Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

I suppose there are a lot of things it could be. Covid, RSV, flu, Norovirus, family emergency ... Pretty clear it's the Boss that's been afflicted, though.

There are nasty bugs going around… I’ve been really sick twice this winter (still recovering from a cough right now), and repeatedly tested negative for all the big names.

Could be something too embarrassing to identify like the runs.

Tom, insert pun-free zone here, please!

born to...

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/OblongBitesizedIzuthrush-size_restricted.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwHIs7IafD0

Candy's Restroom

Mister state pooper

Thunder Road

Meet me tonight in Atlantic...

Nah, too easy

Greetings from...

41...

tomorrow night's show, the third impacted, postponed now too

The latest in weird Bruce news is that apparently Bruce only eats one meal a day, and this has prompted Chris Martin to also only eat one meal a day.

https://consequence.net/2023/03/coldplay-chris-martin-bruce-springsteen-one-meal-per-day/

“he looks better than me”
= 100% why i hate this dude

Ugh

tour seems to back on now. Some relatives of mine saw last night's Buffalo show

Who else is going to be at the Brooklyn show tonight?

Yo

Huzzah! I'll be the white guy with a grey beard.

I may actually go to tonight's show! Nosebleed seat, but whatever, if someone I know ends up dropping out, I'm there.

I believe I have pretty rock star seats that my generous friend has been relentlessly apologetic about.

I didn't notice this until Rolling Stone pointed it out, but Steve Van Zandt has lost a LOT of weight! Not an unhealthy amount but he's nearly as trim as he used to look if you ever watch the DVD's or Blu-rays of their 1979/1980 shows.

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/bruce-springsteen-and-steven-van-zandt-perform-onstage-news-photo/1462434440

No longer in character as a mobster.

Journalist and Springsteen fan Caryn Rose venting in her substack about the Detroit show she saw and the whole tour:

What this setlist is lacking is any kind of strong thematic or narrative arc. Yes, there are songs about loss and he speaks about his bandmates and “Last Man Standing” but they’re just presented in the setlist without any connection or relevance

“I’m on fire” was on at the bar today. Just gets creepier and creepier

I didn't notice this until Rolling Stone pointed it out, but Steve Van Zandt has lost a LOT of weight! Not an unhealthy amount but he's nearly as trim as he used to look if you ever watch the DVD's or Blu-rays of their 1979/1980 shows.

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/bruce-springsteen-and-steven-van-zandt-perform-onstage-news-photo/1462434440

― birdistheword, Monday, April 3, 2023 10:20 AM

I thought for a sec that Gaga had joined Springsteen on stage.

Maybe he's on the same weird diet?

"Put down that hot dog, Stevie! You had your one for the day already!"

But really, I've wanted to know for years what the daily routine of someone like Springsteen is on the day of a show: when they get up, what they do, how they get into the best zone for being onstage for hours.

I assume they don't speak.

What this setlist is lacking is any kind of strong thematic or narrative arc. Yes, there are songs about loss and he speaks about his bandmates and “Last Man Standing” but they’re just presented in the setlist without any connection or relevance.

That is total nonsense; you can get the narrative arc just from the opening sequence. "No Surrender" --> "Ghosts" --> "Prove it all Night" --> "Letter to you;" the titles alone are a thesis statement for the show. Springsteen is reassuring us, telling us that after this gap of years he's still got it, that he knows it's been a long time, he knows we've come through a lot of losses, and he's going to give us the three-hour joyous Bruce show we want and need. I thought "Wrecking Ball" worked particularly well in the overall sequence; the lyrics fit with both the post-pandemic sense of mourning and also the defiant, holding-back-the-dark-for-a-bit-longer energy of it all. "Tonight all the dead are here, so bring on your wrecking ball."

The "Letter to You" tracks flattened the mood a bit, and I don't think "I'll See You in My Dreams" and "Last Man Standing" are particularly strong songs, but I do think they fit in the sequence. It reminded me of the recurring moment in the Odyssey where Odysseus and his companions, having escaped from yet another adventure that's cost them some of their shipmates, stop for a moment to thank the gods, celebrate their survival and acknowledge their losses. "Our precious lives we had, but not our friends." Springsteen has been making space for the dead in his shows for years, but there's something about knowing that everyone in the arena has come through a pandemic that makes these pauses to mourn particularly meaningful.

watching the show now, static or not I think it's a pretty inspired cross section of his career.

I mean, I sort of get her point because it is a bit more jukebox-y than most Springsteen tours, but that seems like a reasonable concession to age, and it's not like it's all big hits. No "Hungry Heart," and three songs from The Wild, the Innocent and the E. Street Shuffle. Sure, it's not one of those tours where you might get Hungry Heart or Sherry Darling or One Step Up or Highway 29 depending on Bruce's mood, but it's still got some interesting choices.

As I told my friends, he could have been better tonight, but he was easily as good as anyone could have asked for (the challenge of setting the bar so high for so long).

He played Saint in the City tonight, btw.

Huzzah! I'll be the white guy with a grey beard.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, April 3, 2023 9:39 AM (thirteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I looked everywhere and didn’t find anyone who fit your description

I was near a few middle aged or older people.

xpost <3 goddamn

I actually went, and IMHO it was actually a great show.

What this setlist is lacking is any kind of strong thematic or narrative arc. Yes, there are songs about loss and he speaks about his bandmates and “Last Man Standing” but they’re just presented in the setlist without any connection or relevance.

I think I was aware of Springsteen's practice in doing this, but all honesty, it feels a little ridiculous to hold any show to this standard, even if it's Springsteen. A show doesn't have to be a live concept album.

Anyway, Josh was right, it was a pretty inspired cross section of his career, and while I expected the songs of mourning and remembrance, I actually did not expect the swinging jazz that was basically the core of the show (and for me, arguably the highlight). I'm guessing this has been a big part of their last few tours, but I haven't seen the full band in quite a while so this is all new to me. I should add I've been going mostly to jazz shows these past four or five months, so I was kind of primed for swinging beats and extended horn solos.

(Also, I thought it was inspired to turn a Chuck Berry number like "Johnny 99" into a different kind of Chuck Berry number, fusing it to "You Never Can Tell" and then stretching it to encompass polyphonic New Orleans jazz.)

I remember when I first got into Springsteen, there was the complaint that breaking up the E Street Band was pointless because he was releasing very little material that demanded something else (the sole exceptions were "Streets of Philadelphia" and The Ghost of Tom Joad). When tonight's show broke into "Kitty's Back" and the rest, the first thing that came to mind was Duke Ellington and to a lesser extent what Wynton Marsalis has been trying to do with a larger ensemble. I started thinking how some of these older E Street Band numbers could actually work as jazz standards - nothing against the horn players, they were fine, but imagine if it was 1990 and Springsteen fronted a residency with top flight (and sympathetic) jazz players. I could see those pre-Born to Run songs being covered and maybe laying the blueprint for new material that would fit right in - the kind of stuff Chicago could only wish for but done with better talent and without their dubious taste or risible pretensions. If Springsteen was able to pull it off, it would make the break (or hiatus) with the E Street Band much more understandable. It still would have been bewildering at the time, but it makes more sense now given his recent experiments with Southern California pop music and Tom Morello.

Also my section apparently had a lot of people from Jersey, sometimes to its detriment. When Springsteen was singing "Last Man Standing" after giving it that solemn introduction, the guy behind me erupted with WOOO's when he made references to Route 9 or anything Jersey related. I guess I should be happy they're actually listening to Springsteen instead of talking through the new material, but still...

imagine if it was 1990 and Springsteen fronted a residency with top flight (and sympathetic) jazz players. I could see those pre-Born to Run songs being covered and maybe laying the blueprint for new material that would fit right in

sting-steen!

(for what it's worth, i'd note there were plenty of jazz and jazz-adjacent players in springsteen's orbit in the early days: david sancious, ernest "boom" carter," randy brecker showing up on "meeting across the river," etc. and circa 1990, max weinberg was flirting w/jazz during his brief sideline as a label boss.)

sting-steen!

LOL, good point...I was hoping Springsteen would come up with something Ellingtonian rather than the smoothier, poppier stuff worthy of beer commercials.

It's probably no surprise that the jazz elements of the E Street Band kind of left with Sancious et al though Carter left his stamp on "Born to Run." (I think Weinberg says he's still unable to play what Carter plays on the record - it's ridiculously awesome.)

I looked up Weinberg's jazz endeavors - he has or had a big band, and they do "Kitty's Back," but it's not quite what I hoped.

I thought it was strange when he opened some (all?) River 2016 tours with NYC Serenade, with an orchestra. Didn't make sense thematically at all - only song with the orchestra, wrong album - nice as it was to hear.

sting-steen

If you need somebody, baby we were born to run

Caryn Rose has been banging on about "narrative arc" for years, here she is reviewing a 2012 show I saw in Austria: "Doing so [collecting sign requests] offers the possibility for great surprises, including this night's three tour premieres, but it also runs the risk of creating massive problems with pacing, flow, and the thematic arc of the show." It is indeed total nonsense, as bitw says a show is not a concept album. A greatest hits set is fine with me.

the thing is, it's not a hits show!

Yeah, I take your point. But even if it's a mix of hits and deep cuts, why should there be any kind of "narrative arc"? It's just a collection of songs, and I neither want nor need them to somehow hang together narratively or thematically. His main themes are pretty much present in everything he writes anyway!