Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

Interesting, yeah, IMO Wild & Innocent has a legit claim to being his best album, but it also sounds nothing like the others. But man I love it so much. The debut has some good songs, I like it a lot, but seems a tier lower. Everything after through Tunnel of Love is great.

yeah i remember when, after hearing nebraska & born to run, i picked up wild & innocent and O_______________O'd at the opening moments

Wild I & es is prob my fav atm tbh

I'm loving Wild & Innocent, yeah. The whole thing hangs together like one big song in many parts...it's a real joy to 'discover' it finally.
I think it will take me a few listens to ease into Greetings, it is a different sounding Bruce & band for sure. Band is so much further down in the mix or something, and at times he is very Dylan sounding with his sing-talkign... It's just weird to go back to that from Darkness, say. The songs themselves are p. great though. Cool to hear and get acquainted with the original Blinded By The Light though bc the Manfred Mann version drives me bonkers.

Never really heard Wild & Innocent - and I say I love the Boss?

Greetings doesn't quite do it for me, not as much as later records anyway. I love virtually everything from Born to Run on - including almost everything he's released in the last decade: rare for an artist to stay that good and not throw it all away somehow.

Oh and The Promise is probably my favourite LP of 2010.

I love most of his stuff in the last decade too. Magic in particular was a terrific album. Workin' on a Dream was less good, but still had several stellar tracks. To me, Springsteen is the only rock/pop artist with a career spanning several decades that has never truly had a bad period. (I realize Human Touch sort of sucked, but even that had some great songs -- and I love Lucky Town). Sure, I would agree that his music up through Tunnel of Love was better than the music after, but to me the drop-off is not that big -- the real reason that the earlier music gets more attention and love is the subject matter it deals with rather than the quality of the material.

Dug up the Hammersmith 75 show.... the part in Spirit of the Night where he tumbles off the stage and goes back into the song whispering "Where's my hat?" lololol

Bruce in woollen beanie and beard pretty much unfuckwithable <3. Damn this show is so freaking TIGHT
And the quality of his voice is just kinda mesmerizing, especially in that piano only Thunder Road. Like, damn.

yeah that thunder road just had me speechless

The Live 85 box version almost pales...same arrangement but yeah, the Hammersmith performance just smokes everything I've heard

I didn't like him in the 80s, and I don't like him now.

has anyone posted this video yet? because so omg classic
i am brimming with lol emotions about this performance, and "it could be a song about becoming a woman too" in the intro
this is one of many reasons bruce springsteen rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dy7RTicVr0

one of my favorite Bruce songs - wow that is a great video!!!! < 3

one of my favorites too and I love that video - have it favorited on youtube. :)

i grew up with the more adult springsteen, the tunnel of love guy in the bolo tie, and sassy bruce springsteen who puts pictures of his butt on his records -- but i was a child and i didn't care because i loved that guy. i went to see the tunnel of love tour with my parents in 7th grade and it was like whoa lifechanging -- i spent a lot of time at the library listening to old music after that.
when i finally heard this song, i was older, in my 20s, and it rang true then.

now i am 35 (still female) and this song still resonates with me

will stan for bruce until i pass out

^^^

word!

been listening to nothing but the river, tunnel of love and darkness on the edge of town lately

those albums are pretty good fyi

o r they

feel like i should write bruce springsteen a song entitled "marry me"

i used to hate tunnel of love but lately its been all i want to listen to.

"tougher than the rest" !!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's kind of a cliche at this point, but Tunnel of Love sounds better the older you get. He's not writing about teenage love on this one.

sweet edit of tougher than the rest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFpJp29MELM

i enjoyed that! also, apart from the albums i can't stop listening to lately:

"Dancing in the Dark" is amazing. I don't really think anyone has really captured anything essential about this song in print.

otm

Yeah that Vogel edit is sweet.

i just want to slow dance to it!!

For like a year I was thinking it was by Christian Vogel, which didn't make much sense.

I seriously can't listen to Bruce without becoming excessively emotional. The run from "Downbound Train" through the end of Born in the USA just made me cry like 500 sad/happy tragicomic tears into the soup I was making.

The Boss is good for the working men, cutting down on those salt costs.

I seriously can't listen to Bruce without becoming excessively emotional. The run from "Downbound Train" through the end of Born in the USA just made me cry like 500 sad/happy tragicomic tears into the soup I was making.

― Ralpharina (La Lechera), Saturday, April 2, 2011 3:53 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i can't actually listen to the song "born in the usa" for this reason. except it's just brutal, not tragicomic.

the dogs on main street howl cause they understand, btw

the songs aren't tragicomic, the cooking-while-crying is!

you and i are high priestesses of the church of bruce.

tonight i got totally obsessed w/ the song fire

NOW I WORK DOWN AT THE CAR WASH
WHERE ALL IT EVER DOES IS RAIN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-ICc5NVjck&feature=player_embedded

lmfao

<3

hahaha that's great

btw I have listened to "Badlands" approx 25 times this week. Loving it so hard right now.

Have you ever heard the concert Bruce did for the 10th anniversary of radio station WMMS in 1978 at the Agora in Cleveland? The version of Badlands on there is ball-bustingly great. That whole show is just peak after peak.

i'm really digging all of his The Wild, the Innocent through Darkness on the Edge of Town period lately.

x-post - I haven't! Will check out if I can find it.

erica i have been playing a lot of "badlands" lately, too.

:)

This is really interesting, the story of the original Dancing In The Dark video.

http://goldenageofmusicvideo.com/?p=436

oh, that's good

so descriptive!!

“Now for Bruce, this was the first single he’s releasing after Nebraska, which was not that big of a hit for him, so, Bruce is very nervous,” Pearl continued. “We’re all on set now and Bruce is really pumped. I mean, he’s been working out, and he has a little bit of stubble. Now, I would take a look at people when they first show up. I’ll say hello, and I take a quick look at their face to see, if I know them, if anything is changed – I’m seeing how to light them. I’m take a look at their face and where they part their hair — I mean, those all things that matter to me when I do the lighting. So anyhow, he’s got serious sideburns. Big sideburns, he’s pumped, rippling muscles in his arms, good muscle definition, he’s wearing a wife beater sleeveless shirt, sharkskin pants, and black pointy-toe shoes and basically, that’s the New Jersey, sort-of early ‘60s thing going on, right? But very manly, right? So I lit him very hard – hard edge lights for his rippling muscles, and just really chiseled him with light. He comes out and he stands there and he goes, ‘I don’t know. I think you should get like a big silk [lighting filter] out here and just put a big light through the silk, and silk over the camera, the big silk, you put a big light through it and I go, ‘That’s how we light Stevie Nicks.’ I said, ‘You’re not a p*ssy, you’re quite the opposite. You’re super manly here. I can’t light you like I would light a woman.’ And he said, ‘But that’s what I want.’ And Jeff Stein is there, and said, ‘Just try it once doing it Daniel’s way, and if you don’t like it, we’ll change it.’”

That's incredible Bruce with the long memory, tricks the dude into directing a video for him 10 years after the fiasco!

"This video contains content from SME, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds"

NOW I WORK DOWN AT THE CAR WASH
WHERE ALL IT EVER DOES IS RAIN

― difficult listening hour, Sunday, April 3, 2011 12:36 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark

lol

oh i thought that was a fake lyric, but its a real one

Dud - if only on a personal level. I know a lot of British people that are partial to a bit of Springsteen, and my dad was a bit of a fan of his back in the '80s. I think 'Born To Run' and 'Thunder Road' are great tracks, but on the whole I've never been able to relate to his lyrics - which seem to be the point of Springsteen. Stuff like 'Born In The USA', while the passion in his voice can't be denied, just bores me a bit... that repeating keyboard phrase just hammering itself into the ground. So yeah, I can understand why some people like it - but it's not for me.