organist Danny Federici worthy of their 40 years together, that encapsulated the sadness of his death; the acknowledgment that the band was going to keep going on without him; and lastly, the fact that Danny made Bruce utterly crazy at times. And with a beautiful and ethereal vocal coda, it felt as though the band was trying to be with Danny one last time.
17. "All I'm Thinkin' About" (Devils & Dust, 2005)
Bruce showing off the falsetto that he developed in the mid-90's for a joyous little love song with some great steel guitar. It's one of those Springsteen songs that can slip by unnoticed, but when you dig in, you get its greatness.
18. "Let's Be Friends (Skin To Skin)" (The Rising, 2002)
This is the song that should have been the second single off of The Rising. With a great groove, gorgeous background singing and an instantly rewarding chorus, the song had me at hello, but alienated a lot of Springsteen fans for whatever reason. The song was probably a little too black for them.
19. "Code Of Silence" (The Essential Bruce Springsteen, 2003)
June 12, 2000 at Madison Square Garden was the only time I've ever been scared at a Bruce Springsteen concert. The first concert of 10 as the controversy around "American Skin (41 Shots)" became incendiary, with Fraternal Order of Police head Bob Lucente calling Springsteen a "dirtbag" and "floating fag." There were a lot of off duty cops there that night, and most of them seemed, especially the ones in the row in front of me, were drunk and pissed off.
So to start the stand, he opened with this song, a great rocker about a breakdown in communication that creates suspicion and distrust. This was his statement, and it was a great one, for all 10 nights.
As far as the cops went, they booed during all of "American Skin," and then they sang along with "The Promised Land." Then, when Bruce did an incredible acoustic version of "Born In The U.S.A.," one of them shouted, "You have no right to sing this song anymore." Three songs later, he was passed out, drunk.
20. "Long Walk Home" (Magic, 2007)
Disillusionment and the realization that in the Bush Administration we veered so far off the path of what this country is supposed to be about, that we may never get back.
21. "All The Way Home" (Devils & Dust, 2005)
Written for Southside Johnny in 1991, Bruce changed the arrangement completely, speeding it up, making it far less reflective, effectively turning it from a Sinatra-esque torch song into a cool country end-of-the-night come on. Worked for me.
22. "Devil's Arcade" (Magic, 2007)
Love, sex, death, destruction, a killer arrangement and a dramatic high point of Magic.
23. "This Life" (Working On A Dream, 2009)
A gem of a song that should have gotten a lot more attention, mainly from Bruce, who played it barely at all on the Working On A Dream tour.
24. "Gypsy Biker" (Magic, 2007)
An odd song in a way - it's characters seeming more like Vietnam Vets than veterans of Iraq, "Gypsy Biker" burned with some great lead guitar and one absolutely killer line: "To the dead it don't matter much/about who's wrong or right."
25. "American Skin (41 Shots)" (Live In New York City, 2001)
It's too long, and it's lacking a killer melody, but the power of it is undeniable, especially considering the ruckus it caused. It was never a diatribe against the police; after all, the person praying for the victim's life in the first verse is a cop who knows what a deadly error he's made.
Rather, it's a lament about an America where we've been taught to fear the other, and what happens in that climate. The fact that it's another song about the lack of communication made the controversy about it even more fitting - everyone who criticized it had absolutely no idea what the song was about.
Best Springsteen albums of the 2000's in order:
1. Magic 2. The Rising 3. Devils & Dust 4. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions 5. Working On A Dream.
Here is a link to my appearance with John Franck on E Street Radio this past Friday. We played several unreleased Springsteen songs that we think should be on Tracks 2.
I haven’t gotten that email from you yet requesting my advice on the setlist for the new tour. Maybe it went into my spam folder. Strange. It probably just slipped your mind amidst all the preparations for the tour.
Anyway, I read the accounts of this week’s two rehearsal shows on Backstreets. Sounds like you made some progress on night #2, but I think Chris Phillips’s criticism is dead on – you don’t really have a new show yet. You’ve just added some new songs to a pre-existing framework. And I assert that you need a new show.
So I’ve constructed a working set list for you of 24 songs (you can expand on it later), based on the themes you’ve been talking about in interviews (“Our band was built on hard times”), the new album and of course, the need to get the crowd out of their seats, shaking their asses and rocking. I’ve put some alternate ideas for a few slots as well.
I’ve also compiled a list of songs that in my opinion, you should avoid, as well as a list of songs that you might want to either dust off, or try out with the band for the first time.
Here we go:
The Set
1. Cover Me (It rocks, it’s about hard times, and it’ll be a cooking opener – just no prolonged intros, ok? Count it off in the pitch black, and then when Max’s drums kick in, have the stage lights explode. They’ll love it – even your core fans that say they hate it will be like, “Yeah, that’s a pretty great opener.”) 2. Roulette (Uh, can we say financial crisis, anyone?) 3. Outlaw Pete (I’m not a big fan of this one, but I know it’s important to you to play it.) 4. My Lucky Day 5. Spirit In The Night 6. Working On A Dream (Bruce, I heard the rehearsal version – you brought the song a whole step higher. Bad move. Bring it back down to the original key.) 7. Seeds/Spare Parts 8. This Life (Sounded gorgeous in the rehearsal, but please drop the crowd participation part – too cheesy. Having the background vocalists is a great move though.) 9. What Love Can Do/Good Eye/Queen Of The Supermarket 10. Candy's Room 11. Cadillac Ranch/I'm Goin' Down 12. Leap Of Faith 13. Girls In Their Summer Clothes (Do it in the same key as the recorded version, ok Bruce? It's one of your greatest songs ever, and you bringing the key up on the Magic tour just didn't work - it killed the melancholy at the heart of the song which makes it so wonderful.) 14. Kingdom Of Days 15. The Last Carnival 16. Backstreets/The Price You Pay/Long Walk Home 17. Born To Run (It needs a new context to freshen it up, but you can’t not play it.) 18. Born In The U.S.A.
Encores
19. How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live? (Says it all, right?) 20. Open All Night (Rock it, baby) 21. Pink Cadillac (A little humor is nice.) 22. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) 23. Land Of Hope And Dreams/Raise Your Hand (Totally different songs, I know, but in a way, they're very similar. Use em depending on your mood.) 24. Eyes On The Prize (You’ll have em weeping and raising their fist – perfect way to close it out.)
Warhorses That Need A Break For This Tour – Use Sparingly, If At All
Out In The Street Badlands Thunder Road Dancing In The Dark No Surrender (unless you do it acoustic – then it would be lovely) The Rising The Promised Land Lonesome Day The Ties That Bind She’s The One Darlington County Ramrod
No. Just no.
Mary’s Place Bobby Jean Waitin’ On A Sunny Day American Land Last To Die Livin’ In The Future Working On The Highway
Time To Take It Out Of The Closet
Better Days Open All Night (see encores) Highway Patrolman Walk Like A Man Spare Parts (see main set – put Nils on pedal steel for this bad boy.) New York City Serenade Lucky Town When You’re Alone (acoustic version would be lovely) One Step Up The Price You Pay (see main set) Another Thin Line
Time For An E Street Version
Maria’s Bed Cross Your Heart Real World Long Time Comin’ Leah All I’m Thinkin’ Bout O Mary Don’t You Weep
I think with this as a general framework, you’ve got the makings of a kick ass tour. If I come up with any other ideas, I’ll definitely let you know. Let me know your thoughts - but don't have Little Steven call me about it, ok? He'll just tell me that you need to do all the songs from Disc 2 of Tracks. And when are we going to discuss the archivist/re-issue job? Call me before the tour starts, ok El Jefe?
Today is the 32nd anniversary of my mother’s death. I’ve debated whether or not to write about it on the blog for the past 36 hours or so. I am and have been deeply reluctant to write about her – I don’t want to seem mawkish or significant. And I sure don’t want anyone’s sympathy – I’ve been blessed in a multitude of ways. But I write anyway, because so much of who I am as a music person is from her – both in life and death.
My mother, Gerda Pastor, was born in 1931, in a little village called Nowy Targ, in the southern part of Poland, near the Czechoslovakia border. Her father, Max, was a contractor who bought various foodstuffs in the Polish farmland, and then sold them to Polish army posts. He had been an officer in the Polish Army during World War I, and he built upon those contacts to create a successful business. Max was a gruff man, and while loving, the real warmth in the house came from my grandmother Bronia, who my mom adored. She also had an older sister, Helene, who she had an up and down relationship with.
My grandfather knew by 1938 that there was no future for Jews in Poland. Anti-Semitism was all encompassing in Poland – my aunt told me years later that it was “everywhere you went.” The epithet “Dirty Jew” was commonplace and accepted at all levels of Polish society, and it followed my family, and all Jews everywhere. So they decided to get out. My grandmother had relatives already in New York, and they agreed to provide a sponsorship so they could attain visas. The process was ongoing in September of 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.
My grandfather had managed to get American dollars in anticipation of leaving Poland, and with those, he proceeded to bribe their way out of Poland. Carrying as little as possible (what survives are some photos and a Candelabra that is at my father’s house), they got one of the last trains out of Warsaw before it fell to the Germans. They traveled to Romania, and then to Yugoslavia, where they got on the S.S. Rex, which sailed for New York and arrived November 15, 1939 (ironically, my day of birth, 31 years later). My mother was eight years old. Much of their family was still in Poland, and would eventually be murdered in Auschwitz, a fact that haunted my mother until her dying day.
Settling at first in the Bronx, and then in Washington Heights, my family began to adjust to life in America. My grandfather went to work as a dishwasher in the luncheonette that was owned my grandmother’s relatives, and did so without complaint. Then he became a line cook, and eventually, he owned his own dairy restaurant. There was no “English As A Second Language” type of program in the school system back then, so my mother and aunt (my aunt was 14) entered school without speaking a word of English. Within 6 months, my aunt says, they both could communicate passably in English. They adjusted.
What is important to know about my mother is that she was exceptionally beautiful, and her beauty gained her entry into a glamorous and sophisticated world. Men wanted to wine her, dine her, teach her, etc. (Emphasis on the “etc.”) She came to have a love affair with culture – film, music (especially opera), and fine art. She became a stylist, and she also wrote for several New York based art magazines as well acting as an agent for Vincent Cavallaro, who would later become my Godfather.
She absolutely adored New York, and was the quintessential New Yorker – smart, sophisticated, sexy, urbane, and in possession of what my father later called, “a very wonderful and timely streak of vulgarity.” She dressed uber-stylishly. I’m not sure I ever saw her wear a pair of jeans. Dresses or slacks. And always high heels. She spoke several different languages and traveled often – to Italy (on several occasions), France and Israel (she was an intensely devout Zionist). Later on after I was born and she was in her 40’s, a male friend of a neighbor of ours said upon meeting her, “Oh, you’re the Femme Fatale from next door!” She batted her eyes at him – she loved it.
She met my father through her work in June of 1966. He was running a company that manufactured womens shoes, belts and handbags, and she came to consult as a stylist. My father fell in love with her at first sight. “From the moment I saw her until the day she died,” he told me after she was gone, “there was no one else.”
When my father proposed, my mom had a few conditions. One of which was to have a child. My dad already had two kids and wasn’t keen on another, but my mom said she wanted to bring a Jewish child into the world that would replace the Jews that had been killed in the Holocaust. He accepted her conditions, and they married in November of 1968. Two years later I was born.
What I remember most about her in those years was her warmth. It was enveloping. When she was joyful, she could light up a room, and her laugh came from deep down within her, a soulful laugh. (My father loves to tell the story of how when they saw Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” in 1968, my mother the Holocaust survivor laughed so hard during the “Springtime For Hitler” scene that she peed in her pants.) She was physically demonstrative, generous with hugs and kisses for all.
She became devoutly religious as she got older, and I can remember how she would light the candles every Friday night to usher in the Sabbath. She would cover her eyes and say the prayer, and in those moments, she seemed almost taken by the spirit. I can see now that she was communing with something – maybe God, maybe the memories of Poland, or maybe just a spirit that she was attuned to. When she would tuck me in at night, we would always sing the “Shema” together, and it was done with an immense amount of love, but with more than a hint of sadness in there too. I didn’t know it then, but it was my first introduction to soul.
Her sadness became a real darkness at times. For whatever reason, she took the burden of the deaths of six million Jews upon her in some fashion, and it led her to drink. My dad told me well into my adolescence that I once asked him, “Why does Mommy act so different at night then she does during the day?” He traveled a lot for work then, so her drinking scared him to death, as she was responsible for looking out for me. It scared me too. I knew she loved me a lot, but the darkness she was enveloped in made her seem unreachable to me at times, and like all little kids, I blamed myself. And then I got angry and I diminished her in my mind. Every night when my dad would walk in the door, I would be thrilled – it was though the cloud above the house lifted, and I felt completely safe again.
I don’t want to make too much of her drinking. It was there and it happened, but we were a very happy family. I was very happy. I never wondered for a second whether my parents loved me. I could feel their adoration. And I adored them.
Saturday, March 19, 1977 started as a gorgeous, brilliantly sunny day. It had snowed several inches the day before, severely enough that they shut my 1st grade class down about an hour or two after we had arrived. I watched my usual Saturday morning cartoons – The Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner show, followed by the Shazam and Isis hour on the little black and white TV in my room, played outside in the snow, and then got dressed.
At around 1pm we left in my father’s rust colored Dodge Dart to go to the library. He drove, I sat in the passenger’s seat so I could be his co-pilot, and my mom sat in the back seat. We were all in good moods. None of us wore seat belts. A few minutes after 1pm, we were traveling through an intersection when we were struck at full speed by another car that ran a blinking yellow light. We spun out and crashed into a telephone pole.
I remember vividly looking to my left, and seeing my father moaning and writhing, his eyes closed, in obvious agony. His moaning was an unbearable and frightening sound, but I was so disoriented that everything occurred to me in the moment as surreal. I had slammed stomach first into the glove compartment, but was strangely not in much pain. I was just scared, stunned and in shock. I heard sirens arrive quickly, and a policeman emerged to help me get out of the car. When he pulled me out, I turned to the right and saw my mom, unconscious, her head resting against the right window, a trickle of blood coming down her ear. I took the policeman’s hand and was led to a waiting ambulance. There was a crowd of onlookers at the scene, the looks on their faces both horrified and concerned. I turned around one last time and looked at the car, twisted and mangled beyond recognition.
My father, fortunately, suffered relatively light injuries (a broken rib and a black eye), but my mom never regained consciousness. While I underwent surgery for a ruptured spleen that the doctors detected after shortly after arriving at the hospital, the doctors told my father that while I was going to be fine, my mom had suffered massive brain damage from her head slamming into the window at the moment of impact, and she wasn’t going to make it. They had to tell him three times before it registered. She died a little past midnight on Sunday, March 20, 1977.
Even now, 32 years after, I find it difficult to really be with the enormity of what happened that day. But obviously, one part of my life ended on that day, and another one began. I soon forgot what my mom’s voice sounded like, and I can’t recall it consciously, but there are times that I’ve dreamt of her (I like to call it “getting a visit from her”), and when she speaks, it’s her authentic voice. She’s there within me, always.
My love and appreciation for music, for literature, for art and beauty – that’s her. What I heard in soul music from the moment I first heard Otis Redding - that deep sadness along the irrepressible joy, sometimes apart, sometimes entwined – well, that’s an experience of life that I understood, and understood young, probably too young. Soul music, at its best, is an acknowledgment of the harshest blows that life can give, coupled with an indominitable resiliency and will to keep going.
That will to keep going despite it all is why Springsteen’s music has meant so much to me, why the line “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” from “Badlands” is one that never fails to move me to the core of my being. And it’s why I have so little listening of much of the post-modern music (yes, I’m talking to you, indie rock) that is at the vanguard of music today, so much of which is more head than heart, that takes its risks in the realm of form instead of emotion, revels in distance as opposed to connection, that in its cool, drains much of the joy out of song and performance.
When I’m in the studio with an artist or when I’m writing about a piece of music that I love and want you and everyone else to love and appreciate, that’s my mom within me. And it’s how I do my best to honor her memory, and keep her being alive. My mother used to quote a line from Puccini's Tosca, which declares, “I lived for art and I lived for love.” What else are you going to live for?
I have to admit that I find it vaguely surreal to encounter Hangin’ On E Street, a horribly named, but sort of cool page on Bruce Springsteen’s website that has several videos of indie artists talking about Springsteen’s influence. As a long time Springsteen freak whose teenage years coincided with Born In The U.S.A. mania, I remember a time, basically from about 1985-2000, that loving Bruce as I did could not have been considered more uncool, especially in the alt/indie leaning circles that I was traveling in. I guess the memories of those dumb bandannas have faded, and enough people now know that “Born In The U.S.A.” isn’t a jingoistic anthem.
Most of the artists on the page talk about Bruce’s songwriting, his live shows and some allusions to his “authenticity.” Fair enough. But what new and developing artists would do well to know about and take from Bruce is the keen critical eye he took to his own material and performances in the early years - continually reshaping his songs and performances, taking them up several levels in the process. It was this restless spirit applied to his own work, that more than anything else, separated Springsteen from almost every other rocker of his time - and led to him being who he became as a singer, songwriter, recording artist and performer.
Springsteen’s debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, released in January of 1973 was a good but not great album. A compromise between his rock roots and the singer/songwriter he had been signed as by John Hammond, the album was poorly recorded, and did not adequately capture Springsteen’s roots as a rocker. The songs tumbled in a torrent of imagery, and while many of the songs were great, the tepid arrangements didn't adequately reveal the quality of the songs.
In 1973, Springsteen’s shows with the band (they weren’t officially the E Street Band yet – that came in 1974) were good and sometimes excellent, but not nearly at the level he would soon reach. Springsteen was finding his way – figuring out what worked and what didn’t. Songs stayed close to their recorded versions, but Springsteen experimented by dropping unreleased songs into his set to gauge audience reaction, an almost unheard of practice in rock. (The great exception to this would be the Grateful Dead, but once their songs debuted live, they rarely altered.)
In 1974, Bruce Springsteen transformed as a live performer. The first key step was the firing of drummer Vini Lopez in February, and the substitution of Ernest "Boom" Carter in his place. Carter brought both power and a funky, syncopated groove to the drumming stool, and the power of the songs began to shine. Given a solid rhythmic foundation, Springsteen now felt comfortable to play with his own arrangements, elasticizing them and altering them. In that process, he made his live experience unique every single night - and began to create the enormous groundswell of fan and critical momentum that led to Born To Run.
(Compare the two versions of "Walking The Dog," one recorded with Lopez in January of 1974, and one with Carter, recorded about five weeks later in early March, 1974. The difference is staggering.)
Springsteen was not content to simply write a song or play a performance. His obsessive drive caused him to write and re-write lyrics, tweak arrangements and continually look for what he could put in the songs and the shows to take them to the next level. Versions of "Born To Run," "She's The One," "Jungleland" and in early 1975, "Thunder Road" debuted, all in either slightly ("Born To Run") or vastly different ("Jungleland," "Thunder Road") form then how they would be released a year later on Born To Run.
Most artists would have been content with those three songs - all were good, and "Born To Run" was already great. But Springsteen was unsparing of himself and so dedicated to the vision in his head that he wouldn't compromise. Draft after draft of lyrics were written until, as Springsteen said later, "they were stripped of cliche." Arrangements were re-thought and re-shaped until their power was maximized.
I've worked with more than a few artists, and I've never encountered any that were willing to be that unsparing with their own work, and it's that element of his greatness that I would advise developing artists to take on. It's also the most difficult one to emulate - but that's what separates the merely good from the great. And now more than ever, if you're going to have a possibility for being a lasting musician, you've got to be great.
Bruce Springsteen’s 13 minute set (they went over by one minute) last night at the Super Bowl halftime show was a lot of fun. Bruce and the band looked like they were having a great time, and true to his word, the mini-set showcased the feeling of the final 15 minutes of a Springsteen show – fun, communal, exultant, and occasionally, very corny and silly.
That corniness has been a part of the band’s legend since before there was a legend of the E Street Band. Bruce has feigned heart attacks on stage, staged wrestling matches with bears, had conversations with aliens, spoken to God, and has had his mother admonish him on stage so he’d play one more encore. As Greil Marcus wrote in 1980, “At his finest, Springsteen can get away with almost anything, stuff that coming from anyone else would seem hopelessly corny and contrived – and that he can come up with stuff to get away with that most rockers since Little Richard would be embarrassed even to have thought of.”
Certainly, Springsteen stole many of those moves from the early rock and soul tradition. One thinks of James Brown shucking off cape after cape, leaving the stage only to come back to drive the audience further into ecstasy. Bruce has acknowledged these debts in interviews, and they are as crucial a piece of understanding his performances as any.
It is this portion of Springsteen’s artistic and performance persona that turns off a lot of smart people to his music. Bruce got mainly great reviews from last night’s set, but some predictable pans came in from writers like the utterly awful Jim DeRogatis, and from the New York Times. (And I'm sure we'll soon get another anti-Bruce missive from the awesomely tiresome Bob Lefsetz shortly.) What writers like these miss is that Springsteen (especially when he’s with the E Street Band) views a good part of his job to be an entertainer. And to a lot of people who love rock, and especially the denizens of post-Velvet Underground music, entertainer is a dirty word, redolent of inauthenticity, insufficiently artistic. (Can you imagine what Jeff Tweedy or Thom Yorke would do if you called them entertainers?)
But Bruce Springsteen is much smarter than these guys. Because he knows that a show is a SHOW – that when one is on stage, it’s inauthentic not to recognize that there is a stage. Punk and post-punk bands seek to eradicate the boundaries between audience and performer by pretending (emphasis on pretense) that there’s no difference between them. Springsteen recognizes that there’s a difference between the performer and audience, but he creates an emotional connection over the course of the night that reaffirms the common humanity of every single person in the building on that night – for the band and the audience. It's that affirmation of a common humanity - its joys, struggles, pain, fun, heartbreak and possibility - that makes a great Springsteen show so transcendent. And it’s what makes him so much wiser than the mistaken and misguided spokesmen for authenticity and cool who criticize him for his soulful, and sometimes corny heat.
There are two kinds of improvisation in music. One kind is self-conscious. It is improvisation for improvisations sake (countless jam bands). Then there is the kind of improvisation that exists because the performers can't be contained within the known limits of a song. The songs from this Sam & Dave show in Stockholm, 1967, are examples of the latter. The greatest of all soul duos take some of their best known songs and recreate them - slow them down, expand them, inject subtle changes in tempo and feeling and make them overwhelming.
Stax's Spring 1967 tour of Europe was one of their greatest triumphs. Greeted with a love and an un-ambivalent respect that they could not receive in America, they responded by delivering shows that forty years after the fact, remain legend. The four songs contained here are a small example of the fire they brought to the stage every night. Both Michael Jackson, who used to watch them in the wings at the Apollo, when the young Jackson 5 was playing the chitlin circuit, and Bruce Springsteen, who went to see them in the 70's, both said they stole liberally from Sam & Dave's show. Mediocre artists borrow, great artists...
Sometimes, I think, it’s got to be hard to be Bruce Springsteen. Even as he nears 60, there are many, many great expectations placed upon his music. While Dylan fans never know what to expect and are thrilled when Bob releases an album good enough to put his 80’s output further in the rearview mirror, hard-core Bruce fans expect something that is more than just good – at our core, we still hope and expect that he’ll deliver his best music yet. Not Born To Run II mind you (although I’m sure there are some fans who’d be thrilled with that), but something that powerfully and intensely illuminates and deepens our own lives and experiences – like a combination of The River and Tunnel Of Love. And Springsteen has been so remarkably consistent throughout his career, with such an incredible body of work that it almost seems unfair to judge him against his past, but fair or not, that’s how the great ones are judged.
I’ve been trying to write a review of his new album, Working On A Dream, for the past week. But I have found myself confounded by it. On one level, it contains some of the most beautiful music he’s ever made, grand and orchestral, with swirling string sections, stately melodies and symphonic pop that goes in directions that Bruce has never quite gone before. But on another level, at least half the songs feel somewhat hollow at their core. The resonance of Springsteen’s greatest music – where the song hits you right where you live, in the most authentic part of your being, well, in that context, the tank is running low here. Somehow, Bruce Springsteen, an artist who has made his career subverting form for content, has made a record that uses form to disguise the fact that most of his new songs aren’t great.
You can hear what’s wrong with Working On A Dream on “Outlaw Pete,” an Ennio Morricone influenced tall tale that isn’t funny enough to be taken satirically, nor is it affecting enough to be taken seriously as an epic. The music soars at moments, but it never fully lifts off. It’s stuck in some sort of weird middle ground, and at 8 minutes, it goes on for about four minutes longer than necessary. It’s all very interesting – interesting and a little cerebral as opposed to viscerally powerful the way great Springsteen music is. “Queen of the Supermarket” is another interesting song – Bruce being enraptured by the sensuality of the truly super market, and falling in love with the cashier. It occurs as a clichéd parody until the last verse, when Bruce drops an F-bomb that brings it all back to reality, and you end up wondering whether the whole song is brilliant – or just a very interesting songwriting device by a master writer. If you have to ask…
“My Lucky Day,” “This Life,” “Good Eye,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” "Surprise, Surprise," “What Love Can Do,” “Life Itself…” none of these songs are bad. Hell, If Tom Petty wrote “My Lucky Day,” it’d be heralded as a classic. There are lovely melodies, exuberant choruses, plaintive sentiment…and it just doesn’t doesn’t work at Springsteen’s usual level.
Only on two songs, “Kingdom Of Days” and “The Last Carnival,” does Springsteen hit the levels we're accustomed to. “Kingdom Of Days” is a soaring mid-tempo reverie of a love and life that is made more resonant by the consciousness of its finiteness. The towering melody, lovingly detailed lyrics and especially the gorgeously romantic instrumental bridge are the sound of peace, gratitude and acceptance – it’s as though Springsteen has finally arrived in the spot he wrote about in "Born To Run;" where he's gotten to that place he's wanted to go, and is walking in the sun.
“The Last Carnival,” a meditation on the death of founding E Street Band organist Danny Federici, is an out and out Springsteen classic. Over a simple guitar riff, gorgeous background vocals that sound like they’re out of a Simon & Garfunkel song, and lyrics that recreate the circus life of “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” from The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle, the song is a tear-jerking elegy to a fallen comrade that transcends mere sentimentality. It’s a sublime love song.
Musically, the album showcases Springsteen’s love and exploration of the sound of the white pop/rock of his adolescence. The Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Byrds, the Righteous Brothers and Roy Orbison are all present and accounted for. It's a sound that works well, but the lushness and prettiness of the sonic template doesn't always feel a match for Springsteen's grittiness. Where Springsteen's soul sound always feels like can extension of the man himself, these pop sounds occur more like a coat he's trying on temporarily.
Working On A Dream is a good album. Sometimes it is very good. But Bruce Springsteen is capable of making a better one. Perhaps that is harsh. I consider it a compliment. When no one expects greatness from Bruce Springsteen anymore, he’ll truly be finished.
Had he lived, Elvis Presley would be 74 years old today. He has long since passed into the realm of myth - a Rorschach test upon which people project their thoughts, opinions, desires, feelings, resentments and dismissals about almost any conceivable topic: Music, America, race, culture, materialism, decline and a few hundred subjects.
I've never cared much about any of that. The fact is that Elvis was a sublime singer and a singular presence as a performer and instigator of a cultural movement whose repercussions we continue to live with today. It's a common canard that Elvis won his acclaim because he was white and some of his other contemporaries (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc.) were black, and that he was just derivative of them. But Elvis Presley released his first singles in 1954, before Chuck Berry and Little Richard ever released a record. (And Elvis was more charismatic than Chuck, and prettier and more versatile than Richard.) He could sing anything - rock, country, r&b, gospel - and when he was at his best, during the 50's and his late 60's comeback, he wove together those various strands of American music to create something mythic in scope, a force which resounded all over the world.
Unfortunately, his music, like much early rock, gets far less respect and acclaim than it deserves; it’s been subsumed by the myth. To many, the songs sound like quaint period pieces. I think they are still stunning. “Hound Dog” remains explosive. “Mystery Train,” “Baby Let’s Play House,” “Milkcow Blues Boogie,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Trying To Get To You,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “Jailhouse Rock” continue to provide joy, delight, and a far greater sense of risk, danger and sex than the most rebellious punk band you can find.
Happy birthday Elvis! For my money, you are still, and will always be, the King.
My favorite live rock and roll memories have come from Bruce Springsteen, and some of my favorite live Springsteen moments have come from the Christmas shows he did in the first half of this decade with the Max Weinberg 7 and assorted friends at Convention Hall in Asbury Park. Joyous, exuberant and soulful, filled with friends (various E Streeters, Southside Johnny) and special guests (Elvis Costello in 2001, Sam Moore in 2003), these shows have been celebrations of the Asbury Park sound, a soul/rock hybrid that at its best can leave you crying and shaking your ass simultaneously.
At the first Bruce Springsteen and Friends show on December 17, 2000, no one knew quite what to expect. What came was, if not shocking, a night of one "holy shit" moment after another: A country version of "Blue Christmas;" A killer, horn-led version of "Lucky Town;" Listen to the crowd explode when the horns play the intro to "The E Street Shuffle," and the screams of joy that emerge when Bruce plays the first notes of "Kitty's Back," not played since September, 1978. Little Steven and Bruce killed on the great "Until The Good Is Gone," from Steven's Men Without Women album. And then there was the debut of "My City Of Ruins," pre-9/11, which the audience fell in love with from the first chorus of "Rise up!"
In 2001, the crowd had a better idea of what would happen, so Bruce started bringing out more guests. Bruce Hornsby and Elvis Costello appeared at the show on December 8, 2001 and Hornsby plays some, uh, interesting accordion on a hilarious and great cover of Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing," led by Springsteen. And Elvis Costello does a touching acoustic version of "Alison," with Bruce on background vocals in the choruses, leading into "Tracks Of My Tears"/"Tears Of A Clown." Southside Johnny does a great mini-set, especially on the sublime Springsteen-penned 1977 ballad, "Love On The Wrong Side Of Town."
2003 was my favorite year for the holiday shows for one reason: Sam Moore. I went to the first night, and seeing Sam and Bruce play together was pure joy and ecstasy. "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" was astonishing; from the way that it was obvious that Sam still had it, and for Bruce's harmonies. Bruce debuted a beautiful cover of "(What's So Funny) 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding," that he would take out on the road for the Vote For Change tour the following fall. A great, great night.
Going to see Bruce in Asbury is akin to seeing Santa at the North Pole. These were joyous shows that brought the Christmas/holiday spirit like few things I've ever experienced. I hope Bruce and friends revive this tradition. It's a great one. If you're into the soul aspects of Springsteen, these shows are nirvana.
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