Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

Even redeems a crummy Kinks song.

If one can redeem something terrible by making it terrible in a brand new way. You weren't kidding about SCTV!

Listening to that album now. Almost laughed out loud at the veiled Tina Turner reference in “Heaven Is a Disco”

This thing is from the same universe as that Lou Reed live with The Toys albums.

The Tots, not The Toys. American Poet.

Springsteen joined Mellencamp onstage last night at NJ PAC for "Pink Houses":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qo_-W4lBe4

Bruce looking lithe, limber and ready to get back on the road.

Wait, hold up, is that Lisa Germano?! She's back!!

Yes it is! I saw Mellencamp at the Beacon and he was awesome. At one point, he let a kid get on stage and let HIM sing one of his hits while he walked off for what seemed like a smoke.

Tour resumes tonight, Bruce lookin' good!
https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/432766426_949567229858904_5539654209860653751_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=VIQrTwEDuDIAX-pUF_u&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&oh=00_AfAb_AU3DFryU1mnOECcjxasUkZHb2Bs1-l5gM3TKWfI8A&oe=65FE75E5

hottest silver fox in town

Some nerd livestreamed the whole show, if you want to watch it:

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1083363189561218&id=1182636260&mibextid=qi2Omg

More or less the same set, slight tweaks.

Had no idea he was even on tour!

Interesting:

https://pitchfork.com/news/bruce-springsteen-movie-starring-jeremy-allen-white-in-the-works/

The Bruce

The movie is just gonna be him floating down a river in a canoe listening to the songs on a boom box. Would watch!

Love that Bruce is getting back in the habit of popping up on stage with other musicians. Somebody leaked the news yesterday, and I think he flies home between shows anyway, but Bruce flew east from Cali to play with Zach Bryan in Brooklyn yesterday.

I'm not familiar with the song they played together "Sandpaper."

I think it's new.

Just found out about this guy flying home between shows. That's wild. (Not to mention, environmentally questionable.)

Carbon footprints of the rich and famous. But he's 74, it's probably nice to go home for a few days.

Speaking of flying, some friends and I are talking about flying up to one of the Philly shows. I don't know if it'll come together, but I really would like to see him (at least) one more time.

going to see him for the first time in sf on Sunday. excited!

you are in for a treat my friend

Looks like he is loosening up the setlists, maybe 5%, throwing in some songs he hasn't played yet, taking the occasional request. Still mostly the usual, but I think he knew people were getting a little tired of that.

I think I'm going to try to see him again in Philly this August, depending on prices.

Some nice additions in Los Angeles last night, reportedly. And 32 songs, 3 1/2 hours! He's done this before, recently, one tour leg exciting but still relatively conservative, and then the next one loosening up, with more requests and surprises.

Bob Seger used to do the same thing. Play two or three shows, fly home for a few days, go back out. Metallica, too.

Zeppelin kind of invented the home-base method of regional rock band touring, as I understand it. Set up in Chicago, head out for a bunch of shows within a certain radius. This is not what Bruce is doing, though I think Bruce does fly home after almost every show. I meant that Bruce toured for much of 2023, took time off to get healthy, and now has returned to the road (for many months) reportedly reinvigorated.

The sound at the show last week was almost unbearably loud (forgot to bring ear protection which i basically always tote to a show). The horn section was just blaring and after 2 hours I was semi covering the ear most exposed to a speaker stack when they came in. But I am really happy that I went and jeez feel like we really got our money's worth. Band sounded great and was awesome to see those legends.

it's quite remarkable to see him in 2024 and consider that he is more or less 40 years past his live peak.

I love, for the boss' sake, that he has a "Little Big Man" in the band

Jim DeRogatis has been pretty upfront about how much he hates Springsteen, but apparently he said on a recent podcast that he was bullied by Springsteen fans when he was a teenager (mentioned just in passing while dumping on Springsteen's music). This sounds like mockery but I would've been like "Jim, if Bruce knew, he would've gone out there and stood up for you." (And he would've too!)

What does he dislike about Springsteen's music?

I've heard him give every reason imaginable and at this point they feel like empty, hypocritical reasons given how he'll gush over other musicians or records far more guilty of the alleged offenses.

Here's a sample from 2005:

"Write about what you know" is the first rule teachers give all aspiring pretentious writers. The problem with Bruce climbing inside the heads of these characters is that he has long since lost any connection to their blue-collar roots, if he ever had them.

If Bruce wrote about what he knows these days, the labor disputes he'd chronicle would be about the difficulties of keeping good gardeners and nannies and the demands for bonuses that those pesky E Streeters make at the end of his top-grossing tours, and the personal conflicts would be along the lines of him wondering if it was worth it to alienate so many fans and invoke the scrutiny of the IRS by backing that loser John Kerry.

And somewhere in this clip is a rant that devolves into a bizarre attempt at humor, picking apart how Springsteen's dressed and complaining how he's actually "from the suburbs" and would've been eaten alive in New York City (which is a bit strange when Springsteen spent plenty of time there when he was struggling to get established).

also strange because *not* being from the city has been a core part of springsteen's brand for his entire career. surely dero knows what (and where) new jersey is?

Dero's from Jersey City!

"Write about what you know" is the first rule teachers give all aspiring pretentious writers. The problem with Bruce climbing inside the heads of these characters is that he has long since lost any connection to their blue-collar roots, if he ever had them.

Everything about these sentences is abysmal.

The hell is "pretentious" even doing there?

Levon Helm did not actually experience the Civil War

Don't get above your rising] raisin'

some critics really do come up with strange convoluted overbaked reasons for not liking something when the truth is usually just “don’t like the tune or his voice”

Ya think?

If he's writing that in 2005, about the stuff Springsteen was coming out with in 2005, then I think there's a part of it that I agree with, but that "if he every had them" definitely doesn't sound like someone who knows Springsteen's work at all.

Like, I do think that Springsteen in his early work is driven not just by connection to his blue-collar roots but by a sense of having just barely escaped a particular kind of working-class life that seemed to be marked out for him. And as he gets older and farther away from that life, and more comfortable with his status as a rich man, he loses that driving sense of "this could be me" that I think animates a lot of his portraits of people broken down or frustrated or limited by working-class life.

It makes me think of Dickens and the blacking factory, and one of the fundamental differences between Dickens and Springsteen (other than all the obvious ones) is that Dickens actually did work in the blacking factory, and so that experience is a foundational trauma that never quite goes away. Whereas for Springsteen it's a source of survivor guilt but not something that actually happened to him, and so its influence weakens over time.

And I think Springsteen is at his strongest when he is animated by that sense of identification with his characters, and that he finds that sense of identification, very often, through his own anxieties and obsessions. There's a feeling of "what if...?" behind a lot of Springsteen's songs, imo. Who or what would I be if I had never found music? If I had been sent to war? If I let myself drift too far away from people and couldn't find my way back?

By the time you get to Western Stars, the central "what if" has to do with marriage, and connections with people, and age, and the fear of impulsively throwing it all away and ending up alone at the end of your life. But there's a period in between Ghost of Tom Joad and Western Stars where Springsteen is still trying to be the writer of the working class, and imo you can tell that his heart isn't really in it, that the working-class experiences he's writing about are no longer the things that keep him up in the middle of the night. So on that level I don't exactly disagree with that criticism, but it sounds like it's coming from someone who wasn't going to like Springsteen no matter what.

"if he ever had them," rather

Great post lily

otm I think Tom Joan is the last time he’s really persuasive in that mode, and even there it feels more like journalism than imagined memoir — like he’s done the research and is mustering substantial empathy as an artist, but he’s not drawing from any well of experience or first-hand observations.

lol Tom Joad autocorrect

Excellent post Lily. And tipsy makes an excellent point how Joad "feels more like journalism than imagined memoir" - I've grown to like that album, but it's probably no coincidence that the best songs (at least for me) were based on stories already written in detail elsewhere. I supposed "Nebraska" can be described as such but IIRC a lot of what's memorable and haunting in that song are Springsteen's own creation. A large part of the title track of Joad translates and even transcribes what Steinbeck wrote for his novel. Then there's "Galveston Bay" which is all drawn from a real-life story - I'm not sure if any particular lyric stands out for me, but it's a great story where all the details add up to something that's left a stronger impression than anything else on the album.

Yeah, the narratives on Nebraska feel deeply inhabited in a way they don't really on Tom Joad. Like whatever he'd tapped into on Nebraska wasn't quite there anymore, artistically, so he had to use other tools.

When more details about his depression came out in his memoir, it kind of suggested that Nebraska could only be a one-time achievement. IIRC, 1982 was about the time he really hit the breaking point with his depression, and a lot of that album really sits "comfortably" in the mindset of someone who's in a really dark place. If that's what it took to get him there, I don't hold it against him if he doesn't ever reach the same harrowing depths again.

I hear a lot of depression on Tom Joad, but I agree that Nebraska was the kind of risk that he could only take once and didn't dare try for again. It was written iirc before Springsteen had his big breakdown on his cross-country drive, and I get a sense from it of Springsteen sliding into depression almost deliberately, not trying to break his fall because to him, at that moment, depression feels like creativity. There's a kind of dark energy to Nebraska, a black light of empathy that feels very seductive. You listen to a song like "Reason to Believe," which is imo the darkest song on the whole album, and it's so charged with that feeling that can accompany the beginning of depression, that the world has been revealed to you as it really is, and that there is something special, something meaningful, about this revelation. Once Springsteen has his big breakdown, I think he stops leaning into the depression in the same way, but I do think it's very much there on Tom Joad - it just has a duller, more exhausted, more lived-in quality by then.

My favorite songs on Joad are the ones that feel as if they were written out of a depression that's if anything more entrenched than that of Nebraska. "Highway 29," "Straight Time," "Dry Lightning," even "My Best Was Never Good Enough" - there's a kind of dull, nihilistic noir voice to all of them that feels like it's probably picking up something very real about Springsteen's state of mind. I agree about the working-class Social Problem songs on Tom Joad - they feel like journalism to me rather than something felt from the inside. But then there's this other side to Joad which is Springsteen writing noir, with that classic noir theme of being so isolated from normal society that all your moral/ethical landmarks disappear and you become monstrous because there is nothing around you to keep you human.

Which can also happen in the deeper journalism, like In Cold Blood. Steinbeck doesn't go deep/isolated in the same way, but he tracks bunches of Grapescharacters, and not just the Joads, through hellacious migration---all those camps, communities of night and day, strange weather, that the reader becomes familiar with, never accustomed to (interesting to compare Woody G.'s "Tom Joad" with Bruce's: Woody had more experience along the Joads' lines, although, like Bruce, he wisely got his ass to NYC and least the fringes of show biz, through he spurned some opportunities there).
I wanted Bruce to drop the Popular Front approach and write about his and my father;s generation, The Greatest Generation as for instance Reagan Democrats, who had benefited at least in part from New Deal, Gi Bill, Eisenhower's construction of the Interstates, Military-industrial Complex boosting of economy------all that, and and then they turned against Big Government, in further contradiction, very selective "conservatism."
He eventually addressed some of that in the monologues-with-piano of his Broadway stint, I think, but maybe not in songs? I haven't kept up, sorry.